Padua under the Carrata, 1318-1405.

Benjamin J. Kohl. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xxvi + 466 pp $45. ISBN: 0-8018-5703-1.

Benjamin Kohl makes it clear at the outset what kind of book he aims to write. He set out to produce a detailed study of one particular signorial regime, based on "painstaking and thorough archival research, informed by a complete knowledge of the secondary literature, presented with the utmost accuracy." Partly from choice and partly because of the nature of the sources for Paduan history in this period, it is largely a narrative history. However, an important element in the book is the material derived from the private documents relating to the Carrara and their leading subjects, preserved in a number of notarial cartularies.

It is fair to say that he has succeeded in writing the kind of book he set out to write. It is the product of well over thirty years of research in Padua and elsewhere and his mastery of the archival material and the relevant secondary sources is impressive. He provides a detailed and nuanced account of the internal and external history of Padua in the period of nearly a century that the book covers. There is, however, a cost. Political narrative means much description of tensions with neighboring territories, border disputes, petty maneuverings, negotiations and shortlived pacifications, and as such does not make for easy reading. More seriously, the wealth of detail can obscure the main lines of development. The importance of Carrara's breach with Venice after the alliance with Hungary in 1357, and later the policy of territorial aggrandizement following the death of Giangaleazzo Visconti, which led to the ultimate destruction of the Cararra regime, comes out much more clearly in the few pages of the introduction than in the narrative chapters, where it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees. The narrative contains very little comment and is not always well integrated with the more analytical chapters. The discussion of the Carrara affinity says surprisingly little about these men's relations with Francesco il Vecchio himself and the reader does not discover until a later narrative chapter how easily some of them passed over to the Visconti in 1388.

There are a number of issues that might profitably have been discussed more fully. "Diarchy," the dual rule of the early Carrara lords and the Paduan commune, which the book "takes seriously" in the introduction, is not mentioned, at any rate in that form, subsequently. There is no discussion of intellectual or cultural life as such, so that Petrarch and other writers and scholars appear only incidentally and works of art are considered only in connection with the individuals or families who commissioned them, with a concentration on the identification of family portraits.

But these omissions are presumably the author's choice. He largely disarms criticism by preempting it. He is aware that the comment he made that Kenneth Hyde failed to integrate the notarial documents he used into the text of his Padua in the Age of Dante can be applied to his own book too. He knows that a narrative based largely on chronicles will seem rather old-fashioned. Kohl has not fully integrated his notarial material into his structure either and his book does appear a little old-fashioned, but as a meticulously researched account of nearly a hundred years of Carrara rule in Padua, beginning where Hyde left off and using what materials are available, it is a worthy sequel to Hyde's book and will have a lasting value.

Trinity College, Dublin