The Italian City State: From Commune to Signoria.

Philip Jones. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. x + 702 pp. $135. ISBN 0-19-822585-7.

Jones's grand synthesis may be briefly summarized only at the risk of distortion. The book covers the period from the fall of Rome to the Age of Dante. A second volume devoted to the Italian Renaissance is promised. An indefatigable researcher, Jones seems to have read every significant book and article published on medieval Italy in the twentieth century, and one must admire both his generosity and obvious delight in acknowledging and engaging the work of other scholars.

Yet not everyone will enjoy reading Jones's book. Pages of intricate argumentation teeming with exotic details, foreign words, and technical terms and punctuated by ingenious turns of phrase add up to a self-conscious, extravagant style likely to defeat non-Anglophone readers and native readers of English alike. The apparatus of references is similarly intricate, making it laborious to discern the sources for the ideas, arguments, and descriptions that appear in the text. The omission of maps in a book crammed with the names of so many obscure localities is perverse.

What makes these unnecessary difficulties so maddening is that The Italian City-State is also a rewarding and even an exciting book that seeks to explain the roots, peculiar features, generative forces, and inherent constraints of the civilization of medieval Italian city-states. Jones begins with the tenable observation that economic life in ancient cities was subordinated to political values and institutions, while activities in medieval cities were largely devoted to business and trade. In turn, medieval Italy was different from transalpine Europe, where "class division of town and country, urban and castle society, territorial nobility and commercial bourgeoisie" represented a rejection of antiquity (47). Further, the sociopolitical foundations of the Italian city-states, unlike their northern counterparts, were grounded in the urbanization of the ruling landed classes. The heritage of Roman urbanism and civic values was not denied, but recuperated and tailored to fit the demands of new mercantile territorial city-states. Urbane Italians were recognized for being precociously literate, secular, and hospitable to classical learning and the active life (vita civile), although Jones cautions against viewing them as simply "reborn Romans." Practical, secular, and humanist, medieval Italy was paradoxically "unmedieval," - that is, a fusion of the civic culture of Romanitas (renaissance) and the commercial culture of nascent capitalism (revolution).

Sustained demographic growth, a flow of capital from land into commerce, increasing productivity, and urban expansion were the primary ingredients of the medieval commercial boom. The boom was abetted by, and resulted in, astonishing innovation in, for example, travel, cartography, and telling time, and in the development of credit techniques (bills of exchange, insurance, accounting, and public finance). There was increasing reliance on formal documentation of rights and obligations, on statutory regulation, and on procedural guarantees in the settlement of merchants' disputes, all of which stimulated the demand for notaries and lawyers. Merchant manuals codified a distinct commercial discourse and entrepreneurial ethos. The recognition by theologians, jurists, and chroniclers of the social and economic benefits of legitimate commercial activity served to enhance the merchant's social prestige. This "economic miracle" coincided with a political revolution, which Jones characterizes as a movement from hierarchy to community, lordship to commune, and monarchy to republic.

Anyone familiar with Jones's previous studies will not be surprised by his contention that, despite its achievements, medieval Italy was similar to an underdeveloped country, with static expansion rather than real growth, with an economy dedicated to the production of luxury goods, and with large concentrations of wealth in elite groups. By 1300, systemic structural limitations resulted in widespread poverty in both the city and the countryside and in demographic crisis. The return to power of hereditary aristocracies, the expansion of seigniorial rights and feudal privileges, and the passing of urban rule into the hands of overlords and tyrants was an ubiquitous trend that confirmed Aristotle's theory about the growth and decline of city-states.

Jones's master narrative will no doubt invite vigorous criticism. Still, his book is unquestionably the most important synthesis written in English on the medieval Italian city-states. It is a book that would have pleased the author's adopted forebears, Machiavelli and Marx.

JULIUS KIRSHNER University of Chicago