The idea of community in Renaissance Italy.

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In the Communal Library of Udine there is a thick file titled, "Depositions of witnesses to a brawl that took place in Buia, 1516." (1) The first document in the file reads:

Before Us the Illustrious and Most Gracious Lord, Knight, and Count Messer Girolamo Savorgnan, I, Angelo da Udine, Knight of Your Lordship, present myself solemnly to denounce Costantino, son of Simone di Rizzardi di Buia, and all the others who were in his company.

Thus it was that yesterday I went to Buia on orders from Your Lordship together with Govetto and Colari di Gemona and Zuane Cargnello, all officers of the court, to arrest the said Costantino. In execution of the letters sent by the Magnificent and Gracious Luogotenente with a writ demanding payment of forty ducats granted by a sentence of the Condemnatoria made in favor of Simone, a doctor living in Buia. I found the said Costantino in his house, which is next to the church of Santo Stefano, a house in which [also] lives Leonardo Franz who runs a tavern there. I slapped my hand on his back, saying, "Don't move, Costantino, in the name of Our Lord, Messer Girolamo Savorgnan." The said Costantino quickly grabbed my hand to pull my knife away and began to escape. We scuffled such that the knife fell on the ground. Then he went to pull out his sword, but Govetto took it away. Seeing that he was unable to flee, the said Costantino yelled toward some peasants of Buia who were eating, "Oh my commune, help me, now!" [Oh comun mio aduitarime adesso.] And immediately the peasants, who were five or six in number, jumped up from the table. They put themselves between me and my colleagues, shoving us around such that they drove us to a staircase. I escaped from their hands. As I came out below, I was surrounded by fifty or sixty persons who began to throw rocks at me. Those who were armed yelled, "Hit them, hit them, kill, kill." One who had a lance thrust it three times at Zuane Cargnello, and if he had not been able to protect himself with a shield he would have been killed. Then we took off together with Costantino and all the others. [The crowd] followed me and my colleagues up to the top of the church, shoving us and yelling, "Hit them, hit them, kill, kill," such that we were forced to leave the said Constantino whom we had arrested. We fled. While fleeing we seemed to hear the said peasants ring the tocsin. I saw a great many people running. I understood that the said Costantino and all the others later held a town me eting [una visinanza in commune] so that if anyone went to arrest any of them, all would be armed and would kill [the officials] quicker than they would be able to arrest them for that thing. I ask that all those responsible and guilty be punished as Justice demands. (2)

Of course as one reads the testimony of the other twenty-odd witnesses to this sharp incident in a small town set among the soft, verdant hills of Friuli, the scene becomes murkier, but all witnesses agreed that in the moment of danger Costantino Rizzardi yelled out, "Oh my commune, help me, now!" Although the awkward plea in English is a little less so in Furlano, the language Costantino spoke, it is nevertheless curious that in his spontaneous cry for help, he would have called upon his comune (community) rather than amici (friends) or compagni (comrades), the usual terms of male solidarity, especially in a faction-ridden, vendetta-prone land such as Friuli. (3) This simple phrase, "Oh my commune, help me," seems out of place -- a dramatic major chord in a dissonant composition that might be a clue to the depth of community solidarity in Buia. As an example of communal strength, Buia was unusual in another respect: during the great peasant revolt that bloodied Friuli just five years before, Buia's tranquili ty made it the piece that did not quite fit into the larger puzzle of social discontent. (4) Thus it is that this incident in a Buia tavern might reveal something fundamental about the idea of community normally obscured by the regularities of town and village life in northern and central Italy. The opportunity provided by the Buia case is one of method: an exceptional event in an exceptional place can unmask the hidden assumptions of the mundane and guotidian. (5) What then, could the idea of community, evoked in Costantino Rizzardi's moment of peril, have meant in Renaissance Italy? (6)

There is no single answer to this question, of course, because of the friction between the sense of "belonging equally to" embedded in the Latin communities and the multiplicity of actual communities in which any one person or family lived. In addition beneath the edifice of communal equality and collective trust always lurked the destabilizing fault lines of continuous social tensions, the tensions among families, factions, patronage networks, classes, competing institutions, and age groups and between men and women, clerics and the laity, citizens and non-citizens, insiders and outsiders. For heuristic clarity the argument might be put starkly. The idea of community, as Costantino Rizzardi's spontaneous cry for help suggests, was activated and became meaningful not as the antithesis of conflict, that is, the embodiment of consensus, but as a form of conflict, the expression of social tensions by other means. The editors of a recent collection of studies of communities in early modern England have stated a similar case: "Community, as a state of interpersonal relations, did not preclude conflict. On the contrary, conflict was intrinsic to such relations, and the precepts and practices of community were invariably crystallized through attempts to resolve or contain it" (Shepard and Withington, 6). To this it should be added that the precepts and practices of community also worked in the opposite direction, transforming and expressing interpersonal conflicts. The signs of institutional rationalization, the literature of republican political thought, and the humanists' concern to articulate an ethic of civic harmony that are habitually cited to identify what is distinctive about Renaissance political culture were epiphenomena. They were the surface representations of the idea of community, or to employ an architectural metaphor, the elegant Albertian marble facade covering the rough-hewn bricks of actual social life. This paper inspects those bricks from three angles: community as social interaction in an institut ional guise, community as a certain kind of space, and community as a process of social exclusion.

Before peering into that argument, however, it may be helpful to scrub away some of the accumulated theoretical grime that obscures the ability to see Renaissance Italian communities in their own terms. In recent years the problem of reviving communities and vitalizing democratic participation has preoccupied a growing number of scholars of politics, most famously Robert Putnam (2000). Putnam's work is useful not because he can serve as a straw man but because his work is a particularly eloquent iteration of the virtues of community life and because he insists that the history of north-central Italy since the eleventh century provides the best single example, in his words, of "the powerful impact of civic engagement on government performance" (2000, 344). In his Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993), Putnam begins his analysis of the effectiveness of regional governments in Italy since 1970 with the medieval origins of the communal republics. He asks, "How did the inhabitants of nort h-central Italy first come to seek collaborative solutions to their Hobbesian dilemmas?" (180). In asking this question Putnam participates in the hoary tradition of political theory that traces the successes and failures of particular constitutional arrangements to their origins -- the myth of the founding fathers that stretches back to Aristotle but was revived in Renaissance political discourse, most prominently by Machiavelli. Putnam also reinvigorates the characteristic Anglo-American interpretation of the political history of medieval and Renaissance Italy by celebrating the "civic communities" of North, especially those in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany that "value solidarity, civic participation, and integrity" (2000, 345), thereby creating cooperative solutions to collective problems. (7) Putnam describes the roots of successful civic communities as "astonishingly deep." (2000, 345) Those towns that got it right in the eleventh century created a civic heritage of "rich networks of organized reciprocity a nd civic solidarity," which supplied the collective resources for a thriving community life. (2000, 346)

Putnam builds his analysis upon a reading of how Hobbes, Hume, and Tocqueville came to understand the genesis of trust within communities, what he calls "social capital." (8) In this formulation, communities are built upon the principle of generalized reciprocity. The philosopher Michael Taylor described the principle this way:

Each individual act in a system of reciprocity is usually characterized by a combination of what one might call short-term altruism and long-term self-interest: I help you out now in the (possibly vague, uncertain, and uncalculating) expectation that you will help me out in the future. Reciprocity is made up of a series of acts each of which is short-run altruistic (benefiting others at a cost to the altruist), but which together typically make every participant better off. (28-29)

Successful communities, so the argument goes, are built upon a norm of generalized reciprocity. This reciprocity need not be based on idealistic selflessness, gullibility about the nature of political power, or saintliness, but on what Tocqueville called, "self-interest rightly understood." (As quoted by Putnam, 2000, 135) More recent social science would locate generalized reciprocity within the fabric of daily social interactions. The tighter the weave of social exchanges the greater the sense of community trust. Daily human interactions produce the kind of face-to-face reliance and mutual knowledge that social science calls "thick trust," the kind one acquires through frequent contact with close professional colleagues, for example. "Thin trust," in contrast, is based on a general community norm, the kind of fragile trust one might display toward those who are nodding acquaintances in the neighborhood. As Putnam puts it, "thin trust is even more useful than thick trust, because it extends the radius of tru st beyond the roster of people whom we can know personally" (2000, 136). To put the distinction in Italian Renaissance terms, thick trust inheres personal patronage networks -- it cemented factions together under the leadership of a dominant family or padrone -- whereas thin trust unified the commune.

A number of historians of Renaissance Italy have pointed out the insufficiency of Putnam's account of Italian history. (9) My point, however, is not so much that Putnam gets Italian history wrong but that he refocuses western political thought to ask useful questions for understanding communities. How then did the communities of Renaissance Italy employ the thick trust generated by the face-to-face solidarities of family and faction to generate enough thin trust to bolster certain conflicts while suppressing others?

In addition to the Anglo-Scottish-American philosophical approach to communities, which privileges formal institutions and consensus, one can profit from the Italian political concept of dietrologia, literally "behindology." (10) Dietrologia might be defined as the study of how public political actions serve as fronts for some private interest, deal, or conspiracy. Conspiracy with all its pejorative legal connotations is, however, a misleading term. Modern Italian political discourse prefers connubio (marriage), an image that more precisely conveys the sense of the private reconciliation of opposites. The community, by this definition, is less an abstract moral entity than the public representation of private arrangements. Public institutions structured the competition among families and factions to exert influence that served their own interests. From this point of view corruption is not so much a vice as a way of getting things done, coercion not the antithesis of consensus but one of its characteristics, and private distrust not corrosive to community solidarity but a healthy strategy for maintaining it.

COMMUNITY AND INSTITUTIONS

Most Italian Renaissance communities certainly did trace their institutional origins to the communes, which between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries established sworn associations of free men that seized public authority over a town from the emperor, bishop, or local lord. (11) Starting out as little more than neighborhood watch associations devoted to public safety, the successful communes accumulated administrative and judicial responsibilities that were eventually catalogued in the rubrics of communal statuti (statutes). In legal terms communes were just one kind of universitas, a term that was also applied to any association or corporation, the members of which took an oath and were subjected to the legal authority and representation of the universitas. Many kinds of corporations such as a pasture association, a guild, or a faculty could be designated a universitas, a legal situation that makes clear how all towns contained within them several different, often competing, legally constituted communiti es. The historical evolution of these communes into city-republics and principalities from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries is a well known story, but there was a disturbing irony in the subsequent evolution of the largest cities into the capitals of regional states during the fifteenth century; John Najemy puts it well: "If this early republicanism succeeded in creating and theorizing a set of practices that brought the notions of consent and representation firmly into the political discourse of the city-states, it must nonetheless be recognized that one of its notable failures was the unwillingness of the cityrepublics to extend the concept of representation beyond the cities themselves to the surrounding territories. Hence the irony that Renaissance republics proclaimed and defended their own liberty while they treated the populations under their control as subjects to be ruled, an attitude that helps to explain why these territorial dominions so frequently broke apart during military crises" (315).

Buia was one of those subject territories deprived of republican liberty, in this case by the republic of Venice, but it demonstrated a remarkable capacity to exercise its independence in the face of both the local feudal lords and distant Venice. Buia's effectiveness in presenting itself as a community to outside powers distinguished it from other villages and towns in the region, and a clue to its capacity to do so is signaled by the fact that Buia's apparent leader, Costantino Rizzardi, was a notary; The probable cause for his arrest was not a dispute over forty unpaid ducats, as Angelo's testimony suggests, but a long-standing struggle between the Count Savorgnan's feudal claims of jurisdictional rights and demands for corvee labor from Buia, on the one hand, and the community's claims of statutory exemption, on the other. As the notary of Buia, Costantino had defended his town's claims for exemption from those feudal bonds in a protracted dispute that lasted long after his lifetime. In fact Costantino's suit against the Savorgnan counts was still alive more than two hundred years later when the record peters out, revealing an attribute of community practice that might be called, "continuous litigation" (Muir, 2000, 139). Costantino's notarial craft provided his community with its legal defense to counter the swords of the Count: his skill with pens, ink, and parchment, his familiarity with the regularized formula necessary to draft documents, his training in the Justinian Code and the Digest at the notary college of Udine, his access to advocates when necessary, his ability to manipulate the itinerant Venetian judges of the Auditori Nuovi, who themselves lacked formal legal training, and most of all his command of the provisions of Buia's precious statuti, which by the comparatively weak community standards of the region were remarkably strong in protecting the autonomy of the town.

Notaries such as Costantino Rizzardi provided even obscure villages and minor towns with access to the elite weapons of literacy in a culture positively obsessed with the power of written records. The very practice of Italian Renaissance historiography is built upon the paper foundations of those ubiquitous notaries of north-central Italy. As the late Marino Berengo has shown, in the North a class of notaries survived at the margins of urban society, and lacking the wherewithal to maintain an office, they roamed the countryside looking for business in the most obscure villages. Even the illiterate succumbed to the magic lure of record keeping. During the fifteenth century the peasant Massarizia family, who lived outside Siena, kept a farming diary that recorded their business dealings -- of the land bought and sold, the wine stored, the money owed, and the dowries acquired -- even though no family members could write. Unlike the sophisticated Florentine merchants who composed the famous rircordanze, the most assiduous diarist in the family, Benedetto del Massarizia, was less concerned about informing his progeny about his affairs than protecting himself from fraud and disagreements. Whenever Benedetto made a business deal he went to a notary like everyone else to have the contract written up, but he also brought along his little book and asked the notary, a witness, or whomever was available to write down the date and terms of the deal, thereby constructing memories through notarized documents in what has been called "the Renaissance in the fields." (Balestracci) Whether in the towns or in the fields, the tentacles of the notarial craft adhered to every aspect of community and much of private life by the fifteenth century. Notaries guarded the legal fictions of communities, just as Costantino Rizzardi did for little Buia, but the community in this sense was a potential weapon to be deployed against external powers. The potential in Buia was activated in an instant with Costantino's call for help.

Why did some communities cohere in moments of external threat better than others? In Buia the answer might be found in the fact that Costantino Rizzardi was both the padrone of the community and its notary. In other words he presided over a local clientage network and over local institutions. The most prominent forms of social interaction took place behind an institutional guise. And it is in this sense that institutions really mattered, and they mattered not because institutional arrangements were themselves the backbone of community; but because institutions were the public manifestation of certain kinds of social practices, the public space for the resolution of conflicts. Dietrologia, moreover, suggests looking behind the institutional screen to find the wizard at the controls, the notaries, social mediators, and padroni. In writing about communities, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italians often referred to consuetudine (practice) in a sense that combines Pierre Bourdieu's notion of practice (1977) wi th an articulated local tradition of "how things are done." The documents often paired the word consuetudine with statuti. The initial framing of the terms of community can be found in the statuti, those documents that established the terms and conditions of office holding, defined the powers of the community, and most importantly determined who possessed communal citizenship. But the term consuetudine reveals the more elusive practices of community life, the habitual forms of sociability, conflict resolution, and collective action that vitalized statuti into actual living communities. (12)

COMMUNITY AND SPACE

The depositions about the brawl in the Buia tavern recount that after Angelo and his assistants were driven out of town, "Costantino and all the others later held a town meeting so that if anyone went to arrest any of them, all would be armed and would kill [the officials] quicker than they would be able to arrest them for that thing." The original for the phrase translated as "town meeting" is "una visinanza in commune," literally "the neighborhood in commune" or perhaps "the neighborhood meeting as a community." A visinanza or vicinanza in modern Italian evoked that neighborly sense of proximity -- those inhabiting the same vicinity -- an extension of what Dante called the "domestic company of the family" (Convivio, iv. 4). Here in the intimacy of kin and neighbors was the habitual scene of most social life but also the natural forum for "politics, government, and public life, city-states in miniature" (Jones, 404). In this conflation of neighborhood and neighborliness with a mass assembly, variously called an arengo, parlamentum, or most revealingly a commune colloquium (a "community conversation" perhaps), can be found the community in its most elementary form, a group of people who lived in proximate spaces discussing matters of mutual concern and seeking collective solutions to a problem. In the momentary crisis created when the feudal lord's henchman came to arrest the town's notary, a certain kind of community (seemingly exclusively male) crystallized itself.

This is the very kind of micro-situation that should attract analysis because the crystallizing process of most communities has been obscured by state-building in the larger city-states where government authority eclipsed the spontaneous formation of neighborhood- and village-based communities. By the later twelfth century in Venice, Piacenza, Genoa, and less so Florence, the vicinie became agents, if not creations, of the central government. The subdivisions of the city into thirds in Siena, quarters in most towns, fifths as in Pistoia and Perugia, sixths in Florence, Venice, and Milan, or even ninths in Pavia indicates a coordinated legal and spatial definition of neighborhood that implies subordination of the neighborhood to the center, or even a divide and rule policy. (13) In these cities the vicinia may have become less a source of spontaneous community in the sense described here than an institution for enforcing duties to pay taxes, serve in the militia, perform corvees, or maintain public works and churches. Once the crystallizing process had been lost, then communities required not just administration from the top but they had in some sense to be imagined rather than directly experienced. (14)

In a town such as Buia, community was not only a set of institutions and a nexus of social relationships but also a particular moment in a certain kind of space. Community may have been less a permanent, institutionalized condition than a transitory fusion of people who came together in spaces. (15) The incident in Buia began in a tavern where Costantino first called upon his community for assistance, proceeded into the little piazza outside it, and ended at the church where the tocsin was rung: tavern, piazza, church, bell tower -- the generative spaces of communities throughout the European Mediterranean. This space in Buia was and is an intimate one, typical of so many Italian towns in which a bar still lies in wait near a church. The idea of community took hold in certain kinds of spaces, which provided a venue to thicken trust by repeated social interactions. In a kind of feedback process, the spaces of community helped to nurture the idea of community. In the process of feeding community life these spa ces became places, spaces with evocative, multidimensional identities. (16) One can talk about a "sense of place," "places of memory," or "love of place" in Italian cities where certain places bequeathed meaning and continuity across generations while the spaces themselves were refurbished, demolished, enlarged, or abandoned.

Besides a collection of spaces -- buildings, streets, piazze, and churches -- that provide the architectural frame for a community, places provided the vocabulary for the idea of community. By transforming physical spaces into places, citizens build their communities with words and emotions as much as with bricks, creating a semantic order to the urban surface. The difference between a space and a place is not just a matter of semantics and even less a matter of utility but of affective capacity, and that capacity cannot be easily regulated by authorities or planned in advance. (17)

Planned spaces and planned towns that failed to generate living communities are particularly revealing of the impossibility of creating a community from the top down. The humanist theorists of the ideal city designed numerous planned cities that look intriguing on paper but were not especially successful as livable spaces. Along the northeastern frontier of their mainland empire, the Venetians began to build in 1593 the best example of a Renaissance planned town: Palmanova, a fortress city designed to defend against attacks from the Ottomans in Bosnia. Built ex nihilo according to humanist and military specifications, Palmanova was supposed to be inhabited by self-sustaining merchants, craftsmen, and farmers. However, despite the pristine conditions and elegant layout of the new city, no one chose to move there, and by 1622 Venice was forced to pardon criminals and offer them free building lots and materials if they would agree to settle the town. (18) Thus began the forced settlement of this magnificent plan ned space, which remains lifeless to this day and is visited only by curious scholars of Renaissance cities and bored soldiers who are still posted there to guard the Italian frontier.

To discover the places where the idea of community thrived one should pay close attention, in the words of James C. Scott, to "the forms of knowledge embedded in local experience [compared] with the more general, abstract knowledge deployed by the state and its technical agencies" (1998, 311). One of the forms of knowledge embedded in local experience was, of course, the capacity to imagine the community as transcendent, as something greater and more lasting than the ephemeral processes of community crystallization and the mundane interactions among neighbors. The idea of the city as a sacred community, a mystical corpus, was crucial to the political ideology of many late medieval towns. Citizens conceived of their own cities rather more as enchanted communities, mystical bodies, alive with symbolic meaning than the architectural, institutional, and political spaces historians have often made them by reason of the surviving evidence of buildings, monuments, and archival documents. Socialization began in early childhood to teach the meanings conveyed through names, emblems of all sorts, civic myths, and collective rituals. Names and symbols were attached to urban places -- streets, piazze, churches, and town halls -- and public rituals always took advantage of a symbolic geography of the city, bringing a special meaning to urban spaces. (19)

The signifying power of the city's places was most dramatically magnified by the touch of the sacred. But where, precisely, was the locus of the sacred in the Renaissance city? Richard Trexler's work on Renaissance ritual behavior provides a useful model for a serious rethinking of the spatial sacrality of the community. The place of the sacred, in his view, was a social formation: "The place does not sanctify the man but the man the place," as Francesco da Barberino, the end of the thirteenth-century Florentine author of I Documenti d'Amore, put it. (20) If this were so, what does the impulse to consider the community as transcendent signify? It represents perhaps a recognition of the mysterious processes through which communities form themselves and an anxiety about the ephemeral nature of that process, that is a certain distrust of thin trust, which led citizens to seek some binding agent stronger than their own tenuous sociability amidst their own civic spaces.

COMMUNITY AND EXCLUSION

When Angelo arrived to arrest Costantino Rizzardi in Buia on Easter Monday, March 23, 1516, the tavern and piazza were crowded with revelers, and it appears many of them later testified about what happened. Because of the completeness of the judicial record, one can actually determine to whom

Costantino was calling when he yelled, "Oh comun mio aduitarime adesso" (Oh my commune, help me, now). (21) Besides Costantino there are twenty names in the record supplemented by the catchall phrase, "tutti li altri complici et a tal delitto" (all the other accomplices in this crime). (22) Those named include the proprietor of the tavern, Costantino Rizzardi's brother, two other brothers and their nephew, and a father and son. Among the rest there are no common surnames, and there were no women at all. Of course respectable women did not hang around in taverns in small towns during the sixteenth century, but their absence from the tavern and piazza raises the question to what degree women were members of the community, or to put it more precisely were women's communities the same as men's? In a formal legal sense, they were certainly not members of the comune of Buia on the same footing as their brothers and husbands. They could not hold public office and were certainly not called to join and speak at the "v isinanza in commune." These facts are hardly surprising, but they draw our attention to the processes whereby communities constituted themselves through a process of exclusion. There was nothing "universal" about Italian communities. The "public" was a private club.

In Italian towns, prominent families, clans, factions, tower societies, guildsmen, youth abbeys, and minorities, such as Jews and foreigners, fought or negotiated for their own spatial autonomy and distinctive place in the community. Citizenship, the fundamental requisite for holding civic offices, enjoying fiscal privileges, engaging in trade, or basking in prestigious jobs, was of course a privilege of a few rather than a right. The statuti of Italian communes defined citizenship, but numerous consilia and processi testified to its conflicted character. The multiple living communities of affective identification, however, ought to be distinguished from the singular comune defined in the narrow legal sense of bequeathing the privileges of citizenship. Everyone in Buia or any other town lived within multiple networks of affiliation inside and outside the comune. Besides the formal vicinia, which elected a mayor, there were pasture associations, fiscal units for taxation, guilds, the pieve of Santo Stefano, th e militia, and work units to perform corvee obligations to the local Savorgnan lord. None of these groups took in exactly the same people. A peasant could easily be a member of a pasture association whose other members mostly came from other villages and towns. In the bigger cities, the multiplicity of potential communities included an even more bewildering variety of shifting, non-corporate and corporate associations. On top of these one must add the most powerful social glue of all, family, kinship, and faction. These multiple and potentially conflicting forms of association embodied what Giovanni Levi has called "a system of continuous tensions" and a social style of behavior Ron Weissman labelled, "the importance of being ambiguous." (23) Such a system of tensions placed a heavy burden on those who mediated among the local social networks and communities and between the comune and outside powers. These mediators were typically the local notables and notaries: the Costantino Rizzardis of this world.

That multifaceted, tension ridden, and ambiguously constituted commune that Costantino invoked in his moment of distress was the exclusive community of the adult, male citizens of Buia. Many people were barred from the institutionalized communities of northern Italy, and a great deal of recent research has been devoted to identifying the excluded and to uncovering other unofficial communities that paralleled the official ones. The task of measuring adulthood, for example, isolated what Stanley Chojnacki in writing about Venice has called the two fault lines running through Renaissance society: "one separating adolescence from full-scale adulthood, the other distinguishing men from women. But they are overlapping fault lines with twists and turns, mapped by individual circumstances and personal choices" (185). Adulthood was measured in many ways through minimum age laws for exercising political rights or inheriting property and by symbolically significant events such as dividing patrimonies held in fraterna, emancipating sons from the authority of the pater familias, and allowing daughters to marry or take monastic vows. Certainly the famously troublesome youth abbeys, the brigati in Boccaccio's parlance, testify to the existence of gangs of male youths, which constituted a kind of counter community that exercised certain informal rights of jurisdiction, especially over sexual mores, through performing the mattinata and other forms of charivari. (24)

It is now becoming dimly apparent, largely thanks for the remarkable series of studies of Italian nuns and lay women, that thin trust helped women as much as men establish communities, ones that coexisted alongside those of men, especially in the great cities. (25) Laura McGough has identified a parallel female community alongside male communities with noblewomen and female patricians serving as patrons and mediators, much as Costantino Rizzardi did for the adult men of Buia. During the sixteenth century, communities of Jews began to be found in many places in northern and central Italy, and not just in the ancient center of Jewish life in Rome. In the larger towns the Jews constituted authentic, if not entirely autonomous, communities, but in obscure places, some close to Buia such as San Daniele, the few Jewish families were insufficient to create authentic alternative communities. The relationship between the Jewish communities and the dominant Christian ones can hardly be recaptured through a narrow exam ination of their legal status. In Rome, at least, the Jews were formally designated a universitas, that is a legal corporation, but the social realities denied Jews the full powers of a corporation, and Jewish conceptions of political theory, such as they were, failed to accommodate a distinction between ecclesiastical and secular authority that was embedded in the ius commune. As a result the Jewish communities defined themselves in many different ways that were adapted to local conditions and to their relationships with Christian authorities. The autonomy, safety, and prosperity of these communities were the product of the very same system of continuous tensions that characterized gentile communities. Current research suggests that the status of Jewish communities in Renaissance Italy was not a single one but an ever changing process, in which interaction between prominent members of the Jewish and Christian communities, at least in some places, tended to break down the stark legal and religious divisions b etween Jews and Christians. (26)

Other counter communities are coming into view, consisting of persons formally or informally excluded from participation in the juridical communities of the Italian towns. The most dramatic examples of counter communities were supplied by the bands of outlaws who infested the mountains. (27) Through the draconian interdictio aquae et ignis (prohibition of water and fire), outlaws were legally deprived of the benefits of community, and yet they established what Randolph Stain has called, "contrary commonwealths," that paralleled and threatened the established communities. Finally, as Steven A. Epstein's remarkable new book Speaking of Slavery demonstrates, Italy was no stranger to rejecting certain persons because of differences in skin pigmentation and ethnicity from membership in the majority community. Renaissance communities became communities by including some, ostracizing others.

*****

Buia has served here as the synecdoche for the thousands of communities of north-central Italy during the Renaissance. It certainly could not, however, be characterized as typical. Why bother, then, with this obscure town home to somewhat fewer than 2,000 souls on that Easter Monday in 1516? Buia produced no writer or artist of distinction, lacks monuments worthy of mention, has never been subjected to ethnographic description, and offers nothing of interest to the tourist, except a mildly pleasant pear brandy. To the casual eye the Renaissance missed Buia. During the most notorious and bloody peasant revolt in sixteenth century Italy, however, virtually all Friuli was visited by violence except for Buia. It was able to cohere as a community in the face of a peasant rebellion, a notoriously tyrannical feudal lord, an earthquake, and countless other vicissitudes. During the sixteenth century Friuli was one of the least communal, most feudal regions in northern Italy, a region ruled more by force than by law, i n which family and faction prevailed over weak communal institutions. And yet in little Buia the idea of community survived and thrived. Why it did so may elude the understanding of a mere historian, but in that nasty little brawl of Easter Monday 1516, one can see revealed the crystallizing process that made Buia a community like many others all over north-central Italy, a process whereby the intimacies and conflicts among neighbors were transformed into a certain kind of fragile trust that is the idea of community.

(1.) "Deposizioni di testimoni sopra una baruffa successa in Buja 1516," Biblioteca Comunale, Udine, MS 1042, busta 1, filza 3, dated 25 March 1516.

(2.) In translating this passage, I have kept Angelo's statement in the first person, even though the text begins in the first then switches to the third person. In the rush of transcribing oral testimony, notaries quite frequently changed back and forth from first to third person.

Davanti de nui Illustre et Clarissimo Signor Cavalier et Conte Misser Hieronymo Savorniano. Comparo mi Anzolo da Udene, Cavalier di Vostra Signoria, et proponendo gravamento querelo contra et adverso Constantino fiolo de Simon de Rizardo de Buia et tutti li altri che sono stati in sua compagnia.

Cum cio sia che essendo andato ieri a Buia de mandato di vostra Signoria insieme cum Govetto e Colari de Giemona et Zuane Cargnello officiali per retenir detto Constantino. In exequution dele lettere over mandato del Magnifico et Clarissimo Signor Logotenente de una cartolina de spese fatte per una sententia del condemnatoria fatta in favor de Simon dottor habitante in Buya de ducati quaranta in circa come in quella. Et havendo trovato detto Constantino in casa sua quale e apresso la ecclesia de San Stephano, ne la quale habita Lonardo Franz che fa hostaria. Et messoli la man a dosso dicendoli, "Sta forte Constantino da parte del Signor Nostro Messer Hieronymo Savorniano. Ditto Constantino subito li misse la man sopra la sua per tirarli el pugnal de man et scomenzo a retirarse. Et scaramuzar talmente chel casche el pugnal in terra. Et da poi messi la mano per la spada et Govetto ge la rolse. Et vedendo non poter fugir ditto Constantino scemenzo a cridar verso alcuni villani de Buya che fazenano colatione, "Oh comun mio aduitarime adesso." Et subito ditti villani che erano da cinque o sei saltorono da tavola. Et misseno de mew di esso Anzolo et compagni urtando de qua et de Ia talmente che lo redusseno ad una scala. Et mi scampo de mano. Er come el fu da basso et gerano da cinquanta in sexanta persone che comenzorono chi cum sassi. Et chi cum arme cridare, "Dali, dali, amaza, amaza." Et uno che haveva uno spontone trasse tre volte verso Zuan Cargnello er qual sel non se havesse reparono, cum Ia rodella l'havavia motto. Et dapoi tolse [?] deli _____ [illegibile word] insieme cum Constantino et tutti li altri. Er accompagnorono esso Anzolo et compagni fino in capo de la giesia scaramanzando et cridando, "Dali, dali, amaza, amaza," talmente. Et li fu forza a lassare ditto Constantino che era retenuto et fugir, et fugendo li parese aldire che ditti villani sonavano compana a maretello. Et vedeva corer gran zente. Et ha inteso che ditto Constantino dapoi et turn li altri fezeno una visinanza in commune che se alcuno an dava per retenir alcuno de loro de tuoi tutti le arme et amazarli piu presso he lafarsi retenire per le qual cosse dimanda chel sia puniti tutti Ii culpabili et delinquenti come rechiede Ia Justitia. Ibid., fobs. 1r-2r.

(3.) Muir, 1993, 77-107.

(4.) Ibid., 176-77.

(5.) For the heuristic value of the "normal exception," see Grendi.

(6.) Raymond Williams, 1976,76, noted the conceptual vagueness of community in social thought and the tension between its past and present meanings. For an excellent updated discussion of the historical and theoretical meanings of the word community, see Shepard and Withington, 1-15.

(7.) Cf. Muir, 1995.

(8.) On the theme of trust, cf. Becker, and on social capital, cf. the articles on the theme, "Patterns of Social Capital: Stability and Change in Comparative Perspective," The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1999 29: 339-782.

(9.) Cohn and Brucker.

(10.) The term dietrologia is a commonplace of contemporary Italian public discourse rather than an analytical concept, but the idea shares some affinities with James C. Scott's concept of "hidden transcripts" (1985, 1990). The difference is that dietrologia describes the ways in which the hegemony of the state hides the actual workings of power and the powerful, whereas Scott sees hidden transcripts as one of the arts of resistance to domination. The distinction made here is that the often hidden forms of social interaction in Italian communities are more revealing indicators of the distribution of power within and the vitality of the community than the formal institutional structures. Both the dominators and the dominated practiced dietrologia, creating a persistent gap between the operations of power and the appearances of power.

(11.) literature on the origins of the communes is vast, but the most recent comprehensive study is Jones.

(12.) A large and revealing body of legal-historical scholarship is devoted to elucidating statuti, the presence of which represents a marker for the existence of a community in the formal juridical sense. As valuable as this body of scholarship has been it harbots a certain tendency to search for foundations, as if understanding the origins of a community explains what community meant. This very fruitful approach can be integrated with one that asks how custom, contingency, and probability, embedded in the notion of consuetudine, are revealed through symbolic acts that both mark and mask the operations of power within the community. Cf. Bourdieu's highly critical meditations on scholastic reason (2000).

(13.) Jones, 403-408.

(14.) The term, "imagined communities," is obviously indebted to Benedict Anderson (1991). The imagining of local communities in Renaissance Italy primarily took place through identification with patron saints and the performance of civic rituals

(15.) Agnew, Agnew and Duncan.

(16.) Cf. Foucault, 149.

(17.) Such a view of these processes is now a commonplace in social, urban, and political theory. From three very different perspectives, cf. Certeau, Braunfels (367-71), and Scott, 1998.

(18.) Braunfels, 159. For a careful and brilliant analysis of another failed

project in city planning, Tafuri, 139-60.

(19.) Weinstein, Trexler, and Muir, 1999, 383-92.

(20.) Quotation from Francesco da Barberino as translated in Trexler, 52.

(21.) Biblioteca Comunale, Udine, MS 1042, busta 1, filza 3, fol. lv.

(22.) Ibid., fol. llv.

(23.) Levi, 7-10, and Weissman.

(24.) Klapisch-Zuber.

(25.) Brown and Davis, Chojnacka, McGough, Schutte, and Sperling.

(26.) Luzzati, Bonfil (1990, 1994), and especially Stow.

(27.) Ortalli.

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