Power and Patronage in Early Medieval Italy: Local Society, Italian Politics, and the Abbey of Farfa, c. 700–900. By Marios Costambeys. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, Fourth Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xvi + 388. $115.00 cloth.

摘要

This book is a dense and difficult read that desperately needed a good editor. Thenintroduction begins well by putting Farfa in its historical context and discusses the sources for writing the history of the monastery in the early Middle Ages butnthen meanders from one thing to another for more than fifty pages. FirstnCostambeys discusses the chronicle of Gregory of Catino—called “Farfa’sngreat high medieval historian” twice on pages 7 and 8—then he switches to andescription of Farfa’s geographical setting on the slope of Monte Acuziano, innwhich we are told that “English travelers in the nineteenth century also notednthat the slopes of the hill were heavily wooded” (9). We also learn that thenFarfa River, which gives the monastery its name, was recognized for thenquality of its waters since antiquity. Costambeys’s evidence is a quote fromnVirgil’s Aeneid (7.715) that says nothing of the sort. Then we leave geographynand return to Gregory of Catino. His reliability is explored; a short excursus isnmade on sources outside the scope of the book’s chronological framework;nand Gregory’s collection of canon law is discussed for two pages. The authornavers that Gregory compiled the collection to “defend Farfa’s patrimonynagainst the specific threat to it from irresponsible abbots and from the pope,”naccepting Boynton’s conclusions about the collection’s purpose. Half thencollection does deal with rights and property, and I believe that the editor ofnthe collection, Theo Ko ¨lzer, came to a much more balanced conclusion aboutnGregory’s purpose that is far more convincing—“Schwerpunkt der CollectionFarensis ist der Schultz des Kirchengutes in weitesten Sinn” (Collectioncanonum Regesto Farfensi inserta, Monumenta iuris canonici, Series B, 5n[Citta ` del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1982], 74). But why arenwe reading about a twelfth-century canonical collection in a book that treatsnthe period 700–900?