Creating a Sense of Glorious Destiny. Mastery of Speech in the Libellus de Situ Civitatis Mediolani (Late 10th-Early 11th Centuries)

Abstract

In the decades around 1000, an anonymous cleric at Milan Cathedral wrote a booklet on the history of his city which he built as a collection gathering, in chronological order, the Lives of the local bishops. The unfinished work not only testifies to the learning and culture of the author but also to the historical relevance of an ambitious text commissioned to support the political claims and the legitimacy of the Milanese church in its quest for primacy in the kingdom of Italy. This chapter explores the refined style of the author and the ways in which he constructed a coherent and cohesive narrative by sewing together individual biographies. The medieval reception of this biographical collection also shows the ways in which the text was repurposed to fulfil different functions and multiple goals, both within and beyond the city of Milan. Finally, this study analyses the text in the light of two interpretative concepts borrowed from the field of social anthropology. De situ clearly appealed to the literary tastes of the scholars trained in the cathedral school, thus addressing an audience shaped as a specific »community of learning«. More generally, the collection contributed to nourishing the sense of identity of the clergy and the people of Milan, that is a »textual community« which, through the acts of reading and listening to the text, felt it belonged to that glorious history and expected to see its reflection in the present.