Daily Life on the Istrian Frontier: Living on a Borderland in the Sixteenth Century, by Robert Kurelić

Abstract

This book is much more than just a history of daily life in sixteenth-century Istria. A better way to describe it would be a total history of Istrian society, as seen through the angle of its many frontiers. I say frontiers plural because, as becomes immediately evident to anyone flicking through this book, the border between Venetian Istria and Austrian Istria was not the only one in the region, let alone the most consequential. Robert Kurelić’s investigation might have started there, but, as he shows so well when discussing the famous example of Morlak immigrants, ethnic and cultural boundaries were often just as important—if not more so—than state borders. The same could be said for the frontier between urban and rural society, especially since coastal Istria, where Italian influence was most evident, was highly urbanised compared to the inland areas, which would long remain under the domain of a feudal...