Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence by Patricia Lee Rubin (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 318 tions on symbolic language and political structures. The title article of the book, which was Reuter’s inaugural lecture as chair of Medieval History at the University of Southampton, begins by discussing the perception of medieval historians as benign, often uninteresting members of the academy and British society . Reuter argues that the medieval period was when many European nations first came to be, thus the period is critical to understanding contemporary national identity. Yet for Reuter this approach has a serious pitfall: the nationcentric approach to history, which deters historians from comparative studies and led to “European models” that are often representative of one region. For example, the “feudal revolution” was composed by French historians writing about France supplemented with a couple of studies by French medievalists on the Mediterranean. Thus highly localized terminology and models inhibited the assessment of the relevance of these models outside of France. In this address, Reuter presents two means of overcoming this problem arguing for serious reflection on our working assumptions and enhancing our accounts with a greater awareness of Europe not just France. In his essay on the symbolic meaning of Canossa, where in January 1077 King Henry IV performed public penance in the snow for three days, Reuter rejects the common perception of the event as deeply humiliating for the German king overturning long standing notions held by Germans about their nation ’s relationship between church and country. By tracing the history of public penance from late antiquity into the Salian period, Reuter determines that this symbolic performance at Canossa was an ambiguous ritual, which presented a way out of a difficult situation on both sides. This collection of essays harmonizes well because many of the methodological goals advocated in the first section of the book are applied in the remainder of the book, and it brings together a series of papers which have very different topics and audiences. Reuter wrote an article on the place of Carolingian tradition in Ottonian royal legitimization for a major international exhibition in Magdeburg on the Ottonian kings. Although targeted for a lay audience, Reuter draws his ideas from the latest scholarship and discusses complex ideas on an accessible level. Ottonian interest in the Carolingian kings was minimal before 987 and their rule was structured as consciously un-Carolingian. Yet it is not Reuter’s conclusions about the Ottonians which make this essay sing, instead it is how he connects the trends in Ottonian East Francia to larger historical debates about dynastic self-project in early modern Europe, the process of remembering, and how the creation of continuity by kings was a joint project between the king and their experts in symbols. This collection of essays is aptly described by Janet Nelson as a labor of love, and I would add that it is a fitting tribute to a much-missed member of the early medieval historical community. SARAH WHITTEN, History, UCLA Patricia Lee Rubin, Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2007) xxiii + 418 pp., ill. In Patricia Lee Rubin’s new, handsomely-illustrated book, Florence is the center of attention. While Florence has occupied a prominent place in Italian Renaissance studies, few scholars have addressed in a single work the vast amounts of sources available. Rubin, on the other hand, makes it her goal “to take ad- REVIEWS 319 vantage of the rich findings of recent historical scholarship in order to enrich the art-historical understanding of the period” (xi). She weaves a dense tapestry of information together, yet the text is not a seamless package. Rather, it is a complicated one that occasionally offers conflicting notions of social life in Florence. This complex nature only further underscores the rich contents of this book. Despite its focus on Florence, the book is essentially about vision and visuality, or as Rubin states, the “social dynamics of the visual” (xii). Some of the many topics that she discusses include visual culture and the “conventual constructions of reality” (2); artistic skill as currency; technologies of vision in Florence; gendered viewing; Dante and vision; and the visuality of devotion. Unfortunately, this review will not allow me to discuss everything...