James A. Palmer. The Virtues of Economy: Governance, Power, and Piety in Late Medieval Rome.

Abstract

The world of fourteenth-century Rome is little known. In part, this is due to a dearth of evidence, but, as James A. Palmer emphasizes in his introduction to The Virtues of Economy: Governance, Power, and Piety in Late Medieval Rome, historians’ choices and priorities have also contributed to the lacuna. Historians of religion, politics, and culture have focused on papal Rome and used the papacy’s Avignon sojourn as a reason to ignore the city in its absence. Social historians have prioritized other Italian communes that are seen as less exceptional. Palmer argues that Rome’s exceptionality has been overemphasized and that in many ways it was a typical fourteenth-century Italian commune. He introduces a wide array of characters—barons, merchants, prostitutes, widows, guildsmen—and shows how they interwove spiritual and temporal concerns in their daily lives and in their plans for death. One of the many strengths of Palmer’s book is that he refuses to simplify these characters or to pigeonhole them into static roles. Similarly, his Rome resists easy categorization. It is not papal or baronial, religious or commercial, a city of natives or a city of immigrants; it is simultaneously all these cities and more.