Rosa Canosa . Etnogenesi normanne e identità variabili: Il retroterra culturale dei Normanni d'Italia fra Scandinavia e Normandia . (Collana del Dipartimento di Storia Dell'Università di Torino.) Turin: Silvio Zamorani. 2009. Pp. 189. €24.00.

Abstract

Although long neglected by historians, eleventh and twelfth-century southern Italy has gained much recent attention as an area that once contained a quadrilingual kingdom of Muslims, Jews, and Greek and Latin Christians under Norman control. In the past decade no fewer than three monographs have appeared in English on the Muslims of southern Italy. There has been, at the same time, an even larger growth in the study of the Norman kingdom and its principalities in the eleventh century. This recent enthusiasm for southern Italy as a “frontier” and a point of cultural contact, exchange, and relative tolerance is further complicated by longstanding questions over the origins of the Normans and the construction of their own identity (sometimes called normanitas) during the eleventh-century conquests. In the eleventh century, the Normans created a kingdom that would survive, in one form or another, until the unification of Italy. Normanitas itself has been a difficult notion for scholars to define, and questions about its experienced reality and its persistence have vexed historians. Were Normans really a people (gens or natio in the Latin sources); was the notion of their normanitas simply a function of their many and capable northern and southern European historians of the eleventh century; did they assimilate or change that identity in the twelfth century in the territories they conquered, and if so, how? These are some of the questions at the heart of Rosa Canosa's book. The study takes as its foundation the anthropological notion of ethnogenesis—that ethnic identities are socially constructed and plastic—derived here from studies of Gothic identity and the fragmentation of the Roman Empire in late antiquity. This school of thought has argued, to generalize, that the Gothic “invaders” of the Roman Empire formed a larger ethnic identity around a few chief warriors who transmitted to them a traditionskern, a nucleus of traditions and customs, only after entering the Empire. Canosa uses this as a general model (this comparative approach is one of the useful aspects of the work [p. 154]), and she insists that the Normans formed a separate sense of normanitas in Italy that varied by author but emphasized their Christianity and bellicose virtues (p. 67). Her study ends around 1130 when she considers the specifically Norman identity to have been replaced with a more general “French” identity, at least in terms of origin, and when power was “denormanized.” This notion has been challenged by others working in different sources, notably charters and legal evidence. The greater use of lineage as an identity strategy among Lombards than among Normans is taken by Canosa as evidence of a Norman desire to erase difference once conquest was complete (p. 145). But it is a relative difference, and the Normans continued to recognize social difference as legitimate within their multi-ethnic kingdom throughout most of the twelfth century.