Vestire a modo altrui: Dal sumptus medioevale al luxus d’età moderna tra diritto e morale by Cecilia Natalini

Abstract

Reviewed by: Vestire a modo altrui: Dal sumptus medioevale al luxus d’età moderna tra diritto e morale by Cecilia Natalini Maureen C. Miller Vestire a modo altrui: Dal sumptus medioevale al luxus d’età moderna tra diritto e morale. By Cecilia Natalini. (Naples: Editoriale Scientifica. 2020. Pp. x, 218. €14,00. ISBN 978-88-9391-709-4.) This book primarily addresses students and historians of law, but any historian using or citing sumptuary legislation may profit from reading it. Although it offers [End Page 781] a highly particular (and questionable) genealogy of legal thought on northern Italian urban statutes limiting ostentatious display—chiefly targeting women’s clothing, but also extending to public displays of mourning and marital alliances—this study usefully excavates some moral logics underpinning such legislation and aspects of their political influence on conceptions of the state. The author, jurist and legal historian Cecilia Natalini, opens with a critique of contemporary historiographical emphasis on the ineffectiveness of this sumptuary legislation. Casting it as reductionistically rooted in eighteenth-century German scholarship theorizing state power, Natalini proposes reconsidering this legislation from the perspective of its medieval communal origins in admonishing, rather than commanding, individuals to do good. She poses two questions. First, when and why did the question of sumptus (cost, expense) become, in reality, a question of luxus (excess or extravagance)? This necessitates considering the position of the Christian church on luxus: was it always synonymous with sin? Second, what is the relationship between Christian morality, individual liberty, and public discipline that centuries of ius commune judicial experience bequeathed to modern jurisprudence? In brief, she argues that theologians did not treat luxus as synonymous with sin and that debates about sumptus really became focused on superfluity in the thirteenth century. Natalini believes that an important heritage of the medieval ius commune tradition is the modern western tension between Christian morality, individual liberty, and state authority. The author traces an evolutionary process that begins with Isidore of Seville’s distinction between what is necessary (clothing) and not (ornament) as well as his emphasis on the uses of wealth (rather than the morality or immorality of wealth per se). It continues across the Gregorian Reform (from the school of Chartres to Peter Damian and to St. Bernard), through the twelfth century (Gratian’s Decretum, Alan of Lille’s Summa de arte predicatoria), and into the thirteenth, where the thought of Pope Innocent III accelerates the “giuridicizzazione” of the problem of sumptus/expense. Natalini leans heavily on this recent neologism from contemporary Italian politics (sometimes in the form of “giuridizzazione”) to trace the translation of Christian morality through law into political economy: medieval sumptus, a matter of religious morality and the salvation of the community through obedience to God, becomes early modern luxus, a matter of civic conscience and the well-being of the community through obedience to the state. The crucial turning point and figure in this evolution is St. Thomas Aquinas, whom Natalini credits with using the Aristotelian distinction between ethos and hexis to establish that the quality or status of the person determines what constitutes appropriate use of ornament, which itself is neither a virtue nor a vice. According to the author, this dottrina tomista, with its emphasis on variability, inspired judicial reflection and, ultimately, early modern attempts to legislate limitations on attire appropriate to every human status. Natalini discusses Henry of Susa (Hostiensis), Ubertus of Cesena, Giovanni d’Andrea, Alberico of Rosciate, and, of course, Bartolus of Sassoferrato, highlighting problems of jurisdiction, [End Page 782] proof, and the relation of public and private rights. She then uses the sumptuary legislation of Forlì from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries to illustrate some fruits of this long evolution in one concrete case and closes with reflections on Antonio Roselli’s 1447 consilium, De ornatu mulierum. If approached as an extended essay or thought-piece, the work can sensitize historians to the theological and legal issues raised by medieval and early modern sumptuary legislation. It is not, however, convincing as intellectual history. How, for example, could the dottrina tomista be the “new impulse” driving the legal thought of Henry of Susa (Hostiensis) on sumptuary law when Natalini grounds the...