Medieval and Renaissance Rome: Mending the divide

Abstract

Historians of late medieval and renaissance Italy have long seen the fourteenth century as a dramatic period of upheaval and transformation. Yet despite the fact that Rome has long fascinated scholars, the city's fourteenth‐century history is often given short shrift. Only the dazzling figure of Cola di Rienzo consistently draws scholarly attention, resulting in his somewhat exaggerated role in Roman political history. With important exceptions, Anglophone scholars primarily interested in the Italian Renaissance have traditionally begun their histories in the mid‐fifteenth century with the result that fourteenth‐century Rome is largely passed over. The Avignon Papacy, 1309–1377, is seen as a period of abandonment and ruin. The situation is different among scholars, mostly Continental, whose study of fourteenth‐century Rome's social and economic history has been appearing over the last few decades. This historiography, which has largely operated discretely from the Anglophone tradition, has conclusively demonstrated that late medieval Rome must be considered alongside Italy's city communes. This has transformative implications for Roman historiography. Recent work on Rome's earlier medieval history, as well as on the history and character of the Italian communes, suggests that now more than ever there is much to be gained by bringing these discrete strands of scholarship on late medieval Rome to bear on one another.