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Indispensable immigrants
The wine porters of northern Italy and their saint, 1200–1800
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2015
About this book
Indispensable immigrants recreates the world of peasants who streamed into the cities of late medieval and early modern northern Italy to carry crushingly heavy containers of wine. Written in an easily accessible and unassuming style, it is solidly grounded in previously untapped archival and visual sources. In this first-ever reconstruction of the forgotten metier of wine porter, topography plays a key role in forming the labour market; in the scramble to distinguish professionals from manual labourers the term artist gets divorced from lowly artisan, and wretched diet is invoked to explain why workers are so unintelligent; the wine porters make one of their own their patron saint in thirteenth-century Cremona and other interest groups scheme successfully to get him canonised in Rome five centuries later; and when enlightened despots abolish the guilds, the wine porters’ trade fades away just as the candles on their patron’s altars sputter and die out.
Author / Editor information
Contributor: Lester Little
Lester K. Little is Professor Emeritus of History at Smith College and a former Director of the American Academy in Rome
Reviews
‘The book is a sheer delight, perfect for leisure reading by all historians no matter their chronological or geographic specialization, a testament to the joys of what we do.’ - Rudolph M. Bell, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, Journal of Social History June 2016
‘It is a welcome contribution to his already-renowned scholarship and a tribute to a little-known Italian medieval saint. As a consequence the book itself will be indispensable to medieval and early modern scholars who work on Italy, saints, cults, the papacy, lay piety, and town life.’
Janine Larmon Peterson, Marist College, The Medieval Review, 2016
‘This study, a pleasure to read, should engage a wide range of scholars, of medieval and early modern Italy, of religion and society, of popular piety, of memory and its construction, and of cultural and economic history.’
Thomas Worcester, College of Holy Cross, Renaissance Quarterly Review, Vol LXX, No. 4
‘It is a welcome contribution to his already-renowned scholarship and a tribute to a little-known Italian medieval saint. As a consequence the book itself will be indispensable to medieval and early modern scholars who work on Italy, saints, cults, the papacy, lay piety, and town life.’
Janine Larmon Peterson, Marist College, The Medieval Review, 2016
‘This study, a pleasure to read, should engage a wide range of scholars, of medieval and early modern Italy, of religion and society, of popular piety, of memory and its construction, and of cultural and economic history.’
Thomas Worcester, College of Holy Cross, Renaissance Quarterly Review, Vol LXX, No. 4
Topics
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Front matter
i -
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Dedication
v -
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Contents
vii -
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List of figures
viii -
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Prologue
1 -
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Part I: Alberto
9 -
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1 The legend of Saint Alberto
11 -
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2 The life of Alberto
21 -
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3 The afterlife of Alberto
23 -
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Part II: The wine porters
33 -
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4 The brenta and the brentatori
35 -
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5 Topography and migration
64 -
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6 Porters of the imagination
76 -
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Part III: Sainthood
101 -
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7 Making saints
103 -
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8 Sainthood by community
115 -
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9 Sainthood by the papacy
143 -
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Epilogue
170 -
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Appendix
184 -
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Notes
192 -
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Index
222
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
August 9, 2023
eBook ISBN:
9781526101761
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781526101761
Keywords for this book
bishops; brenta; brentatore; community; Cremona; Fernand Braudel; indispensable immigrants; Northern Italy; papacy; Parma; patron saint; peasants; Piacenza; popes; Reggio Emilia; Saint Alberto; Saint-Mattia; sainthood; Teofilo Folengo; wine porters
Audience(s) for this book
For a non-specialist adult audience
