Volume 100, Issue 1

In 2020, the German Historical Institute of Rome publishes the 100th volume of its yearbook „Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken“. The editors take this opportunity to analyse the yearbook’s history, its origins, contents, profile and functions over more than a century. The article considers the specific significance of Rome as an international hub for research and exchange in the humanities, and examines the journal as a source on the Institute’s history. Reflecting on the yearbook’s past and its development will stimulate and enrich the discussion over its future in a highly dynamic academic context. At the same time, it invites us to consider the variegated field of academic reviews as an object of the historiography of the humanities, hitherto unduly neglected.

On the occasion of the 100th issue of the „Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken“, the article offers a retrospective look at the journal, with a focus on the medieval section. It highlights the presentation or edition of Vatican sources, both as a reflection of the Institute’s research and as a constant distinctive feature in the context of international journals. At the same time, the author stresses the journal’s openness to new topics following trends in medieval studies, alongside well-established issues, and the increasingly intense internationalisation resulting from collaboration with other researchers and institutes based in Rome, Italy and abroad. Finally, it expresses the hope that the journal may continue to be a means of fostering research on primary sources, especially in the context of the Repertorium Germanicum .

The article examines the topics relating to the early modern period covered by the journal „Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken“ in the hundred volumes since its first publication. Thanks to the index (1898–1995), published in 1997 and the availability online on the website perpectivia.net (since 1958), it is possible to identify constants and changes in historiographical interests. Initially, the focus was on the publication of sources in the Vatican Secret Archive (now the Vatican Apostolic Archive) relating to the history of Germany. The topics covered later gradually broadened to include the history of the Papacy, the social composition of the Curia and the Papal court and Papal diplomacy with a specific focus on nunciatures, among others. Within a lively historiographical context, connected to historical events in Germany in the 20th century, attention to themes and sources relating to the Middle Ages continues to predominate with respect to topics connected to the early modern period.

The article examines the role played by contemporary historical research between 1960 and 2018 within the „Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken“. The principal results emerging from the survey are as follows: 1) especially from 1980 onwards, the journal devoted increasing space to contemporary history; 2) it also hosted a growing number of contributions written by Italian authors, both in Italian and in German; 3) in order to enlarge its readership, it would be helpful for the journal to publish a larger number of essays by German-speaking authors in Italian.

The German Historical Institute in Rome (DHI Rome) is the only one among the Humanities Institutes of the Max Weber Foundation abroad to have its own music department, the importance of which in the German-speaking world is demonstrated by the close and structurally anchored connection with the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung (German Musicological Society), among other things, which has been in place since the beginning. The 60th anniversary of the Music History Department at the DHI Rome (after the focus on the historical reappraisal of its founding history on the occasion of its 50th anniversary) now provides an opportunity to focus on the question of the methodological conditions of the relationship between historically active musicology and historical studies. In the end, the question will not only be what opportunities lie today in the connection of the two disciplines, but also why this should continue to be done within the framework of research humanities institutes abroad.

Historical archives are institutions holding historical sources, in particular deeds and files, that is to say records created in the past for administrative and legal purposes. Today, historical archives are responsible for preserving administrative documents that will become sources of history in the future. This paper reviews the connection – and disconnection – between archives of this type and musicology. In the field of music-historical research, it is most common to use music libraries and other special music collections, particularly to examine original manuscripts of musical compositions. Music historians have focused less on archival sources, though these are increasingly valued thanks to the influence of cultural history. On the other hand, historians dealing with general history have been little interested in the history of the arts and, particularly, in music history, instead focusing mainly on political, social and economic issues. Archivists have shared these preferences. By contrast, this article presents examples of the potential of archival sources for music-historical research, and shows that Archival Science contributes to the management of written cultural heritage in the field of music as well.

In 2020, the Institute of Music of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini celebrated its 35th birthday. Its archive preserves 26 collections belonging to Italian composers and musicians of the 20th century: a significant quantity of sources encompassing several generations and aesthetic orientations (from Casella to Romitelli, from Rota to Manzoni etc.). The state of current discourse and new technologies are leading to a re-orientation of archival work. First, it can contribute to a more detailed picture of musical facts and personal interactions. Second, digital technologies create the conditions for new ways of evaluating the data found in different sources; and third, an archive is now increasingly conceived as a service and the use of its resources is not limited to historiographical research but also encompasses the dissemination of knowledge and musical practice. The book series „The Composer’s Workshop”, the online-journal „Archival Notes” and the workshop cycle „Research-led Performance” are examples of the wide range of activities connected with our archive.

As Frédéric Döhl recently noted in his article „Potential und Risiken des Archival Turns in den Digital Humanities für die Musikwissenschaft“ (in: „Archiv für Musikwissenschaft“ 75,4 [2018], pp. 301–320), the hierarchy of accessibility among sources shifts perceptibly during digitalization, and musicology and archives ultimately become something like a dual form of music historiography. This paper tries to argue that the limited accessibility of private archives can be regarded as a parallel phenomenon to the digital multiplication of already known sources, while non-digitized sources increasingly disappear from focus. To avoid unintended consequences that hinder research attempting to open up new sources, it is necessary to find feasible paths to a fruitful handling of such archives at the intersection of the public and private interest. The limitations of temporary research projects in particular complicate the options for exploitation, as the grey area of private archives offers the services of public archives only to a very limited extent. Here, the researcher is often not a user but a supplicant. Considering some of the main problems regarding persisting inaccessibility, reduced opening hours and dealing with archive catalogues (when they exist), this article attempts to determine the potential for a restricted, though fruitful, use of undiscovered sources during ongoing research in which the exploitation of a private archive with an abundance of material is just part of a research project and not its main focus. The discussion is enriched with personal experiences, with two examples from Venice and Florence. These empirical insights were obtained during research on the production mechanisms of Italian opera in the first half of the 18th Century, but could be extended to other interdisciplinary projects that tackle an extensive corpus of heterogeneous sources.

The article investigates the importance of ‚blacklists‘ as a tool of Fascist and National Socialist racial policy in the field of music. It critically examines the radicalizing effects that National Socialist antisemitism exerted on Fascist racial policy, which has often been described as yielding to German pressure. In fact, Fascist leaders demonstrated their will to cooperate on the ‚Jewish question‘ very early, though Fascist antisemitism never reached the exterminatory dimensions of the Nazi Holocaust. Already in 1936, cultural policymakers were working towards the goals of their German allies, taking initial steps to discriminate against Jewish musicians long before the Racial Laws were introduced in 1938. Various documents recently discovered in the historical archives of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome also highlight the pivotal role of musical institutions and their rich documentation in the investigation of cultural policy under Fascist rule, especially since the vast majority of the official records belonging to central institutions like the Italian Propaganda Ministry must be considered lost.

Relationships between kings and monasteries or convents were governed by three privileges: free election, immunity, and royal protection. While the first two privileges have been extensively investigated, royal protection has attracted little attention among medievalists, with the exception of German scholarship. The latter has usually emphasised a specific consequence of the use of this privilege, namely the transfer of ownership rights over the monastery or the convent from the founders’ family to the king. However, this was just one possible effect of royal protection, not necessarily the most common or most important. The distinguishing features of this privilege have been largely ignored, namely its nature as a right in personam , and not in rem , as well as its jurisdictional content, since royal protection allowed protected persons to be judged by the royal court. This article aims to explore the full political potential of royal protection, and to reconstruct the institutional dynamics that the use of this privilege could trigger in the Ottonian period. Two case studies are analysed comparatively: Central Italy and Eastern Saxony. Though different and distant from each other, these two political spaces can be fruitfully compared, as the Ottonians and the religious communities of these areas deliberately decided to make intensive use of royal protection to shape their mutual relationships. This comparative study reveals significant differences in the political application of the privilege in the two regions, in part reflecting a dissimilar understanding of the idea of royal protection itself. This privilege established a bilateral and asymmetrical relationship of variable intensity, which could change in time and space depending on the variable degree of political autonomy enjoyed by the protected abbot (abbess) and his (her) community as well as the different attitude of the king, acting as a lenient judge or as lord of those under his protection.

A specific area of north-eastern Calabria, between the Sila and the Ionian Sea, profoundly Greek and with a degree of stability from the Byzantine to the Norman era and even beyond, represents an ideal local area in which to document the development of the Florensian monastic organization, with its political, social and religious peculiarities. The interaction of Joachim of Fiore and his monks with the political and ecclesiastical authorities did not differ from those of other monastic institutions in the area. As regards the latter, the Cistercians in particular, despite the criticisms levelled by the abbot of Fiore, exhibited similar practical behaviour, both religious and economic, especially in the struggle for the demanium , and this sometimes led to conflict. Both „new“ orders, however, participated in the transition of the area towards the Latin reform.

Venice is considered the best-informed community of the late Middle Ages. The study examines the availability of information for the second half of the 15th century, particularly with regard to the key year 1462/1463, and as a case study concentrates on areas of the supposed Venetian periphery of interest, above all Hungary and the two principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. The result is a thoroughly differentiated system of information acquisition, verification and control. Means of communication, as well as different areas of interest of the Serenissima, can be identified. A distinction is made between information maps and communication maps. The latter also include the distribution of news from the lagoon city exchanged with foreign envoys. During the period concerned, news was exchanged in an astonishingly liberal way, in turn integrating the Serenissima into the information networks of the other Italian states. The study thus places the „information commodity“ within the research field of late medieval gift exchange and patronage structures. In short, a thoroughly pragmatic Venetian approach to news acquisition and evaluation can be observed. Verification of the quality of the information obtained was subject not least to quantitative and ranking criteria. Ultimately, the informational power of Venice was based above all on its outstanding reputation among its contemporaries.

This paper discusses the cleric Nikolaus Graurock († 1493), who came to Rome at a young age to embark upon a remarkable career. His connection to the Hospital and Fraternity of Santa Maria dellʼAnima was the first important support used by this man of legal and diplomatic talents, who thus became acquainted with the customs of the Curia and of Rome and was able to quickly build up a personal network. His membership of the familia of cardinal Latinus Orsini, who came from a family of the high nobility with influence in Rome and Italy, was also fundamental. In the 1450 s, Graurock was one of the key figures – especially in the „Lüneburg Prelate War“ – in the exchange between the Curia and representatives from northern Germany. Thanks to his position, however, Nikolaus Graurock also promoted the careers of others, including relatives. During his long stay in Rome he came into closer contact with those humanists who played an increasingly important role at the papal court from the second half of the 15th century onwards and whose works he later disseminated in Germany. This example of a mid-level cleric thus offers fundamental insights into the career opportunities that Rome and the Curia offered in the 15th century.

The article is inspired by the discovery of new documents concerning the case of the heretic Fanino Fanini da Faenza, who in 1549–1550 was at the centre of a bitter jurisdictional conflict between the Holy See and the Estense State. Thanks to the new evidence collected, it is possible to outline the role played by the legate of Romagna, Cardinal Girolamo Recanati Capodiferro, who conducted negotiations with Duke Ercole II d’Este through the mediation of the Portuguese scholar António Ribeiro. The study then attempts to broaden the analysis, showing that Fanini’s story allows us to reflect on the positions taken by some members of the sacred college (in particular Marcello Cervini and Capodiferro himself) in the months preceding the death of Paul III, on their attitude towards the heretical emergency, and on the attempts of the Italian princes to impose their own control over the inquisitorial courts.

This essay offers a complete analysis and contextualization of Guido Bentivoglio’s contemporary history „Della Guerra di Fiandra”. The comparison with works by historians from the Netherlands, France and Italy, also translated into several languages, on the uprising of the provinces of the northern Netherlands, reveals similarities in composition, stylistic devices, communication with readers and their explicit or implicit individual intentions: they wished to influence current politics. In contrast to the others, Bentivoglio did not write a history book that could be verified by many sources, but a political and military textbook for readers, whom he wished to instruct and delight with classical stylistic devices, situationally used sentences and fictional speeches. With his combination of res gestae with res fictae he created a variant of contemporary history.

They never met. But the ‚friendship by correspondence‘ (1628–1634) between the traveller Pietro Della Valle and the desk-bound librarian of the imperial library in Vienna, Sebastian Tengnagel, was built on a solid foundation: their shared passion for the Christian and Muslim East, its languages and its books was an „iron bond“ that gave rise to a close and immediate understanding between two men, despite their huge differences of temperament and experience. However, these letters (kept at the Vatican Archives and the Austrian National Library) do not just bear witness to the growing knowledge of the East in the first half of the 17th century. They also show that early Catholic Orientalism had its roots in a highly stratified terrain, in which military conflict, irenic tensions, missionary propaganda, philological investigation, religious disputes, a rejection of book censorship, and theories on sovereignty were layered and interwoven. But how, and why, would anyone choose to become an orientalist, and what did it entail? Rome and Vienna, the cities from which the letters were written, were both normative centres with universalist ambitions; both were engaged in a profound rethinking and redefinition of secular and religious power. The pages written by Tengnagel and Della Valle reflect the writers’ love of and interest in books. But reading carefully between the lines you can also hear the ‚noises off‘ of the cities in which they were penned.

During the Thirty Years’ War, the affairs of the Italian imperial fiefdoms could not be at the centre of Imperial Court policy. The correspondence of the nuncios with the Roman Secretariat of State, however, shows that disputes over enfeoffments and other feudal-law problems were not important only in connection with the War of the Mantuan Succession, but that conflicts arose in various areas of northern Italy and kept the Imperial Court Council and imperial commissioners occupied. On the one hand, there were conflicting views concerning the feudal status of territories annexed by the Papal States. In addition, there were unclear legal conditions and disputes regarding many small dominions in the border regions of Savoy-Piedmont, Milan, Genoa and Tuscany, and not just because of the efforts of these principalities to incorporate imperial fiefdoms. There were also serious conflicts over generously granted imperial enfeoffments not in line with Spanish interests. The reports of the nuncios also name some of the fief holders who were taking legal action in Vienna. Additionally, they show that measures taken by the Imperial Court regarding the Italian imperial fiefdoms were considered with great suspicion in Rome and that the Curia in various cases conformed to the French position, which tended to ignore or expressly reject the idea that the imperial fiefdoms were under the control of the Emperor.

Prospero Balbo, the head of a leading Piedmontese noble family, followed a career path similar to that of the versatile French statesman Talleyrand. In the aftermath of 1789, Balbo served under four different regimes: the Old Regime monarchy, the Russian provisional administration of Piedmont in 1799, the Napoleonic empire, and the restored Savoy monarchy. After the short-lived revolutionary movement of 1821 in Sardinia-Piedmont, Prospero lost his job as interior minister and his son, Cesare, was forced into exile. The revolutionary waves of 1820–1821 were the most recent of numerous disruptive events and regime changes that jeopardized Europe and the Atlantic world between the late 1770 s and the early 1820 s. These five decades of revolutionary upheavals, wars, and persistent insecurity forced the traditional elites to mobilize their material, cultural, and social resources to preserve their prestige and power. Based on extensive archival research, this article examines the resilience-strengthening resources and strategies implemented by members of the Balbo family during periods of political turmoil. In doing so, the article aims to develop an analytical and conceptual framework to describe historical processes in terms of resilience and vulnerability. This new approach enables us to look afresh at elite transformations and at the dynamics of political change and continuity in early nineteenth-century Europe.

During the early years of the 20th century, attempts at dialogue with modern culture and practical collaboration with the Protestant majority in the Kaiserreich emerged in German Catholicism in order to overcome the condition of ‚inferiority‘ that characterized the Catholic population. In the context of the anti-modernist repression enacted by the Roman Curia of Pope Pius X, however, the proponents of forms of interdenominational organization, the autonomy of the laity from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and openness towards secularized modernity more generally attracted the criticism of the so-called integralist Catholics. The latter saw a danger to the Catholic faith and to the prerogatives of the Roman Church in these developments and, ultimately, a manifestation of modernist ‚heresy‘. Among the targets of the integralist accusations were the Volksverein and the Centre Party, as well as the interdenominational Christian trade unions. The paper aims to shed light on the contents and characteristics of German Catholic integralism in the years following the encyclical Pascendi (1907): to this end, the specific case of the Cologne priest Andreas Müller (1862–1938) is examined; through dozens of letters addressed to the Nuncio of Munich and the Holy See itself, he denounced the (alleged) infiltration of Modernism in Germany.

This article intends to show that the German language broadcasts of Vatican Radio influenced relations between the Holy See and the Third Reich in the period between the start of the station’s radio broadcasts and 1943. As emerges from the analysis of published and unpublished sources, Vatican Radio seems to have been used as a Catholic propaganda tool in Germany, but also as an instrument of diplomacy. Vatican radio continued to broadcast in German and to attract listeners even after Goebbels’ decree of 1 September 1939 forbidding people to listen to foreign radio stations. The Holy See, aware that its broadcasts were being monitored by the Sonderdienst Seehaus and of their importance not only for the population of Germany but also for its government, exploited them to spread specific ideas and messages depending on the circumstances and the progress of the war. The study of Vatican Radio thus represents a specific point of view from which to understand the Holy See’s attitude towards National Socialism and its actions during the Second World War.

During the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Italian unification in 2011 three disparaging views of the Risorgimento were publicly expressed: the first by ultraconservative Catholics, the second by the neo-Bourbon movement and the third by the Lega Nord. This article analyses their cultural roots, evolution and mutual relations, with a particular focus on the neo-Bourbon movement, the most active during recent years.

The disciplinary tradition of musicology has been divided, from the outset, between historical and systematic aspects, prolonging the ancient conflict between the physical and sensorial aspects of music. In an ongoing process of diversification (synonymous with destabilisation in a minor discipline like musicology), history lost the central position claimed for it in the founding era. Yet this tradition is itself inconsistent given the permanent conflict between aspects connected to history and those connected to the fine arts. Ultimately, this article considers the productive impulse that might be provided by a new and fundamental rapprochement between musicology and history. This productivity and potential is discussed using several potential examples.