Un changeur florentin du Trecento: Lippo di Fede del Sega (1285 env.-1363 env.) by Charles M.de La RonciereReview by: Lauro MartinesThe American Historical Review, Vol. 80, No. 4 (Oct., 1975), pp. 956-957Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1867473 .

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956 Reviews of Books

Frederick was truly heir to the Norman eclectic genius, and his Constitutions were descendants of the Assizes of Ariano issued by Frederick's grandfather Roger II in 1140. Buyken's study does not make use of contextual evidence to substantiate her findings, but the principal manuscript of King Roger's Assizes, Bib. Vat. Lat. 8782, tends to support her lexicographical arguments. It is a late twelfth-century codex that reveals a juridical tradition in southern Italy extending unbroken from the Lombard Edict of Rothari in 643 through subsequent Lombard and Carolingian legislation and the resurrected Institutes of Justinian to the Assizes of Ariano. This manuscript reveals the tradi- tion known to Piero della Vigna and the other jurists who assisted Frederick in the formation of his "new" code. Despite its brevity, Buyken's book is thick in texture and cointains nearly a thousand footnotes; a table of contents and bibliography would have been helpful.

PAUL H. MOSHER

University of Washington

TETA E. MOEHS. Gregorius V, 996-999: A Bio- graphical Study. (Papste und Papsttum, number 2.) Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann. 1972. Pp. viii, 114. DM 48.

This second volume of a biographical series on the papacy is the first monograph-length discus- sion of Pope Gregory V in nearly a century. Teta Moehs justifies a new study of Gregory's brief reign primarily o,n the basis of extensive additional documentation, especially as made available in volumes of the Regesta Imperii edited respectively by M. Uhlirz in 1956 and H. Zimmermann in 1969. She takes the mod- erately revisionist position that this first Ger- man pope was considerably more independent of his imperial cousin and patron, Otto III, than has been recognized.

Gregory V emerges here as a pontiff well aware of Church tradition and of the potential in his office. Moehs stresses Gregory's concern from the outset with reasserting papal preroga- tives and moral authority in Western Christen- dom, a policy reflected most obviously in a vigorously cultivated role as "protector of the monasteries." Thus he conferred exemptions and immunities from local bishops and nobles on monastic houses throughout Europe and maintained a close friendship with the Abbot Abbo of Fleury, a leading advocate of monastic independence from episcopal control. Above all, Gregory's active support of Cluny through grants of privilege-the first pope in this-

can be seen to have furthered considerably the effectiveness of that great reform institution.

But Gregory's exile from Rome by a turbu- lent local faction ended the promising first half year of his reign and began the rapid erosion of his position. When he returned to Rome early in 998 with a vengeful Otto III, Gregory had clearly become the emperor's man, another instrument toward realizing Otto's dream of a Renovatio imperii Romanorum. Otto then presided with Gregory at synods whose decrees served the imperial will more than. the papal. The author, however, goes beyond her sources in claiming so firmly that Gregory was henceforth an unwilling accomplice to the im- perial cause. She also constantly uses the phrase "must have" to make inferences where "prob- ably" or "likely" would often be more ap- propriate in light of the fragmentary evidence.

This sober account makes clear, nonethe- less, that Gregory V's pontificate, though abor- tive, foreshadows in important respects the Hildebrandine era of papal revival in the fol- lowing century.

DONALD SULLIVAN

University of New Mexico

CHARLES M. DE LA RONCIERE. Un changeur floren- tin du Trecento: Lippo di Fede del Sega (1285 env.-1363 env.). (1icole Pratique des Hautes Ittudes-VIe Section. Centre de Recherches His- toriques. Affaires et gens d'affaires, 36.) Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N. 1973. Ppi. 277.

In an age when only princes and saints quali- fied for the order of biography, Lippo di Fede, money changer, was not even a petty clerk in one of the big banking houses of the day. Starting with a small inheritance, his wife's dowry, and a purse full of florins, he went into currency exchange in 1314 and for the next nine years, operating alone, trafficked mainly in regional Italian coins and lent money. Now and then he acted the loan shark but he also lent at little or no interest. His tricksy exchange manipulations were most successful during an interlude (1315-18) when Florentine silver currencies were especially unstable. Drawn, like many a Tuscan, by the solid smells of land, Lippo used his profits and skills to buy out some peasants at Pontanico, just outside Florence, and he held on to those lands through thick and thin. Realizing that he operated at too modest a level to profit in the changed monetary environment of Florence, he abandoned wife, home, and farms in 1323 to seek his fortune in France. There for thirty

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Medieval 957

years, at Pontoise and then Paris, he engaged first in money changing and usurious lending, then in trade. Although his first years abroad were profitable, he fell on bad times again, dropped from sight in 1334, and reappeared in Paris in 1350, henceforth to rely upon money sent to him by his sister. "Naked and without britches," as he was later to be taunted by his second wife (the first having died in 1331), he returned to Italy in 1353. He spent his last years trying to live off a few rents and the produce from his lands, borrowing money from a cousin, and bitterly regretting his late mar- riage in 1354 to a much younger woman, who claimed finely "chel ciesso dovella chacava era piiu bello chio nonavea la boccha mia" (p. 245).

In fixing the outlines of this man's life-the major source is Lippo's unpublished business diary-M. de la Ronciere has produced a work of the first rank. He puts his man squarely into the world of small money changers, chang- ing economic circumstances, city life (Florence), and village life (Pontanico). The book is se- verely empirical and yet imaginative too. There are charts enough and graphs, an easy han- dling of knotted subtleties, and a persistent attack on major questions. We look through Lippo into the life of the times, but where his ledger fails, lhe is presented to us in the life of the times through a richesse of other sources. In the process, we alsoi find the author revo- lutionizing our view of the rural life around Florence, above all by providing some dazzling close-ups.

LAURO MARTINES

University of California, Los Angeles

LOUIS GREEN. Chronicle into History: An Essay on the Interpretation of History in Floren- tine Fourteenth-Century Chronicles. (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1972. Pp. vi, 177. $13.95-

Mr. Louis Green, senior lecturer at Monash University, has analyzed the contents of five chronicles written by Florentine writers of the fourteenth century: Giovanni Villani, his brother Matteo, Marchione di Coppo Stefani, the Anonymous whose oeuvre had once been attributed to Minerbetti, and Goro Dati. Green's is a rather traditional approach to in- tellectual history, the narrative falling some- where in between an explication de texte and a more general analysis of certain character- istics that strike the author as interesting. Through the analysis of these five works,

Green strives to gain an insight into the chang- ing character of the Florentine Weltanschau- ung of the trecento. Starting with Giovanni Vil- lani, to the eventual critical edition of whose chronicle lhe makes a very useful contribution in the book's two appendixes, he suggests that in the early trecento there existed in the minds of Florentine intellectuals a close connection between the supernatural and the- natural. This connection, which tended to interpret his- torical events in light of a supernatural, divine schema, was undermined as a result of the mid- century crisis. The Florentines of the second half of the fourteenth century tended to sep- arate the sphere of thel natural from that of the supernatural, assigning the cause of change in the former to factors intrinsic to it. This separation of the two realms, which in Green's view was an important precondition to tlhe de- velopment of humanism, did not, however, lead to a more rational and secular mentality. Rather, throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there persisted in the minds of in- tellectuals a belief in supernatural forces, not necessarily as determining the quotidian course of human history, but rather now as portents and omens of impending cataclysmic, millen- nial disasters.

Green's narrative is subtle and often ele- gant, and it succeeds in throwing some il- luminating insights on rather familiar texts. Quite clearly, there are problems with an ap- proach that uses five texts, written over the course of nearly a century, in order to establish the world view of an entire culture. But leav- ing aside the question of methodology, one must regret the fact that Green chose to write his book without consulting any manuscript sources; in fact, of the five texts that he stud- ied, there exists a good, critical edition only of one: that of Stefani's chronicle. Perhaps in the end, Green's greatest contribution could be that either he, or a reader of his interesting book, will be moved to undertake one of the major tasks still confronting historians of the Florentine trecento: the preparation of a mod- ern, critical edition of Giovanni and Matteo Villani's chronicles.

ANTHONY MOLHO

Brown University

P. J. JONES. The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State: A Political History. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1974. Pp. ix, 372. $23.50. At long last, Philip Jones's well-known Oxford thesis has appeared in print. The study has not

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