The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran
The Medieval Salento
THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES
Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor
Edward Peters, Founding Editor
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
The Medieval Salento
Art and Identity in Southern Italy
Linda Safran
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association.
Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press
Unless otherwise indicated, all photographs are by the author.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Safran, Linda.
The medieval Salento : art and identity in Southern Italy / Linda Safran. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Middle Ages series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4554-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Visual communication—Italy—Salentina Peninsula—History—To 1500. 2. Material culture—Italy—Salentina Peninsula—History—To 1500. 3. Arts and society—Italy—Salentina Peninsula—History—To 1500. 4. Ethnicity—Italy—Salentina Peninsula—History—To 1500. 5. Salentina Peninsula (Italy)—Social life and customs. 6. Visual communication in art. 7. Material culture in art. 8. Group identity in art. 9. Ethnicity in art. I. Title. II. Series: Middle Ages series.
P93.5.S235 2014
306.4'60945753—dc23
2013031247
Contents
Chapter 6. Rituals and Other Practices in Places of Worship
Chapter 7. Rituals and Practices at Home and in the Community
Chapter 8. Theorizing Salentine Identity
Database: Sites in the Salento with Texts and Images Informative About Identity
Note
Numbers in boldface brackets indicate images and texts in the Database. Greek in the Database reproduces the accentuation and orthography of the original text, whereas in the rest of the book the Greek is corrected. Conventions for inscriptions in the text are the same as in the Database; see page 242.
Introduction
In this book I explore the visual and material culture of people who lived and died in a particular region of Italy in the Middle Ages. I investigate their names, the languages they used in public, how they were represented (and how they actually may have looked), and what components of status seem to have been important to them. I then reconstruct some of the rituals that accompanied local residents throughout their life cycles and during their worship, their daily lives, and their calendar year, focusing on those practices that can be extrapolated from visual evidence. By combining analytical methods drawn from art history, archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, and sociolinguistics,1 I add texture to the stylistic and iconographic analyses that have dominated art-historical study of the region and shed new light on nonelite people who are often overlooked because they have left few traces in documentary texts.
The Medieval Salento: Art and Identity in Southern Italy is not one of those clever book titles that obscure the contents; it is, at first glance, an unambiguous and perhaps even uninspiring title. Yet not one of its principal words—“Medieval,” “Salento,” “Art,” “Identity”—is at all straightforward. These words turn out to be challenging intellectual and historical constructs that require both careful definition and a series of authorial choices. It is important to explore each of these terms to understand how they interrelate and why it is necessary, and even urgent, to consider them together in this book. I begin with the subtitle.
Art
“What is art?” is hardly a new question, but it seems to have become more exigent in the past century as novel forms of creativity, spurred by emerging technologies and social change, constantly appear and are frequently contested. I am concerned in this book with visual arts, not with literature or music or other creative spheres of human activity, but that restriction scarcely narrows the possible answers. Found art, environmental art, performance art, digital art are all “new” types of art that are valid to some viewers, and presumably to all of their creators, yet neither serious nor even “art” to others. It is crucial to acknowledge that definitions of art are culturally and temporally specific and, in particular, that Renaissance notions of art are not relevant to the millennium that preceded it. Despite its widespread impact over the past five centuries, the Renaissance idea of art as something finely crafted, a product of unusual skill or inspiration to be appreciated principally for its aesthetic value, is much too limiting.2 Before the European Renaissance (and also in non-European