Back to the city

Abstract

The last session of the lecture offers a provisional assessment of an investigation that resembles the search for a generative grammar of political possibilities in medieval societies, aiming, on the linguistic model, at a transformational theory of statement production. In political matters, these statements are more diverse than we think, but they obey a few elementary rules of transformation, starting from a single source of production that we have hypothesized to lie outside the field of politics, since the paradox of medieval Christianity confers authority on those who admit the unworthiness of power. In terms of the history of power, if the past is the reservoir of solutions detached from their problems, then writing history amounts to reconstituting the problems for which the institutional forms or political practices of which we keep a trace were the solutions.

This last session suggests this, based on the example of podestataire experimentation in the 1175-1185 decade of communal Italy, in which all or some of the regularities evoked in this year's lecture can be found, opening up the possibility of a return to the city.

Contents

• " Feeling stupid, incapable, incompetent, idiotic " (Pierre Bourdieu, Sociologie générale, 2015) : the effort of research as an art of weakening
• Is a generative grammar of the possibilities of politics in the Middle Ages possible ?
• Regularities rather than rules, a style of inquiry rather than a method : recapitulations of research findings
• Writing the history of problematizations : the past is a reservoir of answers, but what were the questions ?
• An example : the podestà institution as experimentation and invention of politics (Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur ed., I podestà dell'Italia comunale. Parte I - Reclutamento e circolazione degli ufficiali forestieri (fine XII sec-metà XIV sec.), Rome, 2000)
• Scalability and sustainability of experience : the spatio-temporal contours of communal Italy
• A science of government at the service of civic concord : the art of speech
• From Enrico Besta to Giovanni Tabacco, the historiographical debate on the origins of the office of podestà
• A revolutionary moment (Enrico Artifoni) ? Rhythms, spacing, events
• The consistency of communal duration : an accumulation of political forms, not a succession of regimes
• Fuori, fuori il podestà : when the event is born from the disruption of ritual (Todi, July 17 1268)
• Une microstoria de l'écart à la norme (Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, " Échec au podestat : l'expulsion de Comacio Galluzzi, podestat de Todi ", Bollettino della deputazione di storia patria per l'Umbria, 1995)
• Emotional history of a humiliation that is not sovereign : Comacio Galluzzi cries in rage, then takes revenge
• Also in Murano, in 1511, a failure of political ritual (Claire Judde de la Rivière, La révolte des boules de neige. Murano face à Venise, 1511, 2014)
• Fins du Moyen Âge, finalités de son étude : retour sur les trois manières de raconter la disparition, avant récidive, des Laudes regiae (1377, 1530, 1918)
• And how can we tell the story of the origin of royal acclamations ? The coup d'état of 751 and the Donation of Constantine
• The tension between anointment and election, the aim of political archaeology, " this strange mixture of quiet anachronism and happy ethnocentrism " (Olivier Christin, Vox populi, 2014)
• When Ernst Kantorowicz reinterpreted the chivalric revival of Charles the Bold's court : " it was no longer the shimmering splendor of Burgundian chivalry ; it was the universal fame and laurels of Caesar for which Charles burned with envy " (quoted by Robert Lerner)
• The two paradoxical forms of political stability in the Middle Ages : escape is possible, the alternative is thinkable
• The Italian commune as an accentuation, not an exception
• Before the oblivious Renaissance, the presence of the Greco-Roman empire, a wide range of political possibilities
• Back to casa, perhaps another time