Experiencing the new times without thinking ? Around the work of Chris Wickham

Published in 2015 as Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century (Princeton UP), Chris Wickham's book is a major milestone in the renewal of Italian communal history. This session will be devoted to discussing the book in the presence of its author. First, it will be resituated in the social and political history perspective of Chris Wickham's work, particularly since Courts and Conflict in Twelfth-Century Tuscany (Oxford, 2000), and the place of the feudal paradigm in this new historiography will be examined. The strength of the demonstration here lies in breaking down the once smooth and oriented narrative of the emergence of Italian communes. Chris Wickham invites us into a discontinuous history, describing the hesitations, misunderstandings and improvisations of political actors who built a new world without thinking about it, perhaps even without wanting to. Such a narrative bias puts the very notion of historical experience to the test, which is why it is essential to submit it to discussion here. This also requires a methodical reassessment of the history of documentary production, based on the files used in the book - essentially those of Milan, Pisa and Rome.