From commune to urban seigneury : the persistence and evolution of a shared experience of the city

For a long time, the historiography of Italian communes understood the end of these collegiate regimes as a fading away in favor of urban seigniories, as a fall due as much to the deleterious dissensions running through an elite at the end of its tether as to the blows dealt by families with hegemonic ambitions. Over the last twenty years, work carried out mostly collectively has enabled us to re-read the transition from commune to seigneury in the north and center of the peninsula in a completely different light, in the last centuries of the Middle Ages. Now considered as ideal-types largely forged by the actors of the time themselves and, as such, to be deconstructed by researchers, the two forms of political and social organization have seen their antagonism "de-dramatized" (Gian Maria Varanini). The change from one to the other took place in what were sometimes long, bumpy moments, punctuated by involutions and bifurcations, during which numerous forms of personal power were experimented with. The notion of the communal experience that structures the seminar will enable us to observe how the knowledge and practices acquired by the commune in the course of its existence to organize, bind and direct urban communities were taken up, adapted or diverted by the lords, whose responsibility it was to ensure, in addition to security and prosperity, the stability of the social body of which they gradually aspired to become the head.

The seminar will examine some of the areas in which urban lordships were able to continue the communal experiment, enabling large sections of the population to share in the experience of city life: the practice of collective decision-making and public administration; public peace and tranquility, which require specific institutions; collective goods and public resources.