GOSSIP AND RESISTANCE AMONG THE

MEDIEVAL PEASANTRY*
I aim in this article to offer a defence of the study of gossip in
medieval (and not only medieval) history. It is therefore, perhaps,
appropriate to begin with a story, which I will use as a point of
reference for some of the themes I want to discuss. It takes shape
from a court case from twelfth-century Tuscany: that is to say,
from the testimonies of seventeen witnesses recorded in or around
1138 in a dispute between a peasant cultivator called Compagno
and the very rich and powerful monastery of Passignano, situated
in the Chianti hills about forty kilometres south of Florence, over
the ownership of a piece of land at Mucciana on the river Pesa,
where Passignano had just built a mill. To be precise, we have
two stories, one for each side; and we do not have the final
arbitration, so we cannot be sure even what the arbiter thought
was true. But the two stories are interesting in their own right,
as images of plausible and thus possible truths.1
The witnesses were all local; all or most were themselves
peasants; they split roughly evenly between the two sides.
Compagno's opponents thought the issue was simple: he had
never owned or publicly claimed the land until the monastery of
Passignano began to build its mill. They said that Compagno's
great-grandfather Rodolfino had three daughters, only one of
whom received land at her marriage; the others (including
Compagno's grandmother) only got movables. The descendants
of the first daughter sold this land and after two similar transac* This article is a revised version of my 1994 inaugural lecture at the University of
Birmingham, published in pamphlet form by the University under the same title m
1995. To create an article from a lecture I have smoothed out the signs of orahty a
little, and sharply cut back on more strictly local allusions, as well as introducing
some new material. I am very grateful to Leslie Brubaker for her critique of the text,
to her and to James Fentress for some of its underlying ideas, to Peter Burke for his
invitation to try out part of it in Cambridge, to my departmental colleagues past and
present, and to all the good gossipers I have known for their intellectual stimulus.
1
The text is in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, fondo diplomatico, Passignano,
sec. XII, no. 6 [n.d.]; R. Davidsohn, Stona di Firenze, 8 vols. (Florence, 1956), I,
616-17, dates it to 1138, though Compagno's evidence might, if read strictly, put it
to 1137. The arbiter, Inghilberto, was still active in the 1170s: Archivio di Stato di
Firenze, Cestello, 30 die. 1172.

PAST AND PRESENT

NUMBER 160

tions Passignano had got hold of it. They also said that Compagno,
although never openly contesting the land by the river, had in
fact claimed another piece of land, by implication from the same
inheritance, from the then owner, Arlotto (the man who had
alienated it all to Passignano in fact); he had done so by the
simple expedient of turning up and ploughing it, sowing millet
there. Someone told Arlotto about it, and he appeared on the
land to ask Compagno what he was up to; on hearing Compagno
claim the land, Arlotto 'forbade him, threatening him, and began
to run to get arms'. Compagno made himself scarce and did
not return.
Compagno had another version. His branch of the family,
egged on by his grandmother, had always claimed the land and
had never conceded. His direct actions as a sower, he said, had
been numerous. I think he saw all the lands of his greatgrandfather as one, so it did not matter which he claimed; but
they did, he said, include the land on the river Pesa, which he
sowed in the sight of Passignano's own dependants, who did not
protest, only leaving it because of a local war in 1135. He also
cut and sold wood on another tract of land without anyone
protesting; and he cultivated on a third, probably the one his
opponents said he claimed, 'as if it was his land', for two years.
Compagno was arguing, in other words, that his rights to work
the land had not been challenged by others, although he stopped
short of saying that the land was generally accepted as his. He
was establishing a right to claim the land, against the argument
that his branch of the family had never contested it (in Italy, as
in much of medieval Europe, uncontested possession of land for
thirty years was itself proof of right); and he was aiming at the
position of being the pnma facie possessor, thus throwing the
burden of proof on to the other side.
Medieval court cases, like modern ones, generally used written
proofs, if there were any relevant ones, and local knowledge if
as evidently in this case there were not. In Italy, as elsewhere,
local knowledge was sharply distinguished between per visum,
direct witnessing, per auditwn, merely hearing about it from
someone, and pubhca fama, what everybody knew, common
knowledge. Direct witnessing was the only fully legally acceptable
knowledge, but publica fama ran a close second; it was what
everybody knew, so it was socially accepted as reliable. Even
direct witnessing relied, for its context, on common knowledge

GOSSIP AND RESISTANCE AMONG THE MEDIEVAL PEASANTRY

concerning what the events were all about. One of Compagno's

enemies said it was 'public fame' that Compagno's branch of the
family had never held the land; this, to them, gave meaning to
several eye-witness accounts of Arlotto threatening Compagno
and Compagno running off, including one from Arlotto himself.2
Compagno's supporting witnesses, unfortunately, tended to
restrict themselves to statements that Compagno himself had made
to them about one or other of the fields he was claiming being
his, or at most that they had, at his invitation, watched him
plough them, possibly when no one else was around. This was
pretty weak back-up. Although we do not know the decision in
this case, we need not doubt that Compagno lost: in particular,
the fact that the document survives in the archive of the monastery of Passignano suggests that it won.
I
Publica jama, common knowledge, is of course constituted by
talking about the issue: in other words, by gossip. One might
simply here counterpose gossip and resistance; the gossip was
that Compagno had never held the land, whereas Compagno was
resisting, resisting both the beliefs of his richer kin and neighbours
and the rights of a huge monastic landowner at their back. But
what was Compagno actually doing? He was, by going onto three
pieces of land and cultivating them directly, making a public
statement: that he could cultivate them in front of witnesses, both
friendly and hostile, without opposition. He wanted his resistance
to be talked about. He wanted to create his own publica jama,
meaning in this case groups of people in Mucciana prepared to
gossip in public about him, saying, for example, 'well,
Passignano's dependants didn't object to him sowing the land;
that must tell something about his claim'. His enemies responded
by saying that if he sowed, he sowed secretly i.e., without
witnesses, which did not count it was a sort of theft; and, of
course, by saying that Arlotto did throw Compagno off his land,
indeed, with the threat of violence. They were, that is to say,
denying both that his acts were always public and that when
2
For local knowledge, see, for example, Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (New
York, 1983), 167-234; for knowledge as a context for understanding events, see
Paul Strohm, Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts
(Princeton, 1992), 14, 51-6, for fourteenth-century examples.

PAST AND PRESENT

NUMBER 160

public they were unopposed. All of these public acts, which

sometimes have an almost ritualized formality, had as their basic
aim the influencing of the gossip network to side with one or the
other party, or at least to split it into two. Resistance, to be
successful, even in court, needed gossip to legitimate it: agreed
truth was constructed through gossip. It is worth remembering
that communities do not always agree; gossip can be argued over,
and changed. And in Tuscany in the twelfth century gossip was
very respectful of public, direct, action.
Peasants do not speak in many medieval texts. Even in this
one, they do not do so directly; the arbiter (a professional judge
and notary from Florence) asked them questions, and wrote the
answers down, Latinizing them from the peasant Italian as he did
so. The usual caveats about the silences of the illiterate apply
as also those about the narrative strategies of the witnesses themselves. But witness depositions are as close as we can in practice
get to peasants speaking; and in Italy these start unusually early.
Compagno's case is a good example, but it is not unique, even
for the twelfth century. It is, however, also important that when,
in other societies of medieval Europe, we can get somewhere
towards hearing peasants speak, we find them adopting similar
strategies. They talk about each other and they try to affect what
other people say about them. Let us look at two more examples
from different societies; we can then move on to some initial
generalizations.
One society where gossip could really bite was medieval
Iceland. Iceland was so poor that nearly everyone was a peasant,
in the sense that they participated in direct cultivation or (above
all) stock-raising. Icelandic narrative sources are extremely
numerous, dating especially from the thirteenth century; they are
not all strictly 'factual' accounts, but they were certainly in general regarded as naturalistic that is to say, once again, plausible
accounts of social action.3 They are full of public, talked-about,
acts. These narratives, or sagas, focus on feuding and other forms
of dispute; an Icelandic peasant's final success in a feud depended
largely on the opinion his (or, more rarely, her) kin, neighbours
and patrons had of the case, and of his general good standing as
an honourable and successful person. Sagas thus contain, as a
3
For methodological guides, see J. C Byock, 'Saga Form, Oral Prehistory and the
Icelandic Social Context', New Literary Hist., xvi (1984-5); W. I. Miller, Bloodtaktng
and Peacemaking (Chicago, 1990), 43-51

GOSSIP AND RESISTANCE AMONG THE MEDIEVAL PEASANTRY

perpetual (if laconic) Greek chorus, other people's views of public

acts: 'Mordr earned nothing but ignominy from this'; 'Gunnarr
won great credit from the outcome of this case'. Obviously,
people reacted according to their own perceptions of the overall
rights and wrongs of a dispute, but the specific behaviour of
participants at each stage in the dispute was being watched too,
and could affect how the dispute was talked about. A couple of
examples here may help. Hrutr Herjolfsson, a prosperous and
well-thought-of farmer with a fame as a fighter, had a spell put
on him that made him impotent with his wife, Unnr, who
divorced him. Unnr's father, Mordr, correctly sued Hrutr in
court for the return of the dowry. Hrutr challenged him to a
duel, and the elderly Mordr backed down, thus gaining himself
the public ignominy cited above. But Hrutr risked humiliation
in the eyes of public opinion too, on two counts: impotence, for
one; but also for only winning by challenging an elderly and
respected man, which in one sense risked being seen as unfair.
Straight after the case, Hrutr found two children in a house where
he was staying already playing at being Hrutr and Mordr: the
one saying, 'I'll be Mordr and divorce you from your wife on the
grounds that you couldn't have intercourse with her'; and the
other, 'I'll be Hrutr and invalidate your dowry claim if you don't
dare to fight me'. Hrutr's brother got angry and hit them; but
Hrutr reacted differently: he gave one of the boys a gold ring.
This re-established his status as a 'noble-minded' man among the
talkers: 'Hrutr was highly praised for this'.4
Hrutr here had the subtlety to ward off disapproval by a
generous gesture, and he had no trouble about his reputation
again. More common, however, was the danger of inadequate
toughness undermining reputation. Snorri godi was one of the
two leading men of the Thorsnes area of western Iceland. He
invited a large number of people to an autumn feast, and 'people
grew very cheerful and began comparing the farmers in the
district, arguing about which of them was the best man or the
greatest leader, and, as so often happens when people's abilities
are being compared, there was plenty to disagree about'. But
some of them, notably a man called Thorleifr Kimbi, even said
that Arnkell, Snorri's chief rival, was the greatest of all. That
4
Brennu-Njdh Saga, ed. E 6 . Sveinsson (Islenzk fornrit, xu, Reykjavik, 1954),
cc. 6-8; my translations are from Njal's Saga, ed. M. Magnusson and H. Palsson
(London, 1960), 55, 130.

PAST AND PRESENT

NUMBER 160

was too much for Snorri, who had little alternative but to call
Arnkell out, and indeed found a way to kill him before the year
was out without stirring up a feud; only Thorleifr Kimbi, whom
Snorri made sure was there, got punished for it. This combination
of toughness and skill re-established Snorri's public standing in
the eyes and mouths of other Icelanders; it will also have
encouraged his guests to keep quieter in the future.s
In both of these narratives we can see in operation again the
dialectic between public acts and the meaning conferred on them
by gossip. This can indeed be emblematically, and endlessly,
illustrated from Icelandic sources. But we do not find much
resistance there some, but not much. This is simply because,
in a relatively egalitarian society by medieval standards, it was
hard to focus on what or whom to resist. My final example here,
the village of Montaillou in the French Pyrenees in 1322-4, made
almost too famous by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in his book of
1975, brings out the resistance aspect more clearly and shows
how more people could resist than just a single cultivator, such
as Compagno. Montaillou is known about because a high percentage of its inhabitants were Cathar heretics, who were persecuted
by the Inquisition, and also, in particular, because they were
interrogated by an unusually systematic inquisitor, who wanted
to know about everything the Montalionais did, whether in the
fields of economics, sex or hygiene, as a cross-check and backup to his main interest, their religious beliefs. The villagers
obliged; they poured out everything they knew about their neighbours. They had little choice, of course, and it has been pointed
out by Le Roy Ladurie's critics that they did not necessarily tell
the truth: they told what they thought the Inquisition needed to
hear. But again, the stories they told were, even if not always
strictly accurate, plausible as a construction of the world.6 It does
not matter to us whether X really had an adulterous affair with
Y, thus persuading her into heresy; it does matter to us that
belonging or not to Catharism was associated tightly with webs
of sexual contact, family, friendship and patronage. The peasants
5
Eyrbyggja Saga, ed E 6 . Sveinsson and M Thordarson (Islenzk fornrit, IV,
Reykjavik, 1935), cc. 37-8; translation from Eyrbyggja Saga, ed. H. Palsson and P.
Edwards (London, 1989), 98.
6
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou- village occitan de 1294 a 1324 (Paris,
1975). Two good critiques are L. E. Boyle, 'Montaillou Revisited', m J A. Raftis
(ed.), Pathways to Medieval Peasants (Toronto, 1981); Natalie Zemon Davis, 'Les
Conteurs de Montaillou', Annales ESC, xxxiv (1979).

GOSSIP AND RESISTANCE AMONG THE MEDIEVAL PEASANTRY

told of a divided village, with religious and factional identities

mapped on to each other; they also told of a village whose
principal external oppressor was not the aristocracy, which was
weak in the area, but the church and its tithe collectors. Small
wonder that Montaillou was easily encouraged towards heresy by
its village notables, including the local priest himself, whose
brother was capable of redistributing church tithes to the local
Cathars.7 But the move towards Catharism was in each case
structured and thanks to the Inquisition, documented by
talking: beside the fire in each house, while picking lice off each
other, as heretical views spread from family group to family
group, linked by marriage, neighbourhood, work; always talked
from place to place. This resistance to the world of outside powers
was never complete; there were always Catholics in the village
and, eventually, they brought the Cathars down. One could say,
however, that if the success of the Cathars had to do with a
community of village resistance, their eventual failure had to do
with internal resistance to the Cathar village elite which was
expressed in terms of Catholicism. When the priest and his family
overreached themselves, the talking moved against them and an
internal breach opened which allowed the Inquisition to move in.
The talking which the inquisitors extracted and recorded for us
allows an extraordinarily rich view of a medieval village society
and its social attitudes, which can be compared to the analyses of
any anthropologist. Le Roy Ladurie's book has no competitors
for anywhere in medieval Europe, despite twenty years of trying
by medievalists. Montaillou's talking its gossip did that.
II
Gossip has a bad press. There is a strong tendency, with a long
history, to say that people should not gossip, and that the act of
gossiping is idle and trivial. This is arguably the major reason
why the sociology of gossip is extremely ill-developed. One would
have expected it to develop with the flowering of socio-linguistics,
oral history and cultural studies in the last two decades. But there
has not been much since a rather inconclusive anthropological
debate in the 1960s, and even in that debate the best contribution
was actually the first, a lovely and classic article by Max Gluckman
7

Le Roy Ladune, Montaillou, 93.

10

PAST AND PRESENT

NUMBER 160

in Current Anthropology in 1963. There are a few interesting

recent books, but one of the best, by Patricia Meyer Spacks, is
focused on literature, not practice. There is almost no ethnography
that focuses on gossiping (although most anthropologists use it,
more or less innocently, according to taste); there are almost no
transcripts; there are almost no cultural or historical analyses of
actual gossiping sequences or practices, even in the present day.
(A new, systematic, analysis of such sequences is spoilt by its
amazing assumption that gossip is always regarded as 'morally
contaminated'.) One reason for this is could well be that the two
disciplines which would be, on the face of it, the most capable of
generating an adequate gossip theory, oral history and cultural
studies, have suffered so much from having the stigma of being
about 'mere' gossip thrown at them that they have for the most
part worked fairly hard to avoid overt links with studying gossip
at all. But, as a result, gossiping as a cultural practice has a strange
status: an unstudied, marginalized, and devalued Other, but one
that we actually all (or nearly all) engage in. People at best spend
time defining gossip, imprisoning it in boxes (one influential
anthropologist, F. G. Bailey, divided it into five: scandal, chat,
rumour, gossip and criticism), rather than analysing its most interesting feature, its transactional nature: i.e., the way that it establishes and structures relationships between people, which is
essentially what makes us all actually do it.8
8
Max Gluckman, 'Gossip and Scandal', Current Anthropology, IV (1963); R Paine,
'What Is Gossip About? An Alternative Hypothesis', Man, new ser, u (1967), and
several subsequent articles in Man constitute the original anthropological debate, the
anthropological literature is ably summed up in Sally E. Merry, 'Rethinking Gossip
and Scandal', in D Black (ed.), Toward a General Theory of Social Control, 2 vols.
(New York, 1984), i. Of subsequent work, I would smgle out, as texts I personally
have found particularly useful, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York, 1985); Jiirg
R. Bergmann, Discreet Indiscretions. The Social Organization of Gossip (New York,
1993), the moralistic analysis I mention in the text; Melanie Tebbutt, Women's Talk-1
A Social History of 'Gossip' in Working-Class Neighbourhoods, 1880-1960 (Aldershot,
1995), an excellent analysis of how gossip constructed a working-class social world
in the last century or so, based largely on oral history; and the thought-provoking
(although, once again, overly moralistic) commentary in John Sabini and Maury
Silver, Moralities of Everyday Life (Oxford, 1982), 89-106 Most recently, Robert
Lewis kindly recommended to me Samuel C. Heilman, Synagogue Life (Chicago,
1973), whose excellent chapter on gossip (151-92) parallels many of the points I
make in my text. I gained much, too, from J. Shapiro, 'The Role of Gossip in
Everyday Life', an unpublished 1994 senior seminar paper for Wheaton College,
Mass., which the author generously let me cite. F. G. Bailey's categories are in F. G.
Bailey (ed.), Gifts and Poison- The Politics of Reputation (Oxford, 1971), 284-90
Apart from Tebbutt, one of the few historians' analyses of gossip is Steve Hindle,
'The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley', Continuity and Change, IX (1994), see now also

(ami on p II)

GOSSIP AND RESISTANCE AMONG THE MEDIEVAL PEASANTRY

11

Since we cannot do without definitions, here is mine: gossip is,

simply, talking about other people behind their backs. It can also
be characterized a little further through statements about what it
is not: it is not necessarily malicious (though, of course, it often
can be); it is not gendered (the oldest trick is to say that women
gossip, whereas men talk about work or sport, or whatever a
classic piece of social construction though it does seem to be
true that women and men often gossip according to different
narrative strategies);9 it is not necessarily idle or arbitrary (much
gossip is self-interested or manipulative, or else essential information exchange);10 it is not necessarily about secret behaviour
(unpicking someone's role in a public meeting is gossip; and
Compagno, when he wanted to establish his rights in the world
of 'public fame' in the Chianti in the twelfth century, had to take
care, precisely, to do it in public); and, finally, it is certainly not
necessarily untrue indeed, gossip is at its most effective when
it is exact, and, even when it is not, it is true to the attitudes of
a given social group, that is to say it is meaningful to them.
And this is the point: the feature that makes, or could make,
gossip interesting to historians (rather than to ordinary humans)
is the way that it defines group identity. Groups construct themselves by talking. Some of this talking is about shared memories,
what I have elsewhere called social memory: the socially relevant
past, which legitimates or gives meaning to the present for the
group which commemorates it.11 Some of it is gossip: indeed, in
this respect, the group is actually constituted by who has the right
to gossip about outsiders or even absent insiders. The group's
moral values are constantly reinforced, indeed policed, by gossip,
(n 8 corn }

Phillip R. Schofield, 'Peasants and the Manor Court: Gossip and Litigation in a Suffolk
Village at the Close of the Thirteenth Century', Past and Present, no. 159 (May 1998)
It should be noted that not only Heilman but also Paine and Bergmann (esp. 149-53)
recognize the transactional nature of gossip.
9
Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation
(New York, 1990); see further Jennifer Coates, 'Gossip Revisited: Language in AllFemale Groups', in Jennifer Coates and Deborah Cameron (eds.), Women in their
Speech Communities- New Perspectives on Language and Sex (London, 1988), building
on the tentative comments in D. Jones, 'Gossip: Notes on Women's Oral Culture',
Women's Studies Internal Quart, iii (1980) The last two references I owe to Sue
Blackwell. See further below, 15-16
10
Paine, 'What Is Gossip About?'
11
James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), see further
Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History
(Cambridge, 1991). This essentially functionalist point was made explicit for gossip
by Gluckman, 'Gossip and Scandal'.

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PAST AND PRESENT

NUMBER 160

for gossip stories almost always have a moral edge to them it

is this which makes them interesting, indeed fun. But this means
that if you want to know about the boundaries of the everyday
morality of, the sense of belonging to, a social group, then
listening to how it gossips, if it will let you, is one crucial mechanism, maybe even the best one. In Margaret Mead's possibly
imaginary Samoa, where teenagers routinely paired off and made
love under the palm trees, gossip about premarital sex would
presumably have been a great deal less charged than in 1950s
Ireland. As Sally Merry observes, gossip focuses on and thus
makes explicit the structural inconsistencies and areas of greatest
tension and competition of any given social group.12 What people
gossip about, what stories they tell, will also tell you how their
group socially constructs the world outside as meaningful,13 and
about how it understands the processes of practical behaviour,
'habitus', as Pierre Bourdieu calls them,14 which structure the
way everyone deals strategically with that world. Gossip indeed
focuses on these strategies: 'don't you know why she really did
that? it was because . . .'; or, 'he ought to have known that
so-and-so would react that way'. Gossip can even operate as a
learning strategy: one learns how far one can go in bending the
rules in practice, before negative comment cuts in.
It is possible to go further than this, as is arguably necessary
in order to underpin my hostility, already outlined, to definitions
of gossip that are too tight. The ways in which people talk run
into each other, inextricably. Family gossip about the misdeeds
of great-uncle Jack, and family social memory about the misdeeds
of great-uncle Jack in North Africa in 1942, are not that far
apart. One step further back, French Protestant peasants in the
Cevennes of southern France, who have maintained to the present
day an astoundingly dense collective commemoration of thenancestors' Camisard uprising against Louis XIV in 1702-4, will,
while talking about the Camisards, slip without a break to their
own memories of being in the French Resistance in 1942-4, which
12
Merry, 'Rethinking Gossip and Scandal', 278-9. For Samoa, Margaret Mead,
Coming of Age m Samoa (London, 1928); but see Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead
and Samoa (London, 1983), 226-53, 281-93. Opinion is still divided on how authentic
Mead's version was I am grateful to Donna Kerner for her help on this issue.
13
The classic here is Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social
Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1967).
14
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1990),
52-65, for one of the most recent of his formulations of the concept.

GOSSIP AND RESISTANCE AMONG THE MEDIEVAL PEASANTRY

13

was seen by them then, and is still seen now, as a modern

re-enactment of the Camisard movement.15 What links all these
is the construction of a community of talkers, be it a peasant
village, or a family, or a drinking group, or an office or a
class, or a nation who accept, or are supposed to accept, a set
of shared values and images that locate them in the world of the
past and present, and teach them how to deal in, and with, that
world. Look for that talking and you will find those values and
images.
There is no space here to do much of the unpicking of discourses necessary to establish this last point as it affects the
medieval peasantry. Let us look, however, at one further brief
example, a court case over a secret marriage, held in Florence in
1455, and recently studied by Gene Brucker.16 The marriage was
between townspeople: the richer husband, Giovanni, was denying
he had ever married his artisan-class wife, Lusanna. Lusanna
produced, among others, witnesses from the countryside, from
Rignano suU'Arno, where they had spent August the previous
year. These peasants from Rignano stated that they had seen the
couple pick salad together, eat together 'as if they were husband
and wife', go to a birth feast together and go on a local pilgrimage
together, with the wife wearing clothing appropriate to a married
woman. The peasants were watching for (and talking about)
signs, clues, that Giovanni, who was a local landowner and therefore interesting to them, was actually married; these were the
signs, they were important and probative ones they mattered,
and could still be remembered a year later. The couple, of course,
knew the signs too and were operating inside the same field of
meaning (in a sense, if Giovanni was already planning to deny
the marriage, then picking salad with Lusanna in the view of
others was a form of lying). The parallels with Compagno's more
mundane and more desperate public acts should be clear.
So are parallels with our own experiences of life, I should expect.
Four further points, before we return to medieval peasant
resistance. The first is that the group of talkers is not always,
or easily, going to let you in. Gossip defines social groups; by
15
Philippe Joutard, La Legende des Camisards. une sensiklite au passe (Paris,
1977), 279-356.
16
Gene Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence
(Berkeley, 1986), 22, for the Rignano episode; cf Thomas Kuehn, 'Reading
Microhistory', Jl Mod. Hist., lxi (1989), for an interesting critique.

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PAST AND PRESENT

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definition, it excludes non-members. I may gain a reputation as

a sensitive and caring person by gossiping about friends to other,
mutual, friends; if I carry the same information to acquaintances
or strangers, I will only gain a reputation as a megaphone, a bad
gossip, or, as we say using ordinary, negative, language, a 'real'
gossip. Anthropologists have difficulty in villages when they
begin, as people tell them untruths authentic untruths, no
doubt, to be unpicked for social content in themselves, but
untruths none the less. There is an anthropological account of
Sardinia by Maria Pitzalis Acciaro, in which she describes asking
villagers from Mamoiada in the remote central mountains of the
island about the local feud, or disamistade, which had killed thirty
people in the 1970s. They denied it point blank. What feud? The
men were killed for chance reasons, or by outsiders trying, of
course unsuccessfully, to stir up trouble in the village. Pitzalis
Acciaro realized that they were operating inside a very internally fenced-off model of gossip: accurate gossip with outsiders
was not only, for example, seen as acting as a stool-pigeon to
the police, but it was also actually categorized mentally as lying."
(I was myself so fascinated by this that I went to the same
villages myself once and talked to people I met, asking stupid
questions, and they told me such barefaced lies that I could do
the same sort of analyses too, even if not about anything as clearcut as feud.) What this Sardinian example, among many others,
shows is that there is an internal transcript of dialogue for every
group, and an external one. Like gift-exchange, to which it is
very similar, talking is different with insiders and outsiders. We
belong to many, many, overlapping groups, and our gossip
practices are different in each. Maybe there were fewer in
1970s Mamoiada, or Montaillou 650 years earlier, but there were
still several.
James Scott has written a recent book about 'hidden transcripts', where he puts this point very sharply with respect to
resistance: the powerless never tell you what they think; they
never consent to exploitation, but they never normally admit it;
their transcript only comes out at extreme moments of violence,
which is perceived, often wrongly, as disorder by dominators,
because the latter had no warning of it and cannot give it a mental
17
M. Pitzalis Acciaro, In name della madre (Milan, 1978), esp. 86-100, there are
some parallels to this in J Favret-Saada, Deadly Words (Cambridge, 1980), 39-64

GOSSIP AND RESISTANCE AMONG THE MEDIEVAL PEASANTRY

15

frame.18 Scott maybe goes too far here; there are dominated or
exploited groups who do collude in their own domination and
simply try to manipulate it, as for example with the clienteles of
local political bosses throughout southern Europe and Latin
America today. But he is right about one thing. The more you,
as a dominator, are dealing with a group that is mentally resisting,
the less likely they are to tell you what they are talking about
inside the group until it is too late. You may work it out by
signs slow work, odd errors in calculations, sugar in your
petrol, implausibly low harvest figures, or a curious incapacity to
modularize a syllabus but the gossip transcript you will not
easily get. This is a problem, including, but not only for,
historians.
A second point is about gender. I have stated flatly that the
fact of gossiping is not gendered; however, there is no doubt that
the imagery of gossip is a gendered one. Feminist commentators
on the gossip process themselves often assume it; indeed, some
simply turn the moralizing image on its head, celebrating rather
than condemning female solidarity and subversion.19 This to me
as a male does not ring true; whatever men's (well-documented)
incapacity to analyse or judge themselves, their ability and willingness to judge others seems unimpaired. In some contexts, the
gendering goes the other way: the public talking that constituted
publica jama in medieval Italian courts was, for example, almost
always the work of men. Witnessing in documents of the type
this article began with is not only generally the work of males,
but also barely discusses any actions except those of males
women's actions get written out of the public memory of such
societies.20 This is probably because we are here dealing with
18
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance Hidden Transcripts (New
Haven, 1990); on the image of disorder in the context of the Peasants' Revolt in
England in 1381, see Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion England in 1381 (London,
1994), 3-6, 59, 180-8
" F o r example, in Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde (London, 1994),
29-43; Spacks, Gossip, makes some similar points. Tebbutt, Women's Talk?, is the
best guide to the social environment of female gossip known to me, she fends off too
gendered a reading of the gossip process, while insisting on gendered social contexts
for gossip, at 10-16, 30 ff., 49, 176-82
20
A good example is P. Guidi and O. Parenti, Regesto del Capitolo di Lucca, 3 vols
(Rome, 1912), u, n. 1384, a set of testimonies about a private church near Lucca
dating from 1177-8, in which most of the witnesses seem systematically to have
forgotten the major part played in church politics by the present patron's mother a
couple of decades earlier only her son recalls it in court. I will discuss the case in
more detail elsewhere

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structures of legitimation: men talking create pubhcafama; women

talking (at the well, maybe, or at the communal washing basins)
'merely' create a delegitimized gossip. The latter seems, and often
is, more subversive, simply because it is the work of the dominated (as with James Scott's formulations just cited). Max
Gluckman stated that 'the more exclusive the group, the greater
will be the amount of gossip in it'.21 Gluckman was perhaps
gossip's greatest theorist, but this sentence betrays some innocence about the gossip of the excluded, whose values are of course
themselves mostly closed off to elite outsiders. All-female groups
of talkers are in general not only, traditionally, among the most
excluded, but also among the most informally constituted of such
groups. This informality (plus the perhaps justified male fear that
their subject-matter involves a large element of mockery of men)
provides further excuse for the delegitimization of 'gossiping
women'. We have to recognize this near-universal pattern without
being taken in by it ourselves.
A third point is different in type. The above discussion has
been mostly about oral societies, in the classic sense of societies
without significant access to writing. Since the 1960s there has,
of course, been a good deal of debate by people like Walter Ong
or Jack Goody, about the sharp difference between oral societies
and literate, text-based ones. They often imply that patterns of
social organization, and even the social construction of the world,
are entirely different between the two.22 So, the oral world of the
medieval peasantry is out there, to be studied; it has no direct
immediacy for us. This I believe to be utterly false. Take my
next example, the University of Birmingham Faculty of Arts Staff
coffee lounge. (Don't you know about this? Well, let me tell you
about it.) This room is the focus for the public activity of some
250 people. Every event in the public life of half the Faculty is
chewed over in it: the newest rumours about administrative reorganization or the politically inept behaviour of the Professor of
Chinese in the last faculty meeting. Indeed, faculty meetings, at
21

G l u c k m a n , 'Gossip a n d Scandal', 309

Walter O n g , Orahty and Literacy ( L o n d o n , 1982); Jack Goody, The Interface
between the Written and the Oral ( C a m b r i d g e , 1987), a r e perhaps, respectively, t h e
classic a n d t h e most subtle account, D a v i d R. Olson, The World on Paper Two
Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Reading and Writing (Cambridge, 1994), a
reference I owe to Michael Clanchy, sums up more recent work. A neat critique is
Mayke de Jong, 'Geletterd en ongeletterd', in R E. V. Stuip and C. Vellekoop,
Oraltteit en schnftcultuur (Hirversum, 1993).
22

GOSSIP AND RESISTANCE AMONG THE MEDIEVAL PEASANTRY

17

least tense ones, are constantly replayed, analysed for signs of

their hidden content. This is, of course, not in itself surprising;
but there is something else worth stressing. You can hear an
account of a faculty meeting: exactly how a Dean got his or her
way, or failed to do so; who made the good points, who did not.
But go and look at the written version, the minutes, and you will
find nothing of this: the tensions are ironed out; all there is are
decisions. Try and construct the history of the University of
Birmingham from official minutes: you will find institutional
history, and close to nothing else. Course structures; student
numbers.23 Even the rules of the university fit into this pattern.
Of course, these rules are written, but almost no one actually
reads them, or, in many cases, has even seen them. In theory,
they circumscribe people's lives, but not in practice: even university leaders mostly have not read them. Indeed, the latter often
make up their powers as they go along, and people go along with
that even when they do not, they do not know where to look
to find out what the rules 'really' are. Most people go by habitus,
by a set of regular improvisations of practice; and habitus is oral,
and often very implicit too in other words, obscure to outsiders
and barely capable of being described.
The point here should be clear. We as academics are the most
text-based culture there has ever been, and arguably the
most literate. But we live inside an entirely oral working world.
Our sense of what the rules of the university are is, except in
extreme moments, totally oral. And our memory of the university
and its history is, without any significant exception, oral. Gossip
about who said what at faculty meetings, and how well, may
vary, according to whom you are speaking and, of course, with
time: its truth is often a truth of meaningfulness, not of 100 per
cent re-creation. But it is a lot truer than faculty minutes, at least
to the version of the past that really matters to people. There is,
in this respect, no significant difference between the Faculty of
Arts in the University of Birmingham and the peasants of
Montaillou. (Note by the way that the Faculty of Arts gossips
about sex as well, but not in the coffee lounge different groups,
23
1 feel I should stress that this is a point about the genre of faculty minutes, not
in any sense a criticism of any minute-taker. Actually, as this text was in proof, the
Faculty of Arts was reorganized away as a level in the institutional hierarchy at
Birmingham. One could propose that the institutional level on which coffee-lounge
gossip focuses in the future will be that where real local power relations take place,
regardless of the university's constitutional theory.

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different venues.) Oral culture has always dominated all societies;

written transcripts are a surface ripple. Another problem for
historians.
Gossip thus constitutes, constructs, the values and common
knowledge of all the groups we belong to. The fourth point,
then, is how does gossip link into resistance? Because there are
many different ways of gossiping. Gossip is a direct guide to the
lines of power, in Michel Foucault's sense: the hugely complex
network of relationships which construct our social world, hierarchically and hegemonically, and which we cannot fully escape,
even by resisting.24 Now, even Foucault did not think that resistance is impossible; only that it is normally too diffuse to have
any impact on his extremely wide definition of power relations.
We can follow that diffusion of resistance, only too easily. Much
gossip, even when malign about the powerful, is complicit in
their power (I am now talking about ordinary-language power
again, not Foucauldian power). People moan; they do not act.
They content themselves with undermining reputation, not dominance. Even sugar in the petrol tank and other small-scale resistances of the weak (as described, for example, in another influential
book by James Scott, Weapons of the Weak, about Malaysia)25 are
in a certain sense acts of complicity: they are violences, usually
secret, against a bad landlord or employer, not against landlords
as a class, which in actuality they are legitimizing in an ideal way,
just by singling out the bad ones. These acts thus to an extent
respect the hegemony of local dominators, in the very moment
of resistance.26
But gossip can crystallize resistance too, as long as it is not
dissipated. Indeed, successful resistance is always spoken before
it is enacted. The 'common sense' changes. In any society where
power is not simply established by patrols of armed men, that
power's successful reproduction depends on at least a minimum
of consent. Even though people tend to gossip against reputation,
not dominance, in the end one will affect the other: people whose
reputations have really gone will find it hard to dominate. In my
24
As set out for instance in Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, trans. Robert
Hurley, 3 vols. (London, 1979), i, 92-7
25
James C Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven, 1985)
26
Ibid., 241-350; the classic discussion of hegemony is in Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni
del carcere, ed V Gerratana (Turin, 1975), virtually passim, but Scott develops the
theory considerably, including when he seeks to undermine it. His work, here and in
Domination and the Arts of Resistance, is relevant for the next several pages.

GOSSIP AND RESISTANCE AMONG THE MEDIEVAL PEASANTRY

19

Icelandic examples, Hrutr and Snorri dominated not only because

they had reputations for being both ruthless and successful, but
also because they had reputations for fair dealing inside limits.
Had they not had the latter, then the gossip network would have
built up against them, and nicked over, and, in the end, someone
would have called them out, and got away with it, with wide
support: there are many narratives about just such events.
University leaders know or should know this too; if they
do not know it, or forget it, they will start losing and admittedly rarely can even be brought down. People can construct
alternative transcripts of power by talking about them. Gossip
ceases to be complicit, and becomes subversive. As it does so, it
becomes tighter and more opaque to outsiders, and all the more
dangerous for that. Consent falls away. To make the point, let
us return to my main medieval example, the Florentine countryside around 1200.
Passignano, the Chianti monastery we saw apparently winning
with little difficulty against Compagno in 1138 with the help of
his own kinsmen, fell out with a number of its immediate aristocratic neighbours in the 1190s, and also stretched its resources
considerably in a long dispute over ecclesiastical rights with a
church on the Arno, twenty kilometres to its east. That is to say,
it lost money fast, and also its backing from the local aristocracy.
It is interesting, then, that it is precisely in these years that the
monastery also had trouble with one of its most local dependants,
a small-scale rural moneylender called Borgnolino. We have an
arbitration between the two from around 1195, in which it is
striking how many things Borgnolino did to the monastery and
its land and men: he cut down trees, stole oxen, occupied monastic
land (claiming that it was for unpaid loans), burnt down houses,
and more. Now, actually, the monastery did much of this back
to Borgnolino too, but this is not really surprising, for it was a
large medieval landowner with armed men. Borgnolino, however,
was not particularly important at all he was not even a knight.
The most significant thing, though, is that the local men who
helped arbitrate, who included the monastery's most reliable local
managers, recognized Borgnolino's rights as often as they supported Passignano's. Passignano was not, any more at least
briefly sufficiently hegemonic, even in its own village, to be
able to ride over the claims of a small neighbour. Consent had

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fallen away: such claims therefore had to be taken seriously.27

Things could go further, too. The bishop of Florence, in the
same decades, was trying to consolidate his local judicial and
tenurial rights over his own villages, in order to survive and
prosper in a more commercial world by demanding produce that
he could sell in the city. But this was precisely a period when the
city of Florence was putting its own hand on judicial rights in
the countryside, and the bishop was no longer fully recognized
by his dependants as a lord. Resistance grew, first individually,
and then, by the 1220s, collectively: whole villages were refusing
judicial taxes, the recognition of episcopal local officials and oaths
of loyalty. Faced with new demands, and in a less domineering
political climate, consent to the bishop's power suddenly slipped,
and he was faced with near-open revolt in all his major rural
centres at once.28 How the talking went which underpinned this
slippage of consent, among the dependants either of Passignano
or of the bishop of Florence, we have no way of knowing. But
in each case a major local lord suddenly found that his control of
his peasants, which had unwillingly or willingly been accepted
for centuries, was no longer as obvious as it had been before.
The context was indeed a common medieval one, a moment of
external difficulty which weakened lordly hegemony, brought to
crisis by a piece of local domineering: this domineering suddenly
did not work any more. The gossip had evidently flicked over
from (complicit) complaint to (subversive) action, and trouble
ensued, which was hard to contain. And this in an environment
where there actually were armed men holding up traditional
power. Consent mattered there, too.
Peasants did not and do not, of course, resist all the time. They
would, indeed, have been hard to police if they did: even the
most violent lord would find the subjugation of all his peasants
at once a difficult task. More than the cliche of armed dominance
implies, lords sought to establish complicity, at least in the parts
of southern Europe I know best, with the build-up of clienteles
of loyalty and reward stretching far down into the ranks of
27
Archivo di Stato di Firenze, Passignano, 1193 (three texts); 12.., n. 31. For some
background, see J. Plesner, L'emigrazume dalla campagna alia alia hbera d\ Firenze
nel XIII secolo (Florence, 1979), 98-9, 135-6; for the ecclesiastical dispute, see Chris
Wickham, 'Ecclesiastical Conflict and Lay Community: Figline Valdarno m the
Twelfth Century', Melanges de I'Ecole Jranfaise de Rome: Moyen Age, cviii (1996).
28
G. W Dameron, Episcopal Power and Florentine Society, 1000-1320 (Cambridge,
Mass., 1991), 93-140.

GOSSIP AND RESISTANCE AMONG THE MEDIEVAL PEASANTRY

21

cultivators, which can be documented, one way or another, from

the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, and beyond. What peasants
actually thought about this is hard to say in all periods. Pierre
Toubert, in his classic, 1,500-page book on the economy and
society of Lazio, the lands around Rome, from 900 to 1200, has
one sentence on peasant attitudes, commenting on the single
document, out of tens of thousands, in which his peasants said
anything about lordship. What they said was seniores tollunt omnia,
'lords take everything'.29 He is tempted to minimize it, in fact. I
would not; I would say that the hidden transcript here speaks.
But it is at least true that Toubert's peasants did not try to do
anything about it. Somehow, they were, despite themselves,
caught in the complicity.
One further point: it is interesting that, although the main
enemies and exploiters of peasants in all periods were landlords,
when we hear peasants speak, they almost always speak about the
state, or its then equivalents. We can trace a steady worsening of
the strategic relationship between peasants and lords, and a steady
intensification of exploitation, across the whole period 700-1300,
in nearly the whole of Europe. These centuries are not actually a
good time for anyone to speak, at least to us, for documents are
too few, but full-scale or even small-scale revolts are extremely
rare their aficionados, which certainly include me, have to go
looking for them quite carefully to find them at all. The great
revolts begin in the fourteenth century and are directed, not or
not only against landlords, but also against public power in
general. The Peasants' Revolt in eastern England in 1381 was,
genuinely, quite as much against the poll tax as against individual
landlords and, even in the latter context, it seems to have been
directed against landlordship, rather than the particular landlords
of particular tenants. There were small-scale attacks on individual
landlords, but the big movement was against the political system
around the king. This is a standard feature of late medieval and
modern peasants' revolts; indeed, one could say that the absence
of such revolts earlier has a lot to do with the weakness and lack
of intrusion of medieval states before 13OO.30 But it is also the case
29

Pierre T o u b e r t , Les Structures du Laltum medieval ( R o m e , 1973), 549.

See, in general, R. H . Hilton, Bond Men Made Free ( L o n d o n , 1975); R. H .
Hilton a n d T . H . Aston (eds.), The English Rising of 1381 ( C a m b r i d g e , 1984), o n
earlier revolts, which were certainly against lords when they occurred, see R. Jacob,
'Le Meurtre du seigneur dans la societe feodale', Annales ESC, xlv (1990), a reference
I owe to Paul Freedman.
30

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PAST AND PRESENT

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that uprisings, whatever their real objects, were generally commemorated by subsequent peasantries as being against the state.
Talking about uprisings, for the peasant groups that did so, was
most meaningful when it was presumed that the uprising was
against bad government (the king's wicked advisors), especially
taxation and army service. Wicked lords were more likely to be
forgotten. I would guess that this has something to do with the
dialectic between complicity and resistance. Local lords, however
oppressive, were at least local: it was usually recognized, so to
speak, that all the land around did belong to the marquis of
Carabas not always, but usually until full-scale land reform
came in as an ideal with the socialist movements of the twentieth
century. It was easier for talking to be complicit with landlords.
The state, however, was far off, and only impinged as an external,
intermittent, coercive force, taking things from peasants uncontrollably hence, for instance, the importance of trust imagery
in the few apparently peasant texts for the 1381 revolt.31 Peasant
identification with the state tended to be with the person of the
idealized trustworthy ruler, often figures of the past like Richard
I of England or Louis IX of France or Sebastian of Portugal, little
else. Talking, here, could move towards resistance much faster;
the hegemony of the state was never complete in the countryside.
Even real resistance against a bad lord could thus be remembered
by later generations as resistance against the state. We could say
that peasants knew that it was more meaningful to talk about
resisting tax collectors and army recruiters than to talk about
resisting local lords. We could then repeat, if we wanted, that
this was still an error: peasants' real enemies were their lords,
whether good or bad. But we would have to recognize that this
is not what they saw, or what they talked about. Talking, gossip,
led them to resist a different target, and leads us to find out which.
Ill
Historians (and other social theorists) have, as argued above,
often been excessively uneasy about anything that can be categorized as gossip. The recently increased interest in how narrative
strategies work in the telling of stories of all kinds at least give
us some of the tools necessary to unpick gossip and assess its role
31

Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 180-8.

GOSSIP AND RESISTANCE AMONG THE MEDIEVAL PEASANTRY

23

in the depiction of a wide array of realities. The differing subjectmatter of the gossiping of different social groups, the different
ways the stories are told, the different moral spin attached in
different groups to stories of the same type, are direct sources for,
possibly indeed the best guides to, how each social group works.
The analysis of gossip as a social practice and as a set of narrative
strategies allows us in particular to operate in the world of
microhistory with rather greater confidence than we might otherwise have managed: it contributes to what Clifford Geertz calls
the 'thick description' of social practices, which is what, among
other things, constitutes for many people (including myself)
Montaillou's greatest strength.32 Even through the distorting
medium of the interrogation of medieval witnesses, we can get
somewhere towards this, and there is still plenty of scope for it.
The underlying principle behind such procedures needs always
to be the recognition that gossip is about groups. People rarely talk
to the wall; they talk to other people, and what they say depends
on who those other people are: which group they belong to. Gossip
articulates and bounds identity, group memory and legitimate
group social practice (Bourdieu's habitus again). It represents the
re-creation of the structures of that group, and of society in general,
at the level of consciousness. This must mean, indeed, that it represents the construction of social structures themselves, for, unless
people are aware of social structures, in however mediated a way,
they do not happen.33 One could easily map the different sorts of lies
Sardinians told me pretty closely onto different village social structures, mountain and pastoral versus plains and agricultural, lots of
landowners versus few, and so on; the lies, and the hidden transcripts they are guides to, are ways into how these structures are
seen, and therefore how they work. Analysing gossip is harder in
the Middle Ages, where Montaillou's are few, but it is none the less
worth looking for: particularly in court records, but also, of course,
in the case of more elite social groups, in narratives of contemporary
events as well.
A final point: it is certainly not strictly necessary to defend
'History' as a form of knowledge in an essay of this type; but it
32
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 3-30, 412-53.
Classic microhistories are an Italian speciality: Giovanni Levi, L'eredtta tmmatenale
(Turin, 1985), Osualdo Raggio, Faide e parenlele (Turin, 1990); Angelo Torre, //
consumo di devozioni (Venice, 1995), are three important and related examples.
33
Cf. E. P. Thompson, 'The Peculiarities of the English', in his The Poverty of
Theory: and Other Essays (London, 1978), 85.

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is worth commenting on the issue, for the analysis of narratives,

discourses, is also regarded now by many people as something
that forces us to recognize that we cannot get past texts, words,
to the 'real' thing that they signify;34 and this would be above all
true in the past, which is only formed by texts and their material
and visual equivalents, such as hand-axes and icons. I am not
going to try to defend history from this recognition; I have tried
to get around Jacques Derrida myself, and I do not think that I
can. But I also do not think the issue is crucial, for one practical
reason, which is the way gossip itself works.
We all construct every corner of each of our own personal
social worlds through texts: books, newspapers, television programmes, but above all, the oral narratives that constitute gossip.
Gossip stories are, as texts, no more permeable than any piece of
writing. Yet we all deal with them, as guides to social reality and
its meaning. We learn to deal with them, from childhood, the
learning itself being part of our social practice: how to believe,
disbelieve, test, second-guess ('how does he know?', 'why is she
telling me this?'). We cannot cope with society at all without this
practical knowledge, whether we actually think we are gossiping
or not. We can criticize gossip, and we can certainly disdain it,
but, if we do not deal in it at all, we cannot deal with other
people. So, in practice, none of us can do other than try, effortfully, to go beyond texts and use them as clues to how to negotiate
the perplexities of the social world.35 The analysis of gossip and
the practice of the historian at this point fuse into one, with the
defence of history simply becoming, 'this is something we all do,
all the time, provisionally'. All human relationships are, in fact,
mediated by spoken or written or material representations,
whether our own or those of Compagno in the twelfth-century
Chianti and his rich opponents, and we all know it without feeling
much existential doubt. The historical project itself, as we analyse
Compagno, is one of these relationships.
University of Birmingham
34

Chris Wickham

Classically, Jacuqes Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatn Chakravorty Spivak

(Baltimore, 1976), 158-64; before him, Roland Barthes, 'The Discourse of History'
(1967), now m E. S. Shaffer (ed.), Comparative Criticism: A Year Book, lii (1981), on
historical wntmg itself as a rhetorical system.
35
For clues, see Carlo Ginzburg, Mm emblemi spie (Turm, 1986), 158-209. There
are instructive analogies to the position argued here in J. H. Hexter, The History
Primer (New York, 1971), 122-5, always a stimulating book, although Hexter's
ultimate purposes are somewhat different from mine.