La mobilità sociale nel Medioevo italiano: Competenze, conoscenze e saperi tra professioni e ruoli sociali (secc. XII–XV). Lorenzo Tanzini and Sergio Tognetti, eds. I libri di Viella 220. Rome: Viella, 2016. 458 pp. €44.
essay combines that interest with a subtle exploration of visual art at the Mantuan court. Jonathan Spangler’s essay on France offers a sociology of those who controlled access to the king; they were generally from the high nobility, Spangler shows, but that apparent success weakened connections between the grandees and the provincial nobles, thus weakening the order as a whole. As the editors explain, the authors have deliberately avoided social or political theorizing, and the collection includes no attempt to compare early modern cultures of access with examples from other times and places. That interpretive reticence extends to some purely early modern issues as well. For instance, only two of the authors directly address the question of princely absolutism, a question that lurks in any discussion of early modern states, and they offer opposing views: Mark Hengerer, in a subtle account of the Habsburg court, dismisses the concept as inappropriate to early modern realities, whereas Fabian Persson (in his equally impressive account of Swedish developments) treats the installation of absolute rule as a fundamental reality. The Key to Power? leaves theorizing and comparison to the reader—but its finely crafted examinations of specific situations offer abundant encouragement for doing so.