The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran

      

       The Medieval Salento

      THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

      Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor

      Edward Peters, Founding Editor

      A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

       The Medieval Salento

       Art and Identity in Southern Italy

       Linda Safran

       University of Pennsylvania Press

       Philadelphia

      Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association.

      Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press

      Unless otherwise indicated, all photographs are by the author.

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

       www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Safran, Linda.

      The medieval Salento : art and identity in Southern Italy / Linda Safran. — 1st ed.

      p. cm. — (Middle Ages series)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-8122-4554-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

      1. Visual communication—Italy—Salentina Peninsula—History—To 1500. 2. Material culture—Italy—Salentina Peninsula—History—To 1500. 3. Arts and society—Italy—Salentina Peninsula—History—To 1500. 4. Ethnicity—Italy—Salentina Peninsula—History—To 1500. 5. Salentina Peninsula (Italy)—Social life and customs. 6. Visual communication in art. 7. Material culture in art. 8. Group identity in art. 9. Ethnicity in art. I. Title. II. Series: Middle Ages series.

      P93.5.S235 2014

      306.4'60945753—dc23

      2013031247

      Contents

       Note

       Introduction

       Chapter 1. Names

       Chapter 2. Languages

       Chapter 3. Appearance

       Chapter 4. Status

       Chapter 5. The Life Cycle

       Chapter 6. Rituals and Other Practices in Places of Worship

       Chapter 7. Rituals and Practices at Home and in the Community

       Chapter 8. Theorizing Salentine Identity

       Database: Sites in the Salento with Texts and Images Informative About Identity

       Notes

       Works Cited

       Index

       Acknowledgments

       Color plates

      Note

      Numbers in boldface brackets indicate images and texts in the Database. Greek in the Database reproduces the accentuation and orthography of the original text, whereas in the rest of the book the Greek is corrected. Conventions for inscriptions in the text are the same as in the Database; see page 242.

      Introduction

      In this book I explore the visual and material culture of people who lived and died in a particular region of Italy in the Middle Ages. I investigate their names, the languages they used in public, how they were represented (and how they actually may have looked), and what components of status seem to have been important to them. I then reconstruct some of the rituals that accompanied local residents throughout their life cycles and during their worship, their daily lives, and their calendar year, focusing on those practices that can be extrapolated from visual evidence. By combining analytical methods drawn from art history, archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, and sociolinguistics,¹ I add texture to the stylistic and iconographic analyses that have dominated art-historical study of the region and shed new light on nonelite people who are often overlooked because they have left few traces in documentary texts.

      The Medieval Salento: Art and Identity in Southern Italy is not one of those clever book titles that obscure the contents; it is, at first glance, an unambiguous and perhaps even uninspiring title. Yet not one of its principal words—“Medieval,” “Salento,” “Art,” “Identity”—is at all straightforward. These words turn out to be challenging intellectual and historical constructs that require both careful definition and a series of authorial choices. It is important to explore each of these terms to understand how they interrelate and why it is necessary, and even urgent, to consider them together in this book. I begin with the subtitle.

      Art

      “What is art?” is hardly a new question, but it seems to have become more exigent in the past century as novel forms of creativity, spurred by emerging technologies and social change, constantly appear and are frequently contested. I am concerned in this book with visual arts, not with literature or music or other creative spheres of human activity, but that restriction scarcely narrows the possible answers. Found art, environmental art, performance art, digital art are all “new” types of art that are valid to some viewers, and presumably to all of their creators, yet neither serious nor even “art” to others. It is crucial to acknowledge that definitions of art are culturally and temporally specific and, in particular, that Renaissance notions of art are not relevant to the millennium that preceded it. Despite its widespread impact over the past five centuries, the Renaissance idea of art as something finely crafted, a product of unusual skill or inspiration to be appreciated principally for its aesthetic value, is much too limiting.² Before the European Renaissance (and also in non-European