The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran

And yet scholars have divided these fragments of historical information according to a rigid taxonomy of religion or language, or a conflation of the two. One might argue that Jewish hopes for the afterlife are so different from those of Christians that such a separation is legitimate—an argument that bears examination, given that both tombstones promote the deceased’s resurrection albeit in different terms—but even scholars who examine Christian texts in Latin have been unwilling or unable to juxtapose them to Christian examples in Greek.

      I argue that looking at Donna’s dress, pose, and language of supplication yields greater insights if compared not only to other representations of female supplicants produced between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, but also if supplication patterns are analyzed across the lines of gender, language, or even confession. Early feminists promoted the study of women as a kind of “affirmative action” to redress previous inattention, but many scholars now prefer to consider both genders in tandem.⁹⁰ Similarly, I maintain that our understanding of the Orthodox Christians of the medieval Salento can only be enhanced by looking also at the Roman-rite Christians and the Jews.⁹¹ If the Muslims had left any visual traces of their frequent early medieval raids, I would have included them, too.⁹²

      I practice a certain amount of affirmative action on behalf of the Jewish residents of the Salento because they have been routinely ignored, except by Jewish-studies specialists, whose publications are in turn ignored by art historians. For the Jews I have availed myself of a wider chronological range of visual testimony, from the seventh to the later fifteenth century, and expanded the geographical limits to include central Apulia and a bit of Basilicata; I also introduce relevant texts from Trani, Rome, and Ashkenaz. Perhaps in the future this will not be necessary, but at present it is important to underscore firmly the coexistence of multiple faiths in the Salento even at the risk of overemphasizing one of them. For the Christians, by contrast, I do not mine documentary sources,⁹³ and I have included local manuscript texts only sporadically, focusing instead on public texts.⁹⁴

      Visual and material evidence indicates that people of different faiths and different languages lived and died in close proximity in the Salento. The proximity of neighbors who were not entirely like oneself must have heightened awareness of similarities as well as differences. Public art therefore could be an agent of separation or unification, mediating onomastic, linguistic, cultural, and social friction and effecting different desired outcomes.⁹⁵ Even such a humble visual display as a short graffito could be an effective means of publicly communicating what was important to its author/inciser, and viewing it and adding one’s own text alongside created a new social community.

      While nearly all of the local Hebrew texts are available in good editions, the Latin ones are insufficiently studied (and untranslated), and only the more impressive of the Greek texts have been published; shorter texts, including graffiti, and their accompanying images have received very limited attention. Moreover, local texts and images often have been published in isolation: witness the many volumes devoted exclusively to rock-cut churches even though the visual and textual culture of the so-called civiltà rupestre is no different from that above ground.⁹⁶ Jewish tombstones are compared only with one another and not with epitaphs for the dead of other faiths even when they bear a non-Hebrew text. It is critical to move beyond these restrictive taxonomies to a regional perspective, one that incorporates all of the visual material and thereby gives a voice, however faint or distorted, to more members of medieval society. While church doctrine and courtly literature and political intrigue are undeniably of cultural importance, they had less impact on most people’s lives, and on the formation of their identities, than did daily exposure to the visual environment and regular encounters in worship spaces, cemeteries, and village streets. While I focus here on a single region in medieval Italy, a multidisciplinary approach to historical visual culture and to questions of individual and group identity has implications well beyond that time and place.

       The Database

      The basis for this book is the Database (pages 239–336). Readers have already seen references to the Database in the form of boldface numbers and letters within square brackets. Sites are arranged alphabetically, with each city, town, or village followed by its modern Italian province in parentheses and by the name of the specific structure or kind of work within each site; if the work has a specific date, it appears in boldface type. This is followed by measurements or other details. Capital letters (A, B, C, and so on) identify every relevant inscription or image within that site; each inscription is given in the original language, followed by an English translation (unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine). If both inscriptions and images exist, the former precede the latter. Works of unknown provenance are alphabetized according to their current location. Pictorial graffiti (pg) are listed separately from textual graffiti, which are considered inscriptions. These data are followed by a list of narrative scenes (sc) and identifiable saints (st). With very few exceptions, representations of Christ and the Virgin are not included because they are ubiquitous and uninformative about matters of personal or regional identity. Each entry concludes with a short bibliography that emphasizes recent literature. Notes to the text do not duplicate this bibliography.

      The Database is not a compendium of all texts and images in the medieval Salento; it is a collection of published and unpublished art, as defined above, that serves as a starting point for all of my observations about local identity. Some well-known and art-historically significant monuments (such as San Mauro and San Salvatore, outside Gallipoli) are not included because they contain no pictorial or textual representations of contemporary people. And while the Database does include every image (or partial image) known to me of a nonsacred individual datable with reasonable certainty between the ninth and early fifteenth centuries, it does not include every inscription from that period.⁹⁷ In addition to texts unavailable to me, I have omitted texts whose published transcriptions seem unreliable and whose original has been lost. The images and texts that are included all yield insight into individual or corporate identity in the medieval Salento. Taken together, these disparate data provide a picture of local life that complements and expands upon previous studies based exclusively on documentary sources, archaeological finds, or a single artistic medium.

       CHAPTER 1

      Names

      Ever since Adam named the animals in Genesis 2:20, humans have given things—and people—names. Names, and the kinship relationships expressed through them, are among the most essential and universal components of identity. Personal names and surnames connect people with ancestors, places of origin, social and religious communities, and larger cultural groups, and thus contribute to the formation of both individual and communal identity. They have a taxonomic function, suggesting things—rightly or wrongly—about their bearer’s religious, social, or cultural affiliation. Some names confer power by linking an individual, even superficially, with an important family (e.g., the Kennedys, the Rothschilds). An infamous name can compel shame or fear: how many boys now are named Adolf?¹ While few people believe that nomen est omen, we still draw conclusions from people’s names.²

      Naming is a fundamental way of imposing control over one’s surroundings. In the past two decades, many evangelical Christians have followed a “prosperity theology” of “name it and claim it.”³ Some medieval Jews and Christians could harness divine power by invoking supernatural names known to only a few. In traditional families, assigning someone a theophoric or festal or saint’s name is still thought to afford special access to a powerful intercessor: the patron saint or guardian angel surely will protect his or her namesake. By extension, communities named after a saint had a privileged relationship with heavenly intercessors beyond what the great majority of places could claim.

      The study of names has become fashionable in recent decades, resulting in prosopographical catalogs, anthroponymic colloquiums, and onomastic or prosopographic journals in several countries. Few of these, however, look beyond documentary sources at names made visible inside churches or on humble tombstones, and even fewer consider a regional name stock across different language groups. These public visual sources have been ignored or underutilized in anthroponymic studies. In this chapter, I look at people, places, and power—Jewish and Christian