Luigi Andrea Berto, Making History in Ninth-Century Northern and Southern Italy, Pisa 2018
The ninth century is regarded as an era in which the creation of historical narratives was thriving, a process in which old stories were retold and new narratives were composed. Making History in Ninth-Century Northern and Southern Italy zooms in on this process in the politically-fragmented landscape of Italy, where local polities interacted with Muslims, Franks and Byzantines. These conditions proved stimulating for authors to compose narrative sources focusing on local events. With this study, Luigi Andrea Berto aims to increase the general awareness of these texts, to analyse the various ways in which the authors shaped the events into a narrative, and to offer a contribution to a better understanding of Early Medieval Italian history.
Berto clusters the sources geographically in three regional groups and structures his study around these nuclei, introducing each area’s historical context: Carolingian Italy (7-42), Lombard Southern Italy in the period 774 – c. 900 (43-116) and the independent city of Naples in the eighth and ninth centuries (117-150). The sources concerning Carolingian Italy consist of the Historia Langobardorum codicis Gothani (11-16), the poem De Pippini regis victoria Avarica (17-18), Andreas of Bergamo’s Historia (19-38) and the Rythmus de captivitate Lhuduici imperatoris (39-42). The southern section focuses on the Cronicae Sancti Benedicti Casinensis (47-68),
Erchempert’s Ystoriola Longobardorum Beneventanorum degentium (69-111) and a chronicle of the years 892-897 known as the Continuatio Codicis Vaticani (113-116). Lastly, the Neapolitan section covers John the Deacon’s continuation of the Gesta Episcoporum Neapolitanorum (121-150). The book does not devote attention to two sources from Central Italy, the Roman Liber Pontificalis and its Ravennate counterpart by Agnellus of Ravenna, since they have already been studied extensively. The book ends with appendices (151-162) on the ways the aforementioned sources indicate notions of time, make use of numerals, and narrate episodes using direct speech, as well as on the titles used to indicate the rulers of Naples. In all, Berto succeeds in offering the reader a perspective that aspires to come as close as possible to the culture of the authors, to their possible reasons to start writing and to their perceptions of the past and the world surrounding them (6).
A particular strength of the book is the attention given to depictions of what the author classifies as “supernatural”. The texts often connect matters of war and conflict in particular to a supernatural dimension, which offers readers an outlook on the cultural perception of warfare. The reader gets an impression of some Lombards witnessing a fireball, in the form of a dragon crossing the sky from east to west, which forewarned an impending Byzantine invasion (114). In another instance it is told that God caused a dry riverbed to be suddenly flooded again overnight, preventing Muslim raiders from pillaging Monte Cassino (60). These supernatural exempla offer readers a glimpse of the dynamic ways in which these Italian authors made sense of and attached meaning to the turbulent events of their times, both in the context of warfare and beyond.
To sum up, this book offers a valuable English-language introduction regarding the creation and reshaping of history on the politically-fragmented Italian peninsula. Berto is well-acquainted with these texts as, apart from this book, he has also published several new critical editions, often accompanied by a translation in either Italian or English. This book is beneficial for students and scholars alike who want to get (re-)acquainted with the debates and contexts relevant to ninth-century Italy and its sources. Readers familiar with Berto’s earlier publications might encounter some overlap, as the author himself also points out (6, note 9). However, this study and the extensive bibliography provide a solid foundation for future studies of this region.