The Seigneurial Turn, the Church and National Historiographies

Alessio Fiore's important book on the transformation of the Italian countryside in the decades between 1080 and 1130 is a bold contribution to longstanding historical debates, suggesting what he calls a 'seigneurial transformation' in Italy at that time. He portrays the nearly complete collapse of the essentially Carolingian political order of the kingdom of Italy during that period and the fragmentation of power into smaller seigneurial units; a radical break marked, among other things, by a significant increase in violence. The fact that Fiore avoids the term feudal (thus ridding himself of all its distracting historiographical associations) does not mean, however, that the developments he describes are not remarkably similar to those posited mainly by scholars of medieval France (both from France and from the English-speaking world). Fiore's work shows how fruitful it can be to adapt historiographical ideas developed for other regions, as Kohl's himself attempted to do for Germany and France, and to cross the borders of tradition and language.