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Four generations of the aristocratic Barberini family and its
"vassals" clashed over how the early modern Roman countryside
should be governed. Villagers sometimes cultivated noble
interference, but they frequently resisted it through the
strategies of adversarial literacy, political ways of reading and
writing that challenged noble hegemony in the village.
The early modern Roman countryside was a site of contestation
between great aristocratic families and an expanding papal
political regime. Rarely has the role of the inhabitants of this
landscape--the villagers--been considered as part of that power
struggle.
As Caroline Castiglione shows in this compelling revisionist work,
one Roman aristocratic family, the Barberini, was not squeezed out
of governing by the extension of the papal bureaucracy, but rather
became increasingly engaged with it during the long eighteenth
century. Through their participation in the rural commune,
villagers in an extensive territory belonging to the Barberini
became active participants in the governing of the countryside.
Villagers cultivated and exploited interference from the
aristocratic family and the papal government, but they also kept
urban elites at bay, defending their rights through the strategies
of adversarial literacy. Such literate practices drew on village
mastery of local constitutions, debates in the village assembly,
and brilliant use of the legal system of the papacy to thwart the
designs of the Barberini. Later villagers created and interpreted
sources for themselves, effectively challenging the elite monopoly
on making and interpreting texts.
A lost world of increasingly savvy villagers, irate nobles, and
exasperated bureaucrats emerges here in an engaging narrative that
chronicles how seemingly marginalized villagers challenged the
pragmatic control of the Roman countryside, using texts and ideas
that urban elites had exported to the countryside for other
purposes.
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