The book is especially pertinent given the current renewed rise of far right activity in Italy The book should be marketable alongside the volumes in Routledge’s burgeoning Fascism and the Far Right book series The Blackshirts have in certain places been characterised as non-essential to Mussolini’s rise to power. This book argues the vital role they played

The book is especially pertinent given the current renewed rise of far right activity in Italy The book should be marketable alongside the volumes in Routledge's burgeoning Fascism and the Far Right book series The Blackshirts have in certain places been characterised as non-essential to Mussolini's rise to power. This book argues the vital role they played

In The Seigneurial Transformation, Alessio Fiore discusses the transformation of the fabric of power in the kingdom of Italy in the period between the late eleventh century and the early twelfth century. The study analyses the major socio-political change of this period, the crisis of royal and public structures, and the development of seigneurial powers, using as a starting point the structures of power over men and land, and the discourses about the exercise of local power. This period was marked by a rapid reshaping of the structures of local power; while the outbreak of civil wars in the 1080s did not imply a clear-cut rupture with the past, it led to a staggering acceleration of pre-existing dynamics, with a reconfiguration of the matrix of power, in turn expressed in a transformation both of the instruments of local political communications and of the practices of power.