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S. Cohn, I centri minori della Toscana nel Medioevo: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Figline Valdarno, 23–24 ottobre 2009, ed. Giuliano Pinto and Paolo Pirillo, The English Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 547, December 2015, Pages 1535–1536, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cev270
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Extract
As the introduction, the ten papers and Giorgio Chittolini’s masterful summation make clear, ‘centri minori’ is a vague term but should be defined by more than mere numbers of inhabitants. These were places of urban character that lay between cities, on the one hand, and castles, ‘borghi’ and villages dedicated primarily to agrarian pursuits, on the other. On the use of this term, however, no consensus emerges from these essays. For some, cities were simply places with cathedrals (Florence, Pisa, Siena, Lucca, Arezzo, Pistoia, Volterra); for others, towns such as San Gimignano, Montepulciano, Borgo San Sepulcro, Prato and Cortona might qualify. In fact, the famous Catasto of 1427 entitled as ‘città’ places which did not possess this ecclesiastical status (Prato, Cortona, San Miniato, Montepulciano, and Castiglione Fiorentino). In her essay on Cortona, Céline Perol compares this town with Volterra and effectively demotes Cortona to a ‘centro minore’. Although Cortona after the Black Death was more populous than Volterra, its economic and social character was essentially agrarian. This is the only essay in the collection to privilege economic and social criteria over sheer size of population.
