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Luca Zenobi, Terre di confine tra Toscana, Romagna e Umbria: Dinamiche politiche, assetti amministrativi, società locali (secoli XII–XVI), ed. Paolo Pirillo and Lorenzo Tanzini, The English Historical Review, Volume 137, Issue 589, December 2022, Pages 1808–1811, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac227
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Extract
The history of borders and borderlands is seeing a resurgence of interest on the Continent. While in the 1990s and early 2000s the theme sparked several publications by anglophone historians, these days the topic is examined mostly by European scholars. Their focus tends to be on the patterns that borders allow them to identify, rather than the borders themselves. In the case of this book, edited by Paolo Pirillo and Lorenzo Tanzini, these are the patterns listed in its subtitle, albeit with a degree of jargon: political dynamics, administrative structures and (interactions with) local societies. In essence, borders are used as a lens to study relationships of power and the ways in which pre-modern polities ruled over their territories. The book results from a two-year project developed jointly by the Deputazioni di Storia Patria for the Italian regions of Tuscany, Romagna and Umbria. These are cultural associations with a rich history of their own. Born in the nineteenth century with the purpose of publishing records related to the separate regimes that existed before Italian unification, they went on to become the beacons of regional history in the peninsula. The Deputazioni have sometimes been accused of isolationism or, worse, parochialism. This volume goes some way towards challenging these preconceptions and showing that, while promoting new research on their respective regions, they can shed light on issues of interest to all historians.
