This is a fascinating book, tackling an obvious theme, yet one that has hitherto lacked any really detailed study. Water is an essential for life, totally taken for granted in modern (western) societies wherein baths, toilets, and, of course, status-symbolic dishwashers swallow up vast volumes, all to minimal financial outlay of individuals. Water rationing and impurities nowadays cause major outcries, with occasional switches from plenty to little hard to cope with--and personally witnessed when British students have attended Italian excavation projects in summer months in upland regions, only to find at the end of a gruelling digging day that the water supply was only on for two hours over lunch! (Though a few beers normally help wipe away the grime and offer alternative liquid sustenance!).
For the Roman epoch a similar image of 'water for everyone' prevails, with monumental aqueducts, bath buildings, public ornamental fountains and canals implying a pan-Empire abundance and supply. In reality, of course, the monuments obscure a somewhat different, less grand world, since it was only the larger Roman towns that secured adequate all-year round water supplies, and probably the majority of communities still very much relied on local water courses, natural springs, cisterns, private and public wells; settlement location strategy was fully dictated by water availability (cf. pp.22-23). For Italy this reliance on nature and on self-supply becomes much more prominent with the decay of the Roman Empire and beyond: towns continue, but rely more fully on wells and cisterns, and the Church is one of the few powers to access piped water and to maintain baths; we see also a migration or shift of many rural communities to more upland sites, and in time the emergence of castles, often positioned more through strategic need and so without adequate water supply. Nature itself makes water play a significant role: records of floods testify to a breakdown in Roman systems of water control and over-exploitation of terraces and perhaps also to a wetter climate, with a subsequent re-emergence of marshland zones (pp.67-75).
Squatriti's volume masterfully discusses the role of water in the changed Italy of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (AD 400-1000). In this he uncovers an astonishing array of textual information on a theme which might generally be assumed to be very poorly documented--for what 'historical' significance does digging a well have? Sometimes, clearly, references are incidental and in other cases assumed, duly indicating that water was a commonplace; but more explicit references, such as in the Lombard laws, do denote how water was nonetheless vital, disputable, and thus noteworthy. A major strength of the book is Squatriti's ability to scrutinise not just text but also to appreciate the input of archaeology, allowing him thereby to paint a fuller physical image of the ways in which people used or exploited water, how water was controlled, its use as a resource, and public awareness of its purity or otherwise. As he states in his Introduction (p.3), "As it does everywhere else, the 'aquatic history' of early medieval Italy illuminates oscillations in social relations, economic conditions, and cultural expectations in the peninsula... A study of how societies coped with problems of hydraulics gains relevance precisely when it covers a crucial period of social, economic, political, and cultural transformation"; and "This study demonstrates one thing above all others: water was indissolubly both matter and custom, both nature and culture in the diverse landscapes of Italy during the early Middle Ages. This duality shaped the modes of water procurement, distribution and usage." (p.4) Crucially, the study of water and people helps assess on a novel footing the so-called transition from ancient to medieval and to view the degree to which Roman cultural systems persisted or faded--and central in this is the loss of the major public baths and the mode of communal bathing and social interaction, and the emergence of more private bathing and particularly church/episcopal/monastic baths, with a more focussed and practical role of cleansing.
There are two main parts to the book: chapters 1 and 2 ('Water for Everyday Use' and 'Water, Baths and Corporeal Washing') centre mainly on people and place, attitudes and domestic use; chapters 3, 4 and 5 ('The Wet and the Dry: Water in Agriculture', 'Water, Fish and Fishing', and 'Water and Milling in Early Medieval Italy') extend the picture out more to the countryside and to the rivers as resources--for fishing and for milling. In all of these themes it is apparent that control over water was a mark of power. Hence: "After the glummest Dark Ages, Italian charters show that wells and cisterns usually were attached to the plushest houses, controlled by rich and powerful people," an indication of the costs of both construction and maintenance; indeed, one well 100 feet deep is cited as costing a weighty 30 gold solidi. (p.26) Similarly, from the 700s charters show increasing numbers of private fisheries and fishing privileges; these "accompanied the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few and indeed were an important component of the process by which large landed properties, fortified with numerous exclusive rights, spread across the countryside." (p.105) The ability of landowners to donate rights and fisheries to the Church and to monasteries could further enhance their prestige. In both these instances--wells and fisheries--we observe a greater privatisation of control over water, contrasting again with the much more public provisioning of the Roman era. In the case of the fisheries, meanwhile, we can also observe a medievalisation of eating habits: a move away from the meat-eating emphasis of the Roman period to one influenced heavily by the monastic preference for fish (p.106, with Squatriti rightly noting how fish-tendencies are evident already in the earlier sixth century, but here becoming formalised as monasticism itself becomes more standardised from the later eighth century).
Alongside the images of water and power, Squatriti carefully seeks to follow also the role of the more humble Italian dweller and farmer, largely hard to trace in both text and excavation. Sometimes we hear merely of a body of farmers, occasionally representing whole village communities, losing out in cases on fishing rights or water access against local nobles or dukes or even monastic lords (pp.92-94, 111-113); or we hear of the fishermen and their families employed by secular lords on their piscaria, but undertaking other chores, whether cultivation or salting and transporting the fish (p.122); and, of course, the act of farming was entrusted to differing levels of peasants, whose jobs also extended to digging and cleaning out ditches and irrigation channels, and tending vegetable patches (pp.76-81). The monasteries seem quite forcible in asserting rights and ownership to water over local peasants; that of San Vincenzo al Volturno, whose massive expansion in the ninth century will have brought with it ever increasing demands on its surroundings, is offered as a key example, though in this instance limited local resistance or disputes are a sign that most smaller landholders and farmers may have willingly acquiesced, hoping to enjoy better benefits under monastic supervision (pp.93-95). And Squatriti also informs us of millers in eighth-century central Italy who "were subordinate men who had animalesque names (with tell-tale diminutives, like Taurulus and Ursulus) and were sold and bought together with the mill they ran, formally without control over their lives or the mill" (p.151); in other instances, 'amateurs' were utilised, i.e. ordinary farmers and tenants who were required by lords to assist in the milling work. Despite the diminutives, however, the author shows that the poor reputation of the typical medieval miller as depicted by Chaucer amongst others, is not one readily drawn from the texts of early medieval Italy (pp.156-158).
There are, admittedly, gaps in the evidence available to scrutinise. Whilst reasonable evidence exists for the fifth century from texts like the Codex Theodosianus and through inscriptions and even standing remains, there are then limited data for the period after the Gothic Wars until the rise in the use of charters, diplomas and other texts from the eighth century, culminating in the relatively abundant archival material in the tenth century in particular. In between, the Lombard laws, notably those of Rothari and Liutprand, offer occasional insights/facts, but perhaps not enough to fill a void in which many of the 'non-classical' changes probably become formalised, notably in terms of bathing regimes. One example of this troublesome hiatus comes in the discussion of horti (vegetable plots/gardens): Squatriti tells us that "After Cassiodorus [i.e. from the 530s] the direct evidence becomes more nebulous. Irrigated horti are described but once, in a suspect royal charter presumably of the year 714..." (pp.81-82). It is striking, however, that the revival of text in the eighth century coincides with a revival of water, most notably in terms of aqueducts for towns being repaired (Rome, Milan, Benevento) and urban and rural monasteries creating their own dedicated piped supplies and milling units. This seems not merely to represent a revival in documentation, but rather genuinely reflects economic and demographic growth and the re-emergence of power foci and the desired accoutrements of display and convenience, with water an integral element in these (cf. pp.16-20).
The gaps in the evidence cannot be remedied, and archaeology cannot yet easily help, since settlements of the period 550-700 remain poorly understood (although the excavations at sites like Brescia and San Vincenzo, duly noted by Squatriti, are now starting to offer more coherent images of daily life). But Squatriti's work demonstrates that we are perhaps not missing much: things were changing, but not dramatically so, and some of the changes were in fact beginning within the late Roman period, not just beyond it. Change and continuity here almost go hand-in-hand as people adapted to altered and altering circumstances. Water thus offers an excellent window from which to observe the supposed transition from Roman to medieval. We can conclude with Squatriti's own final statement: "In early medieval Italy the history of water, its allocation, and its control was a history of both deep changes and inexorable continuities" (p.164).