Balzaretti describes his book as "a regional monograph that may seem, in this post-postmodern world, a rather old-fashioned work of an empirical kind," for which he offers no apology because it is "the first book in English (or any other language) about early medieval Milan to survey the full range of surviving evidence" (13). Indeed, the book is an extraordinary feat of research. The source material winning Balzaretti's main focus is several hundred charters preserved by the monastery of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan, with particular attention on the period c. 800-980. Balzaretti uses them to show how the transfer of substantial amounts of land by laypeople to the monastic church of Sant'Ambrogio led to the development of Milan's hinterland, which in turn sustained its successful urban economy. The book thus exposes "the micro level daily interactions between monks and society which added up to change at the macro level" (26). Showcasing an argument as much methodological as historical, Balzaretti's book will become not only the standard reference on early medieval Milan, but also a primer on how rather traditional historical methods using rather traditional evidentiary material can still be innovative, original, and address big questions.
The book is divided into three parts. Part I, titled "Small and Large Worlds" situates the importance of Milan's importance in the later Roman world, and relates how exceptional economic development in the Middle Ages and later geographic expansion made it Lombardy's largest and wealthiest city. The introduction demonstrates Balzaretti's fluency with historiographical trends especially over the past thirty years (research for this book began in the 1980s in the form of his doctoral thesis). Aware of postmodern theoretical attacks on "the archive," Balzaretti self-assuredly contends that "a lot of recent historical theory is not practically useful to historians when they come to write history: (19), and that charters in fact shed light on "ordinary people" in a way which naturally lends itself to women's and gender history, microhistory, and historical ecology.
Chapter 1 is a detailed and substantial survey of the available evidence for early medieval Milan. He begins with the oldest surviving original parchment document kept by the Italian state, the so-called Anstruda's charter drawn up on 12 May 721, to illustrate how church acquisition of land marked the transformation of the Roman world into an early medieval one. He then discusses eighteenth-century attention to the Lombard charters, the reason for diminished interest among influential Enlightenment historians, and their total exclusion in the nineteenth century from the MGH volume of Lombard sources. Balzaretti then turns to a detailed discussion about the charters preserved at Sant'Ambrogio (around 300 documents between 720-1000), describing their forms and stating caveats about their interpretation. A survey of other evidence is also included, including manuscript books (e.g. miscellanies containing martyrologies, computus, and doctrinal works, and liturgical books and other works typical of monastic scriptoria), annals (which Balzaretti says do not reflect this period accurately due to their late dating), and legal codes, inscriptions, and the little extant archaeological evidence.
Chapter 2 surveys the reception of Ambrose as a figure and his association with Milan. "Premodern Ambrose" focuses on Sant'Ambrogio as the central site of his cult, discusses how patristic writers employed Ambrose, and explains Carolingian devotion to Ambrose. "Modern Ambrose" seems to shift focus away from the reception history of Ambrose himself, comprising instead a rapid survey of the material about medieval Milan produced from the seventeenth century to the 1990s. The section titled "Postmodern Ambrose?" is, again, less about the figure of Ambrose and more about the postmodern equivalence about documentary sources and traditional local scholarship. Balzaretti uses this opportunity to argue that the famous charter text which supposedly records the foundation of the xenodocium of Datheus, hailed as the "first foundling hospital" in Europe, is a sixteenth-century fabrication.
Chapter 3 traces the transformation of Milan from the lifetime of Ambrose to the eighth century during which the monastery was founded in his name. Balzaretti describes "insider" and "outsider" (Burgundian, Frankish, and even Greek) perspectives about late-antique Milan, and addresses the vexed question of continuity/discontinuity in the transition to the Lombard period, particularly the extent to which the late-Roman urban fabric survived intact into the eighth century.
Chapter 4 concerns the early medieval history of Sant'Ambrogio, beginning with donations made by the Lombards to the basilica church of Ambrose and then the Carolingian foundation of a Benedictine community alongside it. Such aspects as acquisitions and disputes, rivalries involving kings and abbots, and royal and archepiscopal burials all show the extensive power of the monastery into the time of the Ottonians.
To sustain his thesis that the monastery of Sant'Ambrogio played a central role in facilitating connections across the large area of Milan's hinterland, in order to enable thousands of people to live an urban life supported by a complex economy, Balzaretti must first prove that Milan did feature an urban character--the objective of chapter 5 ("Cityscape"). This is a bold argument for, as Balzaretti notes, despite Krautheimer having listed Milan as one of the "three Christian capitals" alongside Rome and Constantinople, early medieval Milan is not usually regarded as a "real" city (238). But Balzaretti contends this has to do with the problems of archaeological evidence in ancient urban sites. As a result, Balzaretti's argument for Milan's early medieval urbanism draws from charters in order to show density, proximity, and familiarity of residents through such evidence as personal details, distance measurements, and the clustering of homes. Altogether, the purpose of Part 1 is to establish that an economic infrastructure was necessary to support this large urban population of around 20,000 inhabitants, and that the monastic community of Sant'Ambrogio--as broker between city and countryside--played a significant role in building it.
This "infrastructure"--social and economic--is investigated in minute detail in Part II, for which an introduction is made about the agrarian landscape, the concept of estates and "manors", and the organization of rural labour and the servile workforce. Successive chapters examine dossiers relating to six villages to offer a minute investigation of the property holdings and economic activities of Sant'Ambrogio over several centuries: the villages are Campione, Gnignano, Cologno Monzese, several in the Valtellina, Limonta, and Inzago. Balzaretti calls his approach "original", "deliberately contrasting with classic works" which focus on institutions such as the manorial system (300). Because his arguments are based on "microhistory"--the meticulous inspection of charters in order to draw out larger conclusions--I will focus on his treatment of the first and earliest estate owned by the Sant'Ambrogio community, Campione, in order to illustrate his methodology.
Balzaretti begins with a geographical and topographical description of Campione, then examines the eighth-century bequest by one vir clarissimus Toto to the archbishops of Milan of his family residence and estate. Balzaretti offers a reconstruction of Toto's property acquisitions and plausible events leading to his bequest and motives. He then compares the Campione charters with local law codes to show that the charters are clearly influenced by the spoken vernacular and that scribes were local, and can therefore be trusted to reflect social relations at the most local level. Balzaretti's analysis also includes the range of Latin terms to describe the servile or unfree, the sums of money reported, and prosopography concerning Toto, his family, their associates and the witnesses to their deeds. Then the change from family to monastic ownership of lands is traced--for example, the private church of St Zeno which disappears from records during the transition from family to monastic ownership to re-emerge in 854 as a "cell" with a monk-priest provost under the jurisdiction of Sant'Ambrogio. Balzaretti has managed to find evidence of resistance to the new monastic landlordship, whose expansionist activities ("encroachment", 344), by contrast with Toto's, sparked complaints from existing landlords such as Teutpert of Vimercate over his property in Balerna. Balzaretti shows how, between 844-865, successive abbots acquired land and entered into tenancy arrangements in several villages to build upon Toto's initial bequest, such as with the tenant Lorenzo and his family in Lamone who promised to make annual return of a range of produce.
The subsequent chapters follow a chronological order, revealing the progressive involvement of the Sant'Ambrogio monks with different villages and their inhabitants. For example, the Gnignano and Cologno dossiers show how the monastery could fit in with existing tenurial patterns to successfully exploit land; monks could even shape the local watery landscape to improve production. The Valtellina dossier shows deliberate estate management through controlling a workforce drawn from neighbouring settlements. Balzaretti avoids a formulaic approach, allowing the "tiniest details" (473) of demographic, ecology, and geography to shape investigations and interpretations.
Part III displays a notable shift in emphasis to economic matters. Chapter 10 describes how economic transactions related to the monastery of Sant'Ambrogio and taking place in the region around Milan "helped to form a hinterland for Milan which was differently constituted from the earlier hinterland of Roman times based on an empire-wide system of exchange" (480). Balzaretti's aim is to show that land management, market production, and property portfolios, and the sale and movement of production from monastic estates for onward distribution, worked to supply the needs of the urban community in Milan itself, such as the numerous xenodochia requiring food for visitors and the poor. Balzaretti consistently couches his historical argument in terms of a historical method: "the microanalysis of charters...is essential to understand how urban territories were formed and sustained, and thus how urban life came to be so important both in Milan and across much of the Italian peninsula" (480).
The book is a triumph, not least for charters and "microanalysis" which, as shown in Part I, had been overlooked by influential Enlightenment historians. They believed that the skill of selecting important facts from the 'vast store cupboard of memory' was superior to the 'antiquarian' study of everything in that cupboard, and therefore that it was acceptable to work exclusively with printed editions or ignore charters altogether, as Gibbon did when he visited Milan (47-48). The potential of archival material to explain the constitution of an entire region is, thanks to Balzaretti, undeniable. His success with this material does beg the question of whether his microanalysis could produce conclusions which don't necessarily concern economic history: Part I, after all, had thrown up many intriguing questions not taken up in Part III. For example, it is not entirely clear why the earlier discussion on the interpretation and reception history of Ambrose the man was needed at all if, as Balzaretti observes, charters are "not...the best source evidence for spiritual concerns" but are a "much better source for transactions that we now term 'economic'" (480). Despite the book's title, Ambrose as figure and cult features hardly at all in his conclusions. Similarly, besides the economic thesis about the development of the hinterland, Balzaretti had also stated earlier on in the book, "In the Milanese case the development of a 'successful economy' came at a considerable cost, namely the continued oppression of the poor by the rich, including rich institutions like the monastery of Sant'Ambrogio which ironically espoused a religion where poverty was a moral good" (27). This intriguing argument would obviously resonate with postmodernist critiques, but it is not immediately clear how Balzaretti has used his microanalysis to shed light on 'oppression' as a social and ethical problem.
For historians with interests besides the economic, Balzaretti's concluding chapters may leave the impression that his book is a straightforward economic history belonging only with the works of Henning, Hodges, McCormick, and Wickham. This would be wrong, for Balzaretti's conclusions change our understanding of early medieval monasticism generally. Most historians know monasticism made a significant contribution to the initial formation of diocesan towns during the third to sixth centuries, especially owing to the dominating figure of the monk-bishop. By contrast, for the post-Roman West, our mental conception of monasteries in towns is rather more vague, and there have been few if any truly systematic studies on urban monasteries in Western European episcopal towns in the period between the seventh and eleventh centuries. The reason for scholarly ambivalence about urban monasteries of this period is the view that monasticism as it developed under Merovingian and Carolingian rule was ideally suited for a rural, agrarian society. Only when cities were sufficiently developed with competitive market economies and non-ecclesiastical élite, it has been argued, could 'urban monasticism' be a meaningful category. Balzaretti's book corrects the view that Milan was transformed by a mercantile class, and instead demonstrates how an urban monastery and its diocesan town constituted a plastic environment in which multiple parties were simultaneously transformed by their interactions with each other. If one had assumed that monasteries in diocesan towns were necessarily overshadowed by the cathedral, or that the most important Carolingian monasteries were necessarily rural entities in remote locations, this book has certainly blown these assumptions apart. Balzaretti's study shows us how one monastery shaped the organisation of a city and in fact kept its urbanism alive. It paves the way for similar studies on other early medieval cities and shows us another reason why the study of early medieval monasticism is not yet exhausted.