Building and Economic Growth in Southern Europe (1050-1300) is the second volume to emerge from thePetrifying Wealth ERC project. The aim of the project is to examine the causes, effects, and implications of the proliferation of masonry construction that took place in the region during the Central Middle Ages. The sudden ubiquity of stone is said to have generated new and resilient individual and collective identities, representing the intersection of the social, cultural, and political. Within this framework, theBuilding and Economic Growth volume is something of an outlier. Its ten contributions focus on the relationship between building and investment on the one hand, and production and trade on the other. The construction boom was funded by economic growth and so acts as a useful indicator of it, but was also a driving force in its own right. As Alessio Fiore notes in his introduction, the economic lens falls slightly outside the remit of the project. But this is by no means a marginal volume. The findings of its authors are useful and significant, both when each chapter is read individually and when the collection is considered as a whole.
Almost all the contributions center on rural contexts. This choice makes sense. It reflects the economy and demographic patterns of the period, as well as the nature of the surviving archaeological record. The volume is divided into three thematic sections. The first part focuses on structures related to farming (cereal storage; irrigation); the second on manufacturing (mills; iron works), coupled with a standalone chapter on residential properties; and the final section concentrates on key transport infrastructures, namely ports and bridges. This structure supports a comprehensive and broad-ranging survey, which will be useful for both experts on the regions concerned and newcomers wishing to gain insight into medieval southern European economies.
The volume offers commendable balance across regions and building types. In several cases, one category of structure is treated in more than one geographical context in consecutive chapters, allowing the reader to draw connections between them. The coverage is comprehensive due to the volume’s realistically open definition of “economy.” While he admits in the introduction that his chapter stands out somewhat from the other chapters on constructions for agriculture and industry, Fiore’s piece on residential properties in northern Italy (with a focus on Genoese sources) feels essential. He persuasively argues that domestic construction played a foundational role in wider urban growth: “like a beat in the background, it set the rhythm” (172).
A major strength of each of the contributions is their clarity in digesting for the reader regionalized and often specialist scholarships. Lorenzo Tabarrini, for example, sets out in useful terms the different kinds of landed estates in northern and central Italy. Meanwhile, Josep Torró’s study of canalization in regions of Iberia that had moved from Muslim to Christian hands provides an English-language summary of scholarship that takes us away from assuming straightforward continuity, instead highlighting the importance of agriculture and different social groups in reshaping the landscape. Across the board, the authors draw together material, archaeological and written, documentary source bases. Almost all the studies marry together divergent materials and the approaches usually taken to them to generate convincing conclusions. Many reflect helpfully on their limitations, such as Jordi Morelló Baget’s discussion of property deeds in his piece on hydraulic mills in Catalonia.
Several themes emerge across the volume. Although politics and power are not the focus of this particular volume emerging from the Petrifying Wealth project, local dynamics are frequently a subject of discussion. Sandro Carocci highlights in his conclusion the plurality of actors who invested in these economic structures. This is clear throughout the chapters. Giovanna Bianchi ties changes in rural cereal storage to the broader political and economic strategy of the Ottonians; Víctor Farías Zurita considers dynamics in seigneurialization through a focused study of the documents of a monastery in Catalonia; the pieces by Torró and Fabrizio Pagnoni on canal building in the Crown of Aragon and northern Italy respectively deal with local communities and their relationships to aristocratic and/or royal authorities.
Another prominent recurring topic is the development and movement of expertise. Maria Elena Cortese’s study of ironworking in central and northern Italy highlights the expansion of this sector in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Not only did this involve the use of a broad range of resources from the local area, but also those with specialized abilities to work with them. Pinuccia F. Simbula shows the development and differentiation of roles engaged in shipbuilding in thirteenth-century Italy, and the mobility of specialized workers within this. However, this is just one element of a much more complicated picture she portrays of the dynamics surrounding maritime infrastructures at a time of growth.
While the volume as a whole is convincing in its assertion of the economic importance and broad implications of building in this period, many of the individual chapters provide arguments that challenge major scholarly assumptions. Paolo Tomei’s study of bridges in Tuscany draws together Chris Wickham’s recent emphasis on the importance of infrastructure for drawing together regional economies with Richard Britnell’s older work on bridges in medieval England. While scholars tend to treat bridges and other kinds of infrastructure as a backdrop, Tomei stresses their importance in connecting and thus expanding trade and exchange.
My only criticisms concern contextualization. While there is further framing on the project website, it would be helpful to know more within the volume about why southern Europe is particularly important for studying economic structures of this kind. How do the findings of this volume speak to broader regional or transregional dynamics? Further consideration of the dialogue of these regions with other areas would also broaden its geographical outlook. Much of the Iberian Peninsula is covered and several of these chapters discuss dynamics with Muslim populations and legacy infrastructure, but the Italian material is almost exclusively focused on Tuscany and the north (France only appears in passing). This may be due to the availability of sources and studies, but it would nonetheless be interesting to know more about developments in the south and Sicily in this period.
The conclusion is cautious about overemphasizing the importance of the economic in the central medieval building revolution, perhaps reflecting the more political and cultural preoccupations of the project as a whole. Nonetheless, what emerges from reading these studies is that this was not a “less” important factor. Instead, the volume demonstrates how social, political, cultural, and economic forces worked in symbiosis to drive and shape this remarkable building boom.