Article,
The 2001 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: The Idea of Community in Renaissance Italy
Renaissance Quarterly, 55 (1): 1--18 (2002)
Abstract
This essay is based upon the methodological assumption that by examining an exceptional event in an exceptional place one can unmask the hidden assumptions of the mundane and quotidian. The problem is to determine what the idea of community could have meant in north Italian towns and villages during the Renaissance. Depositions about a brawl in an otherwise insignificant small town provide an opportunity to examine how the idea of community was crystallized in three ways: community as social interaction in an institutional guise, community as a certain kind of space, and community as a process of social exclusion.
