Chapter 5 recounts the story of Giorgio Amendola from his birth in 1907 through the complexities of his family life and politics until his father’s death. His father’s murder and his combative personality ensured that he dismissed liberal Anti-Fascism as hopelessly feeble and, in 1929, he joined the Communist Party of Italy (PCdI). He soon left for Paris and for his education as a party chief in the making, notably from the Machiavellian Palmiro Togliatti, his ‘second father’. Giorgio loved Paris, City of the Revolution; he did not visit Leningrad or Moscow until after 1945. A young working-class woman called Germaine Lecocq, almost the embodiment of Paris, came suddenly into his life in a story of love at first sight. Unlike his parents’ marriage, it remained that way. The couple’s marriage and first full sexual encounter occurred on the prison island of Ponza. Not long afterwards, a daughter was born with some difficulty in Rome; Germaine’s mother arrived and thereafter remained part of their family. Eventually they moved back to Paris, and, after a brief time in Tunisia, they stayed in France until Giorgio crossed the Italian border to become a fighting partisan in April 1943.

Chapter 5 examines Boccaccio’s authorial defenses in the Decameron in the light of medieval medical and literary prescriptions for lovesickness, such as those in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, and Andreas Capellanus’ De amore (which Boccaccio has been credited with translating). Like these didactic works, the Decameron can also be seen as teaching both how to recover from an unhappy love affair and how to procure a new liaison, thus aggravating the very ills that it is said to cure. Indeed, the book is presented metaphorically as fighting fire with fire, redressing unrequited desire by offering female readers the solace of a personal relationship with its author. But Boccaccio also recognizes that it useless to try to prevent sexual desire, and the cure may do more harm than good. The chapter’s second half examines stories that seem to draw on the dialogues between lovers of different social statuses in De amore. The attempted seductions are all unsuccessful in Andreas’ hypothetical encounters, but the corresponding novelle tend to end happily and to model healthier, more productive human relationships.

The Introduction situates the nineteenth-century heyday of petitions and petitioning within a series of literatures. First, it places the book in the context of existing understandings of British political culture and debates about popular politics that have hitherto focused primarily on political languages and electoral culture, whereas the book redirects attention to practice and forms of political activity outside of voting. A study of petitions and petitioning furthermore challenges revisionist accounts that have emphasised the ‘closing down’ of popular politics or the growing regulation of subjects by the Victorian state. Second, it traces the tracing the genealogy of petitions within British history over the longue durée. While the was part of a common trend towards mass, collective, public petitioning across Europe and North America, the UK experience was exceptional. Third, the Introduction underlines the book’s intervention into a number of important debates within social and political science concerning collective action and social movements, theories and practices of representation, and trajectories of democratisation. Finally, the Introduction provides a chronological overview of petitions and petitioning during the long nineteenth century and an outline of the book’s structure.

The conclusion summarises the key findings of the book. Not only were petitions and petitioning a central, and hitherto, missing component of our understanding of UK political culture, but these practices contributed to the transformation of political culture. The remainder of the conclusion considers how a study of petitionary culture reconnects and pushes forward the currently fragmented field of nineteenth-century political history, before considering three major implications of the book for the wider historiography. First, it demonstrates that UK political culture was even more inclusive than previously thought, thereby qualifying the emphasis on the exclusivity of the political nation. Second, it charts how the authority and legitimacy of the Commons in particular, and Parliament more generally, was renewed by petitions, although it could also, on occasion, be challenged by petitioners. Third, it shows how the UK state was transformed by the continuous interaction with petitioners, and restores the place of the people within accounts of the relationship between state and subjects. Ultimately, petitions and petitioning were part of a broader social phenomenon that decisively reshaped the modern political culture of the UK.

Nineteenth-century MPs spent a significant proportion of their time presenting petitions and corresponding with petitioners. Petitioning and the interactions between petitioners and parliamentarians was an important component of how representation worked in practice. This chapter first examines the shift in how parliamentarians conceived petitions from an eighteenth-century system of ‘virtual representation’ to embodying aggregated popular opinion. The chapter then examines petitioning and the practice of representation. While not everyone had the right to vote, parliamentarians believed that all subjects had the right to be represented through the presentation of their petitions. The correspondence between MPs and petitioners provided a forum to negotiate the meaning of representation. Parliamentarians sought to uphold their independence in the face of petitioners demands to present and support their requests. Finally, the presentation of petitioning was a mechanism for geographic but also issue-based representation. Overall, the interaction between parliamentarians and petitioners provides new insights into the shifting relationship between politicians and the people. More broadly, it focuses attention away from theories of representation and electoral or formal representation to a wider concept of the culture of representation within a given polity.

When I told Clare Alexander, my splendid agent for over two decades, that I wanted to write a book about the Amendolas, father and son, she replied sceptically: ‘Who has ever heard of the Amendolas?’ In Italy, as noted in my Conclusion, Giovanni, the Anti-Fascist, is commemorated in almost every town and city; Giorgio less so, but he does have an active foundation named in his honour. But, outside Italy, Clare was right.

It has brought me a great pleasure putting together in 2020–2 this study of the Amendolas, father (liberal democrat, Anti-Fascist, saint and martyr) and son (communist). In my narration I have remained an ‘indipendente di sinistra’ (Australian-Oxfordian or rootless cosmopolitan-style). I have never renounced an Anti-Fascism of my own slant. In my research for this book, I have been helped by email contact with the liberals Elio D’Auria and Antonella Amendola, who may well end up wondering if Rosario Romeo was not right about me and ‘Botany Bay’. Giovanni Cerchia, from further to current Left and the academic director of the Fondazione Giorgio Amendola, together with Prospero Cerabona, the foundation’s president, have also generously assisted me, both in my research and, importantly, in obtaining quality reproductions of many of the photographs that illustrate this text, whether sourced directly from the foundation or from the Istituto Gramsci in Rome.

Chapter 2 investigates how the three opening stories of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron reformulate examples of ascetic and altruistic behavior used in vernacular sermons, concentrating on Italian sources close to Boccaccio: the homilies of Giordano da Pisa and the devotional treatises of Domenico Cavalca and Iacopo Passavanti. It explores the Dominican friars’ vicious representations of Jews, and the Decameron’s surprisingly sympathetic attitude toward them and other excluded or subordinate social groups in medieval society. The apparent filogyny and filo-Judaism in Boccaccio’s reworkings of antifeminist and anti-Semitic exempla do not seem to respond to contemporary women’s or Jews’ historical circumstances, however, so much as to the reductive didacticism of his sources. The chapter’s final sections examine how Decameron novelle 5.8 and 5.9 parody sermon exempla by showing how abstract moral injunctions can be put to different ends, thereby undermining the assumption that any lesson can be universally applied.

This critical study places Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century story-collection in the context of the wide array of didactic narrative traditions that his tales are largely based on and frequently parody, including Aesopic fables, framed narrative collections of Islamicate origin, medieval compilations of sermon stories and of saints’ lives, and classical anthologies of historical anecdotes. In Boccaccio’s revisions, the inherited stories suggest very different ethical paradigms (more skeptical, more tolerant of natural impulses) than in earlier contexts. The book examines Boccaccio’s texts not only in relation to both premodern notions of literary exemplarity, but also to recent critical claims about narrative’s ability to promote empathy and emotional intelligence. Boccaccio asserts in the Decameron’s Preface that his tales provide readers with useful advice by showing the consequences of human behavior, but the very plethora of different teachings and variant outcomes that are proposed undermines the assumption that a specific narrative lesson can ever be universally applied.

The right to petition was the ‘cornerstone’ of all other liberties, petitioners frequently argued. In the UK the right to petition was based on precedent, conventions and popular constitutionalism and was not, as in polities established in revolutionary contexts, a codified constitutional right derived from the idea of popular sovereignty. The right to petition was a contested right formed through a continuous, dynamic struggle between petitioners and Parliament. The right to petition was open to all subjects, and not limited by class, gender, race, literary, property or the franchise. There was little restriction of the content, as opposed to the form, of petitions to Parliament, and the decreasing limitations on petitioning in relation to association and assembly, ensured it became the key mode in connecting, legitimating and underpinning other political activities. Finally, petitioners successfully pressed for a popular, open right to petition, but politicians were able to resist attempts to expand the right of petition into a right of presence or audience. The contest over the right to petition was one of the ways in which politicians sought to retain their discretion and uphold parliamentary sovereignty while acknowledging popular rights.

Between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century the context for petitioning changed. The number of public petitions addressed to the House of Commons declined, and commentators and politicians increasingly regarded petitioning as redundant in an era of mass electoral politics ushered in by the Third Reform Act (1884–85). Yet, as this chapter shows, petitioning did not decline but was rather reinvented in this period. Campaigners increasingly addressed singular mass petitions to a range of different authorities, including the monarch and Downing Street, in ways that emphasised the performative presentation of petitions to maximise coverage in the mass media. High-profile examples, such as petitions organised by the militant suffragettes or the Ulster Covenant and Declaration (1912) associated with Unionist opposition to Irish Home Rule, were part of a broader reimagining of petitioning with the UK’s nascent democracy. Finally, contemporaries also considered petitions to be a mechanism for calling referendums, as shown in a number of bills of the time, and also in the numerous mass petitions from Unionists and others to the king calling for Home Rule to be referred to the people via referendum or general election. As this chapter shows, while the practice of petitioning changed during an era of rapid democratisation it retained an important place within UK popular politics and political culture.