Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-m42fx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-21T17:20:06.599Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Economic Idylls and Pastoral Realities: The “Trickster Economy” in the Kingdom of Naples

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

John A. Marino
John A. Marino
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Traditional European values of noncapitalist wealth preferred “rent to profit, security to risk, tradition to innovation, and, in terms of personal goals, gentility to entrepreneurial skill and renown.” Both in the dynamic, expansive sector of the international economy and in marginal, “retrograde” economies, nonpecuniary values based upon kin, custom, religion, law, and politics openly contradicted the utilitarian assumptions of our contemporary economic theory, spurned reinvestment, and worked against development. How can we balance such premodern conceptions with economic forces that may have been imperfectly understood or not even perceived and, at the same time, give both early modern rationale and economic rationality a place in our descriptions of the old order in Europe? In other words, how can we account for the role of culture in economic decision making?

Type
Social Conflict in Popular Culture
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , April 1982 , pp. 211 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1982

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Earlier versions of this paper were delivered to faculty seminars at Florida International University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an All-University of California Economic History Conference at Davis. My thanks to the many colleagues who have helped me to refine this argument.

1 Taylor, George V., “Noncapitalist Wealth and the French Revolution,” American Historical Review, 72:2 (1967), 482.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For an anthropological approach to noncapitalist wealth, see Sahlins, Marshall, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Godelier, Maurice, Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology, Brain, Robert, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Polanyi, Karl, “Societies and Economic Systems,” in Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economics; Essays of Karl Polanyi, Dalton, George, ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 3–25.Google Scholar On center and periphery theory applied to capitalist development, see Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).Google Scholar

2 Jane, and Schneider, Peter, Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily (New York: Academic Press, 1976), esp. 81–109, examine the cultural values of groups like peasants, herdsmen, and rural entrepreneurs whose cultural codes of honor, friendship, and cleverness “are for the most part still followed today.”Google Scholar

3 Croce, Benedetto, History of the Kingdom of Naples, Frenaye, Frances, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 (original Italian ed., 1925))Google Scholar; and Davis, John, Società e imprenditori nel Regno Borbonico 1815/1860 (Bari: Laterza, 1979).Google Scholar

4 Jones, Philip, “Medieval Agrarian Society in Its Prime: Italy,” in Cambridge Economic History, 2d ed., Postan, M. M., ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), I, 341–42 and 347–48Google Scholar; and “Delia caduta dell’ Impero Romano al secolo XVIII: La storia economica,” in Storia d'Italia, Romano, Ruggiero and Viventi, Corrado, eds. (Torino: Einaudi, 1974), II, Pt. 2, 1555–58.Google Scholar See also Galasso, Giuseppe, Il Mezzogiorno nella storia d'Italia (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1977)Google Scholar, who argues that the social and economic outlines of the Mezzogiorno were drawn in the Middle Ages; and Abulafia, David, The Two Italies: Economic Relations between the Norman Kingdom of Sicily and the Northern Communes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), which gives evidence of this disjunction between the kingdom of Norman Sicily and the communes of northern Italy.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Beloch, Karl J., Bevölkerungsgeschichte Italiens, 3 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1937–61), III, 215Google Scholar, gives hearth information for each province. Raw data should be interpreted in light of Villani, Pasquale, Numerazioni dei fuochi e problemi demografici del Mezzogiorno in età moderna (Napoli: Istituto Grafico Italiano, 1973).Google Scholar

6 Delille, Gérard, Agricoltura e demografia nel regno di Napoli nei secoli XVIII e XIX (Napoli: Guida, 1977)Google Scholar; and Calabria, Antonio, ”State Finance in the Kingdom of Naples in the Age of Philip II” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1978), ch. 2, “Some Background on the Neapolitan Economy.”Google Scholar

7 Albèri, Eugenio, Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al senato durante il secolo decimosesto (Series 2) (Firenze: Società editrice fiorentina, 1858), V, 449–50, relazione of Alvise Lando.Google Scholar

8 Croce, Benedetto, “II ‘Paradiso abitato da diavoli,’ ” Uomini e cose delta vecchia Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1927), I, 68–85, originally presented to the Società napoletana di storia patria on 12 June 1923. In discussing the literary and philological sources of the proverb, Croce argues that its origins lie in the thirteenth-century Angevin trading boom and was probably coined by Florentine merchants.Google Scholar

9 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology, Jacobson, Claire and Schoepf, Brooke Grundfest, trans. (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1967), 226. “The purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real).”Google Scholar

10 Goethe, J. W., Italian Journey (1786–1788), Auden, W. H. and Mayer, Elizabeth, trans. (London: Collins, 1962), 190–91 (12 March 1787).Google Scholar

11 Einaudi, Luigi, “Goethe, la leggenda del lazzarone napoletano ed il valore del lavoro,” La riforma sociale, 25 (1918), 198–202.Google Scholar For the origin and legend of the word lazzarone, see Croce, Benedetto, “I ‘Lazzari,’ ” Aneddoti di varia letteratura, 2d ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1954), III, 198–211. (Written in 1895.)Google Scholar

12 Goethe, , Italian Journey, 198 (16 March 1787).Google Scholar

13 Braudel, Fernand, Material Life and Capitalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 417–18.Google Scholar

14 Croce, , History of the Kingdom of Naples, 45–46.Google Scholar

15 Braudel, Fernand, “History and the Social Sciences,” in Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe, Burke, Peter, ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 18.Google ScholarOriginally published in Annales, E.S.C., 13 (1958), 725–53.Google ScholarBraudel's, major work is The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip 11, 2 vols., Reynolds, Siân, trans. (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).Google Scholar

16 Croce, Benedetto, “A Working Hypothesis: The Crisis of Italy in the Cinquecento and the Bond between the Renaissance and the Risorgimento,” in The Late Italian Renaissance 1525–1630, Cochrane, Eric, ed. and trans. (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 35.Google ScholarOriginally published in La critica: Rivista di letteratura, storia e filosofia, 37 (1939), 401–11.Google Scholar

17 Branca, Vittorio, Boccaccio: The Man and His Works, Monges, Richard, trans. (New York: New York University Press, 1976).Google ScholarFor the Italian text of the Decameron, see Branca, Vittorio, ed. (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1951), and for the English edition, Richard Aldington, trans. (New York: Dell, 1930).Google Scholar

18 Croce, Benedetto, ”La Novella di Andreuccio da Perugia,” in Storia e leggende napoletane (Bari: Laterza, 1919), 47–83.Google Scholar Originally presented to the Società napoletana di storia patria in 1911. Cf. Hobsbawm, E. J., Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Frederick Praeger, 1959), 24–25, who examines the bandit, another trickster-like type who has both literary and social reality.Google Scholar

19 Brown, Norman O., Hermes the Thief (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1947), 78–83, argues that all mercantile activity is a kind of theft, which is not that far removed from the medieval rationale against usurious profits.Google ScholarOppenheimer, Paul, ed. and trans., A Pleasant Vintage of Till Eulenspiegel (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1972)Google Scholar relies heavily on the joke that the hero takes literally what everyone means figuratively. The popular tales about Till Eulenspiegel, who actually died in 1350, glorify the simple peasant getting back at the city folk. The picaresque traveller becomes an especially polemical figure as the Reformation develops. The oldest text dates from 1515 but probably has a 1480s exemplar. Cf. the anonymous tale of “de Tormes, Lazarillo, which was published in 1554, in Two Spanish Picaresque Novels, Alpert, Michael, trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969).Google Scholar For trickster myths in general, see Babcock-Abrahams, Barbara, ” ‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess’: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered,” Journal of the Folklore Institute, 11:3 (1975), 147–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarTurner, Victor W., The Ritual Process (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), emphasizes the relationship between tricksters and initiates in their rites of passage.Google Scholar

20 Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (1956; rpt. New York: Shocken Books, 1972), 20.Google Scholar

21 Turner, Victor W., “Myth and Symbol,” in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968), X, 580Google Scholar, enumerates common trickster traits: “combined black and white symbolism, aggression, vindictiveness, vanity, defiance of authority, willfulness, individualism, indeterminancy of stature (sometimes tall, sometimes dwarfish), destructiveness, creativeness, and libido without procreative outcome.” Idem, “Comments and Conclu- sions,” in The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, Babcock, Barbara, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 279, outlines the characteristics of the novice: “The novice and his or her seclusion-setting are symbolically equated with dying, death, invisibility, darkness, decomposition, eclipse, the dark of the moon, uniformity, humus, naming anew, new dress, and so on. Liminal symbols tend to be ambiguous, equivocal, neutral, ambisexual rather than be classificatory reversals. This is because liminality is conceived of as a season of silent, secret growth, a mediatory movement between what was and what will be where the social process goes inward and underground for a time that is not profane time.Google Scholar

22 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, The Fate of Shechem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

23 There is general agreement in the identification of the sources for the two episodes of the novella of Andreuccio of Perugia. Lee, A. C., The Decameron, Its Sources and Analogues (1909; rpt. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1972), 30–34Google Scholar; Branca, , ed., Decameron, notes to novella II. 5Google Scholar; and Branca, , Boccaccio: Man and Works, 203–4. The first adventure in the house of the courtesan shows the influence ofa fabliau of the trovere Courtois d'Arras, entitled Boivin de Trovins. The second story, about the grave robbers, was derived from an episode of the “History of Antheia and Habrocome” by Xenophon of Ephesus—a work known to Boccaccio. Boccaccio, however, eliminated almost all traces of the Xenophon story. What is instructive about Boccaccio's treatment of the Xenophon material, and the fabliau for that matter, is how a classical model is turned into a medieval text: the invention of the transition story of the well and the creation of structural repetition by telling the three adventures as permutations of the same theme.Google Scholar

24 Turner, Victor W., ”Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual; An Essay in Comparative Symbology,’’ in The Anthropological Study of Play, Rice University Studies 60, 37 (Summer 1974), 83–87.Google ScholarCsikszentmihalyi, MihalyBeyond Boredom and Anxiety: The Experience of Play in Work and Games (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975).Google Scholar

25 ”Trickster,” in the Standard Dictionary of Mythology and Legend, Leach, Maria and Fried, John, eds. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1950), II, 1123, explains this psychological motive in trickster myths.Google Scholar

26 Chorley, Patrick, Oil, Silk, and Enlightenment: Economic Problems in XVlllth Century Naples (Napoli: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1965), esp. 83–139Google Scholar; Macry, Paolo, “Ceto mercantile e azienda agricola nel Regno di Napoli: il contratto alia voce nel XVIII secolo,” Quaderni Storici, 21:3 (1972), 851–909Google Scholar; idem, Mercato e societa nel regno di Napoli: commercio del grano e politico economica del Settecento (Napoli: Guida, 1974), esp. 15–27.Google Scholar

27 Marino, John A., “I meccanismi della crisi nella dogana di Foggia nel XVII secolo,” in Problemi di storia delle campagne meridionale nell'età moderna e contemporanea, Massafra, Angelo, ed. (Bari: Dedalo libri, 1981), 309–20.Google Scholar

28 Baroja, Julio Caro, “The City and the Country: Reflexions on Some Ancient Commonplaces,” in Mediterranean Countrymen, Pitt-Rivers, Julian, ed. (Paris: Mouton and Co., 1963), 27–40Google Scholar; and Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

29 Galasso, Giuseppe, Intervista sulla storia di Napoli, Allum, Percy, ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1978), e.g., 110–26Google Scholar; and Petraccone, Claudia, Napoli dal Cinquecento all’ Ottocento: problemi di storia demografica e sociale (Napoli: Guida, 1974), 111–26, offers some initial statistics and explanations for urban migration.Google Scholar

30 Branca, , Boccaccio: Man and Works, 276–307Google Scholar, presents an argument for the unifying principle of the Decameron being a mercantile epic. For Branca, , the Florentine merchants were “the real ‘conquistadores’ of that age” (p. 205).Google Scholar See Sapori, Armando, Le marchand italien au Moyen Age (Paris: A. Colin, 1952)Google Scholar; idem, “The Physiognomy of the Florentine Merchant,” in Social and Economic Foundations of the Italian Renaissance, Molho, Anthony, ed. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1969), 66–76.Google Scholar

31 Braudel, , The Mediterranean, I, 89Google Scholar, cites Coniglio, Giuseppe, Il Viceregno di Napoli net secolo XVII. Notizie sulla commerciale efinanziaria secondo nuova ricerche negli archivi italiani e spagnoli (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1955), 28–30.Google Scholar But the document, Pisa, Archivio di Statodi, Archivio Alliata 14, “Discorso sopra la Dogana di Puglia del regnio [sic] di Napoli a Sua Cath. Regia Maesta,” ca. 1560, is presented out of context. The large grain grower was complaining about the recent alienation of agricultural land to pastoral use and was, therefore, trying to discredit the pastoral sector as being one contrary to a productive economy.Google Scholar

32 de Cervantes, Miguel, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha, 25th ed. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, Coleccion Austral, 1973 (original ed., 1605/1615)), 43 (pt. I, vii), 394 (pt. II, xiv), 530 (pt. II, xliii).Google Scholar

33 Branca, , Boccaccio: Man and Works, 292Google Scholar, quotes Sapori, Armando, Mercatores (Milan: Garzanti, 1941), 97.Google Scholar

34 Hicks, John, A Theory of Economic History (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 2, on “custom” and “command” economies.Google Scholar

35 Davis, Natalie Zemon, “Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Errors,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 227–67, demonstrates the Renaissance fascination with proverbs and speculates upon their significance.Google Scholar

36 Franco, Domenico, “La pastorizia ed il commercio della lana nella antica e nuova Cerreto,” Samnium, 39:1–2 (1966), 73–74, n. 10, gives eighteen proverbs from the dogana of Foggia.Google Scholar

37 Poggioli, Renato, ”The Oaten Flute,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 11:2(1957), 147–84Google Scholar; idem, ”Naboth's Vineyard or the Pastoral View of the Social Order,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 24:1 (1963), 3–24.Google ScholarBoth, collected in hisThe Oaten Flute. Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

38 Archivio Doria Landi Pamphilj, Roma (hereafter cited as ADLPR), bancone 21, unnumbered, “Libro mastro primo dell'Industrie dello Stato di Melfi (1671/72–1686/87)”; bancone 21/14, “Libro del'Industrie nello Stato di Melfi (1671/72–1691/92)”; bancone 21/14, “Manuale del libro dell'Industrie (1691/92–1702–03)”; and scaffale 16/54, ’ ‘Manuali del libro dell ’ Industrie dello Stato di Melfi dal 1703/04 al 1742/43.”

39 Zotta, Silvio, “Azienda agraria e sussistenza in una terra lucana all'inizio del Seicento,” in Economia e classi sociali nella Puglia moderna, Villani, Pasquale, ed. (Napoli: Guida, 1974), 180.Google Scholar

40 Archivio di Stato di Foggia, Dogana delle pecore, Serie V, regg. 1999–2551 (a. 1623–1801), “Libri di pesatori di lana”; and Dogana, Serie I, fasc. 355–56, “Atti della voce della lana del corrente anno,” (a. 1730–1807); and ADLPR, as cited in note 38, above.

41 ADLPR, as cited in note 38, above.

42 de Leruela, Miguel Caxa, Restauracion de la Antigua Abundancia de Espaha, Flem, Jean Paul Le, ed. (Madrid: Instituto de estudios fiscales, 1976 (first ed., Naples, 1630).Google Scholar The links between Spain and Naples are again emphasized if we can remember that Caxa de Leruela was in Naples as a fiscal officer in the company of the visitor general Alarcon (1628–31). For a fuller treatment of the arbitristas, see Vilar, Jean, Literatura y economia. La figura satirica del arbitrista en el Sigh de Oro, Real, Francisco Bustelo G. Del, trans. (Madrid: Selecta de Revista de Occidente, 1973)Google Scholar, and Salomon, Noel, Recherches sur le thème paysan dans la “comedia” au temps de Lope de Vega (Bordeaux: Institut d ‘Etudes Iberiques et Ibero-Americaines de 1 ’Univer- site de Bordeaux, 1965).Google Scholar

43 Stefano, Stefano Di, La ragion pastorale over comento su la Prammatica LXXIX de offitio Procuratoris Caesaris, 2 vols. (Napoli: Domenico Roselli, 1731), I, 130Google Scholar, quotes Tasso, , L'Aminta, Act 2, Scene 2, 891–97:Google Scholar

(Daphnis) Il mondo invecchia

e invecchiando intristisce.

(Thyrsis) Forse allora,

non usavan sí spesso i cittadini

ne le selve e ne i campi, né sí spesso

le nostre forosette aveano in uso

d'andare a la cittade. Or son mischiate

schiatte e costumi.

44 Venturi, Franco, “The Enlightenment in Southern Italy,” and “Spanish and Italian Economists and Reformers in the Eighteenth Century,” in Italy and the Enlightenment. Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, Corsi, Susan, trans. (London: Longman, 1972), 198–224, 265–91.Google Scholar Originally published in Rivista Storica ltaliana, 74:1 (1962), 5–26; and 74:3 (1962), 532–61.Google Scholar

45 Stefano, Di, La ragion pastorale, I, 131, quotes Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia, Eclogue 6:Google Scholar

Ed io per quel che veggio ancor comprendolo,

Che son pur vecchio, ed ho curvati gli omeri

In comprar senno, e pur ancor non vendolo.

O quanti intorno a queste selve noveri

Pastori, in vista buon, che tutti furano

Rastri, zappe, sampogne, aratri, e vomeri.

D'oltraggio, e di vergogna aggi non curano

Questi compagni dal rapace Gracculo, ecc.

The English translation is taken from Sannazaro, Jacopo, Arcadia and Piscatorial Eclogues, Nash, Ralph, trans. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), 68–69.Google Scholar

46 Poggioli, Renato, “The Pastoral of the Self,” Daedalus, 88:4 (1959), 686–99, collected in The Oaten Flute.Google Scholar Like many of his recent predecessors, Cervantes tended to relate the pastoral calling to the moral and social status of the landed gentry (p. 688). See Don Quixote, pt. I, vi, and pt. II, lxxiii. On the picaresque in general, see Babcock, Barbara, “ ‘Liberty's Whore’: Inversions, Marginalia, and Picaresque Narrative,” in Reversible World, Babcock, ed., 95–116.Google Scholar

47 Vilar, Pierre, “The Age of Don Quixote,” in Essays in European Economic History 1500–1800, Earle, Peter, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 100–112.Google Scholar Originally published in Europe, 34:121–122 (1956), 3–16.Google ScholarElliott, J. H., “Self-Perception and Decline in Early Seven- teenth-Century Spain,” Past and Present, no. 74 (1977), 41–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For decline in general, see Starn, Randolph, “Meaning-Levels in the Theme of Historical Decline,” History and Theory, 14:1 (1975), 1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 Williams, , The Country and the City, 288–92Google Scholar