in a single statement or monument. The combination of images and texts in all three of these examples—Donna dressed with a certain elegance, the menorah and shofars on Leah’s rubricated epitaph, the blessing Christ and coat of arms alongside Donadeus’s dedication at Castro—tells us even more about these individuals’ perceived place in their world and in the world to come. When these data are supplemented by material remains, such as excavated belt fittings, and when analogous instances of display and additional evidence for local rituals of life, death, and commemoration are also considered, a richly textured picture of local medieval life can emerge. A “real-life” regional microhistory extrapolated from visual and material sources is the subject and the object of this book.88 The analogies between this approach and those of the New Historicists and anthropologists’ “thick description” should be clear.89
To underscore the local and regional qualities of the people in my study, I have limited my inquiry to monuments and objects that are more or less fixed in time and space. I say “more or less” because Donadeus’s inscription was moved from inside the cathedral to the outside, but it is still in the same relative location; Leah’s tombstone is now in a museum, not in a cemetery, but there is no doubt that it was produced and displayed in Brindisi; and Donna’s tiny image and short accompanying text are still exactly where they were painted in a crypt church in the hinterlands of Vaste over six hundred years ago. Castro, Brindisi, and Vaste were in the Middle Ages a town, city, and village that had more in common with each other than with places of similar size located farther away.
The changes in context, function, and usage that have affected virtually all medieval monuments mean that historians have to work that much harder to gain insight into the past. Interdisciplinarity is essential. Within the Salento, it seems to me a mistake to consider Leah’s Hebrew tombstone in isolation from Stratigoules’s long epitaph in Greek produced a century later [32.J]. And yet scholars have divided these fragments of historical information according to a rigid taxonomy of religion or language, or a conflation of the two. One might argue that Jewish hopes for the afterlife are so different from those of Christians that such a separation is legitimate—an argument that bears examination, given that both tombstones promote the deceased’s resurrection albeit in different terms—but even scholars who examine Christian texts in Latin have been unwilling or unable to juxtapose them to Christian examples in Greek.
I argue that looking at Donna’s dress, pose, and language of supplication yields greater insights if compared not only to other representations of female supplicants produced between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, but also if supplication patterns are analyzed across the lines of gender, language, or even confession. Early feminists promoted the study of women as a kind of “affirmative action” to redress previous inattention, but many scholars now prefer to consider both genders in tandem.90 Similarly, I maintain that our understanding of the Orthodox Christians of the medieval Salento can only be enhanced by looking also at the Roman-rite Christians and the Jews.91 If the Muslims had left any visual traces of their frequent early medieval raids, I would have included them, too.92
I practice a certain amount of affirmative action on behalf of the Jewish residents of the Salento because they have been routinely ignored, except by Jewish-studies specialists, whose publications are in turn ignored by art historians. For the Jews I have availed myself of a wider chronological range of visual testimony, from the seventh to the later fifteenth century, and expanded the geographical limits to include central Apulia and a bit of Basilicata; I also introduce relevant texts from Trani, Rome, and Ashkenaz. Perhaps in the future this will not be necessary, but at present it is important to underscore firmly the coexistence of multiple faiths in the Salento even at the risk of overemphasizing one of them. For the Christians, by contrast, I do not mine documentary sources,93 and I have included local manuscript texts only sporadically, focusing instead on public texts.94
Visual and material evidence indicates that people of different faiths and different languages lived and died in close proximity in the Salento. The proximity of neighbors who were not entirely like oneself must have heightened awareness of similarities as well as differences. Public art therefore could be an agent of separation or unification, mediating onomastic, linguistic, cultural, and social friction and effecting different desired outcomes.95 Even such a humble visual display as a short graffito could be an effective means of publicly communicating what was important to its author/inciser, and viewing it and adding one’s own text alongside created a new social community.
While nearly all of the local Hebrew texts are available in good editions, the Latin ones are insufficiently studied (and untranslated), and only the more impressive of the Greek texts have been published; shorter texts, including graffiti, and their accompanying images have received very limited attention. Moreover, local texts and images often have been published in isolation: witness the many volumes devoted exclusively to rock-cut churches even though the visual and textual culture of the so-called civiltà rupestre is no different from that above ground.96 Jewish tombstones are compared only with one another and not with epitaphs for the dead of other faiths even when they bear a non-Hebrew text. It is critical to move beyond these restrictive taxonomies to a regional perspective, one that incorporates all of the visual material and thereby gives a voice, however faint or distorted, to more members of medieval society. While church doctrine and courtly literature and political intrigue are undeniably of cultural importance, they had less impact on most people’s lives, and on the formation of their identities, than did daily exposure to the visual environment and regular encounters in worship spaces, cemeteries, and village streets. While I focus here on a single region in medieval Italy, a multidisciplinary approach to historical visual culture and to questions of individual and group identity has implications well beyond that time and place.
The Database
The basis for this book is the Database (pages 239–336). Readers have already seen references to the Database in the form of boldface numbers and letters within square brackets. Sites are arranged alphabetically, with each city, town, or village followed by its modern Italian province in parentheses and by the name of the specific structure or kind of work within each site; if the work has a specific date, it appears in boldface type. This is followed by measurements or other details. Capital letters (A, B, C, and so on) identify every relevant inscription or image within that site; each inscription is given in the original language, followed by an English translation (unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine). If both inscriptions and images exist, the former precede the latter. Works of unknown provenance are alphabetized according to their current location. Pictorial graffiti (pg) are listed separately from textual graffiti, which are considered inscriptions. These data are followed by a list of narrative scenes (sc) and identifiable saints (st). With very few exceptions, representations of Christ and the Virgin are not included because they are ubiquitous and uninformative about matters of personal or regional identity. Each entry concludes with a short bibliography that emphasizes recent literature. Notes to the text do not duplicate this bibliography.
The Database is not a compendium of all texts and images in the medieval Salento; it is a collection of published and unpublished art, as defined above, that serves as a starting point for all of my observations about local identity. Some well-known and art-historically significant monuments (such as San Mauro and San Salvatore, outside Gallipoli) are not included because they contain no pictorial or textual representations of contemporary people. And while the Database does include every image (or partial image) known to me of a nonsacred individual datable with reasonable certainty between the ninth and early fifteenth centuries, it does not include every inscription from that period.97 In addition to texts unavailable to me, I have omitted texts whose published transcriptions seem unreliable and whose original has been lost. The images and texts that are included all yield insight into individual or corporate identity in the medieval Salento. Taken together, these disparate data provide a picture of local life that complements and expands upon previous studies based exclusively on documentary sources, archaeological finds, or a single artistic medium.
