Two novelties distinguish this recent collection. They are not methodological, but procedural. First, it has gone global. One of its three editors is Japanese, as are four of the fourteen contributors. Consequently, the other novelty is that its findings, ordinarily presented in Italian and German (as befits the Italo-German Institute where the volume originated), all appear (with assistance from three translators, one of whom is also Japanese) in occasionally opaque European-Union English (the spell-check function preserves several howlers, for example, “week” instead of “weak”).
Thematically, the volume has minimal coherence. Nearly all of the contributors work within the paradigm of “communalism” developed by Blickle and his Swiss student Jon Mathieu.1 Geographically, communalism undeniably flourished best in Alpine regions; its largest and most durable political successes were the Gray League and the Valais federation. However, this volume imperfectly conceals the geographical boundaries between its mostly regionally based scholars (four from...