In this ambitious book, De Munck traces both small and large transformations in craft and merchant guilds, in attitudes to labor, in cities, in corporative ideology, and, most profoundly, in the conception of what constitutes a political entity. His account begins with medieval communal revolts, the resulting growth of communes and guilds in the late tenth-century Italian peninsula and early eleventh-century southern Netherlands. In both regions, about 25 percent of the population lived in cities by the thirteenth century, a density unmatched in other parts of Europe. The formation of communes resulted in a radically new body politic that included those who labored with their hands as citizens and members. As De Munck argues, the rise of corporate bodies, indeed, the ideology of urban corporatism itself—rooted in “an ontologically grounded” ideal of a “harmonious social whole” (288)—developed through the sixteenth century in diverse forms in different cities. It formed a...

You do not currently have access to this content.