The Social World of the Abbey of Cava, c. 1020–1300 by Graham A. Loud (review)

Reviewed by: The Social World of the Abbey of Cava, c. 1020–1300 by Graham A. Loud Maureen C. Miller The Social World of the Abbey of Cava, c. 1020–1300. By Graham A. Loud. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press. 2021. Pp. xxxiii, 456. 135. ISBN 978-1-783-27632-5. ) This is an important and extremely valuable book. It is also the generous gift of a senior scholar in southern Italian medieval history to a younger generation of historians in this field and to those who will come after them. In addition to providing an updated history of this eleventh-century foundation and the monastic congregation it inspired, Loud's Social World of the Abbey of Cava contributes key research tools, bibliography, and archival citations to inspire and enable future studies. The first third of the monograph traces the origins and growth of Cava from an encampment of hermits just north of Salerno in the 1020s to a reforming monastic congregation of over a hundred dependent abbeys across southern Italy. This section documents the transformative impact of the patronage of the Norman conquerors of the south and the key role that purchases of property by the monks played in building Cava's prodigious patrimony. The abbacy of Peter I (1079–1123) is highlighted in these developments. Part 1 concludes in an important and judicious appraisal of the problem of forgery in the defense of this patrimony that should interest historians of monasticism beyond southern Italy. The rest of the book places the economic development of the monastery in its environmental, social, and political contexts arguing persuasively that Cava played a highly significant role not only in the region's agriculture but also in its dynamic market economy. Loud emphasizes the abbey's relations with its peasant cultivators and demonstrates some upward social mobility through a detailed analysis of the fortunes of two families. He also reconstructs the monastic congregation's administrative systems, its officials, and its practices across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, arguing that its abbot closely supervised Cava's many dependencies. Loud's nuanced treatment of the abbey's territorial lordship—examining the immunity its holdings enjoyed, the extent of its exercise of justice, and its relations with vassals—is especially valuable, particularly in the contrasts drawn with Montecassino's lordship. While some readers may lament the very limited attention given to the End Page 407 monastery's religious life, Loud rightly emphasizes the social and economic structures that made that life possible for an elite minority. Cava's property management—particularly the transition from renders in kind to monetary rents as well as the importance of labor services into the thirteenth century—bears on the more significant historical problem of the origins of modern southern Italy's under-development. On this issue, Loud's assessment of the impact of the papacy's mobilization of the Angevins against Frederick II's heirs, compounded by the warfare following the 1282 Sicilian revolt, provides additional evidence that southern Italy's economy remained vibrant and its peasant communities dynamic into the late thirteenth century. The research tools provided in this volume, moreover, constitute significant contributions to medieval Italian history. The book includes a concise description of the organization of Cava's archive, our richest surviving collection of medieval documents in southern Italy. It also provides overviews of the region's dating conventions and its medieval currencies, weights, and measures; a list of Cava's abbots and their dates; seven detailed maps; and the genealogies of eight families that figure prominently in the abbey's social world. An appendix also presents data (with archival citations) on Cava's purchases and expenditures. Additionally, the volume's annotation guides the reader to the most important scholarship on Cava, and on monasticism in the south more generally, and provides numerous citations to individual documents using the archive's present numeration scheme. Other contributions are the author's salutary critical readings of The Lives of the First Four Abbots of Cava, a work all too frequently invoked uncritically. Loud also leverages his knowledge of other institutions and regions in southern Italy to contextualize developments at Cava in particular, and in the Salerno region more generally. The contrasts. . .