Dietro le quinte della satira. Rapporti tra cittadini e contadini nel basso Medioevo italiano

This thesis investigates the correlation between the anti-peasant literature, flourishing in Italy since the mid-fourteenth century, and the reality of the relationships between city dwellers and farmers in the Italian late Middle Ages, with particular attention to the Po area. Two satirical stereotypes are discussed above all: the rustic thief in the fields, who drew on himself the fierce hatred of the master class, and the rude peasant, who ate poor food and was completely foreign to the refined food culture of the city. The judicial sources – above all Bolognese –confirm that the image of the rustic thief had a firm foothold in reality, but so did the literary laments of the peasants, regarding the dishonesty of the masters: indeed, there are trials in which the rustics were able to prove themselves innocent from accusations that were unfounded or even false. In addition, some lawsuits against peasants, along with episodic references in government correspondence and regulatory sources, show that contempt for peasants was well entrenched at all levels of society. With regards to the second figure – the rustic rough – the Italian cookbooks, together with the descriptions of great banquets in chronicles, clearly show that not only the products, but also entire recipes associated in literature to the peasant world were part of the elites’ diet. Therefore, there was no strict separation between the city and the country food culture. In conclusion, the anti-peasant satire had a deep connection with reality, since it always started from a real fact or expressed a widespread feeling. It departed from reality, however, when it exasperated the social and cultural subordination of the peasants, denying the aspects of complementarity and integration of the city-country relationship, in which the former was in a dominant position, and the latter anything but passive or defenceless