Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the Politics of the New Age

Rating:
Summary: Choice, December 2003
Review: From 1347 to 1354, a Roman notary and budding antiquarian, Cola di Rienzo, led a revolution in Rome that riveted the attention of papal Avignon imperial Prague, and royal Naples, and for a short time restored the city to the center of what Giuseppe Toffanin once called "the century without Rome." Musto's rich and detailed treatment of Roman society, the fabric of the city, the frustrations of its absent popes, and its thuggish barons wonderfully illuminates 14th-century Rome, much as the late Robert Brentano's "Rome before Avignon" (CH, Oct. '74) illuminated 13th-century Rome. But the center is Cola - the antiquarian, Christian moralist of the buono stato, and apocalyptic visionary strongly influenced by spiritual Franciscan apocalypticism. Musto (co-director, History E-Book Project) deftly handles his often-elusive sources, wringing from them a far more reliable, but no less exciting, picture of the notary and his world than those of writers and artists from Petrarch to Richard Wagner. This splendid study of Cola's life and the forces he encountered, manipulated, and was destroyed by is as definitive, learned, and eloquent as one could hope for, and will long remain the master study of this complex figure and his times. Summing Up: Essential. All levels and collections. - E. Peters, University of Pennsylvania

Rating:
Summary: The Medieval Review
Review: [A] pleasure to read, for Musto has compiled a comprehensive history of the life of an intriguing man who with his words and deeds captivated the imagination not only of the Romans in his day, but also of popes and kings, a Holy Roman emperor, and above all one of Italy's finest poets. As an orator and statesman, Cola di Rienzo embodied the spirit of an age--a "new age" of politics, pursuing justice and peace, shot-through with aspirations and limitations; and his story truly makes for "an endlessly fascinating tale" Apocalypse in Rome constitutes the best new full-length manuscript (in English) in almost a century devoted to a serious historical study of the life and times of Cola di Rienzo. It is...based on "all the available sources" associated with "Rienzo, his Rome and its dealings with [the papacy in] Avignon." In addition, this book draws heavily upon recent studies of the spiritual and intellectual currents, social hopes and turmoil, and factious politics of medieval Rome and the Italian principalities in the mid-1300s. Its aim is, "to understand Cola di Rienzo in his own time and place and in the terms that he and his contemporaries saw him and his work for the revival of Rome." Future scholars and students of Cola di Rienzo, Trecento Rome, and the Avignon Papacy in the time of Pope Clement VI will surely be indebted to Musto for his work.