State, orders, and social distinction

Abstract

This essay seeks to compare different forms of the social distinction in Italy in the late Middle Ages, looking in particular at the specification of the hierarchical mechanisms and of the languages of aristocratic legitimation. In this perspective the framework of a ‘orders society’, whose issues are in part different from those of the previous centuries, correspond to the formation of the territorial states, as they emerge from the crisis of the communal cities and from the end of the unity of the “Regnum Siciliae”. The aim is to describe and analyse some of these forms in order to underscore both the common characters (beginning from those that can justify a ‘framework’, as the circulation of the some juridical or artistic idioms) and the specificity of the institutional contexts.