Introduction

      In this book I explore the visual and material culture of people who lived and died in a particular region of Italy in the Middle Ages. I investigate their names, the languages they used in public, how they were represented (and how they actually may have looked), and what components of status seem to have been important to them. I then reconstruct some of the rituals that accompanied local residents throughout their life cycles and during their worship, their daily lives, and their calendar year, focusing on those practices that can be extrapolated from visual evidence. By combining analytical methods drawn from art history, archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, and sociolinguistics,¹ I add texture to the stylistic and iconographic analyses that have dominated art-historical study of the region and shed new light on nonelite people who are often overlooked because they have left few traces in documentary texts.

      The Medieval Salento: Art and Identity in Southern Italy is not one of those clever book titles that obscure the contents; it is, at first glance, an unambiguous and perhaps even uninspiring title. Yet not one of its principal words—“Medieval,” “Salento,” “Art,” “Identity”—is at all straightforward. These words turn out to be challenging intellectual and historical constructs that require both careful definition and a series of authorial choices. It is important to explore each of these terms to understand how they interrelate and why it is necessary, and even urgent, to consider them together in this book. I begin with the subtitle.

      Art

      “What is art?” is hardly a new question, but it seems to have become more exigent in the past century as novel forms of creativity, spurred by emerging technologies and social change, constantly appear and are frequently contested. I am concerned in this book with visual arts, not with literature or music or other creative spheres of human activity, but that restriction scarcely narrows the possible answers. Found art, environmental art, performance art, digital art are all “new” types of art that are valid to some viewers, and presumably to all of their creators, yet neither serious nor even “art” to others. It is crucial to acknowledge that definitions of art are culturally and temporally specific and, in particular, that Renaissance notions of art are not relevant to the millennium that preceded it. Despite its widespread impact over the past five centuries, the Renaissance idea of art as something finely crafted, a product of unusual skill or inspiration to be appreciated principally for its aesthetic value, is much too limiting.² Before the European Renaissance (and also in non-European