Sleepwalking Into a New World

"This elegant, concise, and highly readable book tackles afresh one of the great problems of world history. Generously acknowledging the research of previous historians and scrupulously avoiding foregone conclusions, Wickham compares Milan, Pisa, and Rome to revelatory effect. This is a work of huge analytical and explanatory power that can be read for sheer intellectual joy." --Jinty Nelson, King's College London "If ever a book needed writing, it is this one. Here we have a familiar narrative reinterpreted, from virtuosic research, by a master historian. With consummate vigor and clarity, Wickham shows how the rise of communal regimes in medieval Italy was hardly the doing of revolutionaries, as some once thought, but was rather a pragmatic adaptation to social and economic change by men assuming consular responsibilities within the lordships of bishops." --Thomas N. Bisson, Harvard University "How and why did the commune, that remarkable form of medieval Italian urban governance, evolve, under what stimuli and with what longer term results? These are some of the key questions to which we are given persuasive and well-argued answers in this eminently readable, deeply scholarly, and very welcome volume--a major achievement on which the author is to be heartily congratulated." --John F. Haldon, Princeton University "Absent from this book are the myths of urban liberty, proto-democracy, and incipient modernity commonly associated with the rise of the Italian commune, and in their place stand defensive reactions to crises, warfare, improvisation, and broader political participation. Wickham describes the process eloquently and with the skill of a gifted social historian." --Edward Peters, University of Pennsylvania "Sleepwalking into a New World is an elegantly written study that addresses one of the major questions in Italian history and presents it in a fresh way. Wickham is the leading medieval historian of this generation, and his decades of studying Italian cities are evident on every page." --Patrick Geary, author of The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe "This is a brilliant book that will generate much debate. It boldly sets forth a new interpretation of how and why the communes emerged while pointing out aspects of their institutional development that merit greater scrutiny. Sleepwalking into a New World is a tour de force by one of the most original historians working today." --Maureen C. Miller, author of Clothing the Clergy: Virtue and Power in Medieval Europe, c. 800-1200 "Wickham's expert analysis and meticulous academic approach build on previous, limited examinations and substantial documentation to turn established research on its head." --Publisher's Weekly