Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Arrigo Solmi (1899)

This brief German scholarly review assesses Arrigo Solmi’s Le associazioni in Italia avanti le origini del comune (Modena, 1898), a study of Italian associations before the emergence of the commune. Schullern devotes most of his review to a historical interpretation of northern Italy, then evaluates Solmi’s sources and the book’s significance for further research. His central conceptual move is to read institutional change through the persistence and competition of national characteristics.

Schullern describes medieval northern Italy as a region of mixed populations whose legal and social institutions bore the lasting imprint of conquest. He contrasts Gothic accommodation to Roman institutions with Lombard national persistence, and invokes the geographical distribution of Lombard and Salic law as evidence that Germanic legal traditions endured beyond changes of political rule. This account supplies his explanation of associational change:

Bei dieser Sachlage ist es begreiflich, daß auch die altrömischen Associationen verschwinden und neue, von rein germanischem Geiste getragene, sich allmählich einbürgern mußten.

English translation: In this state of affairs it is understandable that the ancient Roman associations too had to disappear and that new ones, borne by a purely Germanic spirit, had gradually to establish themselves.

The asserted replacement of Roman associations is nevertheless only one stage in his argument. Germanic forms, he continues, could not retain their original purity: conquered populations continued to assert themselves, while wider historical changes demanded new institutional arrangements. His explanation thus combines national persistence with adaptation, although he treats national groups as enduring entities with characteristic developmental paths.

Schullern explicitly distinguishes the significance he draws from Solmi’s research from the book’s own intended demonstration:

Das Buch Solmi's zeigt uns das an der Hand sorgfältiger Quellenstudien ohne gerade auf eine solche Beweisführung hinzuzielen, und beweist uns damit auf das schlagendste, wie sehr die Nation als solche als selbständiges Lebewesen in der Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte eine entscheidende Rolle spielt.

English translation: Solmi's book shows us this on the basis of careful source studies, without precisely aiming at such a demonstration, and thereby proves to us in the most striking manner how greatly the nation as such, as an independent living being, plays a decisive role in economic and social history.

The nation as an “independent living being” is therefore the reviewer’s organizing interpretation, not a thesis he establishes as Solmi’s declared purpose. His praise for careful source study accompanies a qualified reservation: Solmi apparently had no opportunity to investigate archives or use unpublished documents. Even so, Schullern values the work’s detailed treatment as a guide to further inquiry, especially into the origins of Italian communes.

Für die Lösung dieser letzteren insbesondere hat er manchen Stein des Anstoßes, manches bisher herrschende Vorurteil aus dem Wege geräumt.

English translation: For the solution of the latter in particular he has cleared out of the way many a stumbling block, many a hitherto prevailing prejudice.

The review does not specify which obstacles or prejudices Solmi removed; Schullern expressly declines to discuss the book’s particulars. Its relevance lies both in this favorable assessment of a contribution to communal history and in the way it appropriates that contribution for a national-organic interpretation of economic and social institutions.