Urban society in Medieval Southern Italy and Sicily continues to receive ever greater scholarly attention, and the complexities and nuances of the region’s cities are as a result becoming more fully understood. Consequently, there has emerged a greater awareness of the impact on southern Italy and Sicily’s urban communities which resulted from the multiplicity of cultures present in the region and the dynamism engendered by it geo-political situation in the Mediterranean. It is the convergence of these important themes that frame this extremely valuable collection of essays on urban dynamism and transcultural communications edited by Theresa Jäckh and Mona Kirsch. Largely through the prism of urban centres and their hinterlands, this volume explores ‘contacts and processes of exchange’ (p. 10), and situates them in ‘their urban, regional and Mediterranean context’.

Including the editors’ introduction, the volume contains twelve essays (one in French, two in German, two in Italian, and seven in English) by an impressive range of contributors. These have been arranged chronologically, covering the period from the late-eleventh through to the mid-sixteenth century. The editors explain that rather than arranging the contributions into ‘distinct sections’ (p. 11), the chronological ordering should enable the reader to view the essays ‘as connective spheres: interwoven and mutually dependent upon one another’ (p. 11). Given the frequent overlap within a number of the essays, this indeed seems a sensible decision. Moreover, the editors’ introduction does still provide a valuable discussion on the ‘different disciplinary angles’ (p. 11) which can be identified within the volume and this is useful for the reader to understand the volume’s collective underpinning themes: urban centres and transcultural societies; a dynamic landscape: the hinterland and its pattern of communication; nodes of communication: merchants, commodities, and Mediterranean transfer; motifs and images: transcultural discourses and perceptions.

The contributions address these underpinning themes in a number of fascinating ways. The cities of Messina and Palermo, which understandably feature heavily in the volume, are, for instance, examined through several important optics. Vera von Falkenhausen applies her extensive expertise on the region’s Greek communities and the source material associated with them to offer a comprehensive analysis of the status of Palermo’s and Messina’s Greek communities and the transitions experienced by both. Its comparative analysis of both cities demonstrates the particularly central and vibrant role of Messina for the island’s Greek population. Julia Becker’s piece instead focuses directly on Messina and problematizes the question of citizenship and the application of customs in the context of a city with Latin, Greek and Jewish communities, and concludes that the latter two probably enjoyed a better position than in other large Sicilian cities because of Messina’s ‘internazionalità’ (p. 171). This conclusion fits well with Hadrien Penet’s essay on merchant communities at Messina in the period c.1250 to c.1500. Penet demonstrates not only the cosmopolitan nature of the city and its centrality as a trading hub in the Mediterranean, but also the wide-ranging activity of Messinesi merchants in the Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt. Elisa Vermiglio’s overview of the archival and source material for the city in the fifteenth century, particularly its notarial documentation, equally provides a valuable reference point for all scholars researching late medieval Messina and its connectivity to the wider Mediterranean.

Alongside the comparative analysis by von Falkenhausen, Palermo is the focus of Theresa Jäckh’s interesting examination of the function of space and place in the city. Jäckh approaches Palermo’s space in three ways – via ‘centres of authority and rule’, ‘religious spaces’ and ‘urban space’ – and assesses how they were shaped and appropriated by the Normans following their conquest of the city. Kristjan Toomaspoeg, on the other hand, explores Palermo in the thirteenth through to the fifteenth centuries by focusing on notions of territory and population and the city’s continual renewal of its diverse communities. From this, Palermo appears to be ‘a very special case’ of an urban entity ‘without a dominating majority and composed of persons with variegated origins’ (p. 225). The contribution by Thomas Dittelbach on Norman art and architecture addresses material sources which are for the most part also centred on, or near to, Palermo. Dittelbach explores several art and architectural works (the concept of the empty throne, the cathedral of Monreale, a quadrilingual epitaph, an ellipsoidal casket from the royal palace chapel, the coronation mantle, and the muqarnas ceiling in the Cappella Palatina) and concludes that the agents behind the production of all these works avoided presenting one ‘master-narrative’ and instead established ‘a unique balance of master- and counter-narrative in Sicily that preserved the identity of all ethnic groups’ (p. 150).

Several of the aforementioned contributions examine landscape, hinterland and connectivity as part of their analysis of urban dynamics, and this approach is more explicitly evident in some of the other essays in the volume. Indeed, at the intersection of urban migration, hinterland and communication is Richard Engl’s re-examination of the dynamics of power and movement within the Muslim community during the Staufen era. Rather than viewing the Sicilian Muslims in a teleological framework which emphasises the pressures placed on them which led to their inevitable marginalisation and deportation from the island, Engl demonstrates the agency exerted within the Sicilian Muslim community. It was able to forge cross-faith alliances both within the Kingdom of Sicily and beyond, adapt creatively to military and political opportunities, and construct a series of important hill-top settlements in Western Sicily in the thirteenth century. Via a different optic Alex Metcalfe offers a searching analysis of the interplay between ‘dynamic landscapes and dominant kin groups’, showing how evidence for hydronymy and water-management can reveal the limits of a Palermitan-centred state intervention in rural West Sicilian life and by contrast demonstrates the agency of local kin-groups and lords. Mohamed Ouerfelli’s essay examines the importance of the Sicilian sugar trade in both fifteenth century Sicily and the wider Mediterranean. Through this vibrant trade, Palermo and other centres across Sicily became connected to a specialist international commercial network within which foreign merchants, especially the Pisans, played a prominent role. Last but not least, Fabrizio Titone examines episcopal governance in the diocese of Catania in the Late Middle Ages, and as part of this sheds light on the nature of episcopal visits and jurisdiction, immigration patterns, devotional practices and the utilisation of the sacred. He emphasises how these served as forces for integration and communication and identifies the value of examining, for example, the records for episcopal tribunals which shed light on migration and social mobility within the diocese.

Collectively, this volume manages to simultaneously cover a wide range of distinct themes, while also ensuring that all the contributions speak to, and overlap with, several others. This is a great accomplishment. Perhaps more attention could have been given to other urban centres (Agrigento, Syracuse, Mazara etc.), but the nature of the source material and the importance and complexity of Palermo and Messina justifies the greater focus on these two cities. One of the real strengths of the volume, however, is the revisionist flavour of many of the essays, driven by the generation of potentially new and important conceptual approaches: Metcalfe’s questioning of models of state intervention, Jäckh’s re-reading of urban space, Dittelbach’s counter-narratives, and Engl’s re-interpretation of the conventional paradigms used to interpret the history of the Sicilian Muslim community between c.1190 to c.1250. The end result is an outstanding volume of essays which will be of great value to scholars working on medieval Sicily broadly, on its urban communities, and on the island’s transcultural networks.