Angelo Torre
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Angelo Torre is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the Università del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli, Italy. His researches have focused on the history of local political institutions in Early Modern Europe and particularly in North Western Italy. He has worked on feuds and local conflicts in the fiefs of the Holy Roman Empire, on devotional associations in the Catholic countryside and their relations with local power and on the processes of production of locality in Early Modern and Modern society. He is currently working on commons between XVIth and XXth century in North Western Italy and Switzerland. SInce 2013 he is the General Editor of Quaderni storici.
In November 2023, he joins the IAS for a one-month writing residency.
Research Interests
Microhistory, Early Modern History, Religious History, Social History, History and Anthropology, Local History, Spatial History, History of Historical Writing.
Reinterpretation of Commons in European History
This research aims to read common lands as local resources using a spatial perspective. This approach is directly suggested by judicial sources related to the commons, which often originate from border disputes between neighboring settlements. The very structure of the communities in which the commons are located poses difficult reading problems. Even in the nineteenth century, at least in France and Italy many commons belong to very specific areas of the village (“biens sectionaux”, fractional assets), and not to the whole municipality. The geography of the commons highlights a fragmented and polycentric settlement model, hitherto investigated by geographers exclusively in regional terms, while it could allow a global survey of the territorial formation of municipalities. This spatial study of commons makes it possible to refigure the concept of the peasant community, a crucial issue for the social sciences. Seen through the commons, the community consists of groups of undivided co-owners, more or less solidary and isolated in space, which revolve around the management of shared spaces on the basis not so much of equality, as of relationship with the property: the access to the undivided property relates to the resources that one can dispose of during the winter season. In this sense the collective resources are less an expression of redistribution (e.g. intended for the poorest) than of belonging or citizenship (intended for those who produce a place).
Key Publications
Torre, Angelo, Il consumo di devozioni. Religione e comunità nell'Europa di antico regime, Marsilio, Venezia, 1995.
Torre, Angelo, Production of Locality in Early Modern and Modern Age. Places, Routledge, Londres 2020.
Torre, Angelo (ed.), "Ethnography of the Commons", in Quaderni storici, 56, 3, 2020.
 Sixth session of the "Paris IAS Ideas" talk series, with the participation of Angelo Torre, University of Oriental Piedmont, Paris IAS Fellow |
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