La ricchezza delle pecore. Clero, matrimoni e fame nel Settecento sul Matese

A picture of the society and economy of the Kingdom of Naples between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, observed through the transformations of a rural village in the mountainous hinterland of Terra di Lavoro, a prototype of the marginality of those times. Among the shepherds and peasants of San Gregorio Matese, for centuries subjected to abbey and feudal power, some have the ability to get rich. The mastery of transhumance in the pastures of the Dogana di Foggia opens up new horizons for farmers and shopkeepers, who weave relationships beyond the village walls, from Campania to Molise to Capitanata. Involuntary protagonists of a micro-history subject to the influences of major events, in a bumpy journey along which to deal with epidemics and famines, revolutions, earthquakes and new kings, animated by the yearning for freedom from taxes of the clergy and the feudal lord Gaetani of Aragon. Many fall, few have the opportunity to erect buildings in San Gregorio, Piedimonte and Naples, where doctors, lawyers, apothecaries and notaries grow up who cross paths with the figures of Giuseppe and Biase Zurlo, Davide Winspeare, Giuseppe Poerio, Philipp Hackert and Andrea Valiante. Unpublished archival materials reveal two centuries of emancipation through sheep and land. Until the French reformer shoulder creates the Commune, deprives the registry control of the clergy and annihilates feudalism, while the blood of the first brigandage flows. The book ends with the restorative caesura of 1815, when family partnerships give way to ideological factions, and the tertiary sector is born from the ashes of the Apulian customs system. With the prospect of the nineteenth-century revolutionary and then unitary events to which the country will not be extraneous.