Norms and Disputes: The Shoemakers’ Guild in Eighteenth- Century Bologna

Historians examining popular culture have come to express different, even conflicting views. Often excluded from historians’ analyses of popular culture is the role of work. Yet in the vast majority of the cities of the ancien régime the people were workers: carpenters, tailors, weavers, masons, spinners, tanners, barbers, hatters, bakers, porters, blacksmiths and others. Each trade and each craft had different traditions and social practices, a different identity and status in society and a different culture of work. This article looks at the internal conflicts and disputes of the shoemakers’ craft and guild in Bologna. In particular, it identifies conflicts between urban and rural craftsmen, between shoemakers and cobblers, and between the bottom and top layers of the guild’s hierarchy.