Boncompagno da Signa: the History of the Siege of Ancona (review)

Parergon 22.1 (2005) 281-283 Boncompagno da Signa (fl. late twelfth / early thirteenthcentury Italy) was a prominent teacher and exponent of the medieval art of rhetorical composition (the ars dictaminis), producing over a dozen works in a professional career which spanned fifty years. But not all of his works were strictly didactic. Aside from short works on the nature of friendship and old age, Boncompagno also wrote an account of a little-known episode of Italian history, the 1173 siege of Ancona by the imperial legate Christian of Mainz and his Venetian allies. In this work, titled Liber de obsidione Ancone ('The Book about the Siege of Ancona'), Boncompagno depicts the siege as a great moment in the emerging Italian communes' struggle for liberty against the aggression of the German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. This viewpoint was readily appreciated by subsequent Italian writers, and, somewhat ironically, Boncompagno's reputation for a long while rested on his status as a historian and pro-Italian apologist, rather than as the leading professional writer, or dictator, that he was. More recent scholarship has restored Boncompagno's place in the history of rhetoric, but with the result that this and Boncompagno's other non-didactic works now tend to be regarded as marginal to his main purpose.