Trevor Dean - CRIME AND JUSTICE IN LATE MEDIEVAL ITALY[ CRIME AND JUSTICE IN LATE MEDIEVAL ITALY

The following abbreviations are used in the footnotes for references to archives in Italy:

The history of criminal justice in the later Middle Ages is important for (at least) two reasons. First, because official justice was present across many areas of life a major component in the power of states and ruling classes, a significant presence in cities (lawyers, police, court officials, public punishments), a source of material for fiction-writers and painters and this makes it vital for a wider understanding of the period. Secondly, because of the range of social situations and problems that judicial records give us access to: not just the everyday conflict of insult and injury, but also the oppression of ethnic minorities (Jews, slaves), the frequency of domestic violence, the oppression of servants in urban households, the criminal responsibility of children and the insane, as well as the more colourful cases of skilful thieves, sacrilegious sex and inventive tricksters. The combination of the exotic and the quotidian in one source is hard to resist.

The last three or four decades of the twentieth century saw a great increase of interest among historians across Europe in issues of crime and criminal justice. In general terms, the motivation for this came first from history from below and the unrivalled access to lower-class experience that judicial archives afforded. A secondary impulse lay in the developing history of the state and its institutions of repression. But for Italy there is no such survey: this is one effect of the enduring localism of Italian historiography. This book attempts to fill that gap.

My own trajectory towards the study of crime derived from two impulses. One was an existing interest in comparative history: my first publications, though centred on Ferrara, also compared social developments there to those in France and England. In the mid-1980s, I also became aware of the historian Edoardo Grendi drawing the attention of his Italian colleagues to what was happening over the Alps and beyond the Channel in the incipient area of the history of criminality. Together, these factors led me to shift both the locus and the focus of my research as I followed the greater abundance of documentation: from the study of a princely state to that of a republic, from political and social institutions to law, justice and crime, from Ferrara to Bologna (and more recently to Lucca).

That shift also brought to the fore a need to reflect more systematically on the nature of the judicial sources used in the history of crime. The main issue is that of coerced speech. ).

These thoughts on how historians often present themselves to their public the stress on revelation have particular significance in the history of crime and criminal justice, because of the nature of judicial sources. In other words, they offer something more than, and something different from, the mere history of crime.

Writing the history of medieval (as opposed to eighteenth-century) crime faces a range of additional problems. Gauvards solution to this conundrum was to focus on one type of source, namely royal pardons. My response is different in turn.

This book attempts to address these problems by adopting and extending a structure also used by some other recent works of Italian social history: In Part One, each chapter deals with one type of documentation, in the light of both the problems the source poses and the information it provides. In Part Two, however, I do attempt to smoothe over gaps and disparities in the evidence, in order to examine a range of crimes or behaviours, and to offer some generalisations. Material here is drawn chiefly from cities outside the historiographical duopoly exercised by Florence and Venice: from the archives in Bologna, Mantua, Modena, Reggio, Savona and Lucca; and from published documents for the whole of late medieval Italy, from the duchy of Savoy and the Venetian terraferma to the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily. From the thousands of printed volumes of statutes, I have focused on a range of cities, large and small, across most areas of Italy, including the South and Sicily. I have tried to mirror this geographical spread in the selection of chronicle material. I have used the printed collections of consilia of the leading legal consultants, supplemented by some minor ones, and the best-known collections of fictional tales or novelle . Omissions, of course, there are. At the archival level, several of these omissions are compensated by the availability of good secondary studies.