Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy

Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy
Author: Trevor Dean
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1994-04-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521411025

Drawing on a wide body of internationally-renowned scholars, including a core of Italians, this volume focuses on new material and puts crime and disorder in Renaissance Italy firmly in its political and social context. All stages of the judicial process are addressed, from the drafting of new laws to the rounding-up of bandits. Attention is paid both to common crime and to more historically specific crimes, such as sumptuary laws. Attempts to prevent or suppress disorder in private and public life are analysed, and many different types of crime, from the sexual to the political and from the verbal to the physical, are considered. In sum the volume aims to demonstrate the fundamental importance of crime and disorder for the study of the Italian Renaissance. It is the only single-volume treatment available of the subject in English. Other books have studied crime in a single city, or single types of crime, but few have presented a cross-section of articles which deploy diverse methodological approaches in material from many parts of the peninsula.

The Criminal Law System of Medieval and Renaissance Florence

The Criminal Law System of Medieval and Renaissance Florence
Author: Laura Ikins Stern
Publisher:
Total Pages: 320
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN:

Historians of medieval and Renaissance Italy have long held that the Florentine republic fell victim to rule by oligarchy in the early fifteenth century. Now, in the first complete analysis of the criminal law system of Florence during this crucial period, Laura Ikins Stern argues that the vitality of Florentine legal institutions gives evidence of a centralized state bureaucracy strong enough to thwart the early development of a ruling oligarchy. Exploring the changing roles played by judicial officials as well as the evolution of Florentine government, Stern shows how these developments reflected broad-based change in society at large. From such primary documents as legal statutes and actual trial records, she provides a step-by-step explanation of trial procedure to offer a rare glimpse of inquisition methods in the secular world--from public fame initiation, through the weighing of various levels of proof, to the complex process of sentencing. And sheexplores the links between implementation of inquisition procedure, the development of the territorial state, and the struggle between republican institutions and the emerging oligarchy. The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science.

Murder in Renaissance Italy

Murder in Renaissance Italy
Author: Trevor Dean
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2017-07-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107136644

This invaluable collection explores the many faces of murder, and its cultural presences, across the Italian peninsula between 1350 and 1650. These shape the content in different ways: the faces of homicide range from the ordinary to the sensational, from the professional to the accidental, from the domestic to the public; while the cultural presence of homicide is revealed through new studies of sculpture, paintings, and popular literature. Dealing with a range of murders, and informed by the latest criminological research on homicide, it brings together new research by an international team of specialists on a broad range of themes: different kinds of killers (by gender, occupation, and situation); different kinds of victim (by ethnicity, gender, and status); and different kinds of evidence (legal, judicial, literary, and pictorial). It will be an indispensable resource for students of Renaissance Italy, late medieval/early modern crime and violence, and homicide studies.

Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy

Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy
Author: Trevor Dean
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2007-08-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139466151

In this important study, Trevor Dean examines the history of crime and criminal justice in Italy from the mid-thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century. The book contains studies of the most frequent types of prosecuted crime such as violence, theft and insult, along with the rarely prosecuted sorcery and sex crimes. Drawing on a diverse and innovative range of sources, including legislation, legal opinions, prosecutions, chronicles and works of fiction, Dean demonstrates how knowledge of the history of criminal justice can illuminate our wider understanding of the Middle Ages. Issues and instruments of criminal justice reflected the structure and operation of state power; they were an essential element in the evolution of cities and they provided raw material for fictions. Furthermore, the study of judicial records provides insight into a wide range of social situations, from domestic violence to the oppression of ethnic minorities.

Confession and Criminal Justice in Late Medieval Italy

Confession and Criminal Justice in Late Medieval Italy
Author: Lidia Luisa Zanetti Domingues
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-08-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192659332

In medieval Italy the practice of revenge as criminal justice was still popular amongst members of all social classes, yet crime also was increasingly perceived as a public matter that needed to be dealt with by the government rather than private citizens. Confession and Criminal Justice in Late Medieval Italy sheds light on this contradiction through an in-depth comparison of lay and religious sources produced in Siena between 1260 and 1330 on criminal justice, conflict, and violence. Confession and Criminal Justice in Late Medieval Italy: argues that religious people were an effective pressure group with regards to criminal justice, thanks both to the literary works they produced and their direct intervention in political affairs, and that their contributions have not received the attention they deserve. It shows that the dichotomy between theories and practices of 'private' and of 'public' justice should be substituted by a framework in which three models, or discourses, of criminal justice are recognised as present in medieval Italian communes, with the addition of a specifically religious discourse based on penitential spirituality. Although the models of criminal justice were competing, they also influenced each other.

Paths of Wickedness and Crime

Paths of Wickedness and Crime
Author: Mark Galeotti
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 69
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 1300097442

There were shadows to the Italian Renaissance. Just as art and philosophy were flourishing, so too were darker practices, from murder-for-hire to prostitution. However, despite popular parallels between families like the Borgia and the Medici and the Mafia, there has been little systematic examination of the presence of organised crime in the era. In this short and lively essay, Mark Galeotti rereads and occasionally reinterprets the rich secondary literature to introduce a cast of corrupt princes, bandit chieftains, professional assassins, human traffickers, thugs and conmen and suggest that there were signs of the early beginnings of organised criminality in the towns and cities of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. An historian and political scientist, Mark Galeotti is Professor of Global Affairs at New York University's SCPS Center for Global Affairs.

Love and Death in Renaissance Italy

Love and Death in Renaissance Italy
Author: Thomas V. Cohen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2010-01-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226112608

Gratuitous sex. Graphic violence. Lies, revenge, and murder. Before there was digital cable or reality television, there was Renaissance Italy and the courts in which Italian magistrates meted out justice to the vicious and the villainous, the scabrous and the scandalous. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy retells six piquant episodes from the Italian court just after 1550, as the Renaissance gave way to an era of Catholic reformation. Each of the chapters in this history chronicles a domestic drama around which the lives of ordinary Romans are suddenly and violently altered. You might read the gruesome murder that opens the book—when an Italian noble takes revenge on his wife and her bastard lover as he catches them in delicto flagrante—as straight from the pages of Boccaccio. But this tale, like the other stories Cohen recalls here, is true, and its recounting in this scintillating work is based on assiduous research in court proceedings kept in the state archives in Rome. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy contains stories of a forbidden love for an orphan nun, of brothers who cruelly exact a will from their dying teenage sister, and of a malicious papal prosecutor who not only rapes a band of sisters, but turns their shambling father into a pimp! Cohen retells each cruel episode with a blend of sly wit and warm sympathy and then wraps his tales in ruminations on their lessons, both for the history of their own time and for historians writing today. What results is a book at once poignant and painfully human as well as deliciously entertaining.

Early Modern European Society

Early Modern European Society
Author: Henry Kamen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2005-07-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 113472537X

Drawing together common features of society from a range of different contexts throughout Europe, from Italy and Spain to Poland and Russia, Early Modern European Society surveys the sweeping changes affecting Europe from the end of the fifteenth century to the early decades of the eighteenth century. Henry Kamen includes discussion on: European identities, frontiers and language leisure, work and migration religion, ritual and witchcraft the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the poor gender roles social discipline and absolutism.

Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy

Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy
Author: Katherine Ludwig Jansen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2020-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691203245

Medieval Italian communes are known for their violence, feuds, and vendettas, yet beneath this tumult was a society preoccupied with peace. Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy is the first book to examine how civic peacemaking in the age of Dante was forged in the crucible of penitential religious practice. Focusing on Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an era known for violence and civil discord, Katherine Ludwig Jansen brilliantly illuminates how religious and political leaders used peace agreements for everything from bringing an end to neighborhood quarrels to restoring full citizenship to judicial exiles. She brings to light a treasure trove of unpublished evidence from notarial archives and supports it with sermons, hagiography, political treatises, and chronicle accounts. She paints a vivid picture of life in an Italian commune, a socially and politically unstable world that strove to achieve peace. Jansen also assembles a wealth of visual material from the period, illustrating for the first time how the kiss of peace—a ritual gesture borrowed from the Catholic Mass—was incorporated into the settlement of secular disputes. Breaking new ground in the study of peacemaking in the Middle Ages, Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy adds an entirely new dimension to our understanding of Italian culture in this turbulent age by showing how peace was conceived, memorialized, and occasionally achieved.

How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments

How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments
Author: Philip L. Reynolds
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1083
Release: 2016-06-30
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1107146151

An indispensable guide to how marriage acquired the status of a sacrament. This book analyzes in detail how medieval theologians explained the place of matrimony in the church and her law, and how the bitter debates of the sixteenth century elevated the doctrine to a dogma of the Catholic faith.