Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy

Dean, Trevor

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511496455

Cited by 59 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 83 publications

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“…Trevor Dean, for example, in writing a comparative history of crime in late medieval Italy has explicitly sought to link legal and socio-cultural approaches to court records. By taking into account both the narratives created in and of a trial, he links a legal historical focus on procedure to a social and cultural historian's interest in people's daily lives and ideas, while also considering the narrative qualities of his sources (Dean, 2007).…”

Section: Recent Trends In Court Record Scholarshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: New Approaches to Late Medieval Court Records

Camphuijsen

Page

2019

Open Library of Humanities

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Section: Recent Trends In Court Record Scholarshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: New Approaches to Late Medieval Court Records

Camphuijsen

Page

2019

Open Library of Humanities

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“…In his study on crime and justice in late medieval Italy, Trevor Dean includes a range of cities across different areas of Italy, but his broad comparative approach is exceptional. 36 Crime historians remain reluctant to use comparative perspectives because they have doubts about proper comparative methods. John Carter Wood pointed to the problem of parameters when comparing violence across time and space: what is being compared?…”

Section: Aim Of This Special Sectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to Crime and Gender in History

Heijden¹,

Pluskota²

2018

Journal of Social History

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This essay introduces the special section "Crime and Gender." The first part explains the disregard for women in crime history. The second part summarizes the state of research. The final part describes the aim and introduces the contributions to this special section."Why gender and crime?" asked Margaret L. Arnot and Cornelie Usborne in the introduction to their edited volume on gender and crime in modern Europe (1999, reprint 2003). The answer was quite simple: until the 1980s crime historians focused their studies on the criminality of men because women were thought to be "exceptionally law-abiding," and when they committed crime, their crimes were treated with much more leniency by prosecutors and courts than those of men. 1 Social historians had begun to use judicial sources in order to write a history from below and to include common people in their analyses of crime, the working of the justice system, and social control. However, those studies did not include women's crimes or the issue of gender differences in crime. The pioneering study by John M. Beattie in 1975 on the criminality of women in eighteenth-century England was an important exception, and his work is in many ways still an example to historians writing on female criminality in the early modern period. 2 The neglect of women in crime history is related to the quantitative approaches taken by crime historians between the 1970s and 1990s. British, German, and French studies particularly dealt with questions regarding longterm trends and fluctuations in crime. Such studies focused on theories of civilization, violence, modernization, and urbanization that may explain long-term changes. 3 Historians such as Randolph Roth, Gerd Schwerhoff, Richard McMahon, and Joachim Eibach criticized the way that crime historians interpreted quantitative data on violence and suggested the need for a qualitative analysis and a better understanding of the social and legal context in order to understand changes in violent behavior. 4 Roth, for instance, examined a variety of sources to further the quantitative study of homicide and neonaticide. 5 Most methods used by crime historians estimate only the rate at which homicide came within the purview of the courts, leaving out the most common types of violence committed by men as well as women.

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“…Trevor Dean found five rape prosecutions in Bologna in the decade of the 1390s, three of them failed attempts, and only a handful in Lucca as well. 29 Samuel Cohn, working in Florentine criminal court records, found five cases of heterosexual rape in 1344-1345 and two in 1374-1375. 30 I have found 12 cases of rape or attempted rape in the registers of the Executor, 1344-1351.…”

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Humiliation and the Exercise of Power in the Florentine: Contado in the Mid-Fourteenth Century

Lansing

2015

Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy

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Humiliation and the Exercise of Power in the Florentine Contado in the Mid-Fourteenth-CenturyMedieval historians have long been preoccupied with the relationship between state authority and cultures of violence, as for example in the debates over the identity of the Italian magnates. The last few decades have also seen a turn to understanding violence in terms of emotionality, recognizing that emotional expression could be an aspect of the exercise of power. Gerd Althoff explored this question in terms of how people, particularly rulers, 'staged emotions', using them as a form of ritual communication. 1 One vivid instance is noble anger and violence. Richard Barton argued that nobles in C11th France at times used a show of anger to enforce claims about their prerogatives. 2 A lord might put on a display of affront and rage, to threaten and perhaps seek violent retribution. This contribution builds on the literature on noble anger and the exercise of power by showing its connection with forms of humiliation, drawing on a rich although complex body of sources, mention of emotions in court records. I examine representations of anger and humiliation in mid-fourteenth century denunciations to the Florentine Executor of the Ordinances of Justice. My focus is on three cases in which lords were denounced for the rape and abduction of women. Denouncers to the Executor depicted this in terms of the shame and humiliation of the women's kinsmen. For the denouncers, these abductions and rapes were, in Susan Brownmiller's phrase "messages between men". 3 Of course, the language of the denunciations was very much shaped by cultural and legal categories. I argue that while the three cases probably reflect social experience -elites using anger, sexuality and humiliation to dominate -the denunciations also reveal rhetorical strategies. One example is a denunciation that depicted a noble driven by rage. It survives in the sentences of the criminal court of the Florentine podestà, and was explicitly adjudicated according to the ordinances of Justice. Chele Nutini from San Godenzo, in the Mugello, the region north of Florence, had both denounced and accused Count Guido Domestico, of the Guidi counts, a old feudal family with extensive rural holdings. The Guidi had ceded San Godenzo to Florence in 1344, two years before this case. 4 Chele's accusation was based on this jurisdictional change. He charged that Count Guido through force and violence had unjustly required and burdened him by giving him an order. although he was a free popolano of the city and people of Florence. Count Guido had told him that he must go at his own expense to guard a castrum near the Guidi properties at Romandola, as if he were the count's man, his fidelis. Chele refused to go to the castrum or serve him as a fidelis. Count Guido, "seeing that Chele was amused by his order", "driven by rage" [furore spiritus instigatus] took over fifty of his men to Chele's house. They stole all of his grain, wine, household goods and even his animals. Not content with th...

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Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy

Cited by 59 publications

References 83 publications

Introduction: New Approaches to Late Medieval Court Records

Introduction: New Approaches to Late Medieval Court Records

Introduction to Crime and Gender in History

Humiliation and the Exercise of Power in the Florentine: Contado in the Mid-Fourteenth Century

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