Law and Punishment in Early Renaissance Venice

Ruggiero, Guido De

doi:10.2307/1142398

Cited by 24 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Although somewhat less thoroughly covered than the other areas, Italy is the fifth region with a series of studies that permit empirically based extrapolations. Studies of medieval and renaissance cities include Bologna (Blanshei 1981(Blanshei , 1982, Florence (Becker 1976), and Venice (Ruggiero 1978(Ruggiero , 1980. Romani (1980) has examined court records in late sixteenth-century Mantova, and a fascinating study by Blastenbrei (1995) analyzes wounding reports by medical professionals and judicial records in late sixteenth-century Rome.…”

Section: A Sources: History Of Homicide Databasementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Only to the degree that overall levels of violence fell throughout the early modern age did violence become correlated with class. Ruggiero (1980) has done probably the most thorough analysis of the social status of premodern violent offenders. In a detailed study of violence in Venice between 1324 and 1406, he was able to identify the social standing of more than 1,600 offenders dealt with by the secular judicial authorities.…”

Section: Social Status Of Offendersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime

Eisner¹

2003

Crime and Justice

401

148

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a b s t r a c tResearch on the history of crime from the thirteenth century until the end of the twentieth has burgeoned and has greatly increased understanding of historical trends in crime and crime control. Serious interpersonal violence decreased remarkably in Europe between the mid-sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Different long-term trajectories in the decline of homicide can be distinguished between various European regions. Age and sex patterns in serious violent offending, however, have changed very little over several centuries. The long-term decline in homicide rates seems to go along with a disproportionate decline in elite homicide and a drop in male-to-male conflicts in public space. A range of theoretical explanations for the longterm decline have been offered, including the effects of the civilizing process, strengthening state powers, the Protestant Reformation, and modern individualism, but most theorizing has been post hoc.

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Section: A Sources: History Of Homicide Databasementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Social Status Of Offendersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime

Eisner¹

2003

Crime and Justice

401

148

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“…The secular pattern in Italy, however, diverges decisively from the trend found for northern Europe. There exist isolated estimates for a number of Italian cities, such as Bologna (Blanshei 1982), Florence (Becker 1976), Mantova (Romani 1980) and Venice (Ruggiero 1978), whereby Florence shows the absolute highest homicide rate with 150 homicides per population of 100,000 in the fourteenth century. Blastenbrei (1995) provides homicide rates of 30 to 80 per 100,000 for Rome in the sixteenth century.…”

Section: Italymentioning

confidence: 99%

Modernization, Self-Control and Lethal Violence. The Long-term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in Theoretical Perspective

Eisner¹

2001

British Journal of Criminology

281

159

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The present paper examines secular trends of homicide rates by means of a systematic re-analysis of all available quantitative studies on pre-modern homicide. The results confirm, first, that homicide rates have declined in Europe over several centuries. Second, the empirical evidence shows, that unequivocal decline began in the early seventeenth century. Third, the data indicate that the secular decline begins with the pioneers of the modernization process, England and Holland, and slowly encompasses further regions. These findings corroborate much of the civilizing process framework proposed by Norbert Elias. Yet, the diffusion of self-control was sustained not only by compliance to the state monopoly of power but by a variety of disciplining institutional arrangements. This includes, for example, the early expansion of schools, particularly in Northern Europe, the rise of religious reform movements, and the organization of work in manufacturing. Second, while social disciplining certainly is the central feature of the early modern period, it also served to push forward the rise of the specifically modern individualism that Durkheim sees as the cause of the decline of individual-level violence. About 20 years ago, in an article that has become highly acclaimed among historians of crime, Ted Robert Gurr (1981: 295) examined empirical evidence on secular trends in lethal criminal violence. Gurr primarily reviewed a number of historical studies on homicide in medieval and early modern England, each based on detailed analyses of records for specific periods and specific jurisdictions. While not originally concerned with computing homicide rates, the studies did provide counts that could be used for estimating the rates. Gurr plotted the some 20 estimates for the period from about 1200 to 1800 on a graph, added the London homicide rates for the modern period, and fitted an elegant S-shaped trend curve to the data points. It starts at about 20 homicides per 100,000 population in the high and late Middle Ages and ends after an extended downswing at about one homicide per 100,000 in the twentieth century. Gurr interpreted this secular trend as 'a manifestation of cultural change in Western society, especially the growing sensitization to violence and the development of increased internal and external control on aggressive behavior' (Gurr 1981; also see Gurr 1989). Since then, an impressive amount of research in the history of crime and criminal justice has greatly enlarged knowledge about historical manifestations of lethal violence. It has shown that the history of violence has to be firmly situated in the context of social and cultural history and the long-term development of the core institutions of modern 618

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“…In an article from early in his career, Guido Ruggiero (1978) suggested that banishment as a form of punishment was uncommon in Venice in the premodern period, due to the loss of a contributing member of a society that had "a labor-hungry merchant marine and nascent industrial development" generated by such a sentence (p. 254). But for an alchemist like "Cristoforo di Parigi," who would not contribute, in the eyes of some of the members of the merchant oligarchy that governed the city, to the lifeblood of the Venetian economy and society and, in fact, whose activities poisoned it, banishment was a far more merciful option than outright execution.…”

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confidence: 99%

Magic in medieval Venice

Ryan¹

2019

History Compass

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The scholarly investigation of premodern magic has grown significantly over the past quarter of a century. Many studies have focused on learned treatises written and received by members of the intellectual elite in the medieval and early modern eras. The practice and interest in magic, however, cut across all social spectra. One aspect of this premodern interest in the occult that has been neglected in the extant scholarship has been that of the occult in the service of trickery or fraud, whose practitioners used their claims to accessing bodies of privileged knowledge to defraud others. Using the case of an anonymous alchemist, “Cristoforo di Parigi,” purportedly exiled from Venice due to his alchemical practices, I trace the state of the field of studies on fraudulent magic, broadly, and in Venice, specifically. Fourteenth‐ and fifteenth‐century Venice, furthermore, is the perfect site for such an analysis, as magic and its medieval receptivity have not been extensively studied within that specific venue during the Middle Ages.

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Law and Punishment in Early Renaissance Venice

Cited by 24 publications

References 0 publications

Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime

Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime

Modernization, Self-Control and Lethal Violence. The Long-term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in Theoretical Perspective

Magic in medieval Venice

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