Book Review

Medieval and Renaissance Italians have had a long-standing reputation for chronic violence. This reputation for violence can be traced back to the Middle Ages, when chroniclers, preachers, politico-legal theorists, and public authorities, in the name of civic peace, decried factionalism, feuds, fratricide, and rustic malevolence. By contrast, nineteenth- and twentieth-century legal historians, writing in an evolutionary key, viewed the so-called twelfth-century renaissance of Roman and canon law at Bologna, consisting of an articulated body of principles and procedures and a corps of professional jurists and notaries, as a powerful engine harnessed by ecclesiastical and secular authorities attempting to suppress the particularistic forces tearing apart communities across north and central Italy. An expansive jurisprudence favoring robust public authority, with principalities like the duchies of Milan and Ferrara and republics like Venice and Florence objectified as mini-empires possessing de facto sovereignty, has been hailed by historians of politico-legal theory as a major leap toward the modern state.	1
This model of a "Stato di diritto" has been challenged, explicitly and implicitly, by the many publications of social historians from the 1960s onward. They have underlined the weakness of Renaissance states vis-à-vis the revitalized ascriptive authority and special privileges and immunities of entrenched, heavily armed feudatories and their retainers; and they have detailed the pervasive corruption of officials who could not and did not distinguish between public and private domains. A new generation of political historians, in Italy as well as the United States, rejects the Weberian notion of the immanent rational autonomy of the state with a monopoly of the means of violence. Instead they follow the Austrian scholar, Otto Brunner, in emphasizing that vendettas and other forms of collective vengeance associated with kin and corporate groups were ordinary and legitimate micromechanisms for maintaining order in the Renaissance. Foremost among the political historians is Giovanni Chittolini of the University of Milan, who argues that the late medieval and early modern Italian regional state was a remarkably pluralistic and permeable entity, with no firm boundary between public and private interests, between center and periphery. Chittolini's nonhegemonic regional state was one in which the prince (signore or city) and semi-independent subjects, including self-governing communities with their own laws, were compelled to renegotiate constantly their respective prerogatives and privileges	2
Chambers and Dean's book on the interplay of criminal justice and politics in Gonzaga Mantua and Este Ferrara in the second half of the fifteenth century is at once an extension of Chittolini's revisionism and a respectable addition to the historiography of the Italian regional state. The book begins with a survey of the primary sources—namely, chronicles, statutes, proclamations, records of sentences, and above all the plangent correspondence between the Gonzaga and Este and their chief judicial officers, the podestà and the vicepodestà. Based on these materials, the authors discuss the administration of justice under both regimes and the levels and perceptions of criminality. In the eyes of both judicial officials and the prince gambling, prostitution, and the carrying of arms were directly responsible for a high percentage of the interpersonal violence undermining public order.	3
The heart of the book concerns the career of an investigating magistrate, Beltramino Cusadri of Crema (ca. 1425-1500). An undistinguished jurist who received his doctorate from the University of Pavia, Beltramino served the Gonzaga regime as its leading judicial magistrate in the territorial state from the 1460s until the mid-1480s, when, accused of abusing his authority, he fell from grace. Despite insufficient funding and personnel, Beltramino remained a conscientious and resourceful magistrate, dedicated to the detection and punishment of criminals and willing to bend the rules and disregard local customs to bring to justice perpetrators of unusually vicious crimes. For his part, Marquis Ludovico Gonzaga was a proactive prince pursuing a policy of deterrence through selective use of judicial violence. He supervised the activities of his judicial officers, often instructing them to impose harsh penalties on offenders. Yet, in exchange for monetary fines and license fees, the marquis gladly granted pardons and exemptions from the statutory prohibition against carrying arms. Beltramino joined the Este regime in 1489 and was appointed commissioner in the satellite cities, Modena and Reggio, where he encountered many of the same challenges and frustrations he had experienced at Mantua. Beltramino could not rely on Duke Ercole d'Este's support in prosecuting "fur-collar crime" committed by members of aristocratic families allied to the Este regime.	4
Readers of this engaging book will learn much about the politics of criminal justice in Renaissance Italy, but they will learn almost nothing, owing to incomplete records, about rates of crime and long-term trends in sentencing. The authors report that the majority of persons accused of crime failed to obey summonses to appear in court and were duly condemned in contumacia. This finding is unexceptional. Missing is a discussion of whether the goods of such outlaws, as well as the goods of the accused who appeared for trial and was pronounced guilty, were subject to confiscation or actually confiscated. This is a critical issue, for municipal legislators, anticipating the flight of persons accused of serious crimes (for instance, homicide), typically prescribed confiscation of goods.	5
More significantly, the authors' aversion to lawyers' law grounded in formal reason, which largely determined the classification of crimes and the rules of criminal procedure, is self-defeating. For example, to point to a prohibition against carrying arms, without considering that the term "carrying arms" is technical and plurivocal, and involves a doctrinal distinction between defensive and offensive weapon, is jejune. Theirs would have been a more satisfying book if account had been taken of how Beltramino's legal education assuredly informed his approach to crime. They refer to criminous students at the University of Ferrara, but not to the reputation of the city as a center of legal learning, where the luminaries of fifteenth-century Italian jurisprudence taught and practiced law. Likewise, mention is made of Angelo Gambiglioni (mistakenly called a fourteenth-century jurist who taught at Ferrara) and of his Tractatus de maleficiis, printed in Mantua (1472) and Ferrara (1477) with a dedicatory epistle to Ercole d'Este. Yet the authors fail to incorporate Gambiglioni's insightful treatise on criminal procedure into their own story.	6
These are just some of the omissions that result in a distorted picture of law in Renaissance Italy, in which Machiavellian expediency continually trumps forensic integrity. Clean Hands and Rough Justice reminds us of the chasm still dividing the political and social history of Italy from medieval Roman and canon law scholarship.	7
Julius Kirshner University of Chicago

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