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Book Review
| Trevor Dean, Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. ix + 226. $105.00 (ISBN 978-0-52186-448-0).
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| This book pursues three key goals. The first is to challenge the view, implicit in much of the historiography, that Florence and Venice are representative of the entire Italian peninsula in the late Middle Ages. In an effort to explore the full array of different, local contexts, the author examines a huge number of areas, stretching from such towns as Bologna, Mantua, Modena, Reggio, Savona, and Lucca to more peripheral territories such as Piedmont and Savoy, and the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily. |
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The author's second goal is to undertake a comparative history. Referring to the work of Marc Bloch, the author vindicates the "view from the top down" which is produced by comparing—by sorting out "local" from "general" causes and by establishing connections between phenomena which were separate in time and space. |
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A third goal is to address the nature and peculiarities of judicial records. In the Introduction the author reflects on this topic by examining the different approaches that historians have taken to such records. Marc Bloch is once again evoked to highlight the distinction between the intentional and unintentional information that we can find in historical sources. The author deploys Arlette Farge's analysis of the nature of testimony—words that are often pronounced against the witness's intention and that are not to be read by anyone else—to argue that the source is an unintentional and unwitting clue that generates a "reality effect." But the author also considers various historians who have emphasized the constructed and intentional nature of judicial records, thus questioning whether there is any real possibility of gleaning from these sources anything other than that which their compilers intended. Andrea Zorzi, for example, has questioned whether it is ever possible to move beyond a history of criminal justice to a history of criminality. As he suggests, it may well be the case that judicial sources inscribe criminal "facts" within their own categories, and in so doing, necessarily bend and reconstruct them. Moreover, influenced by the approaches pioneered by Carlo Ginzburg and Claude Gauvard, the author observes that, given the diverse and discontinuous nature of criminal sources, a cumulative approach to history in which developments are shown to occur in a linear, continuous fashion is seldom plausible. |
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The author adopts a methodological approach designed to address each of these three goals and which shapes the book's structure as well. This approach does not avoid the problem of the discontinuous nature of the sources, or that of the relationship between the narrative structure of the source and the "truth" of its contents. Instead, it faces these problems directly. Following in the path of Samuel Cohn and Steven Epstein, the author organizes his argument in two parts. The first identifies the characteristics of five types of legal sources that were very common in the late middle ages: trial records, chronicles, fiction, statute law, and Consilia. The second studies a set of indictable crimes examined by those very sources: insults and revenge, sex crimes, potions and poisons, violence, and theft. Devoted to examining the sources, the first part of the book is organized on the basis of two principles: the place to which the sources refer, and the relationship between the narrative structure of the text and its factual content. In the second part of the book, the author's analysis of different types of crime varies according to the scope of his inquiry: for instance, in the case of thefts, only Bologna is taken into consideration. At the same time, he scrutinizes each specific type of crime through different legal sources. |
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In both parts of the book, two connecting threads are easily recognizable: the relationship between cultural and social history (i.e., the relationship between fiction and archives); and the historian's critique of anachronistic categories of analysis (first of all, the term Renaissance, from which the author keeps his distance). The results of such a complex and ambitious undertaking are made explicit in the closing section of every chapter, where the author presents a short but clear concluding analysis. The author lives up to the promise made in the Introduction: that is, to expand our knowledge of late Medieval Italy beyond the cases of Florence and Venice. Taking into account a plurality of local situations leads to two important conclusions, concerning both procedure and types of crime. First, a linear development of the nature of justice—inquisitorial, accusatorial, negotiated, and repressive—cannot be observed and, instead, these models "vary both between cities and across time" (200). This means that transformations in procedure must be understood as context-specific, rather than the product of some kind of linear evolution. The second conclusion is no less important and concerns the variety of crimes prosecuted and their change over time. The author's scrutiny of different urban areas reveals a growth and a diffusion of new forms of violence—namely the duel—as well as a parallel decrease in the amount of theft and greater attention and strictness towards sexual crimes (adultery, rape, clandestine marriage, sodomy), blasphemy, and sorcery. In the author's view, this in turn suggests the emergence of "a stronger religious rationale" for criminal punishment, as well as a stronger sense of civic decorum and a growing belief in the importance of protecting marriage as an institution. |
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The book's findings concerning revenge are also quite rich. Taking into account the different ways in which revenge is treated by chronicles, juridical tracts, or courts allows the author to elaborate on relationships between social history and the history of the law; between normative and narrative sources. And the book's recurring exploration of how otherwise similarly situated strangers and locals were treated differently by different components of the legal system is also very interesting. It suggests that the status of citizen or of foreigner often helped to determine not only the harshness of the punishment inflicted, but also to define the very nature of a crime. |
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One of the book's limitations is that it fails clearly to identify the cause behind so much local variation in criminal practice. In this respect, the book does not live up to the most ambitious of the goals set forth in the Introduction—namely, to engage in comparative history. Taking into account different urban realities often leads the author merely to juxtapose, rather than to compare. A truly comparative account would single out a number of variables that would allow us to grasp, to analyze, and to interpret the range of local approaches to criminal justice. Why does violence burst out in different places (e.g., Padua, Asti, or Fabriano)? Why is it that "the definitions of assault in these cities are, perhaps predictably, different, though they share the elements of aggressive movement, intent and anger" (172)? Why, precisely, is the status of citizen or of foreigner associated in different towns with different rites of violence? Why are some crimes, such as sodomy, seriously punished in some towns and almost entirely ignored in others? In most cases, the very useful information that the author has garnered about different local situations is not brought to bear for the purpose of singling out elements susceptible to comparative analysis. The author's demonstration that there was a great variety of different, local approaches to crime represents one of the book's great achievements. But the reader is left with a number of questions about the reasons for such variety. |
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| Simona Cerutti
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Centre de Recherches Historiques
École des Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales, Paris |
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