Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy

This volume puts crime and disorder in Renaissance Italy firmly in its political and social context. The contributors include English, Italian, American and Australian scholars. The volume focuses on new material and addresses all stages in the judicial process from the drafting of laws to the rounding up of bandits. The articles range geographically across most of the peninsula. This is the only single-volume treatment available on the subject in English.

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.

Preface; List of contributors; 1. Writing the history of crime in the Italian Renaissance Trevor Dean and Kate Lowe; 2. Criminal justice in mid fifteenth-century Bologna Trevor Dean; 3. The judicial system in Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Andrea Zorzi; 4. The incidence of crime in Sicily in the mid fifteenth century: the evidence from composition records Alan Ryder; 5. Theology, nature and the law: sexual sin and sexual crime in Italy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century Nicholas Davidson; 6. Practical problems in the enforcement of Italian sumptuary law, 1200–1500 Catherine Kovesi Killerby; 7. The prince, the judges and the law: Cosimo I and sexual violence, 1558 Elena Fasano Guarini; 8. Intervention by church and state in marriage disputes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Florence Daniela Lombardi; 9. The writer and the man: real crimes and mitigating circumstances: Il caso Cellini Paolo Rossi; 10. The political crime of conspiracy in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Rome Kate Lowe; 11. Fighting or flyting?: verbal duelling in mid sixteenth-century Italy Donald Weinstein; 12. Banditry and lawlessness on the Venetian terraferma in the later cinquecento Peter Laven; 13. Mihi vindictam: aristocratic clans and rural communities in a feud in Friuli in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries Furio Bianco.

This volume demonstrates the fundamental importance of crime and disorder for the study of the Italian Renaissance, and is the only single-volume, multi-sided treatment available in English. All stages of the judicial process are addressed, and the essays range geographically across most of the peninsula..