Peacemaking, or fare la pace in the common parlance, was a ubiquitous means of settling disputes in late medieval and early modern Italy. Commoners and elites alike had recourse to peace agreements officiated by notaries, a less expensive alternative to using the official justice system. In her tome, Katherine Ludwig Jansen makes a laudable contribution to the growing scholarship on medieval peacemaking by adopting an interdisciplinary approach that unites the fields of history, religious studies, and art history. Moreover, Jansen attempts to place peace settlements within the culture of penance that emerged after the Fourth Lateran Council, of 1215. Although she situates her study in Florence, she expands her purview to include examples from Rome, San Gimignano, and smaller centers in Umbria and Lazio.
In the first two chapters, Jansen establishes a connection between settling disputes through peace agreements and the peace movements that swept through Northern and Central Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Examining rituals associated with the Battuti and the Bianchi, sermons of Franciscan and Dominican friars, and political tracts on good government, Jansen not only situates the peace movements in the context of internecine feuding of Italian city-states but also grounds them in the church's growing emphasis on penance in the thirteenth century. Preachers and, to a lesser extent, the political theorists she examines posited that the outer peace, based on civic harmony and concord, required individuals to seek inner peace, through contrition and charity. Jansen, thus, links the growing use of peace acts to the penitential movements by examining the exempla found in the sermons of Saint Bernardino of Siena and other mendicant preachers.
The next two chapters focus primarily on peace acts made by people of all ranks in late medieval Florence to settle hostilities, feuds, and other disruptions in the social fabric. In chapter 3, Jansen concentrates on peace acts between commoners in Florence from 1257 to 1343. Analyzing a sample of 526 peace acts, she finds that Florentines made peace to repair a variety of disagreements, most notably violent altercations (57 percent of the cases), but also family disputes, theft, kidnapping, and rape. As other scholars have also demonstrated, ordinary people preferred the pax as an economical way of resolving quarrels, especially violent ones, without recourse to expensive, drawn-out litigation. Making the peace through notarial acts mended strained relationships and restored lost honor among individuals and, furthermore, helped establish peace and concord at the local level.
Jansen attempts to tie penance to these peace agreements by asserting that Florentines who resorted to them truly came to the notary with contrite hearts. Here Jansen imposes the preachers’ ideal of peace and penance on the actions of ordinary people, who often made peace with others as an expedient rather than from any religious motivation. The problem is her source base, the notarized peace acts, which, unlike Inquisition and court trials, are formulaic, offering little insight into the interior worlds of their users. Much of the evidence from chapter 4, where Jansen examines peace pacts between the magnate and merchant families of Florence, contradicts her arguments. Many elite Florentines, like their common counterparts, made peace as a means to an end—to stop spiraling violence, to terminate feuds, and, as she demonstrates, to reintegrate banned members of the community. Moreover, her examination of ritual in peace acts in Rome and San Gimignano, found in chapter 5, shows that public humiliation also motivated elite members of society in their peace negotiations. Part of the formal peace made between the Selvucci and Mangeri families of San Gigminano in 1528 stipulated that the Selvucci men had to keep their beards long and wear coarse, black robes for a period of ten years. As she notes, this was the magnate Mangeri family's way of putting the upstart Selvucci in their place. While the punishment might have been penitential in tone, neither party entered into the peace agreement in the spirit of contrition.
Despite this caveat, Jansen provides an admirable work of interdisciplinary scholarship. Her analysis of images to demonstrate the ritual, symbolism, and memory of peacemaking is innovative. The questions she poses both highlight the vitality of the field and supply a blueprint for future studies.
