This collection brings together established historians and art historians to shed light on the problem of murder in late medieval and early modern Italy. Interest in Italian legal and judicial history has been growing for some time. There is also a vocal debate on the nature of violence in early modern Europe and the reasons for its decline over time. This volume is a contribution to that literature and will be valuable to all students of the Italian early modern, and to historical criminologists, anthropologists, and historians of Europe interested in problems of violence and the law.
The book is divided into five parts, beginning with “Domestic Murder.” Here, domestic murder includes the killing of Abel by his brother, Cain, and its depiction in Renaissance public architecture (Scott Nethersole), vendetta and uxoricide in medieval Sicily (Henri Bresc), and a case of “daughter-killing” (really an honor killing) in the Roman countryside in the sixteenth century (Thomas V. Cohen). “Ordinary Murder” is analyzed in medieval Bologna by Trevor Dean, who classifies eight forms of homicide in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and by Sarah R. Blanshei, who argues that Bolognese homicides took place within a “culture of hatred” informed by Roth's American Homicide (2009).
“Sensational Murder” focuses on heinously visible killings, such as the murder of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici (Stefano dall'Aglio) and a case of cannibalism in Milan (Silvio Leydi), and on the popular culture surrounding violence in Venice (Rosa Salzberg and Massimo Rospocher). “Unclassifiable murder” seems an odd designation for part 4, as only the murders disguised as suicides uncovered by Kate Lowe really fit the part. Murders among and of Jews (Anna Esposito) are judicially indistinguishable from “ordinary” killings, and Italian authorities worked assiduously to classify crimes of poisoning, as Alessandro Pastore shows in deconstructing stereotypes of the female poisoner.
“Professional Murder” deals with mass murder in the context of warfare (Stephen Bowd), with the state violence of public executions (Enrica Guerra), and with the apparent distaste that the public had for butchers, as possible murderers in the market square (C. D. Dickerson III). Taken together, the chapters in this volume depict the many fora in which medieval and Renaissance Italians thought about and encountered fatal violence.
The editors argue that “murder was normal in Renaissance Italy” (9), though the research put together here belies that. Indeed, we read of a society deeply concerned with the problem of violence, with elaborate social and judicial processes for its control and a strong fascination with its very abnormality. Common does not equal normal, and in making that equation the editors minimize those attempts to control violence and the experiences of the many Italians who, as Blanshei rightly notes, turned to violence in a society that otherwise denied many opportunities for social and political advancement. Moreover, much of the book explicitly deals with homicides that were not normal but outrageous.
This fascination with the abomination precludes sustained engagement with the quotidian judicial sources of early modern Italy. Dean's and Blanshei's trial records come from a medieval Bologna that predates the great changes wrought on that city by papal rule and judicial consolidation. Guerra does not treat the chronicles of executions produced by comforting confraternities, and does not cite Terpstra's 2008 volume on the same. Pastore does, but mostly stays out of the Bolognese processi that produced those sentences. Cohen delves deeply into a single trial from Rome in exquisite fashion. With the exception of Esposito's chapter on Jews, there is almost no attention to violence between the various nationalities found on the Italian peninsula. Most chapters rely on print media, chronicles, and statutes, and the reader is often left with questions such as how many people were killed in early modern Italy, by whom, and why?
Still, we have here a multiperspectival analysis of fatal violence that makes clear how much it preyed on the minds of early modern Italians. The chapters on art history show that cultural prominence nicely, and the others make clear that violence was a consequence of endemic sociopolitical instability. This volume lays the groundwork for more-sustained research into the incidence and culture of violence in a society that still bears the burden of idealistic Renaissance periodization.
