Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy

Italian urban chronicles are rich sources for social history, because of the great miscellany of information they contain. Here they will be used to reveal values, attitudes, expectations and moralisations regarding crime, policing and punishment, as well as aspects of criminal justice that are not otherwise accessible. As Michael Clanchy has recently observed, until recently ‘in the history of law, at least as far as the Middle Ages are concerned, no one had focused systematically on what expectations people had of it’. Italy has been absent from recent discussion of expectations of the law, so this chapter will take chronicles from over a dozen cities across late medieval Italy (L'Aquila, Bologna, Brescia, Ferrara, Florence, Forlì, Lucca, Modena, Naples, Padua, Parma, Perugia, Rome, Siena) to investigate this question. Chroniclers respond chiefly to two moments in the history of individual crimes and their punishment, namely, the committing of the crime and the enforcement of the law. In telling of the crime, chroniclers provide a range of secular explanations of a kind that is wholly absent from the trial record. In telling of law-enforcement, chroniclers reveal emotional responses to policing and punishment, both their own and those of the urban crowd. Chroniclers, of course, report the unusual and the extraordinary, and one must beware of treating these as the norm. Using such reports to extract attitudes to crime and justice helps avoid this danger.

The approach adopted here is a synthetic, combinatory one.