The Captain's Concubine: Love, Honor, and Violence in Renaissance Tuscany (review)

The Captain’s Concubine: Love, Honor, and Violence in Renaissance Tuscany is an in-depth study of how chivalric codes of honor operated in sixteenth-century Pistoia, a small town in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. This skillfully developed micro-history, presented as a lively drama, is a pleasure to read. The primary texts revolve around the investigation of a street brawl. From them historian Donald Weinstein draws attention to the human emotions associated with notions of honor, an important concept regulating Renaissance society.

On Holy Thursday 1578 Mariotto Cellesi, a cavalier of the military-religious Order of Santo Stefano, waged a bloody street war against fellow cavalier Fabrizio Bracciolini. During the scuffle Bracciolini’s nose was deeply slashed. The mutilated nobleman brought suit against Mariotto and the Cellesi clan. A long investigation ensued, involving magistrates from four Tuscan jurisdictions and three municipalities. Witnesses from all walks of life—patricians, merchants, shopkeepers, weavers, priests, and prostitutes—furnished their perspectives of what had transpired. In the end adjudicators sided with Mariotto Cellesi, rejecting Bracciolini’s version of the Holy Thursday affair. The brawl, it turns out, was precipitated by Bracciolini’s amorous involvement with the concubine of Cellesi’s father, Captain Lanfredino. The lovers were hardly discreet. Bracciolini had brazenly pursued the forbidden but beloved Chiara with serenades, love letters, and even an erotic drawing. Servants also betrayed the lovers’ confidences, propelling Mariotto Cellesi to avenge the honor of his cuckold father, and by extension that of the clan. No less important to Cellesi, however, was that the fruit of his father’s relationship with a concubine threatened his own inheritance. As the investigation of the Holy Thursday affair unfolded, consensus developed among magistrates and the Pistoian community in general that Bracciolini’s injuries were justified. Mariotto Cellesi was absolved, and his old father, Captain Lanfredino, banished the wayward Chiara from the family compound.

There is much to be learned from this lively Pistoian story. Focusing on notions of honor, Weinstein skillfully underlines the various perceptions of its social meaning, sorted according to social class yet still anchored to common ground. Honor in Renaissance society regulated conduct; bound groups to a common culture; fostered personal as well as collective virtue, respect, and public esteem; and was essential in defining the reputation of an individual, and by association his or her family. It was not class specific, Weinstein tells us: ordinary Pistoians as well as nobles supported vendetta. Their shared values refute assumptions about strict class boundaries (p. 146). Nobles and commoners alike agreed that manly honor required Cellesi to punish Bracciolini. Another insight Weinstein draws from the texts is that the opinions of commoners flowed from the town’s gossip networks into the courts, where they were important to the inquisitorial magistrates investigating the Holy Thursday affair. Courts, in essence, were receptacles of street chatter, which presumably affected the outcomes of investigations.

Quite apart from demonstrating how sixteenth-century notions of honor were applied in real situations, this micro history also teaches us about the court system in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Untangling the complex web of secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions in the Italian regional state is no small task. In the Pistoian case Weinstein had to sort through the overlapping jurisdictions of inquisitorial magistrates, the vicar and bishop of Pistoia, and the Twelve of the chivalric order of Santo Stefano, who like the clergy were exempt from the temporal courts. We learn that inquisitorial magistrates acted as investigators, prosecutors, and examiners all in one, weighing public opinion together with the law and their own perceptions of social meaning. The vicar of Pistoia, on the other hand, served the interests of his bishop, while the Twelve of Santo Stefano answered to their grand master. The Renaissance state accommodated multiple and conflicting centers of power, at times created by law but usually operating in response to the special interests of social groups...