Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy (review)

One of the principal interdisciplinary aims of this excellent book is to investigate criminal law from the perspectives of legal and social history. Dean is also not happy with the usual focus on Venice and Florence. He takes pains to sample widely among the archival treasures concerning late medieval Italian justice. The fresh approach that Dean takes emphasizes social and legal attitudes, representations, and constructions of crimes against people. In order to make his case about the period from roughly 1300 to 1500, Dean divides his book into two parts. The first concerns the sources, and the second takes up the most important categories of crime—insult and revenge, sex crimes, potions and poisons, violence, and theft.

Dean has read widely in the sources and is at his best in surveying their strengths and weaknesses. Fragmentary trial records provide different styles of coerced speech, as do legal fictions created by judges, plaintiffs, and defendants. Courts were public spaces where certain rituals of justice occurred. Chronicles memorialized spectacular crimes and punishments but also provide clues about the motives and causes of crime. Contemporary accounts reveal ambiguous attitudes toward the forces of the law. Dean uses late medieval Italian fiction to illuminate how literature criticizes and represents the law and judicial processes. These modest goals and the absence of Dante, the most familiar artist of crime, depreciate an interdisciplinary opportunity to use these perspectives to test conclusions from other sources. Statutory law, however, partly compensates for this slighting of literature because so much of it was a type of sedimentary fiction. Nonetheless, statutes provide an image of criminal justice from the point of view of the rule makers. Finally, though less than 10 percent of Dean's big sample of consilia, or legal opinions, concern criminal justice, they are a marvelous window on the intersection of advocacy, legal reasoning, and social realities.

In the second part of the book, Dean uses these multiple perspectives to pose and analyze fundamental questions about criminal justice. States began to punish certain types of insult and blasphemy more strongly by 1500 because of heightened concerns about public order. The finding that many states also criminalized vendettas undercuts the broad assumption of an Italian "culture of vengeance" deriving from the Florentine experience. Likewise, modern constructions of the concept of sex crimes and the ways that they have been read into Venetian records should not substitute for a wider look at Italy beyond its ports and ghettoes.

Illegitimate violence remains the great subject of the criminal law. Dean is alert to abuse of women and slaves as social phenomena, so-called "rights of chastisement" often sanctioned by the law. His reading across the sources brings to light an important theme of violent acts committed by mercenaries and foreigners, often overlapping categories. Soldiers knew weapons and committed more than their share of crimes. Dean is sure that the percentage of Italian civilians carrying weapons has been exaggerated. Strict and exemplary punishment of violence against persons may have made late fifteenth-century Italy a safer place. Less reliance on foreign mercenaries may have contributed to this result, and people perceived as "foreign" were more likely to be caught and punished.