The Politics of Law in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Essays in Honour of Lauro Martines (review)

In 1968 Lauro Martines published his second monograph, Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence, a magisterial tour de force in which he attempted to place Florentine lawyers and their practice into a larger socio-political context of the Renaissance city-state. Lawyers and Statecraft, as both Martines himself and the editors of the current volume, Lawrin D. Armstrong and Julius Kirschner, observe, was devised as a corrective to reigning approaches to intellectual and legal history of Italian Humanism that tended to focus on ideas and legal concepts rather than social and political context for them. Influenced—directly or indirectly—by Antonio Gramsci’s criticism of the history of “intellectuals” that focuses predominantly on their activities without analyzing “the ensemble of the system of relations in which these activities (and therefore the intellectual groups who personify them) have their place within the general complex of social relations,” Martines placed Florentine lawyers in the middle of their socio-political milieu, seeing them as indispensable for the development of Florentine state between 1380 and 1530 (184).

Four decades later, Martines’s work continues to inspire scholars, a fact best demonstrated by eight contributions from the leading specialists in medieval and Renaissance law that engage with and build upon the discussions initiated in Lawyers and Statecraft. Seven out the eight essays in the volume were presented and discussed at the 2008 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, which allows for greater cohesion among the contributors; the structure of the volume appears to be carefully composed as well. It opens with a brief discussion of the intellectual origins of Lawyers and Statecraft written by Martines himself, followed by a critical review of the monograph’s argument by Julius Kirchner. The volume is concluded by an afterword—which may have doubled as an introduction—in which Lawrin D. Armstrong outlines the main themes of the collection and effectively brings the contributions into dialogue with each other and with Martines’s monograph.

The articles, contributed by both well-established and younger scholars of Renaissance law and politics, not only pay homage to Martines’s book, but also provide illuminating insights into the areas that gained prominence since its publication. Sarah Menzinger’s contribution demonstrates that social networks of lawyers were unique neither to the late trecento and quatrocento—the chronological terrain of Lawyers and Statecraft—nor to the Florentine city-state. Menzinger traces similar roles played by legal experts in Perugia, Siena, and especially Bologna in the thirteenth century, where jurists occupied a precarious position between magnates, with whom they tended to side, and the popolo. Even if the medieval jurists represented less of a uniform social group, their training in Roman law made them culturally cohesive.

Moritz Isenmann brings us back to Renaissance Florence, where he analyzes the process by which legal mechanisms that were supposed to keep Florentine magistrates within boundaries of the law (syndication being one of them) were gradually deactivated during successive periods of emergency rule. By dismantling a system of executive checks and balances, the Florentine state entered a period of absolutist rule with a permanent condition of extra-legal emergency that allowed ruling elites to repress and annihilate political enemies for the sake of communal good. Isenmann’s essay demonstrates a developing system of coercion that emerged in late medieval Florence; this side of Florence’s progression towards the principate is often overlooked by anglophone scholars (Lauro Martines being a notorious exception) who tend to favor non-violent manipulations of public consensus by the oligarchic regimes as an explanation for the transition to absolutism.

Susanne Lepsius and Lorenzo Tanzini in their essays look at the process of interpretation of ius proprium in relation to ius commune and Florentine statutes. Both scholars demonstrate that Florentine jurists spent a great deal of their energy on legal exegesis and production of statutory commentaries. These commentaries, in turn, formed a body of multi-generational...