The Justice of Venice: Authorities and Liberties in the Urban Economy, 1550-1700 (review)

For over a century, the study of one or another of the Serenissima's numerous magistracies has been something of a cottage industry in the scholarship of premodern Venice. From Roberto Cessi's essay on the Ufficium de Navigantibus and Giovanni Cassandro's monograph on the Curia di Petizion to Reinhold Mueller's book and articles on the Procurators of San Marco and Guido Ruggiero's imaginative use of the records of the Council of Ten in his studies of crime and sexual violence, the records of Venice's councils and magistracies have been the source of some of the most innovative and penetrating historical writing on the politics, economy, and institutions of the Renaissance state. In this tradition, James Shaw's revision of a doctoral thesis written under the direction of Evelyn Welch is more than simply the administrative history of another Venetian magistracy. Rather, his accomplished first book on the Giustizia Vecchia in early modern Venice is an attempt at "a social history of justice in the urban economy" (2).

The argument of the book is indicated in its subtitle: it is a study of the competition of authority of the state and its nobles with the privileges of the guilds, as played out in the marketplace of Venice from 1550 to 1700. Established in 1172 for the regulation of the retail food trade, the magistracy became know as the Giustizia Vecchia when, in 1261, oversight of taverns and the wine trade was assigned to a board of New Justices. Until the fall of the Republic, the Giustizia Vecchia was responsible for the regulation of the city's marketplace, and its five noble judges were the court of the first instance for lawsuits arising from disputes over weights and measures, prices and conditions of sale of foodstuffs, and litigation within and among of the trade guilds of Venice. In 1565 was added a board of rich nobles, the Provveditori sopra la Giustizia Vecchia, elected by and from the Venetian Senate and charged with supervising the work of the poor nobles who served as Giustizieri Vecchi and the commoners who staffed its court system and served as Venice's market police. But rather than seeing this additional layer of bureaucratic control as an indication of the growth of the absolutist state, Shaw's careful and extensive archival research shows that the Giustizia Vecchia promoted equity over enforcement of the letter of the law, recognition of state authority instead of strict punishments for infractions. Following Richard Mackenney's work on the function of the guilds in early modern Venice, Shaw argues that while the guilds employed conservative language in defending their ancient liberties they were scarcely opponents of progressive capitalism.

Most valuable are the central chapters, which provide a nuanced description of how the Giustizia Vecchia actually functioned in its punishment of market crime, handling of guild litigation, and settlement of civil suits as a small claims court. The major problem here is the spotty character of the surviving sources, and the consequent small size and questionable representative quality of the samples available. For example, Shaw's analysis of market crime, set forth in chapter 3, is based on the data from just three months in the summer of 1615, and his examination of small claims on two registers containing 392 civil suits from nine years in the early seventeenth century. But given the limitations of some of his sources, Shaw convincingly demonstrates that private interests and market forces were allowed to dominate the legal system, while at the bottom of society, justice was cheap and readily available, serving the needs of the poor and disadvantaged as well as the rich and powerful.

Finally, this volume is very well presented. Footnotes are given at the bottom of the page, often providing transcriptions of archival materials that enable the reader to appreciate the...