The Politics of Law in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy ed. by Lawrin Armstrong and Julius Kirshner (review)

This excellent volume in Italian legal and political history has three goals. It celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Lauro Martines’s Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence (1968). It inaugurates Toronto Studies in Medieval Law, a new series at the University of Toronto Press. And it gathers a group of essays on the place of jurisprudence in communal and Renaissance Italy from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries that together offer an exacting lens onto the importance of practical legal thinking for the evolution of political power in medieval Italy. Whatever its virtues for the specialist in Italian legal history, the collection is even more impressive for offering the non-specialist a technical but jargon-free picture of how lawyers’ thinking mattered for the conceptualization of social bonds and civic belonging before the emergence of a centralized state. Its insights into the legal-discursive networks through which authority was constituted will engage students of European political and legal thought, and its variegated exploration of the consilia on which most of the essays focus will interest students of textual culture in the medieval period and beyond.

Julius Kirshner’s masterful introductory essay situates Martines’s study in the context of the scholarship that in the intervening decades has built on its achievements. Even when he diverges from Martines’s conclusions (as, for example, when he notes the importance of notaries in the ordinary administration of government or when he adjusts the claim that fifteenth-century lawyers were natural supporters of oligarchic power), Kirshner follows Martines’s core insistence that legal culture is best described through the ordinary mechanics of a socially and politically embedded law. Kirshner emphasizes as one of Martines’s most important legacies the attention scholars continue to give to the consilia sapientum, formal legal opinions that were either written in defence of a client’s position or solicited by the government as impartial advice. Addressing the complexity of the consilia as a textual practice, a record of practical thinking, and a historical archive, Kirshner notes that, politically, the consilia valuably index a more independent juridical culture and more complex jurisdictional order than are implied by any proto-statist narrative of Florentine jurisdictional sovereignty.

The contributors variously demonstrate the richness of this approach. In a careful essay that asks Martines’s questions of an earlier historical moment, Sara Menzinger associates consiliar practice in the thirteenth century with the need of the foreign podestà for local and technical advice. She argues that such legal advice seems to have been especially valued in the popular governments, rather than as a prop to aristocratic values, thereby suggesting the limits of any historical approach that relies too strictly on the alignment of lawyers with the interests of their social class. A high point of the volume is Susanne Lepsius’s essay on several consilia concerning dowries by the early fifteenth-century lawyer Paolo di Castro, which together shed light on the culture of statutory interpretation through which the relation of local statute and customs or ius proprium to the broader Roman civil and canon law jurisprudence or ius commune was negotiated. Of particular interest, in a matter that brought Pisan and Florentine statutes into conflict, is Lepsius’s demonstration of Paolo’s delicacy in using the concept of general custom to solve the jurisdictional problem and impose a Florentine norm without, however, asserting its bare sovereignty. Similarly addressing a particular jurist’s engagement with statutory interpretation, Lorenzo Tanzini’s analysis of Tommaso Salvetti’s little-known commentary on the Florentine statutes shows how legality and professional identity informed the law’s relation to the state at least as much as any commitment to executive power did. In an essay that similarly construes early fifteenth-century consiliar culture as one in which lawyers, in Martines’s formulation, got ‘the best out of their rationalism by adapting it to the...