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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 25/7/2021, SPi
Editors
Confession and
Criminal Justice in Late
Medieval Italy
Siena, 1260–1330
LIDIA LUISA ZANETTI DOMINGUES
1
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 25/7/2021, SPi
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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© Lidia Luisa Zanetti Domingues 2021
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021935495
ISBN 978–0–19–284486–6
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192844866.001.0001
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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 25/7/2021, SPi
Acknowledgements
As this book is the result of my doctoral research, I would like to thank first
of all Chris Wickham, my supervisor, for the unceasing support (from an
academic but also personal point of view) he gave me. As all graduate
students know, a good supervisor is fundamental for a doctorate to be a
positive, enriching experience, and I could not have asked for any better.
Paolo Grillo has been a patient reader and a constant provider of good
advice. Together with Rinaldo Comba, he has helped me discover the
complex and fascinating world of the Italian communes, and I owe both
of them much gratitude for this. Other academics that have mentored me in
different capacities, and who I would like to thank are: Michele Pellegrini,
Philip Booth, Ian Forrest, Gervase Rosser, John Blair, John Arnold, Bernard
Gowers, Frances Andrews, Piroska Nagy, and Hannah Skoda. I have been
very lucky to receive the support of so many great scholars. The opportun-
ities I had to work at the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford
and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities really helped me see the
broader value of the Humanities. Conversations with Lorenzo Caravaggi,
Lorenzo Tabarrini, and Alberto Luongo have been very helpful in shaping
and refining my ideas. Finally, I am very grateful for the financial support of
the Arts and Humanities Research Council, of the Scatcherd European
Scholarship of the University of Oxford, of the Past and Present Society,
and of the Institute of Historical Research.
This research allowed me to spend much time in Siena, which ‘cor magis
tibi pandit’. This welcoming spirit is particularly true for the employees of
the Archivio di Stato di Siena, who taught me how to use archival sources
and made me feel at home there. When I think of Siena my thoughts go also
to my grandmother Elsa, of Sienese descent. She would have been very
happy to know her granddaughter got to study her ancestors, as I am sure
she is from where she is now.
Academic research does not stop life from happening, and without the
support of affectionate friends and family I would not be where I am now.
My friends Irina Mattioli, Fosco Dipoppa, Micol Rotondo, Erika de Vivo,
Ida Amlesù, and Isabella Cavaliere always supported me through hard times,
and I will always be thankful for this. I would also like to thank David Swan,
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 25/7/2021, SPi
vi
Contents
Bibliography 211
Index 237
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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 25/7/2021, SPi
In Siena the year began on 25 March, the Feast of the Annunciation, rather
than on 1 January. In both the main body of the text and the footnotes, all
dates have been adjusted to the modern calendar: hence, 17 January 1272
more senensi is rendered as 17 January 1273.
All translations from primary and secondary sources are mine, unless
otherwise indicated. Place names are given in their modern Italian form, but
when available, standard English translations have been adopted (e.g.
Florence, not Firenze). Similarly, Latin personal names are transposed into
modern Italian, except in the case of famous personalities for whom
Anglicized translations or Latin denominations exist (e.g. Anselm of
Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas).
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Abbreviations
AASS Acta Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur, Societé des Bollandistes, 68
vols, 1643–1925
AFH Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, Rome, 1908–
AFP Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, Rome, 1931–
ASS Siena, Archivio di Stato
BCI Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati
BS Bibliotheca Sanctorum, Pontificia Università lateranense. Istituto Giovanni
XXIII, 12 vols plus 3 appendices, Rome, 1961–2013
BSSP Bullettino senese di storia patria, Siena, 1894–
DBI Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana,
Rome, 1960–
PL Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols, 1844–55
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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 24/7/2021, SPi
Introduction
Late medieval people reacted to violent or criminal acts differently from us,
in ways that sometimes we find astonishing and hard to understand. In a
painting by Stefano di Giovanni ‘Sassetta’, kept at the Louvre, for instance,
the blessed Ranieri da Sansepolcro miraculously liberates all the inmates of a
Florentine prison, regardless of their innocence or guilt. This is not an
isolated case: the Virgin Mary saves numerous criminals from execution in
collections of Marian miracles such as that of Gauthier de Coincy; according
to his Vita, St Thomas of Cantiloupe intervened in the hanging of a Welsh
brigand to save his life.¹ These behaviours contrast with the idea, quite
widespread nowadays, that only innocents convicted unjustly deserve to be
saved from punishment, but guilty people need on the contrary to make
amends. At the same time, in contrast with our general distaste for revenge,
seen as something opposed to real justice, vendetta was an important part of
late medieval culture: in communal Italy, the origins of political factions
such as the Guelfs and the Ghibellines were often traced back to feuds
between families.² Why that was the case in what is generally seen as a
profoundly religious society, even though (as will be seen) the Church
vocally opposed this practice, is another aspect of their civilization we
struggle to understand.
The Italian commune of Siena provides unique insights for the historian
seeking to understand ‘why late medieval people reacted to violence the way
they did’, the central question of this book. The variety of discourses on
criminal justice in Siena in the period c.1260–1330 will be described and
analysed through an in-depth examination of local sources of lay and
religious origin. This city offers an incredible and, so far, underutilized
wealth of sources about violent crime for a period that witnessed important
innovations in the domains of criminal justice and pastoral care. This is
¹ On Thomas of Cantiloupe see Bartlett, The Hanged Man. (I use short titles throughout for
reasons of space. Full citations will be found in the Bibliography.)
² Faini, ‘Il convito fiorentino del 1216’.
Confession and Criminal Justice in Late Medieval Italy: Siena, 1260–1330. Lidia Luisa Zanetti Domingues,
Oxford University Press. © Lidia Luisa Zanetti Domingues 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192844866.003.0001
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 24/7/2021, SPi
³ Gonthier, ‘Faire la paix: un devoir ou un delit?’; Rossi, ‘Polisemia di un concetto: la pace nel
basso medioevo’, p. 12.
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3
novels and TV series and the ongoing popular debates about what should be
the appropriate aims of punishment are all good contemporary examples.⁴ It
is therefore not surprising that research on conflict, and in particular its sub-
category of revenge, has been central in the last century in the fields both of
history and of the social sciences, but the pictures presented have been far
from uniform.⁵ Revenge and conflict seem to have become, in scholarly
constructions, the topics of choice to reflect on broader questions about
identity and modernity. Scholars have asked for instance whether we should
see, as many of us do, vengefulness as a residue of a pre-modern and
barbaric mindset to be eliminated, or rather as an ineradicable aspect of
human nature that derives from the way our species evolved. They have
pondered whether conflict and violence are always synonymous with dis-
order and disruption, or constructive forces within society, too. Given the
high cultural significance of such issues, it is understandable how, despite
the quantity of new syntheses produced on the topic, research in this field
seems to be inexhaustible.⁶
Have we always reacted to violence the way we do nowadays, and if not,
what prompted changes in our attitudes throughout history? These ques-
tions are underpinned by the debate on the relative roles of nature and
nurture (or culture) in understanding human characteristics, a fundamental
issue the Humanities and the Social Science have been grappling with in the
last few decades.⁷ Both evolutionary biologists and cultural anthropologists
have produced scholarly work aiming to answer this question, and histor-
ians have been inspired by their conclusions. Therefore, we find historical
works subscribing to either evolutionist or constructivist approaches, that is,
studies that attribute a greater importance to either biological or cultural
⁴ This feature has given rise to an autonomous area of research within the field of cultural
studies. For an introduction see Young, The Scene of Violence: Cinema, Crime, Affect.
⁵ Peristiany (ed.), Honor and Shame and Davis, ‘Honour and Politics in Pisticci’, are the
classics on the idea of honour as a Mediterranean value; Pertile, Storia del diritto penale, p. 14
and the works he cites have seen vendetta as a Germanic institution; medievalists have
interpreted vendetta as part of an aristocratic ethos (on this see below, n. 14); whereas Miller,
‘Lower Class Culture’, has connected revenge to social marginality.
⁶ The bibliography is too vast to provide a complete list. Among the most recent and
influential contributions to the study of conflict and revenge in the Middle Ages see the
collective volumes respectively by Brown and Górecki (eds), Conflict in Medieval Europe;
Barthélemy, Bougard, and Le Jan (eds), La Vengeance, 400–1200; Throop and Hyams (eds),
Vengeance in the Middle Ages; and the collection of sources by Smail and Gibson, Vengeance in
Medieval Europe. For a more exhaustive bibliography see also Zorzi, ‘I conflitti nell’Italia
comunale’.
⁷ Mazurel, ‘De la psychologie des profondeurs à l’histoire des sentiments’, p. 38.
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Medieval studies have contributed to such debates at least since the 1970s
when, thanks to the influence of legal anthropology, the field partially moved
away from an approach to the study of violent conflict centred on institu-
tions. The focus shifted to the interpersonal relationships, behaviours, and
values of the parties involved, and the variety of formal and informal
practices of conflict and its resolution.¹⁰ These studies have suggested that
in medieval times conflict and revenge were used strategically to achieve a
variety of goals, and that extrajudicial or infrajudicial practices of conflict
and peace-making were always engaged in a dialectical relationship with the
official legal culture.¹¹
This shift seems however to have encountered some resistance among
scholars of the late medieval Italian communes, as these polities were
interpreted by many historians as forerunners of modern states, in which
⁸ See e.g. Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, for an example of the work of a historian
deeply influenced by an evolutionist approach.
⁹ A seminal work in the criticism of fully constructivist and fully evolutionist approaches is
Reddy, The Navigation of Feelings. For a recent discussion of this approach based on the idea of
a ‘biocultural brain’ see Boddice, The History of Emotions, chs 1 and 6.
¹⁰ The institution-based approach had its forerunner in Elias, The Civilising Process.
Fundamental for the shift to a practice-based one was Comaroff and Roberts, Rules and
Processes. The difference between the two will be further discussed in Chapter 1.
¹¹ In this case, too, it is possible to offer only some examples of this copious production: for
instance, Cheyette, ‘Suum cuique tribuere’; White, ‘Pactum . . . legem vincit et amor judicium’;
Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements; Geary, ‘Vivre en conflit dans une France sans État’;
Wickham, Legge, pratiche e conflitti. For additional bibliography refer to Brown and Górecki,
‘What Conflict Means’, in Brown and Górecki (eds), Conflict in Medieval Europe.
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5
¹² Zorzi, ‘I conflitti nell’Italia comunale’, pp. 7–8. For an example of this approach see
Ascheri, ‘Beyond the Commune’.
¹³ For a recent overview of studies on the Popolo, see Poloni, Potere al Popolo.
¹⁴ On revenge as an attribute of the magnati see e.g. Lansing, The Florentine Magnates,
pp. 164ff., pp. 184ff. (Lansing later revised her position in the article ‘Magnate Violence
Revisited’); Maire-Vigueur, Cavaliers et citoyens, pp. 307–35. On the exclusionary politics of
popular governments see Milani, L’esclusione dal comune. On the persisting influence of the
magnati on communal politics, even after their exclusion, for instance through the practice of
judicial professions, see Menzinger, Giuristi e politica nei comuni di popolo.
¹⁵ Zorzi, ‘Politica e giustizia a Firenze’; Faini, ‘Il convito fiorentino del 1216’.
¹⁶ Waley, ‘A Blood Feud with a Happy Ending’; Zorzi, ‘Ius erat in armis’; Zorzi, ‘Politica e
giustizia a Firenze’; Zorzi, ‘Conflits et pratiques infrajudiciaires’; Zorzi, La trasformazione di un
quadro politico; most of the essays included in the collection Conflitti, paci e vendette nell’Italia
comunale present examples of feuds that involved members of the Popolo and analyse the
dynamics of conflicts within the popular milieu.
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 24/7/2021, SPi
7
living kinsmen was also presented as an argument for reconsidering the idea
of feud as a practice that kept the peace.²⁴ Doubts about the legality of
revenge across north Italian cities have recently been reiterated by Glenn
Kumhera, who has seen this feature as a Tuscan specificity.²⁵ Since Tuscany
was characterized in the late Middle Ages by either the persistence of
republican regimes or the rise of ‘weaker’ signorie than the rest of communal
Italy, his theory is in partial agreement with Dean’s.²⁶ Despite the wealth of
research on conflict and revenge in Europe and Italy, therefore, there are still
open issues about the nature of these practices and their conceptualization
in the Italian communes. Studies on different polities have led to different
results, something which calls for an expansion of the number of case
studies, in order to understand which variables played a role in determining
local and regional differences.
The debate on the legality of revenge is linked in current historiography to
another open question, that of the evolution of criminal justice in Europe
from the thirteenth century onwards.²⁷ The main trends observed for this
period include first of all the gradual and never totally achieved passage from
an accusatorial procedural system (in which legal actions had to be initiated
by the victim of a crime) to an inquisitorial one (in which the procedure
could be started ex officio by a judge on the basis of the public knowledge
that a crime had been committed; the judge thus proceeded to collect proofs
through an investigation, the inquisitio).²⁸ Secondly, historians have noticed
a process of ‘publicization’ of criminal justice in late thirteenth-century
Europe, that is, the rise of the idea that crimes should not be seen any
more as private matters between the parties involved and their kin, but as
actions that damaged the whole community.²⁹ The rallying cry for this
expanding role of the government in the prosecution of crime was the
phrase, which originated in canon law and was popularized in legal and
²⁴ Ibid., p. 35. Trevor Dean has not been the only historian who expressed doubts about
applying Gluckman’s theory to the context of medieval Europe: other examples include Miller,
‘Choosing the Avenger’; White, ‘Feuding and Peace-Making in the Touraine’. For more
information on this debate see Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe, p. 49.
²⁵ Kumhera, The Benefits of Peace, p. 12.
²⁶ A recent reassessment of the signorial phenomenon in late medieval Tuscany, which
however does not deny its peculiarities completely, can be found in Zorzi (ed.), Le signorie
cittadine in Toscana.
²⁷ For a recent overview of the studies on crime in late medieval Europe see Dean, Crime in
Medieval Europe.
²⁸ On these two procedural models see Rousseaux, ‘Initiative particulière et poursuite
d’office’.
²⁹ Sbriccoli, ‘Vidi communiter observari’; Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe, pp. 5ff.
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