Marco Bellabarba, Gerd Schwerhoff, and Andrea Zorzi, eds. Criminalita e giustizia in Germania e in Italia: Pratiche giudiziarie e linguaggi giuridici tra tardo medioevo ed eta moderna.

Peters, Edward

(Istituto trentino di cultura, Annali dell'Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento/Jahrbuch des italienischen-deutschen historischen Instituts in Trient, Contributi/Beitrage, 11.) Bologna: Societa editrice il Mulino, 2001. Pbk. 374 pp. tbls. 22 [euro]. ISBN: 88-15-08511-4.

Since its establishment in the early 1970s, the Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, now directed by Giorgio Cracco, has produced several impressive series of publications that combine the best of Italian and German historical scholarship over a wide range of topics and periods. The present volume is the eleventh in the Contributi/Beitrage series (all of the Istituto's publications are listed on the nine unnumbered pages following 373), containing the papers given at a conference on the subject held in Trent in 1999. Its subject, criminality (a more awkward and less frequent word in academic English than are criminalita in Italian and Kriminalitat in German) and justice, is one much on the minds not only of Italian and German historians, but also of historians elsewhere, witness the two-volume collection of essays by an international cast of historians, Vortrage zur Justizforschung: Geschichte und Theorie, edited by Heinz Mohnhaupt and Dieter Simon and published as the seventh volume of the Rechtsprechung: Materialien und Studien series of the Max-Planck-Institut in Frankfurt in 1992 and 1993 (102, n. 7), and other monographs and collections in the intervening decade.

The present volume is divided into four sections: Urban Authorities and Justice in the Late Middle Ages (two essays); Penal Justice and Infrajudicial Systems (the current term of art for conflict resolution, discussed on 349) in Territorial States (six essays); Tribunals and Social Practice in the Early Modern Period (five essays); and Prospects (state of the field and suggestions for future research, these three essays). Except for two papers in French by Michael Frank and Xavier Rousseau, all of the papers are in German or Italian. The period treated extends from the thirteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. There is a sensible balance between microstudies of particular places and periods, e.g., Massimo Della Misericordia on ecclesiastical tribunals and communal resistance in Valtellina in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and more general studies, e.g., Paolo Marchetti's excellent study on the maxim iurisdictio cohaeret territorio among late medieval jurists of the ius commune.

For those requiring an introduction to the subject and its literature, the last three essays in the volume, rather than the slender Presentazione, are certainly the place to start. Xavier Rousseau, Mario Sbriccoli, and Gerd Schwerhoff all deal with the twin problems of the growth of state-defined and -enforced criminal justice and criminal justice as a communal resource, negotiated justice as a form of "horizontal social control" (a theoretically-vague anglophone term from sociology, originally derived from Durkheim, thinly disguised in other vernaculars), even of regulating conflicts with higher powers, each essay providing, as do the other papers, a rich bibliography of recent and current scholarship.

Xavier Rousseau, the outside observer among the participants, whose speciality is the criminal law of the early modern Low Countries, shrewdly points out some methodological and conceptual differences between the national and period-specific approaches. The Italian essays and those dealing with the late medieval period seem to invite a political approach, "centered on the ideological and juridical instruments that permit directing elites to establish domination." While the German essays and those dealing with the early modern period apply an anthropological approach, "interested in social configurations among groups and in conflict relationships among individuals on a local scale." In a footnote, Rousseau asks whether such national differences may not reflect contemporary debates in Italy and Germany concerning the form and the role that the state should play in social regulation. No one ever said that historians were exempt from history.

Legal history, once prominent in Renaissance studies in the work of Gilmore, Bouwsma, and Kelley, has recently receded somewhat into the background, and criminal law never really held much interest, probably because the periodization of both fits awkwardly with conventional chronological divisions and the distressing character of the latter fits ill with more admired qualities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, both their periodization and their subject matter make considerable sense and are important. After all, in the Spring of 1513 Machiavelli might sit at his farm, dressed in his robes of civil office and read Livy, but he still felt the pain of the torture he had undergone a few months earlier. And many far weaker and unluckier people did, too. They are also proper subjects for Renaissance study.

EDWARD PETERS

University of Pennsylvania