Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe

Susan Broomhall, Sarah Finn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780367872304
• eBook ISBN: 9781317424185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe examines the purposes for which specific forms of violence and particular emotional states functioned, how they operated in relation to each other, or indeed how one provoked, sustained or diminished the other.

These twelve original essays demonstrate the complexities of violence and emotions and the myriad possibilities of their inter-relationships. They emphasize the great efforts that were made by early modern societies to control modes of violence and emotional regimes to achieve positive as well as negative effects, such as creating order, healing, and bringing individuals and communities together around productive identities.

Authors consider legal documents, news reports, memoirs, letters, confraternity statutes, and medical consultations to investigate the bodily and textual practices in which violent and emotional acts were created, supported and disseminated to investigate the power, aims, effect and outcomes of relationships between violence and emotions. The chapters look at a range of topics and countries including Renaissance Italy and sixteenth-century Germany, France in the grip of the religious wars, and England's Civil Wars as well as a wide range of topics including murder, punishment, community healing, insults, threats, prophecy and medical and devotional practices.

This collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of the history of emotions or violence.

Part 1
Order and disorder

1
Emotions in the heart of the city

Crime and its punishment in Renaissance Italy

Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan

At a time when, in study after study, historians of Italian cities regularly reveal the diversity, in such communities, of methods of conflict resolution,¹ at a time when it is no longer enough to consider the complex plurality of the legal authorities,² and the diverse social uses that such institutional wealth allowed, at a time when increasing attention is being given to the vendetta culture,³ it might appear odd, and historiographically outmoded, to direct our attention to punitive justice. Studies of criminal justice and law and order in urban Italy once dominated the historiography.⁴ Some years ago, analyses of the repressive judicial system and its successive developments serving a more authoritarian organization of power were the subject of numerous works on Florence and Venice.⁵ The history of a criminalization of behaviour and reinforcement of the public justice system was organized according to this paradigm. It therefore comes as no surprise that a study of the spectacle of public justice would coincide with this process of the increasing power of the penal system. While the inquisitorial proceedings, tightening of social control and the progress of, if not the state, then at least a more coercive political power, were being widely discussed, it was logical to extend that interest to the staging of punitive ceremonies.

Thus began the descriptions of tortured, dismembered bodies, exhibited at the city gates. Thus also came, in the quest to restore the ‘éclat’ of torture, and the character of the administration of punishment, references to gallows, stocks and gibbets erected around the city. Most importantly, information surfaced on public ceremonies and the messages they carried from powers having conceived a new ideology of justice based on social pacification. These numerous works bore fruit and thus we went from the purposely teleologic initial studies, which read in the torment of the bodies and sophistication of the executions the sole progress of the state, to more nuanced interpretations. As we know, public justice did not signal the disappearance of the other means of conflict resolution in the final centuries of the Middle Ages. On the contrary, the proceedings, whether within or outside of the judicial system, would often be combined, in order to restore social equilibrium. As to punitive ceremonies, they did not eradicate more violent ritual practices. Indeed, from one system to another, records of exchanges exist. Certain lynching scenarios would pick up on elements provided for in contemporary penal standards. Similarly, local authorities sometimes borrowed certain violent ritual practices to perfect the exemplary nature of the punishment.

The question thus arises: why return to this subject when this historiographic and problematic introduction would tend, however briefly and schematically, to paint it as closed? We may observe the very often perfunctory, even repetitious and conventional remarks reserved for the places where punishment was administered. The initial goal here is therefore to expand the earlier analyses, limited to the merely repressive aspects of the judicial process,⁶ by showing the complexity and mobility of the scenarios employed, with one ambition: to stop treating the urban space like a platform, an obedient and malleable support upon which public authorities would mark their presence. In a second series of observations, the Venetian example will highlight how punishment could also be administered in everyday locations of life and crime. This will be followed by a conclusion discussing the range of uses for spaces in order to better understand the diverse territorialities which managed to coexist in an Italian city in the final centuries of the Middle Ages. Judicial violence is thus at the heart of this analysis, but the aim here is not so much to understand how it was inflicted on the body but rather to explore the complex range of places where it was staged in the city. One can identify the intended audiences of such scenes and the emotions that they were being encouraged to experience. Judicial archives are hence the essential source here, for they reveal not only the places where violence could be inscribed by public authorities in response to the degree of violence of the crimes, but also the whole range of emotions that were designed to be provoked, as well as, more rarely, the spontaneous emotions that these spectacles could engender when the violence of the crowd supplanted the violence of the punishment being administered by the public authorities.

An initial observation will serve to summarize the abundance of available sources. While in the Italian cities, extensive doctrine served the process of consolidating political autonomy by reserving criminal sentencing to the public authorities,⁷ the exercise of justice was soon facilitated by the institution of judicial authorities⁸ and theory about degrees of punishment, resulting in a veritable typology of sanctions – the law was therefore becoming more visible. The locations chosen to seat the magistrate of the podestà were, in their initial construction, reconstruction and extensions, the first public palazzi pubblici in Northern and Central Italy.⁹ Later, with the palazzi belonging to the capitani del popolo, other buildings, larger and more ornate, would come to house this new body of magistrates. There were also prisons built,¹⁰ such as those in Florence, Siena, Bologna and Padua, in the immediate vicinity of the town square except where, as in the case of Venice, the areas of confinement were also located within the government palazzo itself.¹¹ Painted and sculpted images also figured in the same staging, at the heart of the urban space. Consider the images of the so-called ‘pittura infamante’ in the fresco paintings documented in Parma, Bologna, Pistoia, Florence and Siena starting from the middle of the thirteenth century, dishonouring and sentencing traitors, forgers and corrupt officials, most often in absentia, or fallen political enemies, to social death.¹² The iconographic models are set, the perpetrator represented hanging upside down. All sorts of images – devils and skulls – contribute to the dishonour, and the written word combines forces with the image. The drawing makes reference, of course, to the crime, as do the inscriptions, and these tituli, written in large letters, on certain statutes like those of Parma, indicate the name of the guilty party and his crime. In Bologna, 112 individuals were thus punished between 1283 and 1303. At first located inside the palaces, these images were then shown outside, where they could be seen by the greatest number of people, upon the walls of the palazzo communale. But the law itself is also repeatedly represented, and not only in the courtrooms, nor in the oft-cited and commentated Good Government of Siena fresco. Another example is the figure of Venice by Filippo Calendario adorning the ducal palace close to the Piazzetta: a woman, with a severe look and sword in hand, the sea at her feet, like an allegory of Justice with an inscription to accentuate the meaning: Venecia. Fortis iuste trono furias mare sub pede pono.¹³

The law was therefore fully visible in the urban space,¹⁴ and this visibility was still that of punishments administered under an urban-centric system calling for public participation. What do the available sources tell us? Justice was the indispensable auxiliary of political power: to each criminal his punishment, punishment which was hortatory, as all the theorists, even at the end of the Middle Ages, insisted. Its exemplary nature was intended to educate and dissuade, teach and prevent, inform and admonish. In that way, punishment required a wide audience. Penal ceremonies, announced in advance, were held at times and on days, such as those of the market, when the crowd would be at its largest. But there was also a spreading out of the punishment, from sunrise to sundown, or repetition of when the display took place, for example, three days in a row. Throughout the ceremony, messages were delivered. There was the reading aloud of the sentence, the solemnity of such a formal procedure thereby increasing its public character. Criers denounced the crime; such proclamations always accompanied sentences of flagellation and banishment. Moreover, very often this public announcement was reinforced when the crime was displayed on signs which were, for example, nailed to the stocks or mitres carried by the punished. The message is not difficult to decipher when, under the principle of mimicry between punishment and crime, thieves or forgers are shown on the stocks with the product of their crime hanging around their necks. The principle of mimicry which, as we know, was even more apparent in those cases where the offending member was punished: the hand of thieves and forgers, the tongue of traitors and blasphemers.¹⁵ In any case, the widest public display would accompany the degrading punishment with a double purpose: proclaiming that the offensive act had been punished and stigmatizing the criminal.¹⁶

It is not surprising then that the places of punishment would have been located in the public spaces according to the typology identified by recent studies, without major variation, as follows: the palazzo communale, the major public squares and sometimes the square at the cathedral entrance. In those spaces, such as the marketplace, stocks were placed, and men and women were displayed for hours at a time. A cage could be hung from the campanile of the Piazza San Marco in Venice.¹⁷ Players of games of chance, were immersed in the basin of the Piazza dei Priori in Florence (‘perfusi sive baptizati’).¹⁸ As for the ceremonial procession of the condemned person, often dragged ad locum iusticie ‘while attached to the tail of a donkey or a horse’ (‘ad caudam unius equi vel asini’), documents show a well-travelled route. It could vary according to the importance of the crime, and was sometimes punctuated by stops, at crossroads or in front of churches. But in any case, the procession of infamy, with the condemned atop an ignoble cart or, in Venice, a small boat, would follow a well-trodden route, where the crowd, drawn by the town criers, gathered. Stocks and columns, poles with hanging baskets to plunge the condemned into the river, cages, processions, trumpets and town criers: the setting for justice, whether permanent or fleeting, thus filled the urban space.

But it was also to be found at the fringes, since gibbets and gallows, intended to be seen by those entering the city, were placed around its limits. Examples abound. One will suffice: that of the complex punitive rituals used against the Milanese conspirators, guilty of what was called a ‘tyranicide’, the assassination of Galeazzo Maria Sforza in 1476.¹⁹ Their body parts were exhibited, according to a careful calculation which distributed half torsos, arms and legs around the city gates of Milan, while the heads were placed, with that of the conspiracy leader, on the campanile of Broletto, the remains of which were said to be still visible in 1490. Even Venice, a city without walls surrounded by water, did not deviate from the practice. But it is in the lagoon, from pitchforks erected at selected points of entry into Venetian territory, that the tortured body parts were hung.²⁰

From here on, we discover what only rare sources state. Derisory practices and punitive and degrading punishments were reserved for the city centre. Executions more often took place outside the city limits, or at least in a marginal outlying area; examples include Florence, Bologna and Ferrara. There was nothing systematic, however, about such a duality of locations to administer justice. Some cities ignored it. Others, at times,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Routledge Research in Early Modern History
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction Violence and emotions in early modern Europe
• Order and disorder
• 1 Emotions in the heart of the city Crime and its punishment in Renaissance Italy
• 2 Violence, anger and dishonour in sixteenth-century broadsheets from the collection of Johann Jakob Wick
• 3 Murder and misericordia Reconstructing violent death and emotion in the Roman Campagna in the seventeenth century
• Bodies and souls
• 4 ‘Big mouth, big belly, fat pig!' Tumults and troublemakers in the sixteenth-century Paris Hôtel-Dieu
• 5 Miracles and misery Nuns' narratives of psychic and spiritual violence in sixteenth-century France
• 6 Devotional violence and emotional governance in a seventeenth-century French female religious house
• 7 Violence in medical treatment in early modern Europe
• Textual affect and effect
• 8 Violent language in early fifteenth-century Italy The emotions of invectives
• 9 Nostradamus and the res mirabilia Between nature's intelligence and the Word of God
• 10 Propaganda in the English Civil Wars Designing emotions to divide a nation
• 11 A ‘Protestant' approach to colonization as envisaged in John Lockman's martyrology (1760)
• Select bibliography
• Index