Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy 9789048524914

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Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy

Renaissance History, Art and Culture This series investigates the Renaissance as a complex intersection of political and cultural processes that radiated across Italian territories into wider worlds of influence, not only through Western Europe, but into the Middle East, parts of Asia and the Indian subcontinent. It will be alive to the best writing of a transnational and comparative nature and will cross canonical chronological divides of the Central Middle Ages, the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Renaissance History, Art and Culture intends to spark new ideas and encourage debate on the meanings, extent and influence of the Renaissance within the broader European world. It encourages engagement by scholars across disciplines – history, literature, art history, musicology, and possibly the social sciences – and focuses on ideas and collective mentalities as social, political, and cultural movements that shaped a changing world from ca 1250 to 1650. Series editors Christopher Celenza, John Hopkins Umiversity, USA Samuel Cohn, Jr., University of Glasgow, UK Andrea Gamberini, University of Milan, Italy Geraldine Johnson, Christ Church, Oxford, UK Isabella Lazzarini, University of Molise, Italy

Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy Proceedings of the International Conference Georgetown University at Villa Le Balze, 5-8 May 2012

Edited by Fabrizio Ricciardelli and Andrea Zorzi

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Ambrogio Lorenzetti (b. ca. 1290, Siena, d. 1348, Siena), Allegory of the Good Government: Securitas, Siena, Palazzo Pubblico, Room of the Nine Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn e-isbn nur

978 90 8964 736 8 978 90 4852 491 4 (pdf) 684 / 685

© Fabrizio Ricciardelli and Andrea Zorzi / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2015 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Contents Introduction 7 Fabrizio Ricciardelli and Andrea Zorzi

1 The Place of Renaissance Italy in the History of Emotions

15

2 The Emotional Language of Justice in Late Medieval Italy

31

3 The Anxiety of the Republics

45

4 Humiliation and the Exercise of Power in the Florentine Contado in the Mid-Fourteenth Century

77

5 The Words of Emotion

91

Barbara H. Rosenwein

Fabrizio Ricciardelli

“Timor” in Italy of the Communes during the 1330s Andrea Zorzi

Carol Lansing

Political Language and Discursive Resources in Lorenzo de Medici’s Lettere (1468-1492) Isabella Lazzarini

6 Metaphor, Emotion and the Languages of Politics in Late Medieval Italy

111

7 Debt, Humiliation, and Stress in Fourteenth-Century Lucca and Marseille

129

8 Renaissance Emotions

145

A Genoese Lamento of 1473 Serena Ferente

Daniel Lord Smail

Hate and disease in European perspective Samuel K. Cohn Jr.

9 The Emotive Power of an Evolving Symbol

171

10 The Emotions of the State

193

11 Control of Emotions and Comforting Practices before the Scaffold in Medieval and Early Modern Italy (with Some Remarks on Lorenzetti’s Fresco)

209

12 “Bene Comune e Benessere”

237

The Idea of the Dome from Kurgan Graves to the Florentine Tempio Israelitico Ori Z. Soltes

A Survey of the Visconti Chancery Language (Mid-Fourteenth-MidFifteenth Centuries) Andrea Gamberini

Gennaro Ferrante

The Affective Economy of Communal Life Stephen J. Milner

Contributors 252

Introduction Fabrizio Ricciardelli and Andrea Zorzi In the last few years, the study of emotions and passions has entered the agenda of historians. After the first analysis of the topic by Peter and Carol Z. Stearns in 1985, early medieval studies are now oriented toward the analysis of the so-called “emotional communities,” as shown by the study of Barbara H. Rosenwein (2006). With few exceptions, the study of emotions and passions in Renaissance Italy has not yet been investigated. This book collects the essays presented in the International Conference on Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy held by Georgetown University at Villa Le Balze and Università di Firenze on 7-8 May 2012. The conference was the result of a series of meetings we organized between 2010 and 2011. The first meeting was held by the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Venice, where Daniel Smail, Marco Gentile, and Carol Lansing presented their researches on the theme. In winter 2010 Serena Ferente presented a paper on factions and passions at the Dipartimento di studi storici e geografici of the Università di Firenze. One year later, in Spring 2011, we planned the second meeting as a roundtable hosted by the Spring Lecture Series at Georgetown University at Villa Le Balze. Here Andrea Gamberini, Fabrizio Ricciardelli, and Andrea Zorzi presented another series of essays with the aim of studying the signs and forms of political communication at the light of the history of emotions and passions. The third meeting on the theme of the conference was held by the Università di Milano in September 2011 inside of the workshop, coordinated by Andrea Gamberini, Jean-Philippe Genet, and Andrea Zorzi, on The Language of Political Society, one in a series of meetings making up the French-Italian research project on Le vecteurs de l’idéel. Le pouvoir symbolique entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance (v. 1200-v. 1640); the proceedings of this meeting were edited by the three coordinators and published, at the end of the same year, by Viella Editore in Rome as The Languages of Political Society. Western Europe, 14th-17th Centuries. The main goal of this book is to initiate a discussion on the space of emotions in Italian urban societies between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries; to concentrate its attention on every possible passion bound to the use and exercise of power; to investigate the practices and languages of power, not only in the light of the “emotional” interrelationship between passion and hate, but also focusing on distress, fear, joy, and shame. Barbara

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Fabrizio Ricciardelli and Andrea Zorzi

H. Rosenwein (The Place of Renaissance Italy in the History of Emotions) examines how the Italian Renaissance continues to hold an important place in historians’ periodization of Western history, which, even in the twenty-first century, remains, broadly speaking, the three-fold scheme of antiquity, Middle Ages, and modern. Yet it is a curious fact that Renaissance Italy plays a relatively small role in most histories of emotion. This holds true in two ways: first, in discussions of the history of theories of emotion; and, second, in discussions that touch on the history of felt – or at rate, expressed – emotions. This paper talks about Renaissance theories of emotions and practices and suggests how to put the two together. Fabrizio Ricciardelli (The Emotional Language of Justice in Late Medieval Italy) shows how the history of the Italian city-republics between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was characterized by a constant division between political alignments, a division which was a continual source of political struggles that themselves led to the expulsion of the members of one side or the other from the city. From the time of the struggles between Guelfs and Ghibellines at the beginning of the Duecento, expulsion of the enemy party through lists of proscription was a consequence of political bipolarity. The dichotomy between the magnates and the popolani arising in the second half of the same century can be viewed in a similar fashion. The political struggles in Italian communes between magnates and popolani were so vicious and unrelenting that the losers were executed or physically excluded from the city, their goods and indeed their whole lives taken from them. In this tense atmosphere, the metaphorical language of justice can be a powerful political weapon. Andrea Zorzi (The Anxiety of the Republics. “Timor” in Italy of the Communes during the 1330s) makes clear the emergence of a widespread emotion – “timor,” the anguished feeling of a profound and frightening change in the times – in some Tuscan cities in the second half of the 1330s. The essay offers an interpretation of three well-known “monuments” – the Florentine chronicle by Giovanni Villani, the frescoes by Buonamico Buffalmacco in the monumental cemetery in Pisa, and those by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena – which, in the peculiarity of their respective cultural contexts, reveal the shared sense of turmoil that rocked the urban societies of those years. The natural catastrophes, economic crisis, constant state of war, fleeting nature of worldly power, and rise of “tyrannical regimes” were suddenly perceived by contemporaries as a sharp break compared with earlier generations. The “sweet life” depicted by Lorenzetti in the well-governed city, the well-being and power celebrated by Giovanni Villani, and the courtly amusements illustrated by Buffalmacco reflect a

Introduc tion

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common language of anxiety, a sensation of unease and gloom in the face of dangers felt as real or potential. The essay by Carol Lansing (Humiliation and the Exercise of Power in the Florentine Contado in the Mid-Fourteenth-Century) analyzes that central question in the study of the history of emotion concerns causation: How and why did conventions for the expression of emotion change and how was emotional expression linked to the exercise of power? Scholars have shown that people, particularly rulers, staged emotions, using them as a form of ritual communication. One vivid instance is noble anger: the way nobles might use a show of anger to enforce claims about their prerogatives. Lansing’s paper builds on the literature on noble anger and the exercise of power by showing its connection with forms of humiliation. It draws on a rich although complex body of sources, representations of anger and humiliation in mid-fourteenth-century denunciations to the Florentine executor of the ordinances of justice. The focus is cases in which nobles were denounced for the rape and abduction of women. It shows that denouncers to the executor depicted this in terms of the shame and humiliation of the women’s kinsmen. These were, in Susan Brownmiller’s phrase, messages between men. Ultimately, the cases suggest a need to reexamine assumptions about medieval rape. Isabella Lazzarini (The Words of Emotion: Political Language and Discursive Resources in Lorenzo de Medici’s Lettere [1468-92]) aims her attention at Lorenzo de Medici’s letters, which were inaugurated in 1955 with the hope that a less romanticized portrait of him would result. Ironically, rather than painting a more realistic portrait of Lorenzo, recent research is discovering instead that it is not possible to separate the man from the aura of legend and that the latter constitutes an indissoluble aspect of his historical character. Lorenzo’s image-making was a political as well as a psychological necessity of the day, and his correspondence offers insight into his character and into the subtlety of his public style, at the same time illuminating the political reality of late fifteenth-century Italy, its discursive resources and the psychological adjustments it required. In this historiographical context, Lazzarini’s article reads Lorenzo’s letters aiming to find out which words and expressions in his diplomatic and political writings reveal some emotionality. Lazzarini investigates when and why Lorenzo de’ Medici chose to resort to these letters in relation to different kinds of linguistic, textual, and rhetoric discursive resources. More strikingly aware than most of his contemporaries, Lorenzo seems then to calibrate the use of emotional expressions, talks, and gestures within the argumentative framework of his political discourse – both written (controlled) and enacted (manifested)

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– in order to master the anxiety derived from the increasing awareness of the weakness of a whole intellectual and pragmatic system of thought in interpreting contemporary men and events. The essay by Serena Ferente (Metaphor, Emotion and the Languages of Politics in Late Medieval Italy. A Genoese Lamento of 1473) considers that the textual nature of a majority of the late medievalist’s sources poses a challenge to all those who study the history of emotions, since the very relationship between language (particularly written language) and emotion is fraught with theoretical and methodological problems but remains unavoidable. This essay takes metaphor as the principal conduit to emotions within texts and seeks to offer a tentative empirical analysis of its role in generating an emotional understanding of the abstract concepts that populate the language of politics. The specific case study is the marriage metaphor and its uses in a variety of expert and ordinary languages of late medieval Italy. The analysis investigated by Daniel Lord Smail (Debt, Humiliation, and Stress in Fourteenth-Century Lucca and Marseille) starts from the following consideration: as the volume of credit expanded in the later Middle Ages, so too did practices of debt recovery offered by the secular courts of law in all European jurisdictions. It is possible to interpret this emerging system of coercion from a purely economic point of view. Debt recovery, in this view, was the necessary adjunct to a system of consumer credit, since creditors would have been unwilling to extend credit without the guarantee that force would be made available to them if needed. But the existence of these economic functions does not preclude the possibility that debt recovery was simultaneously performing another kind of social or political function. Using archival records from the cities of Lucca and Marseille in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, this paper describes some of the humiliating practices intrinsic to the system of court-sponsored debt recovery. These practices are similar to the humiliations inflicted by the criminal justice system, with an important difference: instances of debt recovery were far more common. Debt recovery was clearly an economic activity, but we cannot fully understand the broader implications of the practice without seriously taking its ability to deliver stress and humiliation to a large segment of the population. Studies of primates and other mammals have suggested that the capacity to deliver stress is an order of power or dominance. The goal of this paper is to suggest that debt recovery was part and parcel of a broader transformation that saw the emergence of a different kind of humiliating society in Europe.

Introduc tion

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Samuel K. Cohn Jr. (Renaissance Emotions: Hate and Disease in European Perspective) examines the connection between epidemic disease and hate during the sixteenth century, particularly with regard to the new disease, syphilis. Cohn untangles the presumed notion that naming meant blaming of the “other,” the outsider, and especially the “absolute other” – the Jew and the Indian. Rather, he argues that throughout the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century, instead of blaming the other with syphilis, writers in Italy and elsewhere in Europe – physicians along with the laity – directed their blame, if anywhere, onto themselves. The last quarter of the sixteenth century marked a new beginning in the disease-hate relationship with new decrees to cleanse city streets morally and physically by booting from its walls undesirables and the underclass when an epidemic threatened. At the same time, blame of others entered medical texts and those by bureaucrats and notaries on defense against pandemics. The disease in question, however, was not syphilis but plague. This rise of a new hate-disease nexus came not because physicians and the laity were suddenly confronted with a new and incomprehensible disease. Instead, it was connected to medical progress, cracks in the holistic theological-Galenic models of epidemic causation – God, the stars, air, climate, and the humors – and the increasing importance that both doctors and the laity began to place on alien germs and alien carriers of disease. Ori Z. Soltres (The Emotive Power of an Evolving Symbol: The Idea of the Dome from Kurgan Graves to the Florentine Tempio Israelitico) aims to show that Kurgan graves and underground domes served a dual symbolic purpose, connoting the dome of heaven but also the pregnant female belly. The freestanding Roman Pantheon echoes the dome of heaven, but the connection between the eye of heaven and the eye of the dome implied an umbilical tie between the two realms. Justinian’s dome in Constantinople also reflected these principles. So did Abdul Malik’s Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The domination of Jerusalem by the Dome of the Rock over the centuries gradually led Europeans to imagine the Israelite-Judaean Temple as domed, or quasi-domed. As Rome was viewed as the New Jerusalem, the dome as a crown for the new St. Peter’s was fits this description. The implications of this would be variously felt in key Protestant structures like St. Paul’s in London, in the US Capitol dome, and in nineteenth-twentiethcentury synagogues – such as Florence’s Tempio Israelitico – whose Jewish congregations felt themselves as spiritually complete as their ancestors in Jerusalem. Thus the symbolic idea of the dome has been continued and transformed over the millennia. Such a structure has addressed an

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unconscious emotional need in offering a diverse if persistent statement of power and empowerment for every community that has employed its form. Andrea Gamberini (The Emotions of the State. A Survey of the Visconti Chancery Language [Mid-Fourteenth-Fifteenth Centuries]) offers an insight into the display of feelings by the Lords of Milan between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The main attention goes to written records (letters, decrees, statues), but other sources (i.e., iconographic ones) are considered. The ultimate goal is to provide an analysis of the Visconti’s communications in the light of the most recent studies on political languages and feelings. So, what was behind the emotions displayed by the Visconti? How did they change over time? And what is the relationship between the emotional register and the philosophical discourses in the Lords of Milan’s letters? The paper answers these questions. Gennaro Ferrante (Control of Emotions and Comforting Practices before the Scaffold in Medieval and Early Modern Italy [with Some Remarks on Lorenzetti’s Fresco]) shows how the emotions of a crowd attending a death sentence were constantly shaken in a clash between desire of mercy and compliance with the stern office of secular justice, as well as those of Dante’s watching in hell the harshness of divine justice. In late medieval Italy some lay companies started to express that need of mercy by comforting those going to death and by mediating emotions between them, the onlookers, and the public executors of justice. With the aim to prepare those suffering men for a “good death” (so that they could eventually deserve the divine forgiveness), comforters complied both with the will of God and with that of the established power, to the point of transforming the emotional ambiguity in political ambiguity. Ferrante’s essay focuses on this intriguing moment in history by analyzing texts of Caterina da Siena and unpublished documents concerning those companies. Stephen J. Milner (“Bene Comune e Benessere”: the Affective Economy of Communal Life) examines what he calls “the affective economy” of the Italian communes, the way in which emotions circulated within communities both binding and dividing in the constitution of the fabric of self and society. The accumulation of affect through association and repetition was central to the generation of attachment (adherence and coherence) in the communal period, especially the passionate attachment to the social fictions of family and communal solidarity. Thinking around the relation of the psychic to the social and the individual to the collective, the aim is to examine the ambiguity of rhetoric as a technology of persuasion which sought to marshal emotions in advising various audiences regarding what they should pursue and what they should avoid. The ability to move was

Introduc tion

13

central to most humanistic and philosophical discourses, however dispassionate and rationalist their claims, and central to the well-being and being well, or otherwise, of communities and individuals. Reference is made to a broad range of late medieval and Renaissance texts and engages with recent writing on the “affective turn” in critical theory. The editors wish to thank Sarah R. Blanshei, Margery Ganz, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, and Stefano U. Baldassarri for their active participation in the discussion. They are grateful to Georgetown University and the Università di Firenze for the scholarly aegis given to their initiative. The editors would also like to thank Alan Earhart, Simona Mocali, and Giuditta Viceconte for their support and invaluable assistance at Villa Le Balze. In addition, they are very grateful to Amsterdam University Press and to Simon Forde, without whose sensitive reading of the manuscript and support for the publication this book would not exist.

1

The Place of Renaissance Italy in the History of Emotions* Barbara H. Rosenwein

The Italian Renaissance continues to hold an important place in historians’ periodization of Western history. Yet Renaissance Italy plays an oddly small role in most histories of emotion. This holds true in two ways: first, in discussions of the history of theories of emotion; and second, in discussions that touch on the history of felt – or at any rate, expressed – emotions. This situation is, however, beginning to change. In this paper I will briefly talk about Renaissance theories, spend most of my time on Renaissance practices, and at the end will suggest how and why it would be good to put the two together when studying emotions in the Italian Renaissance.

Theories of Emotion Histories of theories of the emotions generally spend little time on the Italian Renaissance. Two relatively recent examples must here stand for all: the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion jumps from medieval notions of the passions to Kant, while Dominik Perler’s treatment of theories of the emotions from 1270 to 1670 leaps over the Italian Renaissance as it spans the period from the fourteenth-century English William of Ockham to the sixteenth-century French Michel de Montaigne.1 Yet Renaissance humanists were often keenly interested in the emotions. Petrarch (d. 1374), for example, treated numerous emotions in his De secreto conflictu curarum mearum and above all in his De remediis utriusque fortune, where he borrowed from but also refocused ancient Stoic theories of the emotions.2 Francesco Filelfo (d. 1481) wrote a systematic treatise on the emotions, De morali disciplina, drawing on Cicero’s Tusculan * I wish to thank Damien Boquet, Riccardo Cristiani, John McManamon, Maureen C. Miller, Edward Muir, Jan Söffner, and the participants of the conference for which this paper was written, particularly Stefano U. Baldassarri, Serena Ferente, Marco Gentile, Carol Lansing, and Isabella Lazzarini, for their generous help and suggestions. 1 The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion; Perler, Transformationen der Gefühle. 2 See McClure, Sorrow and Consolation, chapter 3.

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Disputations and the Peri pathon of Pseudo-Andronicus of Rhodes.3 And between Petrarch and Filelfo was Coluccio Salutati (d. 1406) and others as well. 4 When modern scholars of the Italian Renaissance have dealt with its theories of emotions, they have considered mainly grief and consolatory literature.5 George McClure was no doubt correct when he suggested that the modern focus on sorrow accurately reflected Renaissance preoccupations. Speaking of Jacopo Antonio Marcello, a Venetian nobleman moved by the death of his son to ask various humanists to write works of consolation for him, McClure pointed out that Marcello’s grief was also a source of both pride and fame, and thus was perfectly suited to Renaissance values.6 This is important. One cannot easily separate the values – and with them the theories – of any period from the lived experience in the same period. That is why, as I shall remark at the end of this paper, it would be very useful to combine theory with practice in order to explore systematically the emotional expression that we find in non-theoretical materials.

Lived Emotions: Historiographical Traditions The non-theoretical materials: What have Italian Renaissance scholars said about the emotional lives of their subjects apart from theory? The answer until very recently is: surprisingly little. Nevertheless, there is a limited historiographical tradition. I will here outline four approaches, or schools of thought, within that tradition. I call the first the “Burckhardtian;” the second the “Eliasian” (after Norbert Elias); the third I term the “performative,” because it sees emotions as acting out, modifying, or even creating

3 See Kraye, “Francesco Filelfo on Emotions.” For the theory of emotions in the Tusculan Disputations, see Graver, Cicero on the Emotions. For other uses of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations during the Renaissance, see Quillen, “The Uses of the Past,” 363-85. 4 See below, n. 53 for Giannozzo Manetti. 5 The chief literature on the topic up to the mid-80s is cited in McClure, “A Little Known Renaissance Manual,” 247 n. 1. See also King, “An Inconsolable Father,” 221-46. Among the publications that have appeared since 1987 are McClure, Sorrow and Consolation; McManamon, Funeral Oratory; King, The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello; Schaeben, Trauer im humanistischen Dialog. Related to these studies of dolor are those on humanists’ thoughts about miseria and felicitas: see Trinkaus, Adversity’s Noblemen; Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness. 6 McClure, Sorrow and Consolation, 115; on Marcello, see King, An Inconsolable Father, and King, The Death of the Child.

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social institutions; and the fourth I call the “linguistic,” because it profits from the linguistic turn in historical studies.7 1

The Burckhardtian View

Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, first published in 1860, described Italian Renaissance emotional sensibilities as essentially the precursors of Burckhardt’s own Romantic age. For Burckhardt, medieval men were so tied to their group identities and lacking in a sense of their own individuality that they had only the rarest insight into their internal lives. What was the nature of the insight that Burckhardt had in mind? He gives us a hint when he speaks of Petrarch’s “descriptions of moments of joy and sorrow which must have been thoroughly his own, since no one before him gives us anything of the kind.”8 Burckhardt also looked at Boccaccio, who, he said, “succeeds sometimes in giving a most powerful and effective picture of his feeling. The return to a spot consecrated by love (Sonnet 22), the melancholy of spring (Sonnet 33), the sadness of the poet who feels himself growing old (Sonnet 65), are admirably treated by him.”9 Turning to Leon Battista Alberti, Burckhardt found him exploring “the deepest spring of his nature ..., the sympathetic intensity with which he entered into the whole life around him. At the sight of noble trees and waving cornfields he shed tears,”10 and so on. The historiographical tradition initiated by Burckhardt sees the emotions of Renaissance men as expressive of their deepest feelings. That tradition continues to the present day, above all in studies of Petrarch. For George McClure, for example, the young Petrarch fed “on tears, sighs, and swoons, indulging the pleasant pain of romantic longing.”11 This was, for McClure, “a new outlook not only on the general psychology of human emotion, but also on the specific challenges posed by the human condition: particularly those of misery, illness, and death.”12 McClure contrasted Renaissance sentiments with the “somewhat compartmentalized psychological worlds 7 There are other approaches. One is literary/Freudian: see, e.g., Tambling, Dante in Purgatory. For a useful recent overview of the approaches historians have used to explore the history of emotions, see Ferente, “Storici ed emozioni,” 371-92. 8 Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance, 311-12, quoted here from Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance, 311. 9 Ibid., 311. 10 Ibid., 150. 11 McClure, Sorrow and Consolation, 21. 12 Ibid., 20.

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of the poet, philosopher, priest, and penitent” of the medieval period.13 And when Petrarch’s tone shifted – when, later in life, he came to regret finding sweetness in lamentation and upbraided a grieving father for “immoderate weeping” – McClure saw this as reflecting a Stoic resolve that warred with Petrarch’s “enduring need to weep and to write.”14 2

The Eliasian Approach

Nevertheless, despite the exceptions noted above, the tradition inaugurated by Burckhardt was long ago more or less snuffed out by the historiographical approach that is here dubbed the Eliasian.15 Norbert Elias’s narrative of the history of lived emotion was set forth in his exceptionally influential book, The Civilizing Process.16 This is not the place to explore the theory in detail; suffice it to say that Elias postulated a process by which violent behavior, emotions, and impulses of every sort (which, in Elias’s view were essentially equivalent phenomena) were brought under control.17 The essential trajectory of emotions’ history went from impulse to restraint. Elias’s focus was on France, not Italy. Indeed, he went out of his way to deny the pertinence of Italy to his story. He disagreed with Gabriel Hanotaux, who thought that French princes learned from the “tyrants of Naples, Florence, and Ferrara.” Elias argued that it would require “a precise examination in terms of structural history” – something he was clearly unwilling to undertake – to “determine how far the centralization processes and the organization of government in the Italian city-states resemble those of early absolutist France.” He very much doubted that small city-states could engender a civilizing process.18 13 Ibid., 19-20. 14 Ibid., 39. On page 45, McClure speaks of Petrarch’s “emotional instincts.” In his review of Lansing, Passion and Order, McClure objects to Lansing’s interpretation of Petrarch’s change of heart as “paralleling the political restraint of grief sought in communal legislation. Instead, Petrarch’s move toward Stoic calm should be seen in a more discrete, individualized context, namely, his psychological development from the ‘sweet grief’ of the vernacular love poet to the sterner ways of the Latin humanist and moralist.” 15 What is here called the Eliasian approach was anticipated by Dutch historian Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen. 16 Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. The English translation was first published in 1968; the French translation came out in the 1970s; the Italian translation dates from the early 80s. I here quote from the revised edition of the English translation: Elias, Civilizing Process. 17 For a fuller account of Elias’s theory and its implications for the history of emotions, see Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 7-10. 18 Elias, Civilizing Process, 542 n. 128, continuing with the observation that “differences of size always bring with them qualitative differences of structure.... At any rate the account given by

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As a consequence, for historians convinced by the explanatory power of Elias’s global vision, Renaissance Italy became another example of the pre-absolutist Middle Ages, with its impulsivity, violence, and emotional volatility. Edward Muir’s 1993 study of the Friulan nobility is a good example, though he did credit some unspecified Renaissance courts with initiating the civilizing process.19 In the early sixteenth century, Muir said, Friulans were caught in a web of vendettas, in “a pattern of stimulus and response which derived its forms of representation from the cultural precepts about how to express certain emotions.”20 These precepts changed after 1511. “By the middle sixteenth century,” observed Muir, “one of the great transformations in the history of emotions, which had taken hold in the social hothouse of the Renaissance courts, appeared among some Friulan aristocrats, a transformation from externalizing anger and projecting it onto other persons or even animals to internalizing it by adopting the self-control of good manners.”21 Observing that those new manners required courtiers to give up their old eating habits, Muir elaborated on the work of Norbert Elias: “Just by adopting refined table manners, such as using a fork and napkin, courteous men and women distanced themselves from their food, creating a layer of manners which, in separating them from direct contact with bodies and with animals, severed the habitual connections of millennia and produced a new sensitivity. ... Thus good manners repressed emotions.”22 Coming from another tradition not directly dependent on Elias but, nevertheless, echoing Elias’s view of the warrior class, Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur wrote about the psychology of the professional military lineages (the milites) of the Italian communes.23 Though focusing on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Maire Vigueur’s argument was relevant to Renaissance Italy because, as he said, the milites’ “comportment and values” were “of long duration.”24 They valorized war, living to plunder and fostering a “culture of hatred.”25 According to Maire Vigueur, the hegemony of this group and the Venetian ambassador [quoted 356-60] and its whole tone does not indicate that he regarded the specific power position of the French king and the organization of finances connected to it as something long familiar in Italy.” 19 Muir, Mad Blood Stirring. 20 Ibid., xxiv. 21 Ibid., xxv. 22 Ibid., 163, with explicit reference to Elias on 197 n. 2. 23 Maire Vigueur, Cavaliers et citoyens. 24 Ibid., 308. 25 Ibid., 307 for “culture de la haine.”

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its values eventually waned in the wake of the new powers of the podestà and the popolo. The new milites pro comune that resulted from this political revolution fought not for pleasure or plunder or because their lineages depended on cultivating hatreds but because they were conscripted and subject to a bureaucracy that evaluated their ability to provide a mount, paid for the expenses of war, and “pursued the absent and the undisciplined.”26 The new system corresponded to “the demands of rationality” of a growing administration.27 Although Maire Vigueur did not speak of “civilizing,” his approach was nevertheless within the Eliasian tradition. 3

The Performative Approach

Well before Maire Vigueur’s book appeared, however, a new and different – a “performative” – approach to Renaissance emotional life was already underway. The idea of performatives was first proposed in 1955 by the philosopher J. L. Austin, who noted that certain utterances, such as “I pronounce you man and wife,” did not simply describe or command but transformed one thing into another.28 Performatives were constitutive, as in this case, when (if spoken by the proper person) it created a marriage. Some twenty years later, Robert Solomon applied the idea to the emotions. “We might say,” he wrote, “that the emotions are preverbal analogues of ... ‘performatives’ – judgments that do something rather than simply describe or evaluate a state of affairs.... Anger is not merely a report or a ‘reaction’ to an [offensive comment]; it declares that the comment is offensive,” much as the marriage officiant declares two people married.29 This idea worked well for historians interested in Renaissance self-fashioning, which included calculating one’s friends and enemies and making sense of a world bereft of clear social demarcations.30 An even more important legacy of the performative school for scholars of the Italian Renaissance has been the idea that emotions either ratify a 26 Ibid., 389. 27 Ibid., 390. 28 Austin, How to Do Things with Words. 29 Solomon, The Passions, 196. 30 For the emphasis on emotions in Renaissance self-fashioning, see Bouwsma, “Anxiety and the Formation,” and James and Kent, “Renaissance Friendships,” 117. In the late 1990s, William Reddy coined the term “emotives” because, in his view, emotions not only help constitute the world but also have “shaping effects” on the one who feels (already Solomon’s point, in fact). See Reddy, “Against Constructionism,” 331-40, further elaborated in Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 125-26.

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particular social order or challenge it to respond. Behind these studies is the extension of the idea of performatives to “performativity,” assimilating emotions to the sorts of gestures that are involved in rituals, theater, and dance. Thus already in 1985, Guido Ruggiero was suggesting that in fifteenth-century Venice, love between the nobleman Domenico Contarini and the non-noble Gratiosa compelled their contemporaries to make certain judgments: Domenico was adjudged “mad,” and Gratiosa was convicted of black magic.31 Ruggiero pointed out, however, that in other instances, love was actually allowed to trump dowry and that “affection and mutual attraction were becoming for some an important aspect of marriage.”32 Here we see how one historian of Renaissance Italy argued, in effect, that the Burckhardtian feelings of Renaissance men might transform social practices. While Ruggiero was exploring sexuality and love in several studies,33 other Renaissance historians were working on grief within the performative paradigm. In 1994, Diane Owen Hughes published an essay using this approach for public mourning in the Italian communes. City statutes in Piedmont and Umbria, she pointed out, vigorously penalized men’s displays of grief, apparently leaving the “burden of mourning” to women.34 But urban legislation increasingly removed women as well as men from the public arena during funerals, confining them and their grief to the domestic, private space of the household. By controlling traditional expressions of grief, in which women bared their breasts and let down their hair, the cities created “new boundaries” that prevented the “rupture of culturally constructed relations” such as status. Hughes’s emphasis was thus on controlling not emotions per se, but rather their performance. Carol Lansing’s study of the restraint of grief combined even more clearly the Burckhardtian emphasis on feeling with the performative emphasis on 31 Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros, 33-5. 32 Ibid., 36; see also 65-7, 81-2, 157-58. 33 Ruggiero, Binding Passions, where an Eliasian emphasis on the restraint of emotion is combined with observations about the performative work of those bound passions in “forming individuals and society” (13). At the same time, Ruggiero suggests that what looks like subversion might simply express the values and assumptions of certain subcultures: “It is evident that not all people in a society participate in culture in the same way, and often it appears that rather than one culture in a given society, we are encountering various shades of culture or even several distinct cultures” (15). This anticipates my notion of “emotional communities” as discussed in Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, esp. 20-9. Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love, 45, tentatively adds control over “play” during the Renaissance to supplement Elias’s emphasis on the implementation of good manners. 34 Hughes, “Mourning Rites,” 27.

22 Barbar a H. Rosenwein

its public use and display. Explicitly rejecting the Eliasian approach that the control of emotions denoted a “civilizing process,” Lansing argued that in late medieval Italy, men – particularly noble men – were expected to express “sorrow with tears and loud laments, even gestures of self-mutilation, and did so in the streets.”35 These rituals both had affective meaning and performed a function: “the show of grief measured ... community, the honor and loyalty of the living as well as the depth of their loss.”36 However, in the second half of the thirteenth century, city lawmakers strove to associate dramatic gestures of grief with women, sensuality, and lack of reason. They thus linked the new-fledged commune to a certain type of decorum defined as male and rational. Now restraining grief, rather than displaying it, performed the task of ratifying the political order.37 4

The “Linguistic Turn”

Thus far, the approaches to emotions have looked rather little at the full corpus of emotional expression of any one group; they have looked at grief or longing or hatred more or less in isolation. But new interest in “the ways meaning is constituted in and through language” represented by the socalled “linguistic turn,” has recently led some historians to focus on the full affective language of Renaissance Italy.38 This is what I term the linguistic approach. An early example is Lauro Martines, who studied the words used by vernacular poets of the Renaissance referring to “love, anger, and fear” and other matters pertaining to “strategies for living in city-states.”39 More recent is Marco Gentile’s response to Maire Vigueur’s emphasis on noble odium. “The word hatred,” he noted, “which, together with enmity (inimicitia) refers to the vocabulary of conflict ... takes into account only a small portion of the aristocratic political culture, which, in the opposite perspective ... could be easily defined [as] a culture of friendship or even a culture of love. ... In general terms, the relations of power between a lord 35 Lansing, Passion and Order, 218. 36 Ibid., 219. 37 In non-Italian histories of emotion for the same period, the performative tradition has dealt with many topics beyond grief. See, for example, Offenstadt, Faire la paix. It is therefore striking that in the case of Renaissance Italy, grief, the restraint of grief, and the gender implications of such restraint have constituted the major focus. See, e.g., Blanchfield, “The Sincere Body”; Levy, “Augustine’s Concessions.” The same is true in art historical studies: see Barasch, Gestures of Despair; Steinhoff, “Weeping Women.” 38 See Toews, “Intellectual History,” 881. 39 Martines, Strong Words, xiii.

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and both his subjects and friends is described as a relationship of mutual love and friendship.”40 Gentile quoted the words of love that the lord of Busseto, Gian Ludovico Pallavicini, used in his will in 1497: “his widow and his heir were supposed to “love the men (ament et diligant) with every possible benevolence, love and charity,’” while, for their part, the men were to “love, honour and obey” Gian Ludovico’s heirs. A half-century before that, the members of the Rossi family, who were building and consolidating a rural lordship in the region around Parma, addressed their “clients,” both within the city and without, as their “friends” (amici). Such words, used in the particular context of clientage and dependency, were not “mere rhetoric:” in fifteenth-century Lombardy, subjection to the personal rule of a local lord was often felt to be preferable to the jurisdiction of the city, which usually manifested itself in the form of predatory tax collectors. 41 Isabella Lazzarini’s study of the language of emotion in Italian diplomatic correspondence is partly in the performative tradition and partly in the Burckhardtian mode. 42 But it is above all in the linguistic tradition. Lazzerini was particularly interested in finding the different emotional registers in which the Florentine diplomat Rinaldo degli Albizzi worked and was understood. Contemporaries recorded him in different moods. The chronicler Giovanni Cavalcanti, for example, speaking of the possibilities of peace with the duke of Milan in 1423, quoted Rinaldo in a threatening mood: “if ... the duke doesn’t become more civil, then we’ll unsheathe our swords.”43 But the Florentine Consulte e pratiche of 1429 quoted a more encouraging Rinaldo, urging war viriliter against Paolo Guinigi, lord of Lucca. Meanwhile, in his own diplomatic correspondence, Rinaldo wrote on many levels of “formality and familiarity.” Lazzarini noted, for example, that his letters to the public authority were largely dry and formulaic, though shot through with emotional moments. His letters to kin, friends, and clients were less guarded. During the war of 1429 against Paolo Guinigi, when Rinaldo was himself in the field of battle but without the provisions of money and troops that he needed, he wrote to his son, “Patience is the perfect virtue when things come out well; and so the opposite [impatience] when things turn 40 Gentile, “Hatred and Love.” See also Gentile’s essay in this volume. 41 Gentile, “Giustizia, protezione, amicizia,” 8-9; Gentile, “Discorsi sulle fazioni.” See also Chittolini, “Il luogo di Mercato,” emphasizing the desire of the inhabitants of the loci and villae around Parma to maintain their independence from the city, which, after the return of the Visconti in 1420, was trying to claim extensive jurisdictional and fiscal power over the countryside. 42 Lazzarini, “Argument and Emotion.” 43 “Ma se ... il Duca non torni alle convenevoli cose, allora la spada si cavi dal fodero,” quoted in Lazzarini, “Argument and Emotion,” 349.

24 Barbar a H. Rosenwein

out badly – which clearly I know likely to occur in this case. So, [with this] as for the other things I’ve told you. And I did not write above ‘anger,’ but I wrote intentionally either ‘cold or hot.’”44 This is an example of emotions’ reflexive performativity, 45 a way to express the feeling of anger and at the same time to rename and reassess it as a form of “impatience.” Above all, Lazzarini furthered the discussion of emotions in the Italian Renaissance by taking into account the wide range of possibilities for emotional expression offered by its fusion of the medieval Latin heritage, a rich treasury of vernacular idioms, and the recent influx of classical Latin writings. 46 The consequence was not simply that Florentines could wield a huge vocabulary of emotion terms – though that is important enough – but also that they gained new models by which they might confront, make sense of, and react to their world. Lazzarini and Gentile are not alone; indeed, they represent something of a movement, a quite recent emotional turn in Italian Renaissance studies that takes into account at one and the same time emotions’ expressivity, performativity, and linguistic dependency. 47 In a paper for a Paris seminar in 2010, Lazzarini adopted an idea that I have suggested: to look at the emotions expressed by emotional communities. 48 In this instance, Lazzarini considered the corpus of the correspondence of Rinaldo and Lorenzo de’ Medici together, as representative of the emotional community of the Florentine elite. 49 The idea of emotional communities is also a way to theorize Ruggiero’s observation that a subgroup of the Venetian elite may well have had a different attitude toward love than those who condemned the lovers Domenico and Gratiosa: these elites did not all belong to the same emotional community.

44 “La pazienza esser virtù perfetta quando la fine è buona; e così l’opposito, quando fosse il contrario: come chiaro conosco interverrebbe in questo caso. Pertanto, come per più altre t’ho detto; e none scritto sopra ira, ma deliberatamente scritto, e a freddo e a caldo,” quoted in Lazzarini, “Argument and Emotion,” 352. 45 Or, rather, its emotive character, as defined by Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 128. 46 Lazzarini, “Discours émotionnel.” To the purely linguistic repertory of emotional expressions must be added gestures, as in Lazzarini, “Il gesto diplomatico.” 47 For further examples, see Bullard, “Lorenzo and Patterns of Diplomatic Discourse”; for sincerity as against “buone parole” as a major concern for fifteenth-century Italian diplomats, see Bullard, Lorenzo il Magnifico, chapters 2 and 3. See also Horodowich, Language and Statecraft. 48 See Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, esp. 20-9. 49 Lazzarini, “Discours émotionnel.”

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Putting Theory and Practice Together The linguistic approach suggests an additional methodological step that would put theory and lived emotions together. Rather than take modern emotion terms and look for their equivalents in the past, we should find the emotions of the past from its own vocabulary and even its own theories of emotion. Why should we do this? Because terms that have emotional resonance for us today did not always have affective valence, while words that expressed emotions in the past do not always continue to do so today.50 To be sure, we will find considerable overlap among past and present terms, especially in the case of a Western society like Renaissance Italy, whose vocabulary and sensibilities are in many ways ancestors of our own. Yet important differences exist, not only in the terms used but also in the sorts of emotions that were stressed or deemphasized.51 Thus, to give an example, one might consider the Dialogus consolatorius (1438) of Giannozzo Manetti (d. 1459), a Florentine diplomat of Rinaldo’s day.52 Written to console himself upon the death of one of his sons, the dialogue opposed the Stoic and antiStoic positions on grief.53 Since Manetti himself wrote the book in Latin and a year later translated it into the vernacular, the dialogue offers the historian a large inventory of Manetti’s emotion words and preoccupations. Moreover, its many extant copies from the fifteenth century alone suggest that it spoke to more than just a small group.54 Armed with a list of Manetti’s terms, along with a sense of his preoccupations and an idea of the theory of emotions implicit in his work, the historian will have a non-anachronistic way to approach non-theoretical materials, such as letters. The list of terms will include words such as dolor, lamentationes, and fletus in Latin and doglia, pianti, and lamenti in Italian.55 Of course! This is what we should expect in a treatise on consolation. But I found these words by noting that dolor was a key term associated by Manetti with words for the emotions such as affectus, aegritudines, 50 Consider, for example, Rinaldo’s substitution of “impatience” for “anger” above, at n. 44. 51 On this point, see Cohen, Love and Death, 13, where we cannot fully grasp the feelings of people of the past: “The harder we try, as readers or writers, to lay a handsome shape upon the past, the more aware we grow that our story grasps in vain to clasp its subjects – real people, with real passions, very long ago.” Nevertheless, Cohen does not seek to overcome this problem but simply to express the unknowability of past feelings. 52 On Manetti’s career, see Manetti, Biographical Writings, vii-xi. 53 Manetti, Dialogus consolatorius. On this work see De Petris, “Giannozzo Manetti’ and Schaeben, Trauer. 54 See Manetti, Dialogus consolatorius, liii-lxix for the manuscript tradition. 55 Ibid., 30-1 (21).

26 Barbar a H. Rosenwein

and perturbationes, and in Italian, molestie and passion.56 Moreover, also associated with dolor were notions of joy as well, such as rallegrare e congratulare.57 Contradictory emotions such as these arise in part because Manetti presented several different theories of emotions. One theory said that sorrow (and by extension each emotion) was a learned convention (opinio) and thus not natural.58 Perhaps it was just such an idea that buttressed anti-mourning legislation in Florence. By contrast, the “Giannozzo” character – i.e., Manetti himself – of the dialogue argued that grieving was natural to “those who are more human (humaniores).”59 Words, preoccupations, theories: these should be useful tools not only for studying the non-theoretical texts of Manetti himself and of his immediate peers60 but also for the sources produced by other communities that read and valued his work. To be sure, Manetti is only one source useful for such inquiries. This paper began by noting that Renaissance Italy plays a rather small role in the history of emotions. It ends on a happier note. Historians are discovering new aspects of Renaissance political life and preoccupations by looking at emotions in the context of groups of peers and contemporaries. Meanwhile, the waning hegemony of the Eliasian model allows for a new appreciation of Trecento and Quattrocento Italy. The Burckhardtian, performative, and linguistic approaches do not oppose an era of impulsivity to one of restraint but rather see expressive and constative potential in a wide variety of emotional norms, practices, and vocabularies. The emotional communities of the Italian Renaissance are beginning to take their rightful place among the many other communities of Western Europe, no longer necessarily as avatars of modernity but rather as exemplars of human affective possibilities.

56 Ibid., 20 (4), (7)-21 (4), (7) 57 Ibid., 23 (10). These vernacular terms translate the Latin letandum. See ibid., 24 (10). 58 De Petris, “Giannozzo Manetti,” 504. 59 Ibid., 507. A third theory agreed that emotions were natural but based this notion not (like the other two) on the authority of the ancients but on the legacy of Christianity and its notion of original sin. 60 “At the house of Manetti the most scholarly men of Florence gathered: Angelo Acciaiuoli, Benedetto and Matteo Strozzi, Alessandro Arrighi, Antonio Barbadoro”: De Petris, “Giannozzo Manetti,” 520. This, in my view, constituted a social, and thus very likely an emotional, community.

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Works Cited Austin, John Langshaw. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Barasch, Moshe. Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art. New York: New York University Press, 1976. Blanchfield, Lyn. “The Sincere Body: The Performance of Weeping and Emotion in Late Medieval Italian Sermons.” Quidditas: Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 20 (1999): 117-25. Bouwsma, William J. “Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture.” In William J. Bouwsma, A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History, chapter 6. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Bullard, Monica Meriam. “Lorenzo and Patterns of Diplomatic Discourse in the Late Fifteenth Century.” In Lorenzo the Magnificent: Culture and Politics, ed. by Michael Mallett and Nicholas Mann, 263-74. London: Warburg Institute, 1996. —. Lorenzo il Magnifico: Image and Anxiety, Politics and Finance. Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1994. Burckhardt, Jacob. Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ein Versuch. Basel: Schweighauser, 1860. —. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Trans. by Samuel George Chetwynd Middlemore. New York: A.C. Boni, 1935. Chittolini, Giorgio. “Il luogo di Mercato, il comune di Parma e i marchesi Pallavicini di Pellegrino.” In Giorgio Chittolini, La formazione dello stato regionale e le istituzioni del contado. Secoli XIV e XV. 101-80. Turin: G. Einaudi, 1979). 101-80. Cohen, Thomas V. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. De Petris, Antonio. “Giannozzo Manetti and his ‘Consolatoria.’” Bibliothèque de l’humanisme et de la Renaissance 41 (1979): 493-526. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott, ed. by Eric Dunning and Johan Goudsblom. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. —. Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen. 2 vols. Basel: Haus zum Falken, 1939. Ferente, Serena. “Storici ed emozioni.” Storica, 43-5 (2009): 371-92. Gentile, Marco. “Discorsi sulle fazioni, discorsi delle fazioni. ‘Parole e demonstratione partiale’ nella Lombardia del secondo Quattrocento.” In Linguaggi politici nell’Italia del Rinascimento, ed. by Andrea Gamberini and Giuseppe Petralia, 383-410. Rome: Viella, 2007. —. “Giustizia, protezione, amicizia: note sul dominio dei Rossi nel Parmense all’inizio del Quattrocento.” Reti Medievali Rivista, 5-2004/1 (gennaio-giugno): 1-16. http://www.rm.unina. it/rmebook/dwnld/poteri/gentile.pdf —. “Hatred and Love, Friendship and Enmity in the Political Culture of the Lombard Landed Nobility (Late Fourteenth-Early Sixteenth Century).” Presentation, Renaissance Society of America annual meeting, Venice, 8-10 April 2010. Graver, Margaret. Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Horodowich, Elizabeth. Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Hughes, Diane Owen. “Mourning Rites, Memory, and Civilization in Premodern Italy.” In Riti e rituali nelle società medievali, ed. by Jacques Chiffoleau, Lauro Martines, and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, 23-38. Spoleto: CISAM, 1994.

28 Barbar a H. Rosenwein Huizinga, Johan. Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen: Studie over levens- en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden. Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink, 1919. James, Carolyn and Bill Kent. “Renaissance Friendships: Traditional Truths, New and Dissenting Voices.” In Friendship: A History, ed. by Barbara Caine, 111-64. London: Equinox, 2009. King, Margaret L. “An Inconsolable Father and His Humanist Consolers: Jacopo Antonio Marcello, Venetian Nobleman, Patron, and Man of Letters.” In Supplementum Festivum: Studies in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. by James Hankins, John Monfasani, and Frederick Purnell, Jr, 221-46. Binghamton, N. Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987. —. The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Kraye, Jill. “Francesco Filelfo on Emotions, Virtues and Vices: A Re-examination of his Sources.” In Jill Kraye, Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy, article V. Aldershot: Hampshire, England, 2002. Lansing, Carol. Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Communes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Lazzarini, Isabella. “Argument and Emotion in Italian Diplomacy in the Early Fifteenth Century: The Case of Rinaldo degli Albizzi (Florence, 1399-1430).” In The Languages of Political Society: Western Europe, 14th-17th Centuries, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, Jean-Philippe Genêt, and Andrea Zorzi, 339-64. Rome: Viella, 2011. —. “Discours émotionnel, discours argumentatif dans les échanges diplomatiques de l’Italie bas médiévale. Quelques réflexions autour des correspondances florentines au XVe siècle.” Paper presented at l’EHESS, Paris, organized by Stéphane Péquignot and Sylvio de Franceschi, 12 June 2010. —. “Il gesto diplomatico fra comunicazione politica, grammatica delle emozioni, linguaggio delle scritture (Italia, XV secolo).” In Gesto-Immagine tra antico e moderno. Riflessioni sulla comunicazione non verbale, ed. by Monica Baggio and Monica Salvadori, 75-93. Rome: Quasar, 2009. Levy, Allison. “Augustine’s Concessions and Other Failures: Mourning and Masculinity in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany.” In Grief and Gender: 700-1700, ed. by Jennifer C. Vaught with Lynne Dickson Bruckner, 81-94. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Maire Vigueur, Jean-Claude. Cavaliers et citoyens. Guerre, conflits et société dans l’Italie communale, XIIe-XIIIe siècles. Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2003. Manetti, Giannozzo. Biographical Writings. Ed. and trans. Stefano Ugo Baldassarri and Rolf Bagemihl. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. —. Dialogus consolatorius. Ed. by Antonio de Petris. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1983. Martines, Lauro. Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. McClure, George W. “A Little-Known Renaissance Manual of Consolation: Nicolaus Modrussiensis’s De consolatione, 1465-1466.” In Supplementum Festivum: Studies in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. by James Hankins, John Monfasani, and Frederick Purnell, Jr, 247-77. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987. —. Review of Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Communes, by Carol Lansing. The American Historical Review 114(2009): 472-73. —. Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. McManamon, John M. Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Muir, Edward. Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

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Offenstadt, Nicolas. Faire la paix au moyen âge. Discours et gestes de paix pendant la guerre de Cent Ans. Paris: O. Jacob, 2007. Perler, Dominik. Transformationen der Gefühle. Philosophische Emotionstheorien, 1270-1670. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2011. Quillen, Carol. “The Uses of the Past in Quattrocento Florence: A Reading of Leonardo Bruni’s Dialogues.” Journal of the History of Ideas 71 (2010): 363-85. Reddy, William M. “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,” Current Anthropology 38 (1997): 327-40. —. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Ruggiero, Guido. Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. —. Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. —. The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Schaeben, Ulrike. Trauer im humanistischen Dialog. Das Trostgespräch des Giannozzo Manetti und seine Quellen. Munich: K. G. Saur, 2002. Solomon, Robert. The Passions. Garden City: Anchor Press, 1976. Steinhoff, Judith. “Weeping Women: Social Roles and Images in Fourteenth-Century Tuscany.” In Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, ed. by Elina Gertsman, 35-52. New York: Routledge, 2012. Tambling, Jeremy. Dante in Purgatory: States of Affect. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion. Ed. by Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Toews, John E. “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience.” American Historical Review 92 (1987): 879-907. Trinkaus, Charles Edward, Adversity’s Noblemen: The Italian Humanists on Happiness. New York: Octagon Books, 1965. —. In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. London: Constable, 1970.

2

The Emotional Language of Justice in Late Medieval Italy Fabrizio Ricciardelli

The consequences of emotions undergird the languages and institutions of society. The physical and mental capacity to have emotions is universal, but the way these are expressed depends on the personal tendencies and cultural norms shared within the social community where they are manifested. Lucien Febvre wrote in 1941 that emotions are constructed, shaped, and shared by the societies from which they arise and have an essential weight in the culture they themselves have generated, so that “emotional life [is] always ready to overflow the intellectual life.”1 More recently, Barbara H. Rosenwein maintained that “emotions depend on language, cultural practices, expectations, and moral beliefs. This means that every culture has its rules for feelings and behavior; every culture thus exerts certain restraints while favoring certain forms of expressivity ... they are created by each society, each culture, each community.”2 She added, “People lived – and live – in ... ‘emotional communities.’ These are precisely the same as social communities – families, neighborhoods, parliaments, guilds, monasteries, parish church memberships – but the researcher looking at them seeks above all to uncover systems of feeling: what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them; the evaluations that they make about others’ emotions; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.”3 The language of justice adopted in the political trials that took place in urban society during the age of the communes is one of the starting points for reading the process of disciplining set in motion, beginning in this period, all over the western world. The strongly emotional language found in the sources is aimed at creating consent by repressing dissent. The numerous public trials celebrated in communal Italy, and the exemplary 1 Febvre, “La sensibilité et l’histoire,” 5-20. 2 Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” 837; Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” http://www.passionsincontext.de. 3 Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” 842. See also Stearns and Zisowitz Stearns, “Emotionology,” 813-36; and Stearns and Zisowitz Stearns, Anger.

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sentences meted out, reveal the necessity of those in power to legitimate themselves in the eyes of all of society. The trials and sentences appear as symbolic acts whose purpose is the control of a city-state in the grip of violent emotions, with a strong impact on the strategies of the political alliances, undermining their stability at its very base. 4 Political exclusion plays a central role in the study of the language of justice in the age of the communes. For some years now, scholars have paid increasing attention to the different forms in which this practice of justice has been expressed. Numerous studies have brought out how political exclusion became an instrument of justice usually utilized at the end of street conflicts between individuals or whole families. The emotional impact determined by sentences handed down by the city courts has the effect of exile, about which historians of law debate whether it should be considered a move on the part of an individual to escape a specific punishment or a real penal sanction. The force and power of exile are very clear even in classical antiquity if we remember that in Roman law, which would influence greatly the constitutions of the cities in Italy during the age of the communes, this juridical practice was an option offered to a citizen to escape punishment by running away. The praxis was thus considered in antiquity to be a refuge granted to someone sent extra solum, in other words, one forced to live outside the bounds of his home community.5 The communal society that developed in northern and central Italy in the late Middle Ages complicates the methods of this political praxis, thus exclusion practiced by the public authorities – even though it always resulted in the denial of community privileges – began to be imposed by means of the ban, a monetary fine usually so high that it was practically impossible to pay, which implied an indirect and sophisticated form of exclusion. Around the turn of the fourteenth century, the holders of political power found themselves in the condition of judging political opponents using the formula of the political trial in which were handed down exemplary sentences aimed at repressing dissent by way of messages directed towards the watching citizenry. Florence, for example, experienced during this period at the end of the thirteenth and the early years of the fourteenth centuries a transition from an aristocratic-type government to one based on popular support, from a phase of consul/podestà rule in which the old landed aristocracy, now living in the city, were in charge of its government, to a phase in which the people, thus the guilds, held the levers of power. 4 Lansing, Passion and Order, 30-7 and 159-71. 5 Ricciardelli, “Le modalità dell’esclusione politica,” 32-48.

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While in the first phase it was the Guelphs and Ghibellines (both factions made up of the nobility) who wrested political power back and forth from each other, handing out, when they were on the winning side, bans and exile to their defeated enemies, in the second phase the government of the guilds used these political tools, systematically excluding a nobility no longer in fashion and associated with violence and political dissidence.6 When a sentence of ban was issued, it was not so much a sanction inherited from long-standing customs as it was a safeguard adopted by authorities against the failure to execute an order. The etymological root of ban comes from the German binden (to bind), because the sovereign binds the community to himself by means of a command, punishing those who transgress against it. The necessity to punish internal enemies takes concrete form in variable procedures that can be connected with the different images of them taking shape in the various political, economic, cultural, and social situations of the Italian communes. If initially, especially in its perpetual version, the ban was a highly versatile tool which could be used against political opponents, murderers, and counterfeiters indiscriminately, in the course of the thirteenth century it began to be utilized also for those who committed petty crimes. Considered in the same category as ordinary criminals, political enemies became guilty of having made an attempt on the juridical functions of the commune and its property and putting the city’s institutions and prosperity at risk, thus threatening the life of the community. During the fourteenth century it evolved further; on one hand we see a criminalization of political offenses, and on the other a politicization of common crime, both of them viewed as criminal events that undermine public authority. The sanctions against those who committed these crimes had to be severe; therefore, perpetual exile became the inevitable punishment. This phenomenon was the result of the progressive centralization of power in the hands of the highest echelons of the city, who were busy imposing a public character on any behavior deviating from government decisions. Thus political ban was used as a tool for acquiring and preserving power.7 In the language adopted by the judiciary system in the age of the communes, the citation ordered by the judge usually indicates the names 6 Ricciardelli, The Politics of Exclusion, 7-57 (“The Legal Forms of Exclusion”). On this topic, see also Sanfilippo, “Gli esuli di antico regime,” 143-60. More in general, see Agamben, “Politica dell’esilio,” 25-7. 7 Cavalca, Il bando, 17-100 and 42-58. See also Ghisalberti, “La condanna al bando,” 24-37; Pazzaglini, The Criminal Ban; and Ascheri, Il bando, 319-23.

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of the presiding judge and the defendant, and the reason for coming to trial. In Florence, for example, the statutes of the podestà of 1325 call for the citation to be read aloud in the streets of the city by the town crier on horseback, after trumpet calls, in front of the defendant’s house and in the most frequented places of the six city districts. It also called for the six town criers, one for each district, to present a written report that the proclamations had been effected in the most important places in the city.8 Once the citations had been carried out, the magistrate proceeded to “find out the reason for the facts” (rerum cognoscere causas) and to acquire judiciary evidence of the crime, either from witnesses or a confession or on the strength of legal presumption resulting from the absence or flight of the defendant. The judge then fixed a date by which the criminal had to appear and handed down a punishment – usually a fine – in the case of a defendant being declared guilty in absentia. If the defendant was present at the trial, the judge obligated him to swear to the truth and then questioned him concerning the accusation against him. The questioning took place in a public hearing, with the answers being transcribed by a notary. If the defendant did not confess, the Statute of the People and Commune of Florence stated that the judge should authorize the practice of torture, granting the defendant one day’s time to respond before the torture was enacted. After twenty hours had passed, the judge could proceed with torture, in the presence of a notary whose task was to record confessions in writing.9 In cases in which the criminal was prosecuted “because of public knowledge,” two witnesses were sufficient to affirm the truth of the charge against him. If the defendant was a magnate and his offense was against a commoner, one witness was enough. If the defendant did not appear at the trial, and his absence could not be explained by any of his relatives, he was considered to be in absentia, and his absence was viewed as confession of the crime with which he was charged. In cases when the defendant did show up as directed, he was put on trial, and if his innocence was evident then the judge could proceed with acquittal. The Florentine statutes confirm that if the judge’s sentence called for corporal punishment, this had to be carried out immediately; if the punishment was pecuniary in nature (ban), the convicted person had to be given time to gather together the 8 “In locis consuetis et etiam in qualibet parocchia cuiuslibet canonice et populi et etiam in qualibet contrata et burgo minutatim sui sextus’: “Statuto del Podestà dell’anno 1325,” vol. II, book 1, 38. 9 De offitio trium iudicum maleficiorum, in “Statuto del Podestà dell’anno 1325,” vol. II, book 3, 164-8.

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financial resources necessary to pay his fine to the commune. In cases in which the convicted person let the time established by the judge run out, and thus did not pay the amount decreed by the court, the judge had the authority to hand down a second sentence to convert the fine into physical punishment. By assigning to the judge the ability to investigate, put on trial, condemn, ban, exile, and subject to torture, the statutes gave this magistrate unlimited power of judgment, leaving defendants his honesty as their only guarantee of justice. The podestà, assisted by judges (who advised him in handing down sentences) and notaries (who acted as clerks of the court), administered justice in civil and criminal matters. The judges in his court were assigned areas of competence based on the type of crime to be adjudicated.10 Paul R. Hyams has shown that in Norman England, even though the monarchy offered increasing judiciary instruments and the church a system of values for making peace, men and women continued for a long time to prefer vendettas and feuds as ways of redressing wrongs; compared to a desire for reconciliation, these afforded full satisfaction to emotional rancor.11 Studying the judicial documents of Marseilles from mid-thirteenth century to the beginning of the fifteenth, Daniel Lord Smail brought out that the contenders used the arena of court trials not so much as a place for rational confrontation as rather a stage on which to express their emotions, rancor, and insults publicly, and in this way to take revenge on their enemies in front of a community of onlookers with whom to negotiate social sanctions.12 Kiril Petkov has devoted a study to the rite of reconciliation with a kiss exchanged by the two parties as a sign of peace in various late medieval societies, stressing the “emotional economy” of this ritual, examining the motives of the two sides, the effects of gestures, and the mnemonic use of the body as tools for constructing a value system consistent with morality and the social order.13 Investigating the emotions of revenge in the early Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein highlighted how each “emotional community,” each social group that expresses its evaluations and emotional expressions in a specific way perceived the emotions of revenge differently, as a family 10 De officio iudicum collateralium Potestatis, in “Statuto del Podestà dell’anno 1325,” vol. II, book 1, p. 18; and De offitio sex iudicum Potestatis , in “Statuto del Podestà dell’anno 1325,” vol. II, book 1, 18-19. 11 Hyams, “Nastiness and Wrong,” 195-218; Hyams, Rancor & Reconciliation. See also Miller, Humiliation. 12 Smail, “Hatred,” 90-126. 13 Petkov, The Kiss of Peace. See also Frijhoff, “The Kiss Sacred and Profane,” 210-36; Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche au moyen âge’; and Vollrath, The Kiss of Peace, 162-83.

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duty to be carried out without anger, as a state of envy, or as an expression of cruelty.14 The hostility rife in Italian cities during the age of the communes fits in the channel of these analyses. In the course of the thirteenth century, the cities were torn apart by the struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, and in the closing years of the century by the division of the Guelph party into White and Black Guelphs. These divisions gave rise to alliances, clienteles, and protections, but also the capacity to attract followers and to become the head of a coalition that could lead, for a more or less long time and thanks to the distancing of all opponents, the entire structure of the city. Dante’s lines help us understand the situation in one of the most important city-states of central and northern Italy, Florence, seen by the poet as a restless patient who tosses and turns in bed in search of a position that will ease her agitation (“like that sick woman / who finds no rest upon her feather-bed, / but, turning, tossing, tries to ease her pain,”15) controlled by a complex judiciary system that helps make it impossible for one person or group to be definitively dominant. Referring to the late thirteenth-century confrontations between White and Black Guelphs, Dante wrote: “After long controversy / they’ll come to blood; the party of the woods / will chase the other out with much offense. / But then, within three suns, they too must fall; / at which the other party will prevail, / using the power of one who tacks his sails.”16 Here the poet gives us once again an image of a city in the throes of a continually shifting political balance, condemned to be the stage for the clash between opposing factions constantly fighting each other for power.17 The political power intrinsic in each community as a mystic body must not be imperiled. The social body is sacred, just as the space that encompasses it is sacred. Anyone who places himself outside this axiom contravenes against a set of shared rules that find their foundation in communal society. Anyone who attacks the bonum commune cannot remain 14 Rosenwein, “Visualizing a Dispute Resolution,” 85-107; Rosenwein, “Les émotions de la vengeance,” 237-57; and Rosenwein, Emotional Communities. 15 “A quella inferma / che non può trovar posa in su le piume, / ma con dar volta suo dolore scherma”: Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, Purgatorio, VI, 148-51 (online translation: http:// www.worldofdante.org/comedy/dante/purgatory.xml/2.6). 16 “Dopo lunga tencione / verranno al sangue, e la parte selvaggia / caccerà l’altra con molta offensione. / Poi appresso convien che questa caggia / infra tre soli, e che l’altra sormonti / con la forza di tal che testé piaggia”: Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, Inferno, VI, 64-9 (online translation: http://www.worldofdante.org/comedy/dante/inferno.xml/1.6). 17 Pini, Città, comuni, 96-7.

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a part of the civic consortium because he is a source of disturbance. He must be put outside. The dichotomy between center and periphery, inside and outside, is pronounced in the communal cities, and it is precisely through this image of spatial differentiation – as an integral element of the organization of society – that the repression of murderers, thieves, homosexuals, heretics, and political dissidents can be legitimated. All those who transgress against the shared laws, those who threaten the ethical norms, those who work to overturn the customs and models on which the principles universally recognized by society rest are included in the sphere of “differentness” that leads to repression. Anyone who threatens the public good endangers the unity of the community and automatically legitimates the community’s right to repress him. The threat to the community’s unity must be prevented, and the violent repression against the dissident, as a countermeasure, becomes a sacred act because, as René Girard points out, “general unanimity is a process for changing bad violence into stability and fecundity.”18 The widespread perception among the citizenry of the sacredness of the space inside the city authorizes repression of dissent by public authorities. The degree of ceremonial effectiveness of judicial executions is directly proportional to the ability to make punishment public. Expiation of the punishment each time renews the social bond between communitas and citizens and becomes a political tool to be used to gain consent. The sites of public life, such as the town hall, the church steps, and the main squares are the places where corporal punishments are carried out as a function of the crime committed and in keeping with the social rank of the convicted person. The town square, where traditionally the stocks, pillories, cages, and columns were set up, becomes the place where justice makes an example of public executions, ever more solemn and formal, ever more imbued with codified ritual.19 The statutory laws, as we have seen, called for the sentence to be read aloud in the city streets so that the words declaimed by the town crier would resonate beyond the interested parties to become a clear and obvious warning for the entire community. The town square was the place par 18 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 266. On this topic, see Violence and Civil Disorder; Bruni, La città divisa; and The Culture of Violence. 19 Miglio, “Parola e gesto,” 54-5; and Zorzi, “La costruzione della città giudiziaria,” 226-30. See also Ortalli, “Pingatur in Palatio”; Dean, Crime and Justice; and Pratiques sociales et politiques judiciaires. Specific examples are presented in Ruggiero, Violence in Early Renaissance Venice; and Zorzi, “Le esecuzioni delle condanne a morte a Firenze,” 153-253. On the different forms of political exclusion, see Ricciardelli, “Le Modalità dell’esclusione politica,” 49-62.

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excellence to expose the guilty to public scorn, and the column placed in its center served as a brake on an increase in crime. The Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Summa Theologica that public renown is a result of a person’s good reputation and thus is the only way possible for man to achieve eternity. Infamy is the fate of a condemned felon because this act damages, and thus destroys, his political reputation forever. Communal society legitimated the repressive forms of its judiciary system and welcomed Thomas’s words, considering repute to be an essential element of the justice handed down by the courts through ban, exile, and capital punishment.20 Good and evil became increasingly well-defined social categories among those who were inside or outside the sacred precinct of the city community. The walls of the town hall, the city gates, and the façades facing onto the main square became the canvases for a new kind of painting aimed at degrading the dignity of those who had lost their social standing. The punishment of displaying a picture of betrayers of the social order in the places having the greatest social importance fell to anyone who was found guilty of betrayal, falsification, bankruptcy, or arson. The face of authority was no longer revealed only in the rites of Christian pardon, because now it took concrete form in the repression of dissent and the violence of punishment of offenders against the good government of the community. This type of painting, widespread in Italian cities during the fourteenth century, aimed at stigmatizing a person’s image, irreparably damaging, through an appeal to a strong emotional reaction, his name, respect, and honor.21 The portrayal of capital executions became a well-established subject in the figurative arts. And precisely its spread as a genre helps us grasp better than other forms of witness the degree of reception achieved by this propagandistic expression.22 The lists of executed prisoners include habitual felons, members of marginalized social groups, vagabonds, offenders against shared norms, violators of the rules in effect inside the sacred space, petty criminals, and powerful figures like Walter of Brienne, the Duke of Athens who was not only expelled from Florence but also “painted to spite and shame him.”23 The widespread pedagogy of terror was intended to offer the crowd the sight of the physical mutilation imposed by those in power, whose aim 20 Tommaso d’Aquino, Somma Teologica, ad indicem. On this topic, see Guerra, Una eterna condanna, 88-94. 21 Ricciardelli, “La distruzione della memoria politica,” 135-47. 22 Migliorino, Fama e infamia, 73-83. 23 “Per suo dispetto e onta dipignere’: Villani, Nuova Cronica, vol. 3, book XIII, chapter 34, 378.

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was to wipe out any memory of the enemy in the collective imagination of the entire society. City chronicles describe executions and other scenes of justice, stressing their value as examples. It is not the number of occasions on which these pictures could be displayed or seen that gave a political value to such acts, but rather the symbolic value that rooted them in the collective memory. They are a form of communication that, through images, marks off the passage of time, as shown in Bologna, where a young citizen, after being tortured by the public authorities, confessed to having attempted to detach the fresco defaming his father in the city’s town hall.24 In 1292 in Florence, the regime of the people initiated a repression against the magnates by publicizing their bad behavior; the painter Fino da Tedaldo was given by the commune the commission to paint in the Palazzo del Bargello a defamatory picture of people plundering the state coffers. This was a grotesque allegory whose purpose was not to narrate individual episodes but to stigmatize the greed typical of the magnates and of all who wanted to appropriate the city-state’s resources for themselves.25 In Venice in 1310 the infamy of the memory of the Tiepolo family, who had tried to take power in the city, was stigmatized with an inscription memorializing this attempt at insurrection by placing on a column of the ruined family home an epigraph which read “This land was Bajamonte’s and now, due to his iniquitous betrayal, it is confiscated because he made an attempt on the common good, in order to show everyone how right-minded citizens behave.”26 In the course of the first decade of the fourteenth century, in Siena the councils of the commune discussed this topic assiduously, “in council ... what to do about the falsifiers painted in the palace and houses of the commune of Siena, if these paintings should be erased or not.”27 The council put this same topic on the agenda in 1330, when Simone Martini was given the commission to paint in the Sala dei Nove the upside-down image of Marco Regoli, a rebel against the commune who had been sentenced to die by hanging.28 The Florentine statutes of the Captain of the People of 1322-25 24 Lansing, Passion and Order, 181. 25 Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, vol. V, 602. On the iconology of Justice see Sbriccoli, “La benda della Giustizia,” 41-95. See also Prosperi, Giustizia bendata. 26 “De Bajamonte fo questo terreno, e mo per lo so iniquo tradimento, posto in comun et per l’altrui spavento, e per mostrar a tutti sempre senno”: quoted in Zorzi, “Rituali di violenza,” 411. 27 “In consellio ... che sia da fare de’ falsatori dipenti nel palazo et case del comune di Siena, se esse dipenture sieno da spegnere o no”: Il Costituto del comune di Siena volgarizzato nel MCCCIX-MCCCX, vol. II, 271-72. 28 Frugoni, A Distant City, 88-9.

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point out that punishment in effigy inevitably involved the whole community of workers belonging to the miscreant’s guild because of the stain that spread from the individual to affect the guild itself, and emphasize that if a merchant who had gone bankrupt managed to flee, the podestà and Captain of the People were obliged “to have his likeness painted on the walls of the palace of the Podestà so that it can be seen openly and publicly.”29 Documentation of the age of the communes continually and repeatedly makes evident an atmosphere of civil war with which people had to live constantly and shows us that the social humiliation produced by the condemnations handed out by the judiciary system was never erased by a simple swipe of the sponge. From these conflicts emerge heavy pecuniary sanctions like the destruction of property, hanging, decapitation, burning at the stake, and being dragged through the city tied to the tail of a mule. The emotions aroused by these punishments in the people suffering them and those seeing them enacted give us the measure of the atmosphere of violence in which people were forced to live. Even if the city governments continued to be torn apart by struggles between factions and devastated by street fighting, the common good became an ideological projection of reality. In opposition to this situation of constant conflict, the necessity arose to promote harmony in the city, which could be guaranteed only by a shared recourse to justice. The judiciary system took upon itself the right to place on the margins, exclude, or deprive of life, and assumed the role of guarantor of peaceful civic coexistence, becoming in this way the supreme manifestation of divine sovereignty. The biblical maxim “Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram” (Love justice, you who judge the land30) spread rapidly throughout communal society and took center stage in the language of political propaganda. The emotional language of justice now had to be handled virtuously and became able to reward the good, punish the bad, placate factional conflict, control violence, and ward off tyranny.

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29 “Facere pingi in palatio Potestatis in muro dicti palatii, ita quod videri possit palam et publice”: “Statuto del Capitano del Popolo degli anni 1322-25,” vol. 1, book II, 115. 30 The Sacred Bible, Liber Sapientiae, The Book of Wisdom, 1:1 (http://www.sacredbible.org/ studybible/OT-25_Wisdom.htm), on which see Guzzetti, “Giustizia,” 846-54.

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Ascheri, Mario. “Il bando tra crimine e criminalità.” In Diritto medievale e moderno. Problemi del processo della cultura e delle fonti giuridiche. Rimini: Maggioli Editore, 1991. Bruni, Francesco. La città divisa, Le parti e il bene comune da Dante a Guicciardini. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Carré, Yannick. Le baiser sur la bouche au moyen âge. Rites, symboles, mentalités à travers les textes et les images (XIe-XVe siècles). Paris: Le léopard d’or, 1993. Cavalca, Domenico. Il bando nella prassi e nella dottrina giuridica medievale. Milan: Giuffè, 1978. Cohn, Samuel K. and Fabrizio Ricciardelli, eds. The Culture of Violence in Renaissance Italy. Florence: Le Lettere, 2012. Davidsohn, Robert. Storia di Firenze [1896-1927]. 8 vols. Florence: Sansoni, 1956-68. Dean, Trevor. Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. d’Aquino, Tommaso. Somma Teologica. Bologna: Esd Edizioni, 1990. Febvre, Lucien. “La sensibilité et l’histoire: Comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefois?” Annales d’histoire sociale 3 (1941): 5-20. Frijhoff, Willem. “The Kiss Sacred and Profane: Reflections on a Cross-Cultural Confrontation.” In A Cultural History of Gesture. From Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. by Jan Bremmer and Hans Roodenburg, 210-36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Frugoni, Chiara. A Distant City. Images of Urban Experience in the Medieval World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Ghisalberti, Carlo. “La condanna al bando nel diritto comunale.” Archivio Giuridico 159 (1960): 3-74. Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred, 7 th edn. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Guerra, Enrica. Una eterna condanna: la figura del carnefice nella società italiana. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2003. Guzzetti, Giovanni Battista. “Giustizia.” In Enciclopedia Cattolica, VI (1951), 846-54. Città del Vaticano: Edizioni Paoline (1948-54). Hyams, Paul R. “Nastiness and Wrong, Rancor and Reconciliation.” In Conflict in Medieval Europe: Changing Perspectives on Society and Culture, ed. by Warren Brown and Piotr Gorecki. London: Ashgate, 2003, pp. 195-218. —. Rancor & Reconciliation in Medieval England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Il Costituto del comune di Siena volgarizzato nel MCCCIX-MCCCX. 3 vols. Ed. by Alessandro Lisini. Siena: Tipografia Lazzeri, 1903. Lansing, Carol. Passion and Order. Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Communes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. Miglio, Massimo. “Parola e gesto nella società comunale.” In Ceti sociali ed ambienti urbani nel teatro religioso europeo del ’300 e del ’400, ed. by Maria Chiabò and Federico Doglio, 41-58. Viterbo: Union Printing, 1986. Migliorino, Francesco. Fama e infamia. Problemi della società medievale nel pensiero giuridico nei secoli XII e XIII. Catania: Giannotta, 1985. Miller, William Ian. Humiliation, and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort and Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Ortalli, Gherardo. “Pingatur in Palatio.” La pittura infamante nei secoli XIII-XVI. Rome: Jouvence, 1979. Pazzaglini, Peter Raymond. The Criminal Ban of the Sienese Commune 1225-1310. Milan: Giuffrè, 1979.

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Vollrath, Hanna. The Kiss of Peace. In Peace Treaties and International Law in European History. From the Late Middle Ages to World War One. Ed. by Randall Lesaffer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Zorzi, Andrea. “La costruzione della città giudiziaria.” In La costruzione delle città comunale italiana (secoli XII-inizio XIV. 217-41. Pistoia: Centro italiano di studi di storia e d’arte, 2009. —. “Le esecuzioni delle condanne a morte a Firenze nel tardo Medioevo tra repressione penale e cerimoniale pubblico.” In Simbolo e realtà della vita urbana nel tardo Medioevo. Ed. by Massimo Miglio and Giuseppe Lombardi, 153-253. Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1994. —. “Rituali di violenza, cerimoniali penali, rappresentazioni della giustizia nelle città italiane centro-settentrionali (secoli XIII-XV).” In Le forme della propaganda politica nel Due e nel Trecento, ed. by Paolo Cammarosano, 395-426. Rome: École française de Rome, 1994.

3

The Anxiety of the Republics “Timor” in Italy of the Communes during the 1330s Andrea Zorzi

1

A time of “great and perilous change”1

I present here some early results of research I have undertaken on the various transformations in the way legitimation was imagined and portrayed in communal and seigniorial Italy during the 1330s. The fourth decade of the Trecento appears in effect as a time of delicate, profound transformation of the social and political balance in the cities traditionally governed as communes. Giovanni Tabacco and Giorgio Chittolini have captured the maturing in the central decades of the century of processes of hierarchization of power and emergence of more rigid forms of government.2 But the changes that took place in the 1330s have not yet been the object of specific attention. In the following pages I would like to initiate a first attempt at reflection, moving from a perspective – that of the emotions, feelings, and moods of the time3 – which seems to me to offer an invaluable key to reading the sense of a sharp break which many people felt in those years. My interest was piqued when I noticed a number of temporal coincidences that aroused my curiosity. Based on the installment of the payments, art historians agree by now in dating between 1338 and 1339 the frescoes painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the room in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico where the governing Council of Nine met. 4 The idea of commissioning a fresco cycle with a broad political significance must have come to maturity in the period immediately preceding this date: let us say, at most, between 1336 and 1337. Giovanni Villani, for his part, devotes four ample chapters in 1 “Grandi mutamenti e pericolosi.” Among those who have helped me in this work, I must mention Enrico Artifoni, Pierangelo Schiera, Patrick Boucheron, Giorgio Chittolini, and Paola Ventrone. This research is at the beginning and many are the aspects to develop. 2 Cf. Tabacco, Egemonie sociali, 351 and ff. and 372 and ff.; Chittolini, “La crisi delle libertà comunali,” 111 and ff.; and Chittolini, “Introduzione,” in La crisi degli ordinamenti comunali, 17 and ff. 3 On history of emotions cf. Rosenwein, “Histoire de l’émotion,” 371-92; Boquet and Nagy, “L’historien et les émotions en politique,” 5-30. 4 The Italian editions has been edited by Stefano Moscadelli in the Appendix of Seidel, “Dolce vita,” in Seidel, Arte italiana del Medioevo e del Rinascimento, vol. 1, 281-5.

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book XII of his chronicle to the “greatness and state of the city of Florence,” in which he describes analytically the receipts and expenditures of the commune from 1336 to 1338,5 coincident with the period when the fresco commissioned by the Nine in Siena was being conceived and executed. Finally, the vast fresco cycle in the Camposanto in Pisa, which opens with the so-called Triumph of Death, has been authoritatively assigned to the hand of Buonamico Buffalmacco and dated “a little earlier than the threeyear period 1338-1340,” more precisely between 1336 and 1338, to a “date just before the time of execution of the frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Palazzo Pubblico in Siena.”6 This chronological coincidence – the juncture between 1336 and 1339 – of three great “monuments” of Tuscan city culture seemed to me too extraordinary not to try to investigate it and to verify if there were meaningful connections among spheres of expression apparently so different and distant from each other in terms of context, form, and content. The prevailing interpretations that have long been offered for each of them are of little help in tracing shared elements. Lorenzetti’s frescoes in Siena – as we all know – appeared, and continue to appear even in recent studies, as a summa of communal political culture.7 The list of the riches of Florence by Villani has been understood to be a self-satisfied exaltation of the mercantile ruling class, a sort of encomiastic celebration of the city’s greatness.8 The fresco of The Triumph of Death has long been linked to the climate of dismay which spread everywhere after the plague of 1348; reference is recurrent to Boccaccio’s Decameron, whose brigade of youths seems to be reflected in the group of figures who, unaware of the imminent arrival of death, entertain themselves with noble pastimes in the garden shown in the right corner of Buffalmacco’s work.9 These interpretations seem to accentuate the apparent extraneousness of the three works to each other. On the contrary, in the frescoes in Siena and Pisa and in book XII of the Florentine chronicle, I sense a common feeling of perturbation, a negative mood, that traverses the three works like 5 “Grandezza e stato della città di Firenze”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. l, book XII, chapters XCI-XCIV, 190-202 (289 for quotation). 6 Cf. Bellosi, Buffalmacco e il Trionfo della Morte, 48-66 (65 for quotation). 7 Cf. for exemple, Feldges-Henning, “The Pictorial”; Skinner, Virtù rinascimentali, 53-153. 8 Cf. Fiumi, “Economia e vita privata”; Frugoni, “G. Villani, Cronica”; Cherubini, “La Firenze di Dante e di Giovanni Villani,” 35-51. 9 See, for exemple, Meiss, Pittura a Firenze e Siena,” 115 and ff. (who considers Francesco Traini as the author of the painting and dates the paining “around the 1350’s”). On the contrary, Battaglia Ricci, Ragionare nel giardino, considers the Trionfo della morte as a source for the Decameron.

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an underlying given, as though the Tuscan urban societies of those years had been suddenly afflicted by anxiety about a profound and frightening change in the times.

2

“Dismayed and frightened by said signs and damage”:10 Giovanni Villani in Florence

I intend to take a heuristic approach, to attempt to put some pieces together in the framework of a unified discussion. It seems to me that the best starting point is the Chronicle by Giovanni Villani.11 The structure of book XII is indicative: the narrative covers nine years of the history of Florence, bookended by the devastating flood of November 1333 and the inauspicious fall of Lucca into the hands of the Pisans in 1342, which opened the path to power for the duke of Athens Walter of Brienne.12 Compared to the preceding books, book XII is a gloomy one, whose 143 chapters are filled with a staggering number of negative events and great “adversities”:13 the floods of 1333 and 1334; the drowning of fifteen people when a large boat overturned on the Arno in December 1333; repeated fires burning houses in the city (in 1334, 1335, 1337, 1338, 1340, and 1342); the devastating landslide on a hill at Dicomano in the Mugello Valley (in May 1335) which swept away an entire village and muddied the waters of the Arno for months, damaging textile production; flu and smallpox epidemics in 1335 and 1340; the sighting of comets in 1337 and 1340; a solar eclipse in 1339; torrential rains and hail that destroyed the harvests in 1339 and 1340, resulting in famines, hunger, and death; etc. Villani recognizes these events as “signs of future ills for our city”;14 in particular, the natural phenomena appear to be, at the same time, evident manifestations of “God’s judgment on our sins”15 and of “strong planetary conjunctions.”16 The appearance of the comets is interpreted as a “sign of new things in the future, for the most part bad, and sometimes the 10 “Isbigottiti e impauriti per li detti segni e danni.” 11 For a biographical profile, cf. Luzzati, Giovanni Villani”; Ragone, Giovanni Villani e i suoi continuatori,” 213 and ff. 12 As Giuseppe Porta has shown, the 1333 flood stopped Villani on writing his chronicle: Giuseppe Porta, “Introduzione,” in Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 1, pVII-XX (XIII). 13 “Aversità.” For general overview on this topic cf. Artifoni, “La consapevolezza,” 79-100. 14 “Segni di futuri mali alla nostra città”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 100, 212. 15 “Iudicio di Dio per le nostre peccata”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 2, 12. 16 “Forti coniunzioni di pianete”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 2, 13.

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sign of the death of great kinds and lords, or overturning of kingdoms and of peoples …; but most of them mean ill, that is to say hunger and death, and other great misfortunes and mutations of centuries; and these too meant big and new things.”17 Villani observed about Saturn that “its opposition” brings “misfortune, and tumult, and ruin, and floods,”18 About the smallpox epidemic which broke out in the summer of 1335, he records that “it was said by some astrologers and experts on nature that the conjunction of Mars and Saturn in the sign of Libra, and Jupiter in opposition to them in Aries, was its cause.”19 Astrology – as is well known – was an integral part of late medieval political culture.20 According to Villani, too, the heavenly signs foretold events, but men were responsible for their own destinies: their errors were the cause of failure and could bring down divine punishment.21 In the days following the tragic flood of 1333, which resulted in hundreds of people dead and enormous devastation, for example, both “religious sages and masters of theology” and “philosophers of nature and astrologers” were consulted, using the usual method of the scholastic quaestio,22 in order to determine whether the explanation for the catastrophe was “a judgment from God” or “in the natural course.”23 As Enrico Artifoni has hypothesized, 17 “Segno di futura novità al secolo, il più in male, e talora segno di morte di grandi re e signori, o tramutagioni di regni e di genti … ; ma*lle più significano male, cioè fame e mortalità, e altri grandi accidenti e mutazioni di secoli; e queste pure significarono grandi cose e novità”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 68, 152. 18 “Sua opposizione,” “infortuna, e sumersione, e ruine, e diluvii’: Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 2, 16. 19 “Dissesi per alcuni strolagi e naturali, che la congiunzione di Marte e di Saturno nel segno de la Libra, e il Giove a*lloro opposizione nell’Ariete, ne fu cagione”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 33, 81. 20 See, f irst of all, Sennelart, Les arts de gouverner.” On this topic cf. Mentgen, Astrologie; Dagron, “Une rhétorique de l’événement: l’astrologie,” 193-200. Cf. also classical works such as Saxl, La fede negli astri; Garin, Lo zodiaco della vita. On comets in ancient culture cf. Sperl, “Vom Blutregen zum Staubfall,” 58-68. 21 Cf. Barbero, “Storia e politica fiorentina,” 16. On astrology in Villani’s chronicle see Green, Chronicle into history, 29-35. 22 “E di ciò fu fatta quistione”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 2, 12, also for quotations: “savi religiosi e maestri in teologia,” and “filosofi in natura e a strolaghi.” 23 “Iudicio di Dio,” “corso di natura”; here Giovanni Villani has the attention of historians such as Gherardo Ortalli, “‘Corso di natura’ o “giudizio di Dio.” Sensibilità collettiva ed eventi naturali, a proposito del diluvio fiorentino del 1333,” in Ortalli, Lupi genti culture, 155-88; Moulinier and Redon, “L’inondation de 1333 à Florence-, 91-104; Salvestrini, Libera città su fiume regale, 51-86; Jasper Schenk, “L’alluvione del 1333-; Jasper Schenk, “‘prima ci fu la cagione de la mala provedenza de’ Fiorentini”; and Salvestrini, “L’Arno e l’alluvione fiorentina del 1333,” 231-56. More in general cf. Jasper Schenk, “Disastri,” 23-76.

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very probably Villani incorporated into his chronicle the translation, in a Tuscan vernacular that reveals its derivation from the original scholastic Latin, of extensive excerpts from the dossier of answers supplied by the experts who were interrogated for the purpose of adopting suitable public policies.24 Villani himself embraced the theological interpretation of the events as divine punishment for the immoral behavior of the Florentines, although he did not fail to remember that the effects of the flood were made particularly disastrous by the “raising of the riverbed of the Arno, because of bad planning on the part of the communal government in allowing those who had their mills on the Arno to raise the weirs, bringing the level more than seven braccia higher than its former course.”25 A good part of book XII is dominated also by the nightmare brought upon the Florentines by the expansionist actions of Mastino della Scala, signore of Verona (from 1329 to 1351) and of the Marca, who launched an offensive in Emilia and Tuscany with the intent of expanding and developing his dominion beyond regional borders and of conquering Pisa, the bulwark of Italian Ghibellinism. Between 1335 and 1336 he obtained from the Rossi family dominion over Parma, Lucca, and Massa di Lunigiana and lent support to the Tarlati family, lords of Arezzo. The opening up of a Tuscan front unleashed the reaction of Florence which, in an alliance with Venice, engaged in a debilitating war from 1336 to 1339, which ended in an insidious and uncertain peace. The events of “our war with Mastino of Verona”26 underlie the four chapters (XCI-XCIV) in which Villani described the grandeur of the city, “so that our dependents may understand the state of our Commune of Florence in those times, and how it supplied the expense of that war …, in short we shall narrate now the wealth of our Commune, the revenues and also expenditures … of the Commune, from the year 1336 to 1338, the duration of the war between us and Mastino.”27 Placed in 24 “D’una grande questione fatta in Firenze, se ‘l detto diluvio venne per iudicio di Dio o per corso naturale”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 2, 12. 25 “L’alzamento fatto del letto d’Arno, per la mala provedenza del Comune di lasciare alzare le pescaie a coloro ch’aveano le molina inn*Arno, ch’era montato più di braccia VII da l’antico corso”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 1, 11. On this cf. Salvestrini, Libera città su fiume regale, 77-86. 26 “Nostra guerra col Mastino di Verona”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 55, 126. 27 “Acciò che’ nostri discendenti possano comprendere lo stato ch’avea il nostro Comune di Firenze in questi tempi, e come si fornì lo spendio della detta guerra …, in brieve il narreremo apresso del podere del nostro Comune, l’entrata e così l’uscita … del Comune, dall’anno MCCCXXXVI al MCCCXXXVIII, che durò la guerra da*nnoi e meser Mastino”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 91, 190.

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context, what can appear as encomiastic praise of the city at the height of its demographic, economic, and social development by an influential member of the ruling class turns out in reality to be a reaction of pride, veined with a sense of insecurity brought about by the fearful threat coming from the active presence of Mastino della Scala in Tuscany. Villani writes, in fact, “so that our successors who will come in time may be aware of the rise or fall of the status or power which our city underwent, so that for the wise and worthy citizens who, over time, will be charge of it, they may, in our memory and also of this chronicle, provide for advancing it in condition and wealth.”28 Besides, Villani wrote these chapters, and indeed the entire book, after the fact, in the middle of the following decade. He placed the enormous effort made by the commune in the disturbing overall picture of the crisis of the Florentine financial economy caused by the insolvency of loans made by the principal banking companies to the king of England, who had gone to war with the king of France right in 1336, and by the confiscations decreed by the French sovereign of the holdings of the Florentine merchants and bankers in France in 1337 and 1338: international events to which Villani devoted – not coincidentally – specific chapters of book XII,29 a book traversed not only by the dark description of the effects of the interregional Italian wars but also by the reverberations of the European conflicts on the local scene. The first to fail were the Peruzzi and the Bardi banks, about which Villani observes: “because of this default and because of the Commune’s expenses in Lombardy the [purchasing] power and state of the merchants of Florence failed greatly; but also of all the Commune and the merchants and every guild was lowered, and they fell into a terrible state…. And for these said reasons and for others …, our city of Florence suffered a great collapse and this universally bad state did not improve after that …, so that then by repercussions and the failure of credit many other smaller companies in Florence soon afterwards failed.”30 This collapse, as 28 “Perché i nostri successori che verranno per li tempi s’avegghino del montare o bassare di stato o potenzia che facesse la nostra città, acciò che per li savi e valenti cittadini, che per li tempi saranno al governo di quella, per lo nostro ricordo e asempro di questa cronica procurino d’avanzarla inn*istato e podere”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 94, 197. 29 Cf., respectively, Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 55, p123-26, and chapter 72, 156-9. 30 “Per questa difalta e per le spese del Comune in Lombardia molto mancò la potenzia e stato di mercatanti di Firenze; e però di tutto il Comune e*lla mercatantia e ogni arte n’abassò, e vennero in pessimo stato.… E per le dette cagioni e per altre … , la nostra città di Firenze ricevette gran crollo e male stato universale non guari tempo apresso. … , onde poi de’ rimbalzi

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is known, affected even Villani himself as a result of the bankruptcy of the Buonaccorsi company in which he was a partner, costing him the humiliating experience of imprisonment for debt in the Stinche prison in 1338.31 Villani linked the natural catastrophes, wars, and economic crises to the political tensions internal to the communal regime of Florence and discord among the “sects” (sette), manifesting all his concern that these could possibly develop into authoritarian actions. Reconstructing the failed plot by the faction of magnates in November 1340, for example, his comment is explicit: “recounting the adversities which occurred in our city of Florence in these times because of its bad governance disturbs my mind greatly, foreseeing worse for the future. Considering that the citizens, it seems, do not fear God either because of heavenly signs or pestilences of flood, or death, or hunger, nor do they acknowledge their faults and sins; but having completely abandoned holy human and civic charity and only by fraud and tyranny with great greed to govern the republic. Which makes me fear greatly God’s judgment.”32 In this passage Villani’s dual levels of reading emerge: his “ability to identify the tangible causes of an event” and to “bring out at the same time the moral significance.”33 Following a precise scheme, in book XII Villani devoted a chapter to each act on the part of the institutions which altered the organization of the commune: he recorded the institution in 1334 of several police magistrates, not failing to observe that “those who govern the city did it more for their own guard and relief of their state”;34 the establishment in 1335 of the “captain of the guard and preserver of the peace and state of the city”; a new foreign official “with great discretion and power over the exiled; and under his title of guard he extended his office in name and in fact as a police magistrate above any other rule, and exacting blood justice as he pleased, without any statutory order,” this too willed by “those citizens of the people who govern e del mancamento della credenza più altre minori compagnie di Firenze poco tempo apresso ne fallirono”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 88, 182-3. 31 Cf. Luzzati, Giovanni Villani. 32 “Raccontando l’aversità occorse alla nostra città di Firenze in questi tempi per lo suo male reggimento, mi fa molto turbare la mente sperando peggio per l’avenire. Considerando che per segni del cielo, né per pistolenze di diluvio, né di mortalità, e di fame, i cittadini non pare che temano Iddio, né si riconoscano di loro difetti e peccati; ma al tutto abandonata per loro la santa carità umana e civile, e solo a baratterie e tirannia con grande avarizia reggere la republica. Onde mi fa temere forte del giudicio d’Iddio”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 118, 231. 33 Barbero, Storia e politica fiorentina, 15. 34 “Quelli che reggeano la città il feciono più per loro guardia e francamento di loro stato”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 16, 56-7.

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the land in order to strengthen their state and for fear not to lose it”;35 and the creation in 1339 of a new “war captain, that is to say … bargello,” the infamous Iacopo Gabrielli of Gubbio, who in his two years in office “did foul deeds in Florence and its countryside and arbitrated without any form of reason, so that new disgraceful things arose in the city,” and “in the guise of a tyrant, or a performer of tyrannies, proceeds in civil and criminal affairs according to his will, as had been placed in his hands by these said governors, without following laws or statutes, whereby he condemned many innocent people in their property or person, and kept the citizens great and small in great fear, except for his governors, who using his stick carried out their vendettas and sometimes offenses and frauds.”36 Villani’s political judgment on the leaders of the commune of Florence in the 1330s is severe and negative, and can take on overtones of sarcasm, for example where, commenting on Iacopo Gabrielli’s exit from office in 1341 (“who was captain of the guard of the people, that is to say tyrant of the ruling people”),37 he observed that “the wise rulers of Florence corrected their error of his tyrannical office, and decreased the Commune’s expenses, that is to say they doubled them, because where before they had one policeman as their executor they chose two …, but both one and the other office was an outrage and brought great damage and expense to the Commune.” His analysis is merciless: “The city’s rulers, to maintain their tyrannies, and such of their frauds, as we said earlier, supported him to the great detriment of the Commune and burden on the citizens in order to be feared and grand.”38

35 “Capitano della guardia e conservatore di pace e di stato de la città”; “con grande arbitrio e balìa sopra li sbanditi; e sotto il suo titolo de la guardia stendea il suo uficio di ragione e di fatto a modo di bargello e sopra ogni altra signoria, e faccendo iustizia di sangue come li piacea, sanza ordine di statuti”; “quelli cittadini popolari che reggeano la terra per fortificare loro stato e per paura di non perderlo”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 39, 87. 36 “Capitano di guerra, overo … bargello”; “fece in Firenze e nel contado di sconce cose e albitrare sanza ordine di ragione, onde nacquero novitadi sconce di città,” and “a guisa di tiranno, o come esecutore di tiranni, procedea di fatto in civile e cherminale a sua volontà, come gli era posto in mano per li detti reggenti, sanza seguire leggi o statuti, onde molti innocenti condannò a*ttorto inn*avere e in persona, e tenea i cittadini grandi e piccoli in grande tremore, salvo i suoi reggenti, che col suo bastone faceano le loro vendette e talora l’offese e*lle baratterie”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 118, 232. 37 “Ch’era capitano della guardia del popolo, overo tiranno de’ popolani reggenti”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 100, 212. 38 “I savi rettori di Firenze corressono il loro errore del suo tirannico uficio, e scemaro le spese del Comune, overo le radoppiarono, che là dove prima avieno uno bargello per loro esecutore ne elessono due […], ma*ll’uno e*ll’altro uf icio era d’oltraggio e a grande danno e spesa del Comune”; “i reggenti cittadini per mantenere le loro tirannie, e tali di loro baratterie, come

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In Villani’s work, moral judgment is accompanied by an admonitory intent for future governors.39 The explicit fear was of the possible degeneration of “bad government” into a tyrannical regime. Referring to the emergence of Taddeo Pepoli’s rule in Bologna in 1337, for example, he stated that “we said much about the events in Bologna …, considering the ancient union and liberty and state and power of the good people of Bologna, who have gone back in our time because of discord and the tyrannical rule of one citizen, so as to let our city and people of Florence always know for our citizens to guard the liberty of our republic and not fall under the tyranny of lords. Which cause makes me fear for our city of Florence because of discord and bad government; and may this be enough for those who understand.”40

3

“Think about it now before Death pulls you away”:41 Buonamico Buffalmacco in Pisa

Now let us look at the frescoes painted by Buonamico Buffalmacco in the monumental cemetery of Pisa between 1336 and 1338, and in particular at The Triumph of Death. Next to The Triumph of Death on the same south wall of the Camposanto were The Last Judgment, Hell, and The Thebaid. The cycle dwelt on terrifying and admonitory themes more than on the salvation and mercy of God. The frescoes aimed at showing, at one and the same time, the eternal future of divine judgment and the eternal present of death: the intent was to induce the viewer, by thinking about his present and his past, to change his future. 42 The context is public. Construction dicemmo adietro, gli sostenieno a tanto danno di Comune e gravezza di cittadini per essere temuti e grandi”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 122, 240-1. 39 “Avemo sì lungo fatta memoria di questo officio [il citato capitano di guardia creato nel 1335] e de’ suoi processi per lasciarne esemplo a’ cittadini che saranno, a ciò che per bene de la nostra città non siano mai vaghi di fare uficiali arbitrari, che perché si criino sotto colore e titolo di bene di Comune, sempre mai fanno dolorosa uscita per le cittadi, e nascene tirannica segnoria”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 39, 91. 40 “Male reggimento”; “assai avemo detto de’ fatti di Bologna […], considerando l’antica unione e libertà e stato e potenza del buono popolo di Bologna, tornato a’ nostri tempi per discordie e signoria tirannica di singulare cittadino, per dare asempro alla nostra città e popolo di Firenze a*ssapere i nostri cittadini guardare la libertà della nostra republica, e non cadere a tirannia di signore. Onde mi fa temere della nostra città di Firenze per le discordie e, male reggimento: e questo basti a’ buoni intenditori”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 70, 154-5. 41 “Pensalo or prima che Morte ti tiri.” 42 Bolzoni, “Educare lo sguardo,” 529.

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began on the Camposanto in 1278 under the responsibility and supervision of the commune. The great painted decorations were initiated in the course of the fourteenth century. 43 Nonetheless, relations with the ecclesiastical authorities were very close, and studies have brought out the directorial role played by the Dominicans of Pisa, who worked out the iconographical program of the frescoes painted by Buffalmacco, centering around the theme of repentance and confession, following the example of the hermits. The direct overseers were probably the archbishop Simone Saltarelli (who directed the diocese from 1323 to 1342) and authoritative members of the convent of Saint Catherine in Pisa such as Bartolomeo di San Concordio (dead in 1347) and Domenico Cavalca (dead in 1342). 44 The patrons chose one of the most brilliant exponents of the expressionist Gothic style, who had already showed his mettle in fresco cycles painted in the Badia a Settimo and the convent of the Donne di Faenza in Florence and the Vescovado in Arezzo, 45 as the artist best suited to depict the moralizing endeavor which the Dominicans wanted to impart to the frescoes that would decorate the great complex in Pisa. The educational intent explicitly orients those who viewed the paintings towards practices of repentance and confession of sins, given the imminence of death. 46 Jérôme Baschet has stressed the absence of a textual source from which the frescoes would have been adapted, tracing the logic of the program back to the pastoral vocation of the preachers to use all available means for spreading religious messages;47 he has found in the sermons of Giordano da Pisa and treatises by Bartolomeo di San Concordio, Gli ammaestramenti degli antichi, a typical picture of vices and virtues, dated to the first decade of the century, 48 and Domenico Cavalca, Specchio dei peccati dated 1333 and Disciplina degli spirituali, devoted to the vices and dated 1335, 49 the orientations of this reflection on sin, confession, and the efficacy of moral discourse.50 Chiara

43 Cf. Il Camposanto di Pisa; and Ronzani, Un’idea trecentesca di cimitero.” 44 Cf. Luzzati, “Simone Saltarelli,” 1645-64; Bolzoni, “Gli affreschi del “Trionfo della Morte,” 10-12. 45 Cf. Bellosi, Buffalmacco, 105 and ff. 46 Cf. the frescos of the Inferno: “O peccator che in questa vita stai, / involto se’ nelle mondane cure: / pon mente fiso a queste aspre figure / che in questo obscuro Inferno traggien guai. / Chosí com’elle son così serrai, / se non ti guardi le cose future, / se non vorai seguitar le scriture, / se non ti penti del mal che facto hai”; in Morpurgo, “Le epigrafi volgari.” 47 Baschet, Les justices de l’au-delà,” 330-49. 48 Dated “at the beginning of the Trecento” by Segre, “Bartolomeo da San Concordio,” 769. 49 Delcorno, “Cavalca Domenico,” 578. 50 Baschet, Les justices de l’au-delà, 327-48.

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Frugoni has brought out the connections with Cavalca’s Trattato della pazienza, it too written before 1333.51 Lina Bolzoni, for her part, has emphasized that the period when the decoration of the Camposanto was begun corresponds to the time when the first great collections of sermons in the vulgate were compiled.52 Preaching helped create a public capable of reading the painted images and furnished the necessary tools for reading the pictures in the Camposanto, first and foremost to the illiterate.53 The fresco cycle was also studded with large scrolls that originally held rhymed vernacular epigraphs, later partially substituted by Latin inscriptions, which were not limited to narrating the scene but were intended to give them a moral charge and a value as examples.54 It should be noted, however, that the references identified by Baschet, Bolzoni, and Frugoni are to sermon cycles dated some thirty years before the frescoes were commissioned, which Luciano Bellosi has dated between 1336 and 1338:55 Giordano da Pisa preached in Florence in 1304-130656 and in Pisa in 1307-1309.57 This chronological leap is too great to be able to hypothesize a direct link between the different kinds of works; above all, it does not explain why the Dominicans in Pisa only felt in the second half of the 1330s the need not only to preach on repentance but also to rely on the force of images on this theme. An intriguing connection can be made, however, with the great pilgrimage to Rome made by the flagellants, spurred right in 1334-35 by the preaching initiated in those years by Venturino da Bergamo, less erudite than that of Giordano da Pisa but unquestionably more emotional.58 It is Villani once again, still in book XII, who records How one Friar Venturino da Bergamo moved many Lombards and Tuscans to repentance.59 This is his report: “In said year [1334], for the feast days of Christ’s Nativity, a friar of the order of preachers aged 35, from a small nation, because of his sermons brought to repentance many murderous and thieving sinners, and other bad 51 Frugoni, “Altri luoghi, 1581-2. Cf. also Delcorno, Cavalca Domenico, 578. 52 Cf. Bolzoni, “Gli affreschi del “Trionfo della Morte’.” According to Frugoni, Altri luoghi, 1561, the Trionfo should be a “painted prayer.” 53 Bolzoni, Educare lo sguardo, 522-8. 54 On the inscriptions, cf. Butor, Les mots dans la peinture; “Visibile parlare”; and, in particular, Donato, “Immagini e iscrizioni nell’iconografia “politica’ fra Tre e Quattrocento,” 341-96. 55 Baschet, Les justices de l’au-delà, 625 56 Cf. Baschet, Les justices de l’au-delà, 334 n. 105. 57 Cf. Giordano da Pisa, Prediche, 270-2. 58 On the peregrinatio di Venturino, cf. Gennaro, “Venturino da Bergamo”; and Corsi, “La “crociata,” 697-747. 59 Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 23, 66-8.

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men from his city and from Lombardy. And for his efficacious preaching moved to go to Rome during the Lent and to pardon more than ten thousand Lombards, gentlemen and otherwise, all dressed practically in the habit of Saint Dominic, that is to say with a white surplice and a sky-blue or indigo cloak, and on the cloak a cut-out white dove with three olive leaves in its beak; and they came through the towns of Lombardy and Tuscany in groups of twenty-five or thirty, and each brigade with its cross in front, shouting peace and mercy; and arriving in the cities they gathered first in the church of the preaching friars, and in it, before the altar, they disrobed from the waist up and humbly beat themselves for a while…. His said preaching was not, however, subtle sermons or of deep learning, but were very effective and eloquent and with holy words, uttering them very doubtful and meant to move people, as it were stating and saying: ‘What I say to you I know, and nothing more, because God wills it this way.’ He went to Rome with said pilgrims, and with many others from Tuscany who followed him, which was innumerable people with great honesty and patience.”60 The spiritual unease that Venturino interpreted and the collective emotions he was able to arouse closely linked the theme of repentance with that of death. Venturino and his pilgrims to Rome did not pass through Pisa, but his endeavor had vast resonance in the Dominican order and earned the favor of almost all the provincial priors of communal and signorial Italy.61 We also know that some flagellant confraternities held rites of repentance in Pisa’s Camposanto in those years; the founder of the Compagnia dei Battuti of San Giovanni Evangelista della Porta della Pace, the hermit Giovanni Soldato, was buried in the Camposanto probably before 1338,62 thus right 60 “Nel detto anno [1334], per le feste della Nattività di Cristo, un frate dell’ordine de’ predicatori d’età di XXXV anni, di picciola nazione, per sue prediche recòe a penitenzia molti peccatori micidiali e rubatori, ed altri cattivi uomini de la sua città e di Lombardia. E per le sue efficaci prediche commosse ad andare a la quarentina a Roma e al perdono più di diecimila Lombardi gentili uomini e altri, i quali tutti vestiti quasi dell’abito di santo Domenico, cioè con cotta bianca e mantello cilestro o perso, e in sul mantello una colomba bianca intagliata con tre foglie d’ulivo in becco; e venieno per le città di Lombardia e di Toscana a schiere di XXV o XXX, e ogni brigata con sua croce innanzi gridando pace e misericordia; e giugnendo ne le cittadi si rassegnavano prima a la chiesa de’ frati predicatori, e in quella dinanzi a l’altare si spogliavano da la cintola in su, e si batteano un pezzo umilmente.… Le dette sue prediche non erano però di sottili sermoni né di profonda scienzia, ma erano molto efficaci e d’una buona loquela e di sante parole, dicendole molto dubbiose e acentive a commuovere genti, quasi affermando e dicendo: “Quello ch’io vi dico sappia, e non altro; ché Dio così vuole.” Andonne a Roma co’ detti pellegrini, e co*molti altri di Toscana che ‘l seguiro, che fue innumerabile popolo con molta onestà e pazienzia”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 23, 66-8 (emphasis added). 61 Gennaro, Venturino da Bergamo, 401-406. 62 Cf. Battistoni, “La Compagnia,” 199-228; Frugoni, Altri luoghi, 1636-9.

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when Buffalmacco was frescoing that same space. The mass penitential movement set in motion by the preaching of one of the most fervid members of the Dominican order could therefore have been one of the elements that led his Pisan confreres to embrace strongly the power of images63 right in the second half of the 1330s, not before or after.64 What is more, it is possible to trace a further connection, tied to the iconography of death. Venturino’s activity was probably at the root of an innovation introduced in those years in the procedures of accompanying those sentenced to die to the scaffold. We know that he preached in Bologna in 1331 and 1332, where he sometimes accompanied the condemned, persuading them to bear up under their suffering for the remission of their sins, reminding them of Christ’s passion and encouraging them to hope for divine mercy. In 1335 he passed through the city again with his pilgrims to Rome, and in 1336 Santa Maria della Morte, the first confraternity devoted to comforting those sentenced to die of which we have documentary evidence in any Italian city, was founded there.65 A processional cross dated 133540, painted by Bernardo Daddi, was commissioned by the Dominicans, probably in connection with Venturino’s preaching,66 for accompanying prisoners about to be put to death.67 As Massimo Ferretti has pointed out, on the recto of the cross is painted the unusual figure of a flayed corpse, almost certainly a condemned prisoner, wearing the execution tunic that left the neck bare for the axe, “a Gothic zombie,” revealing an evident taste for the macabre [see figure 1].68 Right here, starting from the topic of justice, the frescoes commissioned by the Dominicans in Pisa became majestic interpreters of the divulgation of macabre themes.69 In his representation of Hell, in particular, Buffalmacco broke with the tradition of images of the world beyond, as Baschet has demonstrated, presenting a diversification of tortures, dividing them into compartments based on the scheme of the seven deadly sins, and a more 63 Freedberg, Il potere delle immagini and now also Niccoli, Vedere con gli occhi del cuore. 64 This issue has not been studied by scholars, also by those who have dedicated their attention to assigning a date to the Pisan frescos with philological approach, paying more attention to consider social and cultural elements instead of focusing on the spiritual emotions shared by the contemporaries at that time. 65 Cf. Gennaro, Venturino da Bergamo, 383, footnote 27; and Fanti, “La confraternita,” 32. 66 As theorized by Ferretti, “Pitture,” 150. 67 On this processional cross as one of the first examples of painted crosses painted for the confortation for those put to death, cf. Di Lorenzo, La croce (card catalog). 68 Ferretti, “Pitture,” 150-1. On the taste of the macabre in Dominican spirituality see Schmitt, Spiriti, 60 and 77. 69 Bellosi, Buffalmacco; and Il Camposanto di Pisa.

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general redefinition of the composition of the Last Judgment.70 Rather than confining it to the right corner, as in the earlier iconographic tradition, Buffalmacco set the cave of Hell next to the Judgment, giving it the same amount of space as the rest of the entire picture. Every type of sin is reserved its own well-defined space (from lower left are portrayed the avaricious, lustful (including sodomites), wrathful (including suicides), gluttons, slothful, and envious).71 Above all, he illustrated in detail the torments inflicted with a “massive use of evisceration, decapitation, amputation of arms, and flaying,”72 evidently mirroring contemporary practices of capital execution employed by the forces of justice in the cities73 – the very ones which Venturino had juxtaposed to the cross and the invitation to repent and hope in divine mercy. Having noted these fairly important connections, let us now turn to examine The Triumph of Death, beginning with its unusual layout. Occupying more than half of the fresco is an enormous rocky outcropping, split by a precipice at the bottom of which the dead are piled up, while angels and devils fly about in the sky above; the picture then rises up into the garden where the hedonistic young people are gathered. The overall effect is that of a “grand vision congested by the figurative movement” of “an astonishingly effective visual clamor.”74 The fresco has two main cores. On the left is the theme, deeply rooted in the literary and figurative tradition, of the meeting between the living and the dead.75 Here we see a splendid cavalcade of ladies and knights returning from the hunt, who come upon three coffins containing the corpses, in progressive states of decomposition, of a prelate, a king, and a skeleton. One of the corpses addresses one of the knights with these words: “You who look at me and gaze at me so fixedly, / see how disgusting I am in your sight, / even though you are a splendid young man, / think about it now before Death pulls you away …. / As you are now you must think that I was, / but to each person the world is not a great friend, / you too will have to come to this point and place.”76 A hermit urges the viewer to meditate on the 70 Baschet, Les justices de l’au-delà, 293-303. 71 Ibid., 294. The fresco misses a space devoted to those who are proud, while part of it is representing to the enemies of the Church (heretics, excommunicated, simoniacs, etc.). 72 Baschet, “I peccati,” 238. 73 Cf. Zorzi, “Le esecuzioni,” 153-253; Zorzi, “Rituali di violenza,” 395-425. 74 Bellosi, Buffalmacco, 17. 75 Cf. Frugoni, “Il tema dei tre vivi”; and Frugoni, Altri luoghi, 1561-71. 76 “Tu che mi guardi et sí fiso mi miri, / vedi quanto io son ladio al tuo conspecto, / quantunque che tu sii chiaro giovanecto, / pensalo or prima che Morte ti tiri.… / Sí come hora se’ dèi ben pensar che io fui; / ma il mondo amico ad ciascheduno è poco, / venir pur dèi a questo punto et luoco”; Morpurgo, Le epigrafi volgari, 60.

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meaning of this encounter and marks the boundary between two worlds: behind and above him are numerous vignettes of the life of the fathers in the desert. The scenes of hermitic life are juxtaposed with images of courtly life (the group on horseback), indicating a model distant in time and space (depicted also in The Thebaid in the fourth fresco in the cycle) but at that time a living and current reality: forms of hermitic life were practiced in Pisa and were well known.77 Another hermit admonishes another character with these words: “If your mind will stay well aware / keeping your sight trained here, / vainglory will be defeated / and pride you will see dead. / And you will still meet this same fate! / Now observe the law that is written here.”78 The images and verse inscriptions insist on the fleeting nature of worldly power (vainglory and pride) and the inevitability of death. Among the riders wearing clothing and hats in a great variety of forms can be seen the crowned heads of sovereigns (including a queen). Ancient chroniclers and Vasari in his Lives79 maintained that the figures portrayed included Castruccio Castracani degli Antelminelli, the first great Tuscan lord who extended his dominion over Lucca, Pisa, Pistoia, and Luni between 1316 and 1328; the emperor Ludwig the Bavarian, who had taken Pisa after a siege in 1327 and then granted it to Castruccio in 1328 for him to rule on the emperor’s behalf; and Uguccione della Faggiola, who was lord of Pisa from 1313 to 1316.80 On the right side of the fresco, under the monstrous figure of Death, are piled the bodies of the victims. Vasari describes them as dead “of every state and condition, poor, rich, crippled, well-formed, young, old, male, female; and in short, of every age and sex in good number.”81 Death turns to strike with his scythe also a merry band of young people seated in a garden and given over to worldly pleasures, music and cheerful conversation in a typically courtly setting. Around and above him, souls are being contested by 77 Cf. Bolzoni, Gli affreschi del “Trionfo della Morte,” 36-8. 78 “Se vostra mente serrà bene accorta / tenendo qui la vostra vista fitta, / la vanagloria ci sarà sconficta / e la superbia vederete morta. / Et voi serrete ancor di questa sorta! / Or observate la lege che v’è scripta”; Morpurgo, Le epigrafi volgari, 57. 79 Frugoni, Il tema dei tre vivi e dei tre morti, 211-2 n. 293. 80 Cf. “Castruccio Castracani e il suo tempo”; Green, Castruccio Castracani”; Luzzati, Firenze, 85-94. 81 “Di ogni stato e condizione, poveri, ricchi, storpiati, ben disposti, giovani, vecchi, maschi, femmine: ed insomma, d’ogni età e sesso buon numero”; Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. by Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: Sansoni, 1906), vol. I, 597. A group of mendicants and cripples are preaching the death to give an end to their pains: “Dacché prosperitade ci ha lasciati, / o Morte, medicina d’ogni pena, / deh vieni a darne omai l’ultima cena!”; Vasari, Le vite, 598.

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angels and demons. The ancient chroniclers and Vasari point to the “young man of very fine aspect, with a blue hood around his head and a hawk in his hand” as the picture of Castruccio Castracani.82 Even though uncertain, this identification does have some basis. Castruccio, and before him Uguccione, had been mercenary war captains legitimated by the emperor to exercise their lordly power over Pisa. Memory of them must have been still quite vivid: the Pisans perceived them as elements extraneous to their political tradition, which had not yet known a seigniorial court like the one echoed in the way (between falconry and entertainment) the probable Castruccio appears in the fresco. In the 1330s, however, the city had returned to being governed by a mixed regime, between commune and seigniory, led by Bonifazio (Fazio Novello) of the counts of Donoratico, a family who played a leading role on the political scene of the city, but with connections to the most prominent mercantile and “popular” component as well.83 It is thus probable that, among its many meanings, the fresco aimed in some way to exorcise through the theme of the fleetingness of power the foreign seigniorial dominations that had not left behind them a positive memory in the city. An echo in this sense can be found once again in Villani’s Chronicle where, still in book XII, he admonishes about the vanity of power, referring to the experience of Mastino della Scala:84 “And note, reader, how fortune works in the world, and even more in the processes of wars, which a short time earlier Messer Mastino who was in such great status and lordship … and was a great and powerful tyrant, the greatest in all Italy or had been in one hundred years … ; and soon before had threatened the Florentines to come visit them as far as the gates of Florence with 5.000 iron basinets, and had ordered a rich crown of gold and precious stones to be made, to have himself crowned king of Tuscany and Lombardy.” Notice the mirrored motif of the crown (present in Buffalmacco’s fresco) as a new attribute of lordly power, by this point perceived as tyrannical. Villani goes on: “And he would have done it, if it had not been that God’s judgment humiliated his pride, and the power of the commune of Florence and that of Venice, which rejected and brought to a loss of power and a low state with their work and money … so that he had to pawn his crown and all his 82 “Giovane di bellissimo aspetto, con un cappuccio azzurro avvolto intorno al capo e con uno sparviere in pugno”; Vasari, Le vite, 596. 83 Cf. Ciccaglioni, “Dal comune alla signoria?, 235-70. The signoria of Fazio Novello is also in Bellosi, Buffalmacco, 96. 84 Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 77, 165-7.

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jewels to usurers in order to have the money to resist in his war.” The moral tone of Villani’s comment is right in line with the theme of the fragility and evanescence of all worldly power: “And yet no lord or tyrant or commune can trust in its own power, since every human power is vain and fleeting. And the almighty God of Hosts gives wins and losses to whomever he pleases according to merits and sins.”85 Death, which in Buffalmacco’s painting floats like a monstrous figure, thus inexorably struck Castruccio too, revealing the ephemeral dimension of his lordship over Pisa. In the Camposanto frescoes, the public could see the past and present of life in their city.86 The social circulation of this message must have been boosted not only by direct vision (or reported by others) of the fresco but also, indirectly, by the notoriety and fame of both Castruccio and Buffalmacco, well testified in Tuscan novellas.87

4

“So that no one passes along this way without any doubt about death”:88 Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Siena

Frugoni has shown how Death, winged and menacingly armed, closely recalls Timor in the fresco of the effects of Bad Government painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in that same span of years in Siena; this figure, too, flies armed with a sword, its hands and feet like hooks, its emaciated form barely covered with rags.89 The resemblance is striking also with the demon, 85 “E nota, lettore, come adopera la fortuna nel secolo, e maggiormente ne’ processi delle guerre, che poco tempo dinanzi messere Mastino ch’era in tanto stato e signoria … , ed era un grande e possente tiranno, il maggiore di tutta Italia o che fosse stato intra C anni … ; e poco dinanzi minacciati avea i Fiorentini di venirli a vedere infino alle porte di Firenze con Vm barbute di ferro, e fatta fare una ricchissima corona d’oro e di pietre preziose per coronarsi re di Toscana e di Lombardia”; “e sarebbegli venuto fatto, se non fosse il giudicio di Dio per aumiliare la sua superbia, e*lla potenza del Comune di Firenze e di quello di Vinegia, che ripugnaro e recaro a poca potenza e basso stato co*lloro operazione e danari […], che convenne che ‘ngaggiasse a usura la sua corona e tutti i suoi gioelli per avere danari per resistere alla sua guerra”; “E però nullo signore o tiranno o Comune si può fidare nella sua potenza, imperò ch’ogni potenza umana è vana e fallace. E*ll’onnipotente Iddio Sabaot dà vinto e perduto a*ccui gli piace secondo i meriti e i peccati”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapter 77, 165-7. 86 Bolzoni, Gli affreschi del “Trionfo della Morte,” 37. 87 Buffalmacco is the main character of the novelle VIII, 3, 6, 9, and IX, 3, 5 of Giovanni Boccaccio’ Decameron, and of the novelle CXXXVI, CLXI, CLXIX, CXCI, CXCII of the Trecentonovelle by Franco Sacchetti. Castruccio is the protagonist of the novella V of the Trecentonovelle of Franco Sacchetti, and of the novelle XXXV and LXXI of Giovanni Sercambi’s Novelle. 88 “Unde per questa via non passa alcun senza dubbio di morte.” 89 Cf. Frugoni, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti,” 180.

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a winged figure that flies over the countryside during famines, depicted in a miniature in the Specchio umano, better known as the Libro del Biadaiolo, by the Florentine Domenico Lenzi, a memoir with a moralizing intent (and note, too, written under Dominican influence), profoundly imbued with the sense of the precariousness of human fortunes that spread gloomily after the grave famine of 1329-30 and recently dated to 1337 [see figure 2].90 In any case, looking now at Siena, Timor was in all probability the first, frightening, image seen by those entering, through a door in the opposite wall, the room where the Council of Nine met in the Palazzo Pubblico, frescoed by Lorenzetti.91 As is well known, interpretation of the meanings of this extraordinary cycle of political iconography remains an open question, despite the constant exegesis of which it has long been the object.92 I mention only that the main debate is between those who maintain that the iconographical cycle is largely based on an adaptation of Thomist Aristotelian thought – such as, principally, Nicolai Rubinstein93 – and those who trace in it the rediscovery of republican values in the Latin sources made by the pre-humanist writers, like Quentin Skinner.94 Scholars agree on seeing it as an advanced example of political communication of eminently republican values, just as there is substantial convergence on identifying a dual admonition to the citizens of Siena: on the dangers of the degeneration of the communal regime towards tyranny, and on the servile conditions in which, it was felt, contemporary seigniorial regimes languished in other cities.95 As in the case of the Pisan frescoes, those who have concerned themselves with dating and interpreting the cycle in Siena have up until now eluded the key question: why were the frescoes commissioned right between 1337 and 1338 and not, let’s say, five years earlier or ten years later? This is not a trivial question. Crucial aid in answering it comes now from research done by Gabriella Piccinni on the very difficult economic and political situation in Siena in the 1330s, which has highlighted the dramatic credit crisis that broke out between 1336 and 1340 as a result of the definitive bankruptcy of

90 The edition is in Pinto, Il libro del Biadaiolo, 17. The proposal of dating this book in 1337 has been proposed by Pezzarossa, “Lenzi Domenico detto il Biadaiolo,” 384-6. 91 Cf. Cordaro, “Le vicende costruttive,” 49. 92 Boucheron, “‘Tournez les yeux pour admirer,” 1137-1200. 93 Cf. Rubinstein, “Political Ideas”; Rubinstein, “Le allegorie.” 94 Skinner, Virtù rinascimentali, 53-153. 95 Cf., in particular, Donato, “Ancora sulle “fonti’ del Buon Governo,” 72-3; and Rubinstein, Le allegorie, 357-64.

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the last great Sienese banking companies.96 The mercantile regime of the Nine had on various occasions from 1310 on, adopting a series of support measures, protected from failure the companies headed for the most part with the families with whom many members of the Nine had done business and were related by ties of kinship. At a certain point however, between 1338 and 1339, an intolerable juncture was reached: many banks were in bankruptcy as a result of the crisis of confidence which had struck the operators who had lent enormous sums to the king of England to finance the beginning of the long war with France – the same crisis which led to Villani’s imprisonment and to which he had reacted by extolling the greatness of Florence; the public coffers were strangled by creditors; artisans could not get credit for their activities; and the merchants saw their business decline drastically. A petition submitted to the General Council of the commune on 24 April 1339 by a group of bankers and merchants, and adopted by the Nine, went so far as to ask that imprisonment for debt to usurers be forbidden;97 the presenters of the proposal maintained that “the city and countryside of Siena are about to go under completely”98 and traced a dark picture of the situation, which contrasted with the image of a rich and solid society offered by the contemporary chronicles and the effects of good government which Lorenzetti was finishing painting in those very same days in the room of the palace adjacent to the one where the Council met. It was thus at a delicate and dramatic juncture, which placed their political survival in jeopardy, that the Nine resolved to use, along with other instruments like reform of the statutes (which were revised right in 1337-38, in the direction of full “sovereignty”99), also the tool of propaganda to present themselves as the champions of wellbeing, security, and above all civic concord.100 It should be noted, too, that in the winter of 1335 the city had been invaded in the name of peace by the penitents led by Venturino da Bergamo on their way to Rome.101 Simmering under the portrayal of an age of “great peace and tranquility” in which “each one attended to his earnings … and everyone loved each other as brothers,” in the words of 96 Piccinni, “Il sistema senese del credito,” 20989. 97 Because of the economic crisis in Siena, in 1340 the Nine decided to allow the practice of usury: Piccinni, “Il sistema senese del credito,” 209-12, and 246-50. 98 “La città e ‘l contado di Siena è per venire al tutto meno”; Piccinni, “Il sistema senese del credito,” 281. 99 Ascheri, “Legislazione,” 1-40. 100 “A message by the Siennese ruling class sent to itself”; Piccinni, “Siena nell’età di Duccio,” 33. 101 Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, “Cronaca senese,” 514.

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the chronicler Agnolo di Tura del Grasso,102 and where the effects of good government were ideologically contrasted by Lorenzetti with those of bad government, were not only the tensions already noted (the conspiracies of 1318 and 1328, the riots over the famine of 1329, the accusations of tyranny leveled by the poet Bindo Bonichi, etc.103), but also profound economic changes and wide political fissures. Duccio Balestracci has highlighted the divisions that undermined the regime, split between “a current favorable to the broadening of the social alliances” and “a majority, on the contrary, glued to power and not willing to share it with anybody.”104 Lorenzetti received the commission for the frescoes in a situation of grave crisis for the regime of the Nine. This lends credence to the interpretation of a cycle of images dominated by anxiety and fear – in the midst of which looms a “melancholic” Pax, that is to say, threatened, “doubtful and always hanging in the balance,” mirroring the “city’s ‘dark illness,’ tristizia [sadness], timor [fear]” – recently advanced by Pierangelo Schiera.105 Pax is shown reclining on a cushion under which a suit of armor is clearly visible, while her feet rest on a shield: this is a peace resting after winning a war and ready to take up arms again.106 The olive branch she holds in her hand confirms this: it is a symbol of peace but also of victory.107 Lorenzetti has painted an armed Pax, the result of military defeat of the enemy; not coincidentally, seated next to her is Fortitudo, holding a mace and shield, while at his feet mounted soldiers stand guard, closed in their armor, at the head of a troop of foot soldiers armed with pikes. It should be kept in mind that from the beginning, and for a long time, the room containing the frescoes was called the Peace Room. The frescoes themselves were known as Peace and War; the title of Good and Bad Government is a nineteenthcentury invention.108 War could be the outcome of conflict with external enemies: on the right of the figure of the old man (representing the commune, but also the 102 “Grande pace e tranquillità,” “ognuno attendeva ai suoi guadagni […] e tutti s’amavano come fratelli”; Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, “Cronaca senese,” 367. 103 Zorzi, “Fedeltà ghibellina, affari guelfi.” 104 Balestracci, “Quando Siena diventò guelfa,” 381. 105 Schiera, “Il Buongoverno,” 101 and 103. 106 Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Il Buon Governo. 107 In May 1260, after having conquered some castles owned by the Sienneseai Senesi, the Florentines planted “in su uno poggetto rilevato che si vedea dalla cittade ... [a] dispetto de’ Sanesi, e a ricordanza di vittoria, ripiena di terra, vi piantarono suso uno ulivo, il quale infino a’ nostri dì ancora v’era”; Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 1, book VII, chapter 75, 371. 108 Cf. Boucheron, “Tournez les yeux,” 1190-5; and Dessì, “L’invention du Bon Gouvernement,” 475 and ff.

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common good 109), for example, a crowd of soldiers on foot and horseback, they too armed with pikes, escort a group of bound prisoners and two rural lords who kneel and offer the commune towers and castles as a sign of submission; the virtues presiding over the scene are Magnanimitas, Temperantia, and Iustitia, this last shown holding a sword and, as further warning, a severed head on her lap. But the outcome of internal conflict could also be peace: above all, it was always threatened by discord among the sects and its possible degeneration in an authoritarian and tyrannical direction, as was very clear also to Villani in those same years. This is the meaning of the scene on the commune’s left, presided over by Prudentia, Fortitudo, and Pax. About Prudentia, suffice it to note that this virtue is the protagonist of the treatise on the management of civic conflict by Albertano da Brescia entitled Liber consolationis et consilii, which, while written in the middle of the preceding century, was widely distributed and published in numerous vernacular editions also in the following ones.110 We have already discussed the other two virtues. At their feet are lined up citizens who grasp a rope (which, inspired by Sapientia, falls from the plates of the scales held by Iustitia111) twisted by Concordia and offer it to the commune to emphasize the connection between the values of “justice” and the “common good.” On one hand the rope ties up the prisoners, while on the other it binds the citizens to concord, Concordia (as is made explicit also in the “songs” that illustrate the frescoes112). The rope is a bond, but also an instrument of power: a rope is used to drag Iustitia to the feet of Tyrannides in the Bad Government fresco,113 while on the opposite wall a criminal hangs by a rope from the scaffold which Securitas seraphically displays as she flies over the well-governed city. Thus Lorenzetti also uses this civic “bondage” to express the “melancholic” tone, the tristitia, which infuses the manifestations of power – a civic power here captured in all its uncertainty and in full awareness of its fragility, exposed to the threats of its enemies.114 Skinner 109 Donato, Ancora sulle “fonti,” 58-65. 110 Edited in Albertani Brixiensis, Liber consolationis et consilii. Crucial is Artifoni, “Prudenza,” 195-216; on the culture of political conflict, cf. Zorzi, “La cultura della vendetta,” 144-58. 111 Cf. Frugoni, Una lontana città, 145-9. 112 Following the false etimology diffused at the time, cum chorda instead of concors: cf. Frugoni, Una lontana città, 147-8. 113 The “canzone’ explains that “Là dove sta legata la iustitia, / nessuno al ben comun già mai s’acorda, / né tira a dritta corda”; cf. Furio Brugnolo, “Le iscrizioni in volgare: testo e commento,” in Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 381-91 (385). 114 Cf. Schiera, Il Buongoverno “melancolico.”

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has shown how the dancers in the Good Government fresco115 express the tripudium aimed at dispelling just this tristitia, symbolized by the worms and moths decorating their dresses: the gaudium of the dance, which is guaranteed by pax, struggles against the despondence (accidia) which leads man to death.116 A great many other cues for analysis are offered by this outstanding “monument” of political iconography of the Italian communes, the work, as has been said, of a “doctus pictor.”117 It is one that, we should reiterate, should not be read as a theoretical treatise, as has sometimes been done by its exegetes, but as the “manifesto of a great Commune, conscious of the constant, impending possibility of subversion by powerful social groups.”118 I shall limit myself here to noting some other points of contact with the contemporary works by Villani and Buffalmacco. First of all, we should remember that above and below the frescoes run two friezes containing other figures and the “songs” written as explanation and commentary on the images in the central bands. Even though heavily damaged, they reveal a dual register.119 The allegory of Good Government is framed at the bottom by figures of the Liberal Arts and above by pictures of the planets and seasons: Venus (under whose sign it was thought that Siena was founded 120), Spring, Mercury, Summer, and the Moon. Conversely, the allegory of Bad Government is framed across the bottom by figures of ancient tyrants (the only one still visible is Nero in the act of falling on his sword), and above by the bare, destitute seasons (Fall and Winter), and especially by the planets (Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars) whose conjunction, we have seen, was interpreted by Villani as presaging adversity. Saturn in particular was associated with tyranny and timor in texts about astrology.121 Astrology, publicly called on by the commune of Florence in 1333 to interpret the horrific calamities of that period, was thus cited as an explanation of the manifestations of tyrannical bad government in Siena in those same years. 115 For along time they were believed to be female dancers. On the contrary, Bridgeman, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s dancing “maidens,” has shown that they are male dancers presumably some jesters. 116 Skinner, Virtù rinascimentali, 141-52. 117 Boucheron, “Tournez les yeux,” 1143. Donato, “Dal ‘Comune rubato’ di Giotto al ‘Comune sovrano’ di Ambrogio,” 502-4, has proposed they were written by the Siennese poet Bindo di Cione del Frate. 118 Donato, Ancora sulle “fonti,” 72. 119 Cf. Donato, “Il pittore del Buon Governo,” 211-5. 120 Cf. Seidel, “Vanagloria, vol. I, 301-5. 121 Cf. Seidel, “Dolce vita,” 278-9. On Saturn as a symbol of “melancoly,” cf. Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturno e la melanconia, 149-83.

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An anguished sense of death and squalor runs through the whole wall of the Bad Government fresco, which is dominated by two figures: Tyrannides, surrounded by the vices, and Timor, a horrid old woman dressed in rags with claws on her hands and feet, who recalls the figure of Death painted by Buffalmacco in Pisa. Floating through the air, Timor wields a sword and displays a large scroll which explains what can be seen in this part of the allegory: “Due to seeking one’s own good in this land / Justice is subjugated to tyranny / so that by this path / no one may pass without doubting death / because thievery goes on outside and inside the gates.”122 Fear is the great protagonist of this part of the fresco, paralyzing every form of civic life.123 In the city the houses are knocked down and set on fire, the streets blocked by rubble, violence and abuse of power are rampant everywhere, and no one is working except a blacksmith who is making weapons, instruments of death. In the parched, desolate countryside as well, the few people who are out and about are intent only on destroying the harvests and burning the houses and villages. Right across from Timor, on the opposite wall, is Securitas: the contrast between them is a recurrent theme in moral and pedagogical treatises starting in the preceding century,124 from Moralium dogma philosophorum (attributed to Guillaume De Conches) to Summa virtutum ac vitiorum by the Dominican Guillaume Peyraut and Brunetto Latini’s Tresor (where Timor becomes Paor). Thomas Aquinas, in particular, had reflected on timor as a complex phenomenon, natural and intellectual at the same time, an inescapable Christian emotion.125 Lorenzetti, too, faces this combat between emotions, opposing to the old woman embodying Timor the figure of a young winged woman with her bosom bared (the symbol of prosperity, mirrored by the abundance of the harvests in the countryside over which she floats), holding not a sword which sows violence and death but an admonitory scaffold. Securitas, the only virtue pictured on the wall, presides over the allegory of Good Government. The scroll she holds in her other hand opposes to the doubt about death unleashed by Timor the fearless certainty of punishment: “Without fear every man may travel freely / and each may till and sow, / so long as this commune shall maintain this lady as 122 “Per volere el ben proprio in questa terra / sommess’è la giustitia a tyrannia / unde per questa via / non passa alcun senza dubbio di morte / ché fuor si robba e dentro da le porte”; cf. Brugnolo, Le iscrizioni in volgare, 385. 123 Donato, Ancora sulle “fonti,” 69, sotto la scritta Timor dell’affresco senese traspare un precedente Pavor. 124 Cf. Skinner, Virtù rinascimentali, 129. 125 See now Loughlin, “The Complexity,” 1-16.

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sovereign, / for she has stripped the wicked of all power.”126 The warning is clear: any violence, any disorder, any revolt will be repressed firmly. It is no coincidence that the figure of Pax recalls that of Securitas as it is depicted on Roman coins.127 The guarantee of peace and the resulting good government can only be certainty of punishment, the outcome of a repressive justice used as the instrument of choice for dealing with the insecurity and anguish of a “melancholic” power.128 Another chronological correspondence notable in this span of time, which reveals the deep sense of disquiet racking Italian urban society, was the appearance in Florence between 1334 and 1336 of the first images of Justice holding a sword. Mario Sbriccioli sees in the panels by Andrea Pisano on the cathedral bell tower and the south doors of the baptistery [see figures 3 and 4] the sign of a break with the iconographical tradition which corresponds with the contemporary rise, in the governing regimes of Italian cities, of a “hegemonic” type of justice,129 founded on punishment, on the principle of obedience to the law and a repressive type of political action.130 Just a few short years later Lorenzetti would depict Justice holding a sword (and with a severed head on her lap) as a political virtue tied to the action of the commune. Looking closely, then, the frescoes in Siena, more than a conciliatory celebration of the triumph of republican values, appear as the expression of the crisis of the experience of being a commune, the anguished, and by this point almost anachronistic, ideological manifesto of a political season now on the wane. The “song” that accompanies the images, addressed to the governors (“you who rule”) made its intent explicit, warning that “where there is tyranny there is great suspicion, / wars, robberies, betrayals, deceit,” and urges those who read it to put their “mind and intellect / to each person keeping justice always in mind / to ward off such dark damage, / destroying the tyrants.”131 The danger of tyranny was the major concern motivating the Nine to commission the fresco cycle;132 and this is the same worry that we 126 “Senza paura ogn’uom franco camini, / e lavorando semini ciascuno, / mentre che tal comuno / manterrà questa donna in signoria, / ch’el à levata a’ rei ogni balia”; cf. Brugnolo, Le iscrizioni in volgare, 385. 127 Cf. Frugoni, Una lontana città, 165. 128 On the “melancolic’ charactr of political power, cf. Schiera, Specchi della politica. 129 Sbriccoli, “La benda della Giustizia,” 69-76. 130 Cf. Sbriccoli, “Giustizia negoziata,” 360-1. 131 “Dove è tirannia è gran sospetto, / guerre, rapine, tradimenti e ‘nganni,” “la mente e lo intelletto / in tener sempre a iustizia suggietto / ciascun, per ischifar sì scuri danni / abbattendo e’ tiranni”; cf. Brugnolo, Le iscrizioni in volgare, 385. 132 As evidenced in Rubinstein, Le allegorie, 357-64; e Donato, Il pittore del Buon Governo, 247-9.

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have see emerging in those same years also in Villani’s historical memoir and Buffalmacco’s macabre iconography. There are those who have gone so far as to hypothesize that the Bad Government fresco depƒicts Pisa, Siena’s “tyrannical” rival for control of the Maremma area in that period.133 In reality, the antithesis was not between two forms of power – the commune and the signoria – but between two ways of governing, two ideal models, one oriented towards the common good, the other towards tyranny. A more plausible hypothesis was advanced by Patrick Boucheron, who says that the centrality given to peace in the Siena frescoes was part of a “battle of images” which was becoming popular in those years between communal and seigniorial regimes precisely on this theme, with even the latter increasingly claiming it as a civic value.134

5

Which “sweet life”?

The three “monuments” which I have examined here belong to different cultural contexts, each having its own tradition, which shape their literary and artistic expressions in specific and characteristic ways: the mercantile environment and the writing of an urban memoir in a perspective of universal history in Villani’s Chronicle; the religious sphere, the theological culture of the Dominicans, and Gothic expressionism in Buffalmacco’s paintings; and the political sphere, the pre-humanist secular culture (the approach taken to city life bears witness to the triumph of earthly values that are not measured against the backdrop of eternity 135), and figurative realism in Lorenzetti’s frescoes. Nonetheless, the three texts express – to my mind – a common language of anguish, a feeling of great worry, of insecurity, of foreboding regarding dangers perceived as real or potential. The levels of reading remain multiple. There can be no doubt that in the course of the 1330s the principal cities of Tuscany began to develop a sense of anguish in the face of the proliferation of seigniorial powers which had already emerged sometime earlier in the rest of Italy. Villani mentions, once again in book XII, the expansion in those years of the dominion of the Tarlati family of Arezzo over Città di Castello, Borgo San Sepolcro, and Massa 133 Norman, “Pisa, Siena, and the Maremma.” 134 Boucheron, “Tournez les yeux,” 1195-6; the theme of “peace” and “commun good” in signorial powers, cf. also Zorzi, “Bien commun,” 286-90. 135 The Siennese cicle is without religious references, except the bell tower and the Dome on the right of the Allegory of the Good Government, as noticed by Frugoni, Una lontana città, 170.

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Trabaria, the establishment of Batino Abati’s hegemony over Grosseto, and of Belforti’s over Volterra, reporting with manifest pleasure the expulsion of the Monaldeschi from Orvieto and the return of “popular” regimes in many cities and lands of the Marches.136 Siena and Florence were by now among the very few Italian cities which still had a republican government, along with Venice and, for a short time still, Perugia. Pisa was governed by a “hybrid” regime – “popular” and seigniorial – as we have seen; Lucca was a subject of signori from outside the city; Bologna and Genoa had seen Taddeo Pepoli and Simone Boccanegra take power right between 1337 and 1339. All the other cities, from Milan to Padua, Verona to Piacenza, were solidly in the hands of seigniorial regimes.137 The sense of isolation was accentuated also by the “mutation” in the nature of seigniorial powers that was taking place during that period, and that right in the 1330s made manifest the irreversibility of phenomena that had long been a full and consistent part of the communal experience, beginning with the real consensus enjoyed by many signori because of their ability to act for the common good of the civitas. The seigniorial powers were not only taking on a dynastic nature, but also they were revealing their tyrannical side, due to the growing distance in the relationship between the signore and the community of citizens and in the ability of the rulers to interpret the community’s interests and aspirations.138 Hence the feeling of anguish which all three works endeavored to interpret. But if the reading remained on just this one level, we would not perceive the deeper disquiet, the widespread fear about the impending presence of death – the “doubt of death” to use the words from Timor’s scroll in Siena – which all the texts mentioned (and probably many more, if we expanded the reach of our investigation) make palpable, and which must have corresponded to the spread of a feeling that the people of that time sensed as a strong break with earlier generations. The “sweet life”139 portrayed by Lorenzetti in the well-governed city, the wealth and power celebrated by Giovanni Villani during a time of war, and the courtly entertainment pictured by Buffalmacco, appear at bottom almost to be apotropaic devices to ward off the dismay and gloom of the new, changing times. 136 Cf. Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 3, book XII, chapters 25, 34, 75, 107, 116, respectively, 70-71, 81-2, 164, 217, and 229-30, 137 On the rise of signorial powers in the first half of the Trecento cf. Simeoni, Le signorie, vol. I. 138 On “seigniorial mutation,” cf. Zorzi, Le signorie cittadine, 108-24. 139 To quote the memorable “canzone’ admonishing ammoniva “vo’ che reggiete”; cf. Brugnolo, Le iscrizioni in volgare, 385.

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Works Cited Agnolo di Tura del Grasso. “Cronaca senese.” In Cronache senesi, ed. by Alessandro Lisini and Fabio Iacometti, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, XV/VI. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1931-39, pp. 253-564. Albertani brixiensis liber consolationis et consilii ex quo hausta est fabula de Melibeo et Prudentia. Ed. by Thor Sundby. Havniae: Host & Filium, 1873. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Il Buon Governo. Ed. by Enrico Castelnuovo. Milan: Electa, 1995. Artifoni, Enrico. “La consapevolezza di un nuovo assetto politico-sociale nella cronachistica italiana d’età avignonese: alcuni esempi fiorentini.” In Aspetti culturali della società italiana nel periodo del papato avignonese, 79-100. Todi: Accademia Tudertina, 1981. —. “Prudenza del consigliare. L’educazione del cittadino nel ‘Liber consolationis et consilii’ di Albertano da Brescia (1246).” In Consilium. Teorie e pratiche del consigliare nella cultura medievale, ed. by Carla Casagrande, Chiara Crisciani, and Silvana Vecchio, 195-216. Florence: Sismel, 2004. Ascheri, Mario. “Legislazione, statuti e sovranità.” In Antica legislazione della Repubblica di Siena, ed. by Mario Ascheri, 1-40. Siena: Il Leccio, 1993. Balestracci, Duccio. “Quando Siena diventò guelfa. Il cambiamento di regime e l’affermazione dell’oligarchia novesca nella lettura di Giuseppe Martini.” In Fedeltà ghibellina, affari guelfi, Saggi e riletture intorno alla storia di Siena fra Duecento e Trecento, ed. by Gabriella Piccinni, 2. vols (Pisa: Pacini, 2008), vol. I, pp. 363-383 (p. 381). Barbero, Alessandro. “Storia e politica fiorentina nella cronaca di Giovanni Villani.” In Il Villani illustrato. Firenze e l’Italia medievale nelle 253 immagini del ms. Chigiano L VIII 296 della Biblioteca Vaticana, ed. by Chiara Frugoni and Alessandro Barbero, 16. Florence: Le Lettere, 2005. Baschet, Jérôme. “I peccati capitali e le loro punizioni nell’iconografia medievale.” In Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, I sette peccati capitali. Storia dei peccati nel Medioevo, 238. Turin: Einaudi, 2000. —. Les justices de l’au-delà. Les représentations de l’enfer en France et en Italie (XIIe-XVe siècle), Rome: École française de Rome, 1993 . Battaglia, Ricci Lucia. Ragionare nel giardino. Boccaccio e i cicli pittorici del “Trionfo della morte.” Rome: Salerno, 1987. Battistoni, Andrea. “La Compagnia dei disciplinati di S. Giovanni Evangelista di Porta della Pace in Pisa e la sua devozione verso frate Giovanni Soldato.” Bollettino della Deputazione di Storia Patria per l’Umbria, 65 (1968): 199-228. Bellosi, Luciano. Buffalmacco e il Trionfo della Morte. Milan: Silvana, 2003. Bolzoni, Lina. “Educare lo sguardo, controllare l’interiorità: usi delle immagini nella predicazione volgare del Tre e Quattrocento.” In Arti e storia nel Medioevo, ed. by Enrico Castelnuovo and Giuseppe Sergi, vol. III, Del vedere: pubblici, forme e funzioni, 529. Turin: Einaudi, 2004. Boquet, Damien and Nagy Poriska. “L’historien et les émotions en politique: entre science et citoyenneté.” In Politiques des émotions au Moyen Âge, ed. by Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, 5-30. Florence: Sismel, 2010. Boucheron, Patrick. “‘Tournez les yeux pour admirer, vous qui exercez le pouvoir, celle qui est peinte ici.’ Le fresque du Bon Gouvernement d’Ambrogio Lorenzetti.” Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales 60 (2005): 1137-1200. Bridgeman, Jane. “Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s dancing ‘maidens.’ A case of mistaken identity.” Apollo, 133 (1991): 245-51. Butor, Michel. Les mots dans la peinture. Genève: Flammarion, 1969.

72 Andrea Zorzi Castruccio Castracani e il suo tempo’ Actum Luce, XIII-XIV (1984-5); Louis Green, Castruccio Castracani. A study on the origins and character of a fourteenth-century Italia despostism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Cherubini, Giovanni. “La Firenze di Dante e di Giovanni Villani.” In Giovanni Villani, Scritti toscani. L’urbanesimo medievale e la mezzadria, 35-51. Florence: Salimbeni, 1991. Chittolini, Giorgio. “Introduzione.” In La crisi degli ordinamenti comunali e le origini dello stato nel Rinascimento, ed. by Giorgio Chittolini, 1-36. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1979. —. “La crisi delle libertà comunali e le origini dello Stato territoriale.” Rivista storica italiana, LXXXII (1970): 99-120. Ciccaglioni, Giovanni. “Dal comune alla signoria? Lo spazio politico di Pisa nella prima metà del XIV secolo.” Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo 109 (2007): 235-70. Cordaro, Michele. “Le vicende costruttive.” In Palazzo Pubblico di Siena. Vicende costruttive e decorazione, ed. by Cesare Brandi, 49. Milan: Silvana, 1983. Corsi, Dinora. “La “crociata” di Venturino da Bergamo nella crisi spirituale di metà Trecento.” Archivio storico italiano, CXLVII (1989), 697-747. Delcorno, Carlo. “Cavalca Domenico.” In Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. XXII, 578. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1979. Dessì, Rosa Maria. “L’invention du Bon Gouvernement. Pour une histoire des anachronismes dans les fresques d’Ambrogio Lorenzetti (XIVe-XXe siècle).” Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 165 (2007): 453-504. Donato, Maria Monica. “Ancora sulle ‘fonti’ del Buon Governo di Ambrogio Lorenzetti: dubbi, precisazioni, anticipazioni.” In Politica e cultura nelle Repubbliche italiane dal Medioevo all’Età moderna. Firenze – Genova – Lucca – Siena – Venezia, ed. by Silvia Adorni Braccesi and Mario Ascheri, 72-3. Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per l’Età moderna e Contemporanea, 2001. —. “Dal ‘Comune rubato’ di Giotto al ‘Comune sovrano’ di Ambrogio Lorenzetti (con una proposta per la ‘canzone’ del Buon governo).” In Medioevo: immagini e ideologie, ed. by Arturo Carlo Quint’valle, 489-509. Milan: Electa, 2005. —. “Il pittore del Buon Governo: le opere ‘politiche’ di Ambrogio in Palazzo Pubblico.” In Pietro e Ambrogio Lorenzetti, ed. by Chiara Frugoni, 201-55 (211-15). Florence: Le Lettere, 2002. —. “Immagini e iscrizioni nell’iconografia ‘politica’ fra Tre e Quattrocento.” In “Visibile parlare.” Le scritture esposte nei volgari italiani dal Medioevo al Rinascimento, ed. by Claudio Ciociola, 341-96. Neaples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1997. Fanti, Mario. “La confraternita di Santa Maria della Morte e la conforteria dei condannati in Bologna nei secoli XIV e XV.” Quaderni del Centro di ricerca e di studio sul movimento dei Disciplinati, 20 (1978): 32. Feldges-Henning, Uta. “The Pictorial Programme of the Sala della Pace: A New Interpretation.” The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes XXXV (1972): 145-62. Ferente, Serena. “Storici ed emozioni.” Storica 43/45 (2009): 371-92. Ferretti, Massimo. “Pitture per condannati a morte del trecento bolognese.” In Misericordie. Conversioni sotto il patibolo tra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. by Adriano Prosperi, 85-152 (150). Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007. Fiumi, Enrico. “Economia e vita privata dei fiorentini nelle rilevazioni statistiche di Giovanni Villani.” Archivio storico italiano, CXI (1953): 201-41. Freedberg, David. Il potere delle immagini. Il mondo delle figure: reazioni e emozioni del pubblico. Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Frugoni, Arsenio. “G. Villani, Cronica.” XI, 94, Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo e Archivio Muratoriano, 77 (1965): 229-56.

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Frugoni, Chiara. “Ambrogio Lorenzetti.” In Pietro e Ambrogio Lorenzetti, ed. by Chiara Frugoni, 180. Florence: Le Lettere, 2002. —. “Altri luoghi, cercando il Paradiso (Il ciclo di Buffalmacco nel Camposanto di Pisa e la committenza domenicana).” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, s. III, XVIII (1988): 1581-2. —. “Il tema dei tre vivi e dei tre morti nella tradizione medievale italiana.” Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Memorie, Classe di Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, s. VIII, XIII (1967): 211-6. —. Una lontana città. Sentimenti e immagini nel Medioevo. Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Garin, Eugenio. Lo zodiaco della vita. La polemica sull’astrologia dal Trecento al Cinquecento. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1976. Gennaro, Chiara. “Venturino da Bergamo e la “Peregrinatio” romana del 1335.” In Studi sul medioevo cristiano. Offerti a Raffaello Morghen per il 90. anniversario dell’Istituto Storico Italiano (1883-1973), 375-406. Rome: Isituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 1974. Giordano da Pisa, Prediche inedite (dal ms. Laurenziano, Acquisti e Doni 290). Ed. by Cecilia Iannella (Pisa: ETS, 1997. Green, Louis. Chronicle into history. An essay on the interpretation of history in Florentine 14thcentury chronicles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Il Camposanto di Pisa. Ed. by Clara Baracchini and Enrico. Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Jasper Schenk, Gerrit. “L’alluvione del 1333. Discorsi sopra un disastro naturale nella Firenze medievale.” Medioevo e Rinascimento, XXI (2007): 27-54. —. “‘Prima ci fu la cagione de la mala provedenza de’ Fiorentini.’ Disaster and ‘Life World’: Reactions in the Commune of Florence to the Flood of November 1333.” The Medieval History Journal, 10 (2007): 355-86. —. “Disastri. Modelli interpretativi delle calamità naturali dal Medioevo al Rinascimento.” In Le calamità ambientali nel tardo Medioevo europeo, ed. by Michal Matheus, Gabriella Piccinni, Giuliano Pinto, Gian Maria Varanini (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2010), pp. 23-76. Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl. Saturno e la melanconia. Studi di storia della filosofia naturale, religione e arte. Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Loughlin, Stephen. “The Complexity and Importance of ‘timor’ in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.” In Fear and Its Representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Ed. by Anne Scott and Cynthia Kosso, 1-16. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002. Luzzati, Michele. Firenze e la Toscana nel Medioevo. Seicento anni per la costruzione di uno stato. Turin: Einaudi, 1986. —. Giovanni Villani e la compagnia dei Buonaccorsi. Rome: Istituto per l’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1971. Meiss, Millard. Pittura a Firenze e Siena dopo la morte nera. Arte, religione e società alla metà del Trecento. Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Mentgen, Gerd. Astrologie und Öffentlichkeit im Mittelalter. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 2005; Gilbert Dagron, “Une rhétorique de l’événement: l’astrologie.” In Faire l’événement au Moyen Âge, ed. by Claude Carozzi and Huguette Taviani-Carozzi, 193-200. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2007. Morpurgo, Salomone. “Le epigrafi volgari in rima del ‘Trionfo della Morte’ del ‘Giudizio Universale e Inferno’ e degli ‘Anacoreti’ nel Camposanto di Pisa.” L’arte, II (1899): 68-9. Moulinier, Laurence and Redon Odile. “L’inondation de 1333 à Florence. Récits et hypothèses de Giovanni Villani.” In Le fleuve, ed. by Odile Kammerer and Odile Redon, 91-104. Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1999.

74 Andrea Zorzi Niccoli, Ottavia. Vedere con gli occhi del cuore. Alle origini del potere delle immagini. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2011. Norman, Diana. “Pisa, Siena, and the Maremma: a neglected aspect of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s paintings in the Sala dei Nove.” Renaissance studies, 11 (1997): 310-42. Ortalli, Gherardo. Lupi genti culture. Uomo e ambiente nel medioevo. Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Pezzarossa, Fulvio. “Lenzi Domenico detto il Biadaiolo.” In Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. LXIV, 384-6. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2005. Piccinni, Gabriella. “Il sistema senese del credito nella fase di smobilitazione dei suoi banchi internazionali.” In Fedeltà ghibellina, affari guelfi. Saggi e riletture intorno alla storia di Siena fra Duecento e Trecento, ed. by Gabriella Piccinni, 209-89. Pisa: Pacini, 2008. —. “Siena nell’età di Duccio,” in Duccio. Alle origini della pittura senese, ed. by A. Bagnoli et al., 33. Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2003. Pinto, Giuliano. Il libro del Biadaiolo. Carestia e annona a Firenze dalla metà del ‘200 al 1348. Florence: Olschki, 1978. Ragone, Franca. Giovanni Villani e i suoi continuatori. La scrittura delle cronache a Firenze nel Trecento. Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 1998. Ronzani, Mauro. Un’idea trecentesca di cimitero: la costruzione e l’uso del camposanto nella Pisa del secolo XIV. Pisa: Plus, 2005. Rosenwein, Barbara H. “Histoire de l’émotion: méthodes et approches,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 49 (2006): 33-48. Rubinstein, Nicolai. “Le allegorie di Ambrogio Lorenzetti nella Sala della Pace e il pensiero politico del suo tempo.” Rivista storica italiana, 109 (1997): 781-802. —. “Political Ideas in Sienese Art: the Frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Taddeo di Bartolo in the Palazzo Pubblico.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21 (1958): 179-207. Salvestrini, Francesco. “L’Arno e l’alluvione fiorentina del 1333.” In Le calamità ambientali nel tardo Medioevo europeo: realtà, percezioni, reazioni, ed. by Michael Matheus et al., 231-56. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2010. —. Libera città su fiume regale. Firenze e l’Arno dall’Antichità al Quattrocento. Florence: Nardini, 2005. Saxl, Fritz. La fede negli astri. Dall’antichità al Rinascimento. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1985. Sbriccoli, Mario. “Giustizia negoziata, giustizia egemonica. Riflessioni su una nuova fase degli studi di storia della giustizia criminale.” In Criminalità e giustizia in Germania e in Italia. Pratiche giudiziarie e linguaggi giuridici tra tardo medioevo ed età moderna, ed. by Marco Bellabarba, Gerd Schwerhoff, and Andrea Zorzi, 345-64. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001. —. “La benda della Giustizia. Iconografia, diritto e leggi penali dal medioevo all’Età moderna.” In Ordo iuris. Storia e forme dell’esperienza giuridica, ed. by Mario Sbriccoli et al. Milan: Giuffrè, 2003. Schiera, Pierangelo. “Il Buongoverno ‘melancolico’ di Ambrogio Lorenzetti e la ‘costituzionale faziosità’ della città.” Scienza e politica. Per una storia delle dottrine politiche, 34 (2006): 93-108. —. Specchi della politica: disciplina, melancolia, socialità nell’Occidente moderno. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. Spiriti e fantasmi nella società medieval. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1995. Segre, Cesare. “Bartolomeo da San Concordio.” In Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. VI, 769. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960. Seidel, Max, “Dolce vita. Il ritratto dello stato senese dipinto da Ambrogio Lorenzetti.” In Max Seidel, Arte italiana del Medioevo e del Rinascimento, vol. 1, 281-5. Venice: Marsilio, 2003.

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—. “Vanagloria, Studi sull’iconografia degli affreschi di Ambrogio Lorenzetti nella Sala della Pace.” In Seidel, Arte italiana del Medioevo e del Rinascimento, vol. I, 301-305. Venice: Marsilio, 2003. Sennelart, Michel. Les arts de gouverner. Du regimen médiéval au concept de gouvernement. Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1995. Simeoni, Luigi. Le signorie, 1313-1559. Milan: Vallardi, 1950. Skinner, Quentin. Virtù rinascimentali. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006. Sperl, Alexander. “Vom Blutregen zum Staubfall. Der Einfluß politischer und theologischer Theorien auf die Wahrnehmung von Umweltphänomenen.” In Umweltbewältigung. Die historische Perspektive, ed. by Gerhard Jaritz and Verena Winiwarter, 58-68. Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 1994. Tabacco, Giovanni. Egemonie sociali e strutture del potere nel medioevo italiano. Turin: Einaudi, 1979. Villani, Giovanni. Nuova cronica. Ed. by Giuseppe Porta. Parma: Guanda, 1991. “Visibile parlare.” Le scritture esposte nei volgari italiani dal Medioevo al Rinascimento. Ed. by Claudio Ciociola. Neaples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1997. Zorzi, Andrea. “Bien commun et conflits politiques dans l’Italie communale.” In De Bono Communi. The Discourse and Practice of the Common Good in the European City (13th-16th c.). Ed. by Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, 267-90. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. —. “Fedeltà ghibellina, affari guelfi.” Bullettino senese di storia patria, CXV (2008): 266-305. —. “La cultura della vendetta nel conflitto politico in età comunale.” In Le storie e la memoria. In onore di Arnold Esch, ed. by Roberto Delle Donne and Andrea Zorzi, 144-58. Florence: 2002. —. “Le esecuzioni delle condanne a morte a Firenze nel tardo Medioevo tra repressione penale e cerimoniale pubblico.” In Simbolo e realtà della vita urbana nel tardo Medioevo, ed. by Massimo Miglio and Giuseppe Lombardi, 153-253. Rome: Manziana, 1993. —. Le signorie cittadine in Italia (secoli XIII-XV). Milan: Mondadori, 2010. —. “Rituali di violenza, cerimoniali penali, rappresentazioni della giustizia nelle città italiane centro-settentrionali (secoli XIII-XV).” In Le forme della propaganda politica nel Due e nel Trecento, ed. by Paaolo Cammarosano, 395-425. Rome: École française de Rome, 1994.

4

Humiliation and the Exercise of Power in the Florentine Contado in the Mid-Fourteenth Century Carol Lansing

Medieval historians have long been preoccupied with the relationship between state authority and cultures of violence, as for example in the debates over the identity of the Italian magnates. The last few decades have also seen a turn to understanding violence in terms of emotionality, recognizing that emotional expression could be an aspect of the exercise of power. Gerd Althoff explored this question in terms of how people, particularly rulers, “staged emotions,” using them as a form of ritual communication.1 One vivid instance is noble anger and violence. Richard Barton argued that nobles in eleventh-century France at times used a show of anger to enforce claims about their prerogatives.2 A lord might put on a display of affront and rage, to threaten and perhaps seek violent retribution. This contribution builds on the literature on noble anger and the exercise of power by showing its connection with forms of humiliation, drawing on a rich although complex body of sources, mention of emotions in court records. I examine representations of anger and humiliation in mid-fourteenth century denunciations to the Florentine Executor of the Ordinances of Justice. My focus is on three cases in which lords were denounced for the rape and abduction of women. Denouncers to the Executor depicted this in terms of the shame and humiliation of the women’s kinsmen. For the denouncers, these abductions and rapes were, in Susan Brownmiller’s phrase, “messages between men.”3 Of course, the language of the denunciations was very much shaped by cultural and legal categories. I argue that while the three cases probably reflect social experience – elites using anger, sexuality, and humiliation to dominate – the denunciations also reveal rhetorical strategies. One example is a denunciation that depicted a noble driven by rage. It survives in the sentences of the criminal court of the Florentine podestà, and was explicitly adjudicated according to the Ordinances of Justice. Chele Nutini from San 1 See the discussion in Rosenwein, “Problems,” as well as Althoff’s article in that issue. 2 Barton, “Zealous Anger,” 153-70. 3 Brownmiller, Against our will.

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Godenzo, in the Mugello, the region north of Florence, had both denounced and accused Count Guido Domestico, of the Guidi counts, a old feudal family with extensive rural holdings. The Guidi had ceded San Godenzo to Florence in 1344, two years before this case.4 Chele’s accusation was based on this jurisdictional change. He charged that Count Guido through force and violence had unjustly required and burdened him by giving him an order, although he was a free popolano of the city and people of Florence. Count Guido had told him that he must go at his own expense to guard a castrum near the Guidi properties at Romandola, as if he were the count’s man, his fidelis. Chele refused to go to the castrum or serve him as a fidelis. Count Guido, “seeing that Chele was amused by his order,” “driven by rage” ( furore spiritus instigatus) took over fifty of his men to Chele’s house. They stole all of his grain, wine, household goods, and even his animals. Not content with this, they burned the house. “Persevering in his rage” (in furore perseverans), Count Guido then had his men cut down all the trees and vines on Chele’s land and even destroyed the chestnuts. Count Guido was contumacious and therefore convicted in absentia, sentenced to emend the damages, restore the property, pay a hefty fine, and if captured, to be burned.5 In effect, Chele – or perhaps his legal advisor – employed a rhetorical strategy that played on stereotypical views of noble emotionality: Count Guido was driven by furor, irrational rage. I cannot know whether Count Guido had in fact put on a show of rage, but it is certainly plausible, and probably an effective strategy. The odds of enforcement of the sentence after all were slim. Given what happened to Chele Nutini, surely the next time Count Guido illegally ordered a man to go on guard service, the fellow would be frightened enough to comply. As this sentence suggests, denunciations of noble criminality can be a rich source for depictions of emotions and the violent exercise of power. My focus is denunciations to the Florentine Executor, an office created in 1306 to defend the popular constitution and ensure the enforcement of the Ordinances of Justice, laws which imposed stringent penalties on magnates who injured popolani.6 The Executor became as Andrea Zorzi has shown the guarantor of the legal system more generally. The Executor was an outsider appointed for a semester, with his own officials. He was housed in the public palace.7 Anyone 4 On San Godenzo, see Pirillo, Forme e strutture, 503-4. 5 Archivio di stato di Firenze, Podestà, 135, ff. 260 v-261 r. It is dated 30 March 1346. 6 There is a voluminous bibliography on the magnate and the Ordinances of Justice. For a recent study that cites the bibliography, see Diacciati, Popolani e magnati. See also Lansing, “Magnate violence revisited,” pp. 35-45. 7 See Zorzi, L’amministrazione della giustizia penale. archiviodistato.firenze.it/siasfi/.

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could drop a written denunciation in a tamburo, or wooden box. There were two, one under the loggia of the Palazzo del Podestà and the other at the palace of the Capitano del popolo. The Executor and his officials along with the Capitano opened them up and read and copied the denunciations once a week, on Fridays. If a charge fit within their legal parameters, they were obligated to hold an inquest. Then if they found sufficient legal grounds, they would relate the case to the criminal court. Of course, denunciations cannot be taken at face value. People crafted representations of events in order to get the Executor’s court to take action. Denouncers at least in theory could remain anonymous, so that unlike a person who lodged an accusation, they might suffer little consequences. Some were false, some were clearly intended as pressure tactics, some reveal magnates denouncing each other. It is also evident in many cases that denouncers desperately hoped that the Executor’s office would punish serious crimes and protect them. I have found the denunciations revealing because they appear to be less shaped by contemporary legal categories than other forms of charges in the court. They were very often written in the vernacular, a product of the widespread diffusion of education in the contado recently documented by Robert Black.8 Often, the denunciations suggest a lack of legal advice. The denouncers told stories, – stories that manipulated cultural and political categories as they urged the Executor to act. The records survive only from after July 1343 because of the disastrous fire in the Camera del comune at the time of the expulsion of the Duke of Athens. The earliest, 1345-46, have been thoroughly studied by Claudia Caduff.9 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber recently analyzed a sample of denunciations of magnate violence to the Executor, from the years 1344-50, 1367-77, and 1400-5, treating them as a source for popular perceptions of the magnates.10 Caduff found that three-quarters of the 302 denunciations in her period came from the contado. Most were unsuccessful: in 1345, the Executor acted on only about one denunciation in four. Further, 11 percent of the victims were women and in 40 percent of those cases the charge was rape, which was significantly higher than the percentage of rape charges in the criminal court. I have read the earliest of the Executor’s criminal registers, 1343-51 and have assembled about 160 criminal cases. Three fairly detailed cases from a short period, April 1345-April 1346 describe noble efforts to abduct and rape women. These were not casual, 8 Black, Education. 9 Caduff, “Magnati e popolani.” 10 Klapisch-Zuber, Retour à la cite, 109-42.

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opportunistic rapes. Significantly, in all three cases the nobles came from powerful landowning families: the Bardi, Ricasoli, and Pazzi. These lurid narratives emphasize not the woman, but rather the impact on her male kin, which is cast in terms of shame and humiliation. The first case is an inquest held in response to a vernacular denunciation. Someone who termed him or herself the closest kin to Monna Bice, a widow, denounced Totto di Filippozzo de Bardi. The charge was that Totto had with force and violence taken Monna Bice and held and now holds her, against her will and that of all of “her kin and friends” (tutti suoi parenti e amici). These things are so manifest and public in the land and district of Pozzo, contado of Totto and his brothers Andrea and Francesco, that Buonaccorso nephew or grandson (nipote) of the widow’s husband “grieved and lamented over the shame and outrage he received from Totto (dognedose et ramaricandose de la vergogna et oltraggio che receveva dal dicto Tocto).”11 The denouncer went on: Totto had several persons tell Buonacorso that if he stopped his lament, Totto would not remain angry. He also had Buonacorso told that “he should not remain in this lament, like a person who is kin to Monna Bice and like a man who holds himself shamed (per questo far dire il decto Buonaccorso non se remanea dal decto ramaricamento si come persona distrecta da la decta Monna Bice et si come huomo che temea vergogna).” Buonaccorso persisted. So, Totto had Buonaccorso and four of his kinsmen arrested and questioned. Under force, they confessed that they had sought to kill Totto and hand their paese over to the Count of Romena. Totto therefore had Buonaccorso hanged and the others jailed. The denouncer concluded, “for God’s sake, you are begged to punish this crime, in a way that will do honor to you and to your office, and maintain reason and justice.” Evidently, Buonaccorso had reacted to Bice’s kidnap with a public lament. The denouncer explained his motives in terms of his honor: literally, the shame and outrage he had received from Totto, a message between men. Totto perhaps had expected silent compliance and perceived the lament as a challenge. This was a power struggle over the abduction of a woman, framed by the denouncer in terms of male shame. Briefly, the court held an inquest and seven witnesses testified. According to several, including the parish rector, Ser Zanobio the Florentine vicar of Pozzo on Totto’s orders had had the men captured, imprisoned and punished. Why? Totto and his brothers had 11 Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 51, ff. 51 r-52 r. The witness testimony is in Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 54, ff. 84 r-86 r. I am grateful to Konrad Eisenbichler and Elena Brizio for help with this text.

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jurisdictional rights: Buonaccorso was not a Florentine citizen but rather their subject and fidelis.12 So, the court did not proceed. The intersection of noble violence and state authority is worth noting. Scholars, most recently Thomas Bisson, analyze the acts of violence of medieval nobles in terms of opposition to the state.13 Here, the Florentine territorial state effectively facilitated what the denouncer considered to be seigneurial murder. Who was Totto di Filipozzo? He and his brothers belonged to the Bardi, the famed lineage that rose in the thirteenth century to establish one of the most powerful banks in Europe, bankrolling not only the papacy but European monarchs. Hardly old feudal nobles, they had acquired Pozzo along with two other castles only in 1338. Totto and his brothers were depositors in the Bardi bank. They took part in an armed insurrection against Florence in 1340 and were exiled, but still were paid their shares.14 The Bardi bank failed in January 1346 after Edward III reneged on his debts. Totto and his brothers evidently adopted violent strategies to force compliance and claim resources. One major target was lucrative church properties. In July 1348, they gathered a band of armed men at a farm they owned in the Chianti and attacked a parish church, San Cristoforo. The church was vacant, perhaps due to the priest’s death from the plague, and six men from the parish were guarding it. The Bardi and their troops rode up, armed with crossbows, saying “We have already several times broken the popolo of Florence and we can certainly break that of San Cristoforo. The tamburo and the law are in Florence and we are in the country and can do what we wish. We will hang you as thieves from that oak tree.” When one man resisted in the church, they threw him to the ground, saying “Acknowledge that your life is ours (riconoscere la vita per noi), filthy thief of a traitor that you are.” When he did not acquiesce, Francesco di Filipozzo killed him with a blow to the head with a sword. Nineteen witnesses testified at the inquest. Ultimately, four Bardi were convicted, all of them contumacious. The sentences were lifted in an amnesty of 1351. Psychologists analyze humiliation as one of the “self-conscious emotions,” which also include guilt, embarrassment, and pride.15 In general, humiliation takes place when someone exposes the shortcomings or misdeeds of another. It requires a social context: humiliation is suffered in public. It is not a medieval category, one of the scholastic passions, although these cases 12 On Pozzo, see Pirillo, Forme, 54-5, and 111. 13 Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century. 14 Sapori, La crisi, 129. 15 Ellison and Harter, “Humiliation,” 310-29.

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explicitly speak of shame (vergogna). Nevertheless, it is a useful concept to analyze these texts, particularly as William Ian Miller formulated the distinction between shame and humiliation in 1993. Miller defined shaming as degradation of status, “stripping someone of a status she had some right to before the particular failing.” Ordinary humiliation he saw instead as “deflation of pretension.”16 This is the kind of humiliation professors worry about all the time: the fear of being caught in an embarrassing mistake, a mistake that reveals our failings. From this perspective, both Monna Bice and Buonacorso suffered shame rather than humiliation: that is, not deflation of pretension but a real degradation of status. Bice if the denunciation is true went from respectable widowhood to involuntary servitude. And yet, in this story, Totto sought to humiliate rather than shame: he literally demanded that Buonaccorso cease to act as Bice’s kinsman and as a man shamed by her abduction. The message was: drop your claim to family honor, submit to my treatment of your kinswoman. When Buonaccorso resisted, Totto became angry and enforced dominance, inflicting the forced confessions, imprisonments and hanging. Miller also writes of what he terms capital ‘H’ humiliation, “the horrific domain of brutal and systematic cruelty.”17 The tormentor “denies the social world of normalized encounter”: the humiliated person is made utterly abject, destroyed, at least socially.18 Ultimately Buonaccorso was destroyed, as was Bice. The second case involves the abduction of a woman and the killing of her husband. Several denunciations tell the story at some length. In May 1345, Angelo Panziere de Ricasoli approached a married woman, Monna Cemina, nicknamed Bambina, in the piazza of the commune of San Bartolomeo, which is close to the borders of the Sienese contado. He tossed stones until he broke the pot she carried on her head. Twelve days later, Angelo “like a grande and a tyrant (si come grande e come tiranno)” with his compagnia assaulted her husband, nicknamed Poccia. Holding a naked sword, Angelo said “give it to this traitor (date a questo traditore)” and took Bambina away by force. From Angelo’s perspective, Poccia in resisting his demand was a traitor. Ten witnesses from the village concurred, one of them an eyewitness.19 Further denunciations charged Angelo with hiring two men to kill Poccia because he did not consent to Angelo’s abduction 16 Miller, Humiliation, 157. 17 Miller, Humiliation, 165. 18 Ibid., 167. 19 Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 33, ff. 41 r-42 v. The cedula was recorded at Archivio di stato di Firenze, Capitano del Popolo, 35, f. 3.

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and enslavement of his wife. The assassins caught up with Poccia at the gates of Siena, stabbed him to death and brought his severed hand back to Angelo as proof. Poccia was buried outside the cemetery. Angelo, according to one version, fed the hand to his dogs and continued to keep Bambina as his concubine (amaxia).20 Angelo was contumacious, and ultimately banned in a substantial fine and the destruction of his goods, as well as decapitation if captured. Efforts to enforce the sentence included heavy fines on his brothers and nephews for noncompliance, as well as fines imposed on the rectors of nearby villages for failing to provide troops to aid the court’s officer in enforcing the sentence. This sentence was canceled as well in the 1351 amnesty. Again, Angelo reacted with anger when Poccia refused a humiliating consent, which would have meant dropping his claim to an honorable marriage, and then had the man destroyed. The third case is an attempted rape by a woman’s landlord. The case is remarkable because it depicts successful resistance to similar noble demands. In early April 1346, a man named Bartolo, who termed himself a “poor and wretched person (pauper et miserabilis persona)” “tearfully stated and exposed” the case in a cedula to the Executor. Cherico di Pazzino de Pazzis had gone in the evening to one of the houses he and his brothers owned in the village of Santo Stefano in Pane, in Rifredi, then outside the city. The house was inhabited by Dino, a farm laborer for the Pazzi family, and his wife Francisca, Bartolo’s daughter. Francisca was cooking by the fire. Cherico entered carrying a candle. Bartolo quoted him as saying, “I have many times insisted to you that you must serve me and you have not yet done what I want, but now if you will not consent to me out of love it is fitting that you consent to me by force (multotiens requisivi te quod deberes mihi servire et nondum fecissti quod volui sed nunc si non consenties in me amoris opportet quod consentias in me per vim).” When she refused, he extinguished the candle, and dragged her by her hair towards the bed, saying that if she did not do his will, he would cut her veins with a knife. She cried out for help. Cherico had sent her husband Dino off that morning to gather wood some distance away. Returning home, he heard her cries and found Cherico dragging her by the hair. Dino, “oppressed with the greatest sorrow” said, “What is this, 20 Archivio di stato di Firenze, Capitano del Popolo, 35, ff. 4 v-5 r. The inquest against Angelo is at Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 50, ff. 25 r-30 r. Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 50, ff. 28 r-33 r records efforts at enforcement; the ban of his immediate kinsmen is at f. 45 r. His sentence of 18 February 1345/6 is Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 56, ff. 19 r-20 r; the marginalia records its cancellation. Caduff, Magnati, discusses this case, 35-7.

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Cherico? I did not think that you would do what you are doing to insult me in this way (Non putabam quod tu faceres quod facis in quo modo me vituperare).” Cherico responded, “Dino, be quiet for your own good. If you do so, I will make you a bonum hominem.” Dino responded to Cherico that he should not do rusticitates. Don’t act like a peasant. (Dino later testified that he also said, “You sent me away so you could do this).” Then, Cherico, enraged (irato animo) punched Dino in the mouth, knocking out some teeth. Dino defended himself and his wife and the two men exchanged a great many blows. In effect, the charge was that Cherico took advantage of his landlordship by sending Dino off to cut wood and then demanding service from his wife in the form of sex. Like the other two cases, this was about demands for service and compliance, and whether the low status man could claim honor. Dino initially characterized the attempted rape as an insult, done to himself. Cherico told Dino to tolerate his wife’s rape and offered to reward him by making him his bonum hominem. When Dino told him not to act like a peasant, Cherico became enraged and attacked. Villagers often were reluctant to testify, surely fearing retaliation, and in this case many were surely Pazzi dependants. Remarkably, this case nevertheless went forward because of resistance, initially by two women as well as Francisca’s father. Bartolo’s initial denunciation listed thirty witnesses, all from the village. Initially, twenty-two men testified that they knew nothing, and one stated only that he had heard the story from Francisca. It was two women who testified that this was public knowledge in the village, which was enough for the Executor to refer the case to the criminal court. In the ensuing trial, thirteen men did testify, three of them men who had previously denied any knowledge. Dino and Francisca testified as well. Cherico was convicted of the assault on Francisca, attempted rape and attempted adultery against her will, and fined 600 lb.21 The Pazzi did retaliate, first by a legal countercharge of assault against Francisca, which failed. Then, according to a denunciation of late August, Cinozzo, Cherico’s son, found Francisca, attacked her, grabbed her arms behind her back and began to bind them, evidently an attempt at abduction. He was stopped by an officer of the podestà.22 Cinozzo also was convicted. 21 The initial denunciation is Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 33, ff. 48 r-50 r. The initial witness testimony is Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, ff. 54, 81 r-83 r. Francisca and Dino’s testimony is Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 69, ff. 5 r-12 v. Caduff, Magnati, analyzed this case at length. 22 See Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 69, ff. 51 r-52 v.

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The denunciation of Cinozzo is a vivid evocation of anti-magnate language. The author urges that there is good evidence: the officer who rescued Francisca knows well what happened. “Let it please you that this crime not remain unpunished, and that Cinozzo receive the penalty he deserves, so that these rapacious wolves do not break the bones of orphans and widows and married women who are popolani.” If the Executor looks into the matter, he will find the things written here and even more to be true. The author also appealed to the reputation of the court: it should not be said that Cinozzo is vaunting himself around Florence because he does not believe he will suffer any penalty from his encounter with the podestà’s officer.23 These three stories depict the same general pattern. Men from seigneurial families sought to abduct and/or rape lower status women. In the case of Bambina and surely Bice as well, this was sexual enslavement, women forced into concubinage. Again, these were messages between men: all three nobles demanded compliance from the husband or kinsmen, a compliance that was recognition of the noble’s power. Cherico made the message explicit: tolerate my rape of your wife and I will reward you, make you my good man. Further, all of these nobles are depicted as couching their demands in terms of loyalty and service. For them, men who did not comply were traitors. Scholars tend to treat medieval rape as impulsive, opportunistic. There are reasons for this: twelfth- and thirteenth-century literature often portrays rape in this way, particularly rape of low status women. Andreas Capellanus famously in his Art of Courtly Love “condoned the rape of peasant women by knights”: writing “be careful to puff them up with lots of praise and then when you find a convenient place, do not hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace then by force.”24 The medieval French pastourelles often depict a knight spotting a pretty shepherdess and assaulting her.25 These denunciations instead depict lords employ abduction and rape to humiliate and dominate dependants. Could this reflect real practice? The research of Alain Boureau and others has shown that while a legal droit du seigneur was a fantasy, the idea derived from criticisms of abusive lords dating back at least to 1247.26 My working hypothesis is that there probably was a long history of sexual predation and humiliation by noble landlords, though an ill-documented one, and these cases do offer a glimpse. Is it acceptable to make a big claim, based on only a few cases? The evidence 23 Archivio di stato di Firenze, Podestà, 149, ff. 19 r-21 v. 24 Andeas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, 150. 25 See Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens. 26 Boureau, Le droit de cuissage, 118.

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for rape is notoriously poor.27 As Trevor Dean has argued, “Of all the crimes perpetrated against women, rape stands out for the ineffectiveness of the law.”28 Rape is seriously under-reported, then as now, fewer than one in ten. Convictions were rare. It was seen as a minor crime. Trevor Dean found five rape prosecutions in Bologna in the decade of the 1390s, three of them failed attempts, and only a handful in Lucca as well.29 Samuel Cohn, working in Florentine criminal court records, found five cases of heterosexual rape in 1344-45 and two in 1374-75.30 I have found twelve cases of rape or attempted rape in the registers of the Executor, 1344-51. Two cases concern a pair of brothers from the Adimari family who got hold of keys to the convent of Sant’Agata, and had sex repeatedly with a conversa and a nun.31 Three more cases were failed attempts and not very detailed. In one, another Adimari with a band of armed men tried to kidnap an unmarried Tornaquinci daughter from the church of Santa Maria Novella.32 Another two involve nobles with their henchmen grabbing married women and carrying them off, though not keeping them.33 Three more are premeditated assaults on married women in their homes. In one of these cases, a della Tosa showed up with his men and a ladder to climb into a window of her house. Another is a case of repeated harassment of a neighbor, including assaults on the husband and several attempts at rape of the wife, perhaps due to a property dispute.34 The remaining four cases involve abduction (raptus). Why so few? Rape laws were heavily influenced by Roman law and often were vague. The legal terms commonly used in Italian civic statutes were stuprum, which literally meant to debauch or defile, and raptus, a term that initially meant theft, in late Roman law came to mean abduction and rape, but by the thirteenth century in Italy could simply mean abduction.35 Even the famed jurist Alberto Gandino evidently found the term confusing. During his sindication after a term as a judge in Bologna the legality of one 27 Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe, 82-6, surveys the scholarship on rape in medieval European courts. This quote is on 82. 28 See Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 112-16, and 125-9. 29 Dean, Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy, 140. 30 Cohn, Women in the Streets, 30. 31 This was described as stuprum, and the texts do not explicitly say they were forced. Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 96, ff. 16 r-17 v, ff. 121 r-123 v. 32 Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 119, f. 29 v. 33 Ibid., 96, ff. 102 r-103 v; 157, f. 72 v. 34 Ibid., 122, ff. 27 r; 96, f. 102 r.; f. 122, 5 r. 35 See Brundage, “Rape and Seduction,” 141-8. On the evolution of understandings of raptus in late medieval English law, see Kelly, “Statutes of Rapes.”

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of his judicial actions was questioned because he had had a man suspected of raptus tortured, which was legal in a case of carnal knowledge, but not in a case of abduction.36 Rape cases often hinged on the victim’s sexual reputation, because an accused man’s best defense was to prove that the woman was inhonesta, a woman of bad character who could not be raped. A woman and her family might use a rape accusation in an effort to force a marriage between the alleged rapist and victim. Otherwise, they would hesitate, since the law was ineffective and the damage to a woman’s reputation could outweigh the satisfactions of justice. A case, after all, would be very public. In many Italian towns, including Florence, women had to testify on the steps of the town hall, rather than within the judge’s chamber. Further, in the Florentine statute the penalty depended on the status and condition of the woman. In effect, medieval women had strong incentives not to report rape, and when cases do exist, the evidence typically concerns the victim’s status and reputation rather than the social context or the impact on her kin. The denunciations to the Executor are a rare exception because of their purpose. Denouncers told their stories in terms of noble abuse of power, depicting lords as enforcing their power through rage and humiliation, sexual abuse of women used as a message between men. The denunciations should be located in the complex power struggles of the fourteenth century, as the Florentine commune sought to impose control over the contado and local communities or factions sought ways to make use of the machinery of the Florentine state.37 It would require a second paper to make this case in detail, but these denouncers from the contado were acutely aware of the contests between the Florentine commune and local lords like the Pazzi, Ricasoli and Conti Guidi. Recall that in the first case, Chele Nutini’s initial complaint was that Count Guido treated him like a fidelis when in fact he was now a free popolano of Florence. The denunciations after all were direct appeals to Florentine state authority: it is not altogether surprising that denouncers told these stories that demonized noble landlords as magnates who sought the humiliation of other men. These Florentine cases suggest a need to rethink medieval rape and kidnapping. One obvious parallel is their role in war. Recent events have forced a general recognition that rape is not an accidental byproduct, but a 36 Kantorowicz, Albertus Gandinus, vol. 2. Die Theorie, 398-9. See Blanshei, Politics and Justice, 322-3. 37 One starting point for the very extensive literature is the work of Pirillo; see his Costruzione.

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strategy of war.38 There are far too many well-documented modern horrors: the Korean “comfort women,” or rape as an aspect of genocide in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the Congo, and the Sudan. Works like the anonymous diary, A Woman in Berlin, have sparked serious study of sexual violence during the Second World War in Europe.39 We know more generally that rape profoundly affects not only female victims but their families and communities. In a 2008 interview, Stephen Lewis, former UN special envoy for HIV Aids in Africa, spoke of sexual violence in exactly these terms: “In the Congo, rape is no longer merely a weapon of war. Rape is a strategy of war, employed to humiliate entire families and communities through their women in order to take possession of resources, or to turn the women into sex slaves.”40 The cases I have discussed from mid-fourteenth century Florence suggest that rape could similarly be a way to humiliate, to take resources, to dominate. It is important not to lose sight of the abducted women. One consequence of treating rape as messages between men is that the complexity of the experiences and responses of the women can become invisible. They disappear from the denouncers’ stories, which become about power struggles between men. The Florentine statute required that an abductor be compelled to return the woman to her family, but it is not clear that this happened in practice. There certainly was no suggestion in these legal texts that Bice or Bambina should be returned to their families. Why? Perhaps the answer is suggested by an anecdote cited by Americanist historian James Brooks, in which we hear indirectly of the feelings of a captured woman. In the 1820s an American trader encountered six Mexicans living as captives with a band of Comanches. He learned that one woman’s father had offered to ransom her, but she “preferred to remain with her masters, rather than encounter the horrible ordeal of ill-natured remarks to which she would inevitable be exposed on being returned to civilized life.” Because her captors had given her a disfiguring tattoo, because she had been married and now was possibly pregnant, she would be more unhappy returning to her father. 41 Five of the six captives preferred to stay. I have suggested that the relationship between elite violence and state authority was complex and at times intersected. Even a tribunal charged 38 Buss, “Rethinking Rape as a Weapon of War,” discusses the implications of analyzing rape in terms of “messages passed between men.” She argues that this approach can obscure the complex reasons particular individuals were attacked and their experience. 39 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin. 40 Truscott, “Congo.” 41 Brooks, “Captive,” 283.

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with restraining nobles might in practice reinforce their prerogatives. Further, Florentines depicted displays of emotion as part of the culture of violence, including shows of rage and the humiliation of men through the abduction of their kinswomen. Finally, although rape is difficult to study because of the lack of evidence, in these records abduction and enslavement feature as strategies of domination.

Works Cited Andeas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love New York: Norton, 1941. Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin. London: Guardian Book Service, 2004. Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 33. Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 50. Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 51. Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 54. Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 56. Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 69. Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 96. Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 122. Archivio di stato di Firenze, Atti dell’Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 119. Archivio di stato di Firenze, Capitano del Popolo, 35. Archivio di stato di Firenze, Podestà, 135. Archivio di stato di Firenze, Podestà, 149. Barton, Richard. “Zealous Anger and the Renegotiation of Aristocratic Relationships is Eleventhand Twelfth-Century France.” In Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. by Barbara Rosenwein, 153-70. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Bisson, Thomas. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: power, lordship and the origins of European government. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Black, Robert. Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany. Vol. I. of Teachers, pupils and schools, c. 1250-1500. Ed. by Robert Black. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Blanshei, Sara R. Politics and Justice in Late Medieval Bologna. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Boureau, Alain. Le droit de cuissage: la fabrication d’un mythe (XIIIe-XXe siècle). Paris: Albin Michel, 1995, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane as The Lord’s First Night. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Brooks, James. “Captive, Concubine, Servant, Kin: A Historian Divines Experience in Archaeological Slaveries.” In Invisible Citizens: Captives and Their Consequences, ed. by Catherine M. Cameron, 283-9. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008. Brownmiller, Susan. Against our will: Men, women and rape. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975. Brundage, James. “Rape and Seduction in the Medieval Canon Law.” In Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church, ed. by Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage, 141-8. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1982. Buss, Doris E. “Rethinking ‘Rape as a Weapon of War.’” Feminist Legal Studies 17 (2009): 145-63. Caduff, Claudia. “Magnati e popolani nel contado fiorentino: dinamiche sociali e rapporti di potere nel Trecento.” Rivista di storia dell’agricoltura 33, 2 (December 1993): 15-63.

90 Carol L ansing Cohn, Samuel. Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Dean, Trevor. Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. —. Crime in Medieval Europe, 1200-1550. New York: Routledge, 2001. Diacciati, Silvia. Popolani e magnati: Società e politica nella Firenze del Duecento. Spoleto: Cisam, 2011. Ellison, Jeff and Susan Harter. “Humiliation: Causes, correlates and consequences.” In The Self-Conscious Emotions: Theory and Research, ed. by Jessica Trace and June Tangney, 310-29. New York and London: Guilford Press, 2007. Gravdal, Kathryn. Ravishing Maidens: Writing rape in medieval French literature and law. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Kantorowicz, Hermann U. Albertus Gandinus und das Strafrecht der Scholastik. Vol. 2. Die Theorie, 398-9. Berlin and Leipzig: J. Guttentag Year, 1926. Karras, Ruth. Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto Others. New York: Routledge, 2005. Kelly, Henry A. “Statutes of Rapes and Alleged Ravishers of Wives: A Context for the Charges Against Thomas Malory, Knight.” Viator 28 (1997): 361-419. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. Retour à la cité: Les magnats de Florence, 1340-1440. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2006. Lansing, Carol. “Magnate violence revisited.” In Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. by John Easton Law and Bernadette Paton., 35-48. Farnham Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. Miller, William I. Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort and Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pirillo, Paolo Costruzione di un contado. I Fiorentini e il loro territorio nel Basso Medioevo. Florence: Le Lettere, 2001. —. Forme e strutture del popolamento nel contado fiorentino. Florence: Olschki, 2005. Rosenwein, Barbara. “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions.” In Passions in Context: International Journal for the History and Theory of Emotions 1 (2010): /www.passionsincontext.de/. Sapori, Armando. La crisi delle compagnie mercantili dei Bardi e dei Peruzzi. Florence: Sansoni, 1926. Truscott, Amanda. “Congo ceasefire brings little relief for women.” Canadian Medical Association Journal 179, 2 (2008): 133-4. Zorzi, Andrea. L’amministrazione della giustizia penale nella Repubblica fiorentina. Aspetti e problem. Florence. Olschki, 1988.

5

The Words of Emotion Political Language and Discursive Resources in Lorenzo de Medici’s Lettere (1468-1492)* Isabella Lazzarini

Introduction The Florentine vernacular used in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a dry proverb to underline that a man, knowing that he did everything he could to sort out a problem, could not blame himself anymore: “fa che dei, sia che può.”1 Lorenzo de’ Medici at the end of the fifteenth century changed, softened, and polished the old dictum and by absorbing it into an intimate self-portrait he altered definitively its popular and formulaic nature into a much more sophisticated, personalized and intellectual discourse about his natura. His discourse introduces a fine analysis of the balance between feelings and reason, and between self representation and reality: “pure io non sono apto a disperarmi per questo, perché, facto che ho quello che debbo, tu sai che non sono di natura che pigli troppa molestia di quello che adviene.”2 Lorenzo de Medici represents a milestone in research and imagination on the Italian Renaissance: the edition of Lorenzo de Medici’s letters was inaugurated in 1955 “with the hope that a less romanticized portrait of him would result.” Ironically, rather than painting a more “realistic” * At the seminar on Les émotions dans la négociation, à l’EPHE, Paris (June 2010) I analyzed together Rinaldo degli Albizzi Commissioni (Lazzarini, “Argument and Emotion”) and Lorenzo’s Lettere. The idea was to consider and compare the ’emotional side’ of two groups of letters separated by few decades, but produced in the same environment: emotions in Italian late medieval diplomatic and political letter writing are in fact still rather underestimated (Lazzarini, “Discours émotionnel, discours argumentatif”). It is therefore a pleasure to thank both Stéphane Péquignot and Sylvio de Franceschi for inviting me to Paris, and Jean-Philippe Genet, Andrea Gamberini, Fabrizio Ricciardelli, and Andrea Zorzi for giving me more than one opportunity to develop this research; Barbara Rosenwein has all my gratitude for the comments and suggestions that she generously gave to me during the work. 1 “Do what you must, and let it be what it can”: for some examples, see Nanni, Ragionare tra mercanti, 60-9, 318 (129); Lazzarini, “Argument and Emotion.” 2 Lorenzo de Medici, Lettere, vol. X, l. 995, to Piero Alamanni, 17 July 1487 (“however, I am not inclined to be desperate for this, because – once I have done what I should – you know that my nature is not to be too upset by what does happen.”).

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portrait of Lorenzo, recent research is discovering instead that “it is not possible to separate the man from the aura of legend and that the latter constitutes an indissoluble aspect of his historical character.”3 Lorenzo’s image-making was a political as well as a psychological necessity of the day, and his correspondence offers insight into his character and into the subtlety of his public style, at the same time illuminating the political reality of late fifteenth-century Italy, its discursive resources, and the psychological adjustments it required. 4 In this context, today I will read Lorenzo’s letters looking for “emotions,” that is aiming to find out which words and expressions in his diplomatic and political writings reveal some emotionality, and when and why he chose to resort to them, or to let them filter in his letters, in relation to different kinds of linguistic, textual, and rhetorical discursive resources. An “emotional turn,” as Ferente recently said, is in fact entering the medieval studies on politics.5 Different sources and ages are increasingly investigated from an “emotional” point of view, aiming to answer to various questions mostly related to the debate on political languages.6 However, late medieval diplomatic practice and political letter writing – still mostly seen as institutional tools and political narratives – have been little investigated so far from this point of view, even though they represents a field potentially very promising thanks to the vividness and the abundance of the sources.7

3 Bullard, “Anxiety,” 43. Research has flourished around the 1990s, in order to celebrate the fifth centennial of Lorenzo’s death, but Alison Brown in 2011 can still open her revised collection of essays on Florence by putting Lorenzo’s status at the first place among what we still do not know about Florence: Brown, Medicean and Savonarolian Florencex, XV. 4 Rubinstein, The government; idem, “Lorenzo de Medici”; Bullard, Lorenzo; Kent, Lorenzo de Medici. 5 Ferente, “Storici ed emozioni.” 6 Pivotal research by Althoff, Rosenwein, Miller, White focused on high and central Middle Ages: Anger’s Past; Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions”; Eadem, Emotional Communities; Althoff, “Empörung, Tränen, Zerknirschung”; idem, “Ira Regis”; Miller, Humiliation; White, “The Politics of Anger.” Later periods are still only partially investigated: see Lord Smail, “Hatred as a Social Institution”; idem, The Consumption of Justice; Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation; Lansing, Passion and order; Gentile, “Discorsi sulle fazioni.” 7 For a pioneering and intriguing essay on letter writing, see Najemy, Between friends; on letters and networks in fifteenth century Florence, McLean, The Art of the Network; on emotions in political, dynastical, and diplomatic correspondences, see Bullard, “Anxiety” (a groundbreaking essay, to which this paper is heavily indebted); Lazzarini, “Argument and Emotion”; Antenhofer, “Emotions”; Covini, “Emozioni e diplomazia.”

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Letters Lorenzo de Medici’s Lettere (1460-89/92), still on their way to a complete edition by an Anglo-American-Italian pool of scholars at first led by Nicolai Rubinstein, represent a very peculiar documentary ensemble: their edition gathers all the surviving letters written by Lorenzo during his life, and encompasses in wider circles family, economic associates, officials and ambassadors, Florentine and non-Florentine statesmen, clients and friends. The edition adopts a chronological order, mixing diplomatic and political dispatches, and personal and public letters. The fourteen volumes already available cover Lorenzo’s epistolary production between 1460 and 1489, and collect around seventeen hundred texts: the surviving letters represent two-thirds of the letters actually written and sent.8 These letters constitute an epistolary collection whose largest fraction has a strong political and diplomatic content and has been exchanged with ambassadors or diplomatic agents.9 In this sense, the hypothetical gulf between public (i.e., formal) and private (i.e., personal) writing loses more than ever any useful meaning. Moreover, Lorenzo’s nature and personal role give a peculiar feature to the exchanges: the complex nature of Lorenzo’s personal hegemony over the Medicean regime and the city of Florence partially concealed his monopoly of the decision-making process, and the institutional dynamics were further complicated by the interference of his more personal, patron-client based network.10 Nevertheless, through his intense, and sometimes frantic, correspondence, Lorenzo entered the heart of the peninsular diplomatic negotiation system and day-by-day wove a communication network on the Italian and European level crucial both to the survival of Florence and to the strengthening of his preeminence over the city. The Lettere reveal the sheer complexity of day-to-day diplomatic practice, offering to scholars at the same time a powerful insight into the multilayered political dynamics

8 Lorenzo, Lettere: for a cross-check, see I protocolli. 9 This edition of Lorenzo’s letters have provided endless materials for diplomatic and political research: Fubini, “L’edizione delle ‘Lettere’ di Lorenzo il Magnifico”; almost every editor of one of the volumes (Butters, Mallett, Bullard, Pellegrini, Böninger) has used the letters for some detailed research on the same years: see – among many – Butters, “Florence, Milan”; Pellegrini, Congiure di Romagna. The letters have provided a deeper insight also of the Florentine internal balance of power: see, among his many essays, Kent, “Lorenzo ... amico degli uomini da bene”; Salvadori, Dominio e patronato. 10 Florentine Tuscany; Tanzini, “Tuscan states.”

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behind the diplomacy.11 Moreover, even if Lorenzo could scarcely be considered an average Italian statesman, his letters offer as well a full range of textual, linguistic, and rethorical resources available to the Florentine and Italian elites in the second half of the fifteenth century.12

Emotions As we have seen in these days, dealing with emotions in past ages could prove itself to be a difficult task. Moving forward from the first grand narrative of the medieval emotionality formulated by Huizinga and his vision of the Middle Ages as the “childhood of man” through recent research about social costructionism and cognitive psychology, a largely widespread idea is nowadays that the expression of feelings is, at its most, a mediate, formular and strategic language, an effective political tool.13 For Gerd Althoff, amongst others, medieval emotions were “performed”: above all, they responded to the need to communicate power relations.14 Today, I will try to verify a different perspective: the generic term of “emotions” will be taken to encapsulate the whole gamut of affective reactions, granting them, as William Reddy argues, not only a descriptive, but also a performative – i.e., transformative – value.15 Emotional exchanges (in this case, their written records) will be understood here not only as constative expressions, that is as efforts to describe feelings, nor as statements deliberately included in a strategic perfomance, but rather as utterances able to modify and possibly create feelings. The idea is to avoid trivializing medieval emotions by explaining them only in functional terms, in order to recognize their polyvalent meaning and uses.16 As Rosenwein resumes it, “this turn is needed to avoid both to freeze the meaning of the signals … and to deprive emotions of any inner meaning.”17 To discover and describe emotions, we need to analyze a group of texts in which emotions and feelings have a place, and to identify how emotions 11 Fubini, Italia Quattrocentesca; Lazzarini, “Renaissance diplomacy.” 12 On Lorenzo, Bullard, “Lorenzo”; more generally, see Brucker, The Civic World; Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients; The Rhetoric of Cicero. 13 Rosenwein, “Thinking”: for Huizinga, see Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages. 14 Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik and idem, Die Machte der Rituale: Althoff’s approach has been applied to the late Middle Ages by Offenstadt, Faire la paix; Oschema, Freundschaft und Nahe. 15 Reddy, “Against Constructionism”; Rosenwein, Emotional communities. 16 White, “The Politics of Anger,” 151. 17 Rosenwein, “Thinking,” 830.

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function and figure within differing communicative contexts. The complex textual dossier represented by Lorenzo’s Lettere offers to such an investigation a wide range of materials. The use of emotions is directly linked to Lorenzo’s personal assessment of the political realities of fifteenth-century Italy: his interpretation of reality drove him to use creatively the available rhetorical instruments, and to transmit significant changes both in reality and in its written expression by configuring innovatively his own political language.18 The inner peculiarity of these texts – their “personality,” so deeply linked to the character of the man and the twists of the interwoven political discourse and individual analysis – give to most of Lorenzo’s letters a unusually nonstandard form.

Men Lorenzo was unquestionably a man of considerable intelligence and of distinguished culture, but personal talent or sophisticated education alone can not adequately account for his personal role in the Italian political system.19 Considering that in Italian late medieval society letters were a critical instrument to build a relationally defined self, the social ties bound by Lorenzo were constructed, managed, and maintained by means of the cultural work involved in the daily discursive practice of letter writing.20 Lorenzo therefore wrote about political choices and diplomatic strategies in different ways whilst performing different roles (official and unofficial) and thinking and talking with different people who in turn temporarily exercised public functions and private duties.21 The first circle of his interlocutors consisted of public authority, both in Florence and abroad. In this institutional dialogue, style and linguistic resources are conditioned by formalised formulae and hierarchical rigidity. The distance between Lorenzo and his princely allies forced Lorenzo to subtlety: his opinions and

18 Bullard, “Anxiety,” 73-9. 19 And “for the fame that surrounded him in Italy and abroad even in his lifetime,” Bullard, “Anxiety,” 45. 20 On mechanisms of letter writing in Florentine f ifteenth-century society, see Najemy, Between friends, 18 ff.; McLean, The Art of the Network, 44-51. 21 In doing so, Lorenzo mastered a common practice among Florentine (and non-Florentine) patricians and statesmen: see Lazzari, Amicizia e potere; for Florence, Kent, The Rise; McLean, The Art of the Network; for some examples, see Lazzarini, “Argument” (Rinaldo degli Albizzi); Milner, “Palla Strozzi” (Palla di Nofri Strozzi).

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comments were biased by the difficult task of dealing with stubborn and often unstable allies of a higher rank: Loderei bene che’l signor Ludovico, quando si vuole dolere di noi, non lo facessi in presentia d’altri, perché questo toglie reputatione a lui et a noi. Tra sé et noi dica et faccia quello gli piace, perché siamo apti a soportare quanto richiede questa nostra amicitia, la quale anchora mi fa forse presumptuoso a ricordare liberamente quello mi occorre, la qual cosa pigli S. E. in buona parte, et se vi è bene, l’accepti, se non, per l’amor di Dio non se ne turbi, maxime in presentia d’altri. Basta solamente che dica “io non voglio,” “io non posso farlo,” o “non mi pare.”22

The daily exchange with the Florentine members of the Medici regime who were at same time public officials of the Commune was also bound by formality and self-control: in both cases, irony was Lorenzo’s privileged way of bypassing the institutionalized rigidity of the dialogue, and to let his own concerns and reactions come to the surface (we will come back

22 Lorenzo, Lettere, IX, l. 793 to Francesco Gaddi in Milan, 14 Oct. 1485 (“I would commend that my lord Ludovico, when wants to complain of us, should not do it in front of other people, because this behavior diminish both his and our reputation. Between himself and us, he can do and say what he likes, because we are apt to bear all that our friendship requires; this very friendship makes me assumed enough to rememeber freely to him everything I have in mind, and His Excellence should take this attitude in a good mood, and if it there is any good in it, he should accept it, if there is not, for God’s sake, he should not cross, and mostly in front of others. It is enugh for him to say ‘I do not want to do it’ or ‘I can not do it,’ or ‘I do not like it.’”) The relationship with the Sforza is particularly revealing: in front of the dukes of Milan, Lorenzo was limited by an insormountable distance of rank: “Illustrissimo et excellentissimo signor mio, questo dì ho havuta la lettera di Vostra Excellentia di sua mano propria, et prima io la ringratio dello havermi scripto di sua mano et havere usato meco tanta umanità; di poi, havendo bene pensato a quanto quella mi scrive, et a messer Philippo [Sacramoro] suo oratore, ho facto con detto messer Philippo quella risolutione che intenderà vostra Excellentia ,” Lorenzo, Lettere, II, l. 171, to Galeazzo Maria, 6 Aug. 1474 (“My very illustrious and excellent Lord, today I have received Your Excellence’s letter written by his own hand, and firstly I thank you for writing to me by your own hand and to be so benigne to me; then, after having well thought about what you wrote to me, and to sir Filippo, your orator, I took with the foretold sir Filippo the resolution Your Excellence will be informed of.”). Galeazzo Maria’s way was very different: “Lorenzo, tu vederai quanto ve monstrerà messer Philippo. Pensa bene: quello accordo te piacerà, piacerà ad nui, et fazalo chi se voglia, advisandoti ch’io non me ne voglio impazare. … Galeaz Maria de manu propria,” Galeazzo Maria Sforza to Lorenzo, Milan, 11 Aug. 1474, ibid., 8 (“Lorenzo, you will see all that sir Filippo will show you. Think well on all this: we will like whatever agreement you will like, and let do it by whoever wants to do it; I tell you that I do not want to be bothered by it”).

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to this).23 At a further level stand all the circuits of familiarity: the family, kinship, friends, allies, and supporters within the regime and in the city, the parte and the broader territorial patron/client system (both inside and outside Tuscany).24 With his chancellors and his most faithful collaborators, Lorenzo’s tone is shaped by a revealing mixture of confidence, personal authority and political leadership, like in the case of the tried and tested relationship with Niccolò Michelozzi:25 Tu dovresti essere chiaro per l’altre mie che io non ti costrignerò all’andare a Milano, et però dattene pace, et un’altra volta non mostrare la tua pertinacia in disubidirmi insino che non sè chiaro di quello che ti comando.26

Words Dealing with emotions in past times, one further problem must be faced: the terms that come under the umbrella of the category “emotion” have changed over time, and the words that expressed them varied as well.27 Today, I will choose amongst a first workable list of words few samples of the emotional field linked to political and personal conflict and antagonism,28 aiming to find significant recurrences, common patterns, and personal uses.29 Lorenzo’s letters provide us with an almost infinite variety of linguistic, stilistic and rhetorical nuances. An emotional state can filter into a text in a direct way, mostly through the more or less conscious use of words apt to express or to modify the feelings of the author and of the addressee, or thanks to finer 23 Kent, “Patron-Client Networks”; Brown, “Lorenzo de’ Medici’s new men.” 24 Salvadori, Dominio e patronato. 25 Arrighi, Klein, “Dentro il Palazzo.” On Michelozzi, Rubinstein, “Michelozzo”; Viti, “Michelozzi, Niccolò”; Isenberg, “Censimento.” 26 Lorenzo, Lettere, vol. VIII, l. 788, to Niccolò Michelozzi, 28 Sept. 1485 (“You should very well know by my other letters that I will not force you to go to Milan; therefore, be quiet, and next time do not show your stubborness in disobeying to me until you know clearly what I order to you.”). 27 Rosenwein, “Thinking historically,” 832-3. 28 Such words are often linked together, as to represent “scripts” in White’s model (White, “The Politics of Anger”), but I would be cautious because of the nonstandard character of Lorenzo’s letters. More appropriate here seems Rosenwein’s concept of “emotional community”: “exploring an emotional community means looking beyond “emotionality’ in general and, indeed, beyond any single emotion’ (Rosenwein, “Thinking historically,” 832). Hatred, anger, alteration, despair did not come alone. 29 A much wider emotional palette has been considered in Lazzarini, “Discours émotionnel, discours argumentatif.”

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and less direct discursive strategies: the intentional intrusion of different languages; the use of metaphors, and of literary or biblical quotations, or historical reminiscences; the recourse to proverbs; the irruption of calls to God (per l’amor di Dio) into the formally regulated written text. In such a textually complex framework, words are only one of the available elements of an articulated discourse, in which “practical cultural building blocks” combine with a highly developed personal attitude in taking multiple sides in a discussion that could switch from personal/emotional notes to political reasoning, and from a subordinate to a dominant role within the traditional frame of the letter.30 1 Hatred Lorenzo writes rarely about hatred: in two cases, however, the context, both private and public, is very revealing. The first occurrence is linked to the troubled aftermath of the Pazzi conspiracy: in 1478 Lorenzo is not only physically menaced, injured, nearly killed, but also politically shaken and personally threatened.31 His overall emotional regime is troubled and he lets his temper flow and be seen more than ever. A single episode deeply upset him: desperately needing money to face his internal difficult situation, he discovers that he can not count on the Bruges branch of the Medici’s bank because of the disloyal behavior of one of his father’s clients, Tommaso di Folco Portinari.32 In a letter to Folco di Aldrovando, Tommaso’s nephew, Lorenzo expresses vehemently his feelings towards the old friend, guilty not only of not sending to Lorenzo any money from Bruges, but also of hampering Lorenzo’s efforts to recover the money of the Milanese branch of the bank, previously directed by Pigello di Folco, Tommaso’s late brother. The situation degenerates into one of the most controversial feuds of the whole epistolary collection. The letter to Folco is built around the basic dichotomy between loyalty and bad behavior: this last attitude generates “tali scompigli, dispiaceri e rincrescimenti” that Lorenzo can not prevent himself from telling to Folco the whole truth “perché i modi suoi [of Tommaso] ti vengano in odio, come sono venuti a me” (“with the aim of making 30 McLean, The Art of the Network, 5; on Lorenzo’s personal skills as a poet, and on the cognitive effects that such a talent could have had on his perception on reality, see Bullard, “Anxiety,” 74 and n. 110; on the Florentine literary landscape in Lorenzo’s day, see at least Martelli, Letteratura fiorentina, and now Bausi, Umanesimo a Firenze. 31 On the Pazzi conspiracy, see at least Rubinstein, “Premessa”; Fubini, “La congiura dei Pazzi.” 32 On the Medici banks, still see de Roover, The Rise and Decline, but on Florentine economy see now Goldthwaite, The Economy; on Lorenzo’s financial letters, see Rubinstein, “The letters.”

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you hate his behavior like I did”). Lorenzo ends his letter by recognizing that “Sommi un poco sfogato techo,” but he states clearly that “né ho però parlato sopra ira, la quale non mi suole durare tanto quanto è che Tommaso mi cominciò a dar cagione di adirarmi. Non ti ho detta cosa che non sia vera et che non venga da animo riposato.”33 Lorenzo usually, when it comes to the writing, is not overwhelmed by anger: or, at least, he wants his reader not to overestimate the effect of the offence on him by saying that he writes with a “animo riposato.” Nevertheless, the letter vehemently – “sommi un poco sfogato” – displays all the feelings linked to a serious offence: the bad behavior against loyalty and faith causes anger, but anger does not last long; the definite result, apparently without passion, is hatred, that can only be shown in a display of controlled confidence meant both to create a shared feeling towards the offender and to warn against such a situation the future. The second recurrence of hatred is a completely different context: we are in 1482, in the midst of the war of Ferrara. Three days after the defeat suffered near Rome by Alfonso, duke of Calabria and Florence’s most powerful ally, Lorenzo sends his faithful Niccolò Michelozzi to Milan with the aim of pushing Ludovico il Moro to action.34 To convince his reluctant Milanese ally, Lorenzo does not hesitate to resort to the whole rhetorical arsenal at his disposal: being at stake “la libertà di tutta Italia,” Florence and Milan should face the enemies’ violence with the energy and strength of their already rather legendary ancestors: “è tempo a non dormire: debbesi ricordare la exc. Sua ch’egl’è figliuolo del duca Francesco, et che bisogna habbi heredità della virtù et magnanimità sua.” The pope and the Venetians will in fact take advantage of the favorable situation: “non lasceranno di proseguirla né per volontà, né per potentia, perché sono et ambitiosissimi et pieni di passione, di ira et di odio.”35 This is a very rhetorical text: a political discourse carefully built uses a crescendo of powerful emotions in a strategic, but also performative way. Lorenzo suggests to Niccolò passionate words to inflame 33 Lorenzo, Lettere, III, l. 355 to Folco Portinari, 5 Dec. 1478 (“I let off steam a bit with you, but I have not spoken driven by anger, that does not usually last with me as long as the time that Tommaso gave me a good reason to be angry with him. I did not say to you anything false and that does not come from a soul in peace”): on the whole episode, see Rubinstein’s notes to letter 340, 250-1 . 34 Mallett, “Lorenzo de Medici”; idem, “The Florentine “Otto di Pratica.” 35 Lorenzo, Lettere, VII, l. 583, instruction to Niccolò Michelozzi, 28 Aug. 1482: historical comments on the events at 38-41 (“the freedom of Italy as a whole”; “this is not time for sleeping: His Excellency should remember that he is the son of Duke Francesco, and that he should have inherited his virtue and magnanimity”; “they will not stop from persevering in it neither for will, nor for power, because they are extremely ambitious, and full of passion, anger and hatred”).

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the vacillating Ludovico, but at the same time he is captured within the enchantment produced by his own language. 2 Perturbation/passion/turmoil Antagonism and conflicts feed themselves on a wide array of feelings linked to the idea of “perturbation”: alteratione/passione/turbamento, that is of an alteration of the natural balance of mind and temper both individual and collective because of an immoderate desire, a concern, or even an outburst of anger. The effect of this upheaval of the originary balance of feelings on the individual basis is resentment, but it turns out to generate a series of concrete consequences (scandoli/pericoli/ruine) if the anxiety and passion become collective feelings.36 The meaning of the words alteratione or turbamento goes from expressing a dangerous personal attitude close to a sin, that one can minimize and control thanks to the sistematic recourse to patience and tolerance, to indicating an ungovernable collective attitude, at the same time feared, difficult to control or available to use, but definitely political. Alteratione in an individual sense is quite traditional and close to turbatione: this sense of the word generates a group of very interesting semantic variations.37 If the personal offence is too hard, or the sensibility of an offended individual is underestimated, the deriving ombra – literally shadow, metaphorically resentment and rancour – can provoke some potentially dangerous reactions and concrete consequences like scandoli, pericoli, ruine.38 The perturbed man can enter into a more unbalanced state 36 Rosenwein, Emotional communities, 2-3; Smail, “Hatred,” 90-3. 37 A first basic meaning for alteratione is “change,” mostly in the sense of a dangerous one: when the duke of Milan in 1486 changes his mind about the number of ambassadors that Florence should send to Venice, this does not like to Lorenzo nor to Florentines. Ludovico’s proposal “non poteria esser dispiaciuta qui più’ et “dopo la electione facta questa alteratione non serve a nessuno buono proposito et questa città ne resta pur in qualche carico” (Lorenzo, Lettere, IX, l. 820, to Jacopo Guicciardini, 14 Jan. 1486: “could not have displeased us more”; “after the choice already done, such an alteration does not any good, and this city bears some responsibility on it”). A second meaning of alteratione in an individual sense is quite traditional: the word means anger or indignation “Io ho dispiacere assai che messer Ceccho [Simonetta] habbi preso alteratione della lettera gli scripsi ... non vorrei si credessi lo facessi come adirato” (Lorenzo, Lettere, IV, l. 377, to Giovanni Morelli, 5 March 1479), 19: “I am very displeased that sir Cecco had taken some alteration about the letter I wrote to him.… I would not let him think that I wrote it in anger.”). 38 “Quando si habbi a stare in questa ambiguità, mostrare quanto questa cosa sia mortale et apta a generare non solo ombra ma scandoli, pericoli et ruine” (Lorenzo, Lettere, VIII, l. 729, to Niccolò Michelozzi, 3 Jan. 1485: “if we will stay in such ambiguity, you should demonstrate how mortal this thing could be, and how good in generate not only shadows but also scandals, dangers, and ruins.”).

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and get desperate (desperatione): this evolution must be avoided at any price, because a desperate man can react in a totally uncontrolled way, provoking inconvenienti, unexpected and sudden events potentially very dangerous, and not only for him but for many: ma non observando pagamenti, né pure havendo buone parole, et tenendosi con tucti “e modi sinistri et strani che si tengono, ognuno si mette in desperatione, et cotesto stato e perde reputatione et amici, et altri è constrecto a fare come può, et credo, Piero, che infine ne nascerà qualche grande inconveniente.39

The individual perturbation from alteratione becomes then passion, passione, trasforming itself therefore in an emotional state very close to an affection, but with a rather pathological meaning, immoderate and sometimes painful: “cognosco che io ci ho tanta passione che male mi posso consiglare.”40 The word “passion’ has a multilayered semantic significate in late medieval Italian world, and we have no time to investigate it fully, but at least one of its more important meanings is related to the world of factions: the passioni are also the factions and the political parties. 41 The unbalanced adherence to a political coalition, or a party, that is inin this case partisan loyalty, is close to a perturbed – almost pathological – emotional state; and the other way round. In this case, if the alteratione becomes a collective emotion, that is a change in the mood of a collectivity, let it be the Medicean party, the regime or the whole city, it turns into 39 Lorenzo, Lettere, X, l. 988 to Piero Alamanni, 7 July 1487 (‘but if we neither observe the deadlines for payments, nor have any good words, and behave in all those sinister and weird ways that are in use, everybody gets into desperation, and this state loses both reputation and friends, and others are forced to do what they can, and I believe, Piero, that some great inconveniences will grow.”). The individual meaning of “desperatione” is very clear in an early letter: “l’entrare in desperatione sarebbe la più cativa parte, et io non posso credere che infine, riducendosi la mente al pecto, non si habbi a piglare qualche buono partito” (Lorenzo, Lettere, I, R. Fubini [ed], l. 33, to Otto Nicolini, 27 Jan. 1470: “to enter into desperation will be the worst option, and I can not believe that, at the end, by reducing the mind to the heart, we would not take some good decision”). 40 Such a passione is caused in Lorenzo by the disloyalty of the Portinari: Lorenzo, Lettere, III, l. 350 to Girolamo Morelli, Florence 14 Nov. 1478 (“I am so passionate that I can hardly give an advice on this matter”). Other examples: “non fui mai tanto passionato né affectionato alle cose mie private” (Lorenzo, Lettere, X, l. 928, to Bernardo Rucellai, 14 March 1487: “I have never been so passionate nor affectionate to my private affairs’), “et quanto può la invidia e passione privata’ (Lorenzo, Lettere, XII, l. 1185, to Giovanni Lanfredini, 22 March 1488: “and how powerful the envy and a private passion could be”). 41 Ferente, “Guelphs!”; Gentile, “Factions and parties.”

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a political feeling, both dangerous if uncontrolled and useful if tightly directed.

Irony, Self Representation, and Reality: Concluding Remarks As we have seen, emotional talks, gestures and expressions fill Lorenzo’s letters: however, he works on emotions – and on their complement, rationality and argument – in a very peculiar way. In a sense, his correspondence could be interpreted as a multilayered, rational effort to evaluate events and make political decisions through the interpretation of the psychological ground of political interaction. His personal emotional style, and the expressions of other people psychological reactions, are deeply conditioned by a constant effort of rational reshaping, even when the anxiety about loosing grip on reality actually alters Lorenzo’s mindset and perceptions. 42 In a world in which it becomes increasingly difficult to fill the widening gap between the sense of reality and the use of traditional language, a most effective tool to master the dangerous border between rationality and emotionality is irony. The awareness of the ironical dimension of the political discourse reveals how subtle is the swing between performative and constatative functions in writing about emotions: an altered physical condition, as well as an ironical and complementary self-image as a man prone to raving, fantasizing, or daydreaming because of his physical weakness, helps Lorenzo both in metabolize anger and disillusion, and in promoting and diffusing his carefully built image of a man in control, far from being dominated by passions: “Io vi ho fatto lungho discorso et, restandomi ancora un poco di

42 Lorenzo’s self image making works endlessly on this: “Credo essere conosciuto per homo intero et di buona fede, et posso essere creduto dal Duca [Alfonso] quanto huomo del mondo per sincerità e per essere sanza passione, perché se ho facto cosa che li sia grata [non] l’ho facta per speranza alcuna né di stato né di condocta, ma di mia voluntà e con ragione” (Lorenzo, Lettere, X, l. 909 to Baccio Ugolini, 3 Dec. 1486: “I believe that I am famous for being a righteous and reliable man, and the Duke can believe that I am truthful and without passion more than any other man on earth, because if I ever did something relished by him, I did it not for hope either of state or salary, but by own will and with my own reason.”). In such a deliberate attitude, since his first years of rule his model was Cosimo the Elder: “el modo che andava per la mente a Laurenzo è questo per seguire li modi del avolo suo, che era di fare tali cose cum più civiltà si potesse” (Sagramoro da Rimini to Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Florence, 3 July 1470, quoted in Rubinstein, The government, 178, n. 28: see Bullard, “Anxiety,” 50: “Lorenzo was thinking of acting according to the ways of his grandfather, that was to deal with these matters with as much civility as possible.”).

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febre, non è maravigla se un poco io farneticho”;43 and playing once again with his precarious health conditions: “Io ho inteso la resolutione de cotesti Signori Dieci et altri circa quanto scripsi a Pier Filippo di mano propria, la quale direi non fussi molto a proposito delle presente occorrentie, se non che mi pare da anteporre el giudicio di tanti savi huomini a quello de uno infermo, perché il mio si può più tosto chiamare farneticho che iudicio.”44 In this effort to control both reality and language, Lorenzo’s letters are increasingly rich in “self-portraits,” that is in explicit assessments and descriptions of his personal “nature,” his character, his habits in reacting to reality, in order to steady himself and his self-image at the same time, “for representing and constructing an independent self ”:45 “sopra la fede mia io mai cerchai simile cosa, né ho facto di ciò opera né pensiero alcuno, perché la vendecta non mi è molto naturale, e tu che mi conosci lo sai.”46 Lorenzo’s nature – according to his own words – is therefore far from “passions”: he is not inclined on vendetta, nor ambition; he is not so passionate about his private interest to forget the public honor or the personal rectitude; he is not prone to desperation nor to pessimism. Such a finely articulated nature steadies itself over time: “se parlo troppo, correggiete, ché io per me non posso mutare natura.”47 Was this image “real,” or, better, was this portrait 43 Lorenzo, Lettere, IV, l. 426, to Girolamo Morelli in Milan, 18 Sept. 1479 (“I have made you a long speech and, because I still have some fever, it is not surprising that I rave a bit”). 44 Lorenzo, Lettere, VIII, l. 740, to Niccolò Michelozzi, 17 Apr. 1485 (“I heard the decision of these lords Ten and others about what I wrote to Pier Filippo in my own hand, and I would say that such a decision is not well adapted to the present circumstances if I did not judge wrong to put the opinion of a ill man before the judgement of so many wise men; because mine is better defined as raving nonsense than a judgement”). 45 McLean The Art of the Network, 208. 46 Lorenzo, Lettere, X, l. 910, to Piero Alamanni, 19 Dec. 1486 (“on my faith, I never looked for such a thing, neither have I done or thought anything about it, because revenge does not come naturally to me, and you know that by knowing me.”). More examples can be found: “io non sono di natura ambitioso” (Lorenzo, Lettere, IX l. 885, to Jacopo Guicciardini, 10 Oct. 1486: “by nature, I am not ambitious”); “io sono di natura che difficilmente credo el male, et di questa hesitatione del Conte do qualche colpa alla lungheza nostra; ma spero [che] tuc[to s’abbi] a rassettare: et dire’lo absolutamente et mettere’lo per certo, se non fussi mia natura [pr]ima fare et poi dire” (Lorenzo, Lettere, XII, l. 1191, to Giovanni Lanfredini, 27 (or 29) March 1488: “my nature is to hardly believe the evil, and about the Count’s present hesitation, I think that our delay has some responsibility in it, but I hope that everything will be fine: and I will say for sure that everything will be fine, if my nature was not to do things, before than talking about them”); “perché io sono di natura libero et maxime con quelli con chi ho qualche obligo particolare” (Lorenzo, Lettere, XII, l. 1196, to Giovanni Lanfredini, 2 Apr. 1488: “because my nature is to be free, and mainly with those to whom I feel I owe something specific”). 47 See above. It is interesting to consider en passant that Lorenzo uses the word vendetta only rarely and specifically when he refers to the count Girolamo Riario, nephew of and co-responsible

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congruous with the image perceived by external observers? Are we facing in these texts the first symptoms of the emergence of “a new kind of self, capable of either revealing itself to, or concealing himself from, the outside world”?48 If we turn to the correspondences of the foreign ambassadors who lived in Florence, the picture in fact looks different. Lorenzo emerges from these letters as a man lacking measure and self-control, often prey to sudden emotions unusual and inappropriate for a statesman of his standing. 49 On the other hand, Lorenzo was absolutely conscious of the sheer eloquence of gestures, silences, acts, and consequently of the crucial need to master their use (that is, the “performed’ nature of these expressions, as Gerd Althoff puts it). Writing to duke Galeazzo Maria, he told him that he asked the Milanese ambassador in Florence to tell him “quando intende le persone che parlano, el modo et come si muovono.”50 Is therefore the emotional transparency displayed in front of non neutral witnesses such as the foreign ambassadors a strategic game? We know that Lorenzo was able to play subtly and effectively with emotions and to use them deliberately.51 with Sixtus IV of the Pazzi’s conspiracy (by the way, killed in turn in 1488, in a plot not extraneous to Lorenzo), and only to deny his adherence to its code: apart from the quote in text corresponding to n. 50, see also “non per bizzaria né per vendetta’ (Lorenzo, Lettere, VIII, l. 729, to Niccolò Michelozzi, 3 Jan. 1485: “not out of oddity nor revenge”). However, even if in his own words vendetta is not innate to him, when the news of the capture of Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli in Byzantium reaches Lorenzo, this very news “mi tocha il cuore et stimola assai” (Lorenzo, Lettere, IV, l. 402, to Niccolò Michelozzi, 14 June 1479, autograph: “touches my heart and moves me a lot”). The last quote comes from Lorenzo, Lettere, XV, l. 1438 to Giovanni Lanfredini, 23 March 1489. 48 I can not but rapidly mention such a relevant topic: see Greene, “The Flexibility”; Becker, “Individualism”; Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning; Martin, “Inventing Sincerity”; McLean, The Art of the Network, 192-222: 208. Very useful also Weissman, “The Importance” (I thank Alison Brown for reminding me of this paper, and for her comments on my text). 49 In 1470 Lorenzo was “in tanta passione che mai non vidi homo alchuno de sua conditione in simile,” Lorenzo, Lettere, I, note to the letter n. 60, 177, Sagramoro da Rimini to Galeazzo Maria Sforza, 27 July 1470 (“in such a temper that I never saw a man of his standing in such a mood”). As the extracts from the letters of the likes of Sagramoro da Rimini, or Zaccaria Saggi, or Antonio Guidoni edited in the the Lettere show very well that we can quote randomly, Lorenzo “s’alterò mirabilmente” (“got admirably angry”), or showed a “maravigliosa anxietate” (“an admirable anxiety”), or looked “quasi desperato” (“almost desperate”); his gestures reveal a deep concern like when he “buffò et stete pensieroso” (“grumbled and stayed thoughtful”), or an open irritation, such as when he “commenzò a sbatere el capuzo” (“started to slam his hat”). 50 Lorenzo, Lettere, I, l. 200, to Galeazzo Maria Sforza, 5 Sept. 1475 (“when he listens to people talking, how they talk, and how they move”). 51 Just one example: when Lorenzo wanted to get rid of Lionetto de Rossi, his brother-in-law and the unreliable administrator of the Medici bank in Lion, he concocted with his agent Francesco Sassetti an actual play to induce Lionetto to return confidently to Florence, as Lorenzo tells to Michelozzi: “Resta come ce habiamo a governare con Lionetto. Io sarei de opinione di fare vista di crederli a cagione che si transferissi qua.... Per questo ... lo confermerei della venuta sua, più

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So, what can we conclude, if conclude we must? We began our communication in presenting our attempt to interpret emotions in Renaissance Italy’s political and diplomatic correspondences as performative statements; at the next bend we analyzed the different levels of Lorenzo’s political interactions, and some of the very different and varied regards of emotions as regard to the semantic field of hatred, perturbation, and sorrow. We then tried to interpret the “emotional style” of Lorenzo and its uses. This preliminary investigation, still a work in progress, has revealed the existence of an emotional style in Lorenzo’s letters, an emotional set of words and expressions that turn around some basic concepts about sociopolitical interactions and their representation. This representation resorts to a complex political language rooted in classical, biblical, and literary texts, as well as Latin and vernacular traditions, and participates to a civic culture centered around an urban political society whose survival resides in its skill in adapting to new negotiating and communicative patterns and a new territorial framework, both innovative and fragile. In this sense, Lorenzo’s letters witness a deep transformation. First of all, they reveal a more sophisticated attention to linguistic nuances and options by comparison with the previous decades: not only were the men of Laurentian generation able to refine their understanding and analysis of events thanks to the use of a wider array of argumentative strategies, but also the intensity of the confrontation and the variety of the available discursive resources gave voice to emotions so structural to the dynamics between the actors to alter the formal nature of the diplomatic and political dialogue.52 This increasing linguistic and discursive variety however no longer hid the fact presto che può, con parole dolce et di qualità che havessi cagione conservare la fede in me, et non lo insospectire ... in questi effecti scriverrei, piglando partito di sopportarlo. Quando pure fussi da venire con lui a ropta, mostrerrei indignatione, non havendo lui ubidito del venire, et con questo giustificherei ogn’altra cosa” (“It remains to decide how we have to behave with Lionetto. My opinion would be to show him that we believe him just to induce him to come back here. This looks to me the best available way to solve these matters, and I believe that by this way we can avoid the danger of what he can do if desperate much easier.... For this reason, I would fortify him in his decision to come back as soon as he can, with sweet words apt to confirm him my faith on him and to not arouse his suspicions ... thus, I would write to him this way, by telling him all my support. Even if I was on the verge to break with him, I would show my indignation because of his refusal to obey to me in coming to Florence, and with this indignation I would justify everything”). Lionetto receives Lorenzo’s letter, “bevesela tutta” (“drinks it all”: he believes its content), and comes back to Florence, just in time to be immediately shut in the Stinche, the Florentine prison for debts (Lorenzo, Lettere, VIII, l. 738, to Niccolò Michelozzi, 31 March 1485; the second quote is from a letter sent by Francesco Sassetti to Lorenzo, 4 Apr. 1485, MAP, XXXIX, 422, 150, n. 5). 52 Baxandall, Giotto and the orators, 6; Lazzarini, “Argument and Emotion,” 357-9.

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that language can both contain and be void of real meaning, and that words were becoming much more ambiguous.53 If language is truly a reliable indicator of change, the combination of emotional expressions and rational hypothesis, and – at the emotional level – the hiatus between an instrumental use of emotions and their nature as performing statements, multiply and complicate the meanings of diplomacy and politics at the crossing of different projects and conflicting plans. A growing consciousness of human nature and social interactions, and a sophisticated ensemble of discursive resources proved increasingly ineffective in explaining political dynamics and in interpreting timely a growing amount of diplomatic information. More strikingly aware of these ambiguities than most of his contemporaries, Lorenzo then not only enhanced his personal image-making as a result of the growing anxiety, but also – despite the emphasis on his “natural’ distance from passions – inserted, absorbed, and used emotional expressions, talks and gestures – both written (controlled) and enacted (manifested) – within the argumentative framework of his political discourse.

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McLean, Paul D. The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence. Durham, US: Duke University Press, 2007. Miller, William I. Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Disconfort and Violence. IthacaLondon: Cornell University Press, 1993. Milner, Stephen J. “Palla Strozzi: Orator.” In Men’s Business and Women’s Work: The Political and Material Cultures of the Strozzi and Albizzi, RSA Annual Meeting, Washington DC, 22-4 March 2012. Najemy, John M. Between Friends: discourses of power and desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori letters of 1513-1515, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Nanni, Paolo. Ragionare tra mercanti. Per una rilettura della personalità di Francesco di Marco Datini (1335ca-1410). Pisa: Pacini, 2010. Offenstadt, Nicholas. Faire la paix au moyen âge. Discours et gestes de paix pendant la Guerre de Cent Ans, (Paris: O. Jacob, 2007). Oschema, Klaus. Freundschaft und Nahe im spätmittelalterlichen Burgund. Studien zum Spannungsfeld von Emotion undInnstitution. Köln: Bölhau, 2006. Pellegrini, Marco. Congiure di Romagna. Lorenzo de Medici e il duplice tirannicidio a Forlì e Faenza nel 1488. Florence: Olschki, 1998. Reddy, William M. “Against Constructionism: The Historical Etnography of Emotions.” Current Anthropology, 38 (1997): 327-51. The Rhetoric of Cicero in its Medieval and Early Renaissance Commentary Tradition, ed. by Victoria Cox and John O. Ward. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Rosenwein, Barbara, ed. Anger’s Past. The Social uses of an Emotion In the Middle Ages. IthacaLondon: Cornell University Press, 1998. —. “Worrying about Emotions Emotions in History.” American Historical Review, 107 (2002): 828-45. —. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, Ithaca-London, 2006. —. “Thinking Historically about Medieval Emotions.” History Compass, 8 (2010): 824-42. Rubinstein, Nicolai. The Government of Florence under the Medici (1434 to 1494). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. —. “Michelozzo and Niccolo Michelozzi in Chios, 1466-67.” In Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance. Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. by Cecil H. Clough, 216-28. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976. —. “Lorenzo de Medici: the Formation of his Statecraft.” Proceedings of the British Academy, 63 (1977): 71-94. —. “Premessa ai volumi III e IV.” In Lorenzo, Lettere, vol. III, V-XI. —. “The Letters of Lorenzo de Medici and of the Medici Bank: problems of autorship.” Rinascimento, s. 2, 22 (1982): 275-9. Salvadori, Patrizia. Dominio e patronato. Lorenzo de Medici e la Toscana del Quattrocento. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2000. Smail, Daniel Lord. “Hatred as a Social Institution In Late Medieval Society.” Speculum, 76 (2001): 90-126. —. The Consumption of Justice Emotions, Publicity and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423. Ithaca-London Cornell University Press, 2003. Tanzini, Lorenzo. “Tuscan States: Florence and Siena.” In The Italian Renaissance State, 112-31. Toscani, Bernard, ed. Lorenzo de Medici: New Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Viti, Paolo. “Michelozzi, Niccolò.” In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 74, 264-7. Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 2010.

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Weissman, Ronald F.E. “The Importance of Being Ambiguous: Social Relations, Individualism and Identity in Renaissance Florence.” In Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. by Susan Zimmermann and Ronald F. E. Weissman, 269-80. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989. White, Steven D. “The Politics of Anger.” In Anger’s Past, 127-52. Witt, Ronald G. In the Footsteps of the Ancients: the Origins of humanism from Lovato to Bruni. Leiden: Brill, 2000.

6

Metaphor, Emotion and the Languages of Politics in Late Medieval Italy A Genoese Lamento of 1473 Serena Ferente

The relationship between emotion and language, understood as verbal communication, is both crucial and problematic for historians of emotions. Crucial because written language is for historians the main gateway into past emotions, although by all means not the only one available; problematic because language not only expresses or reflects emotion, but provokes, shapes, simulates, and dissimulates it.1 Indeed a precise awareness of the power of language over the emotions is the very foundation of the art of rhetoric in the West.2 Charles Darwin, however, looked not to verbal communication but to facial expressions to find what he called “the language of the emotions.”3 Throughout The Expression of Emotions (1872) he attempted to find “the innate and universal” signs, common to man and animals,4 that could function as guides to the expression of emotion as opposed to language, which he considered an “artificial,” learned habit. The conventional nature of language and its cultural specificity, indeed, appear to many the ultimate opaque barrier to the historical study of emotions, especially if one understands the latter, commonsensically, as bodily, universal, and nonrational.5 Yet, anthropologists first, and historians more recently have resorted to the collection of emotion-words as a privileged tool to describe in a holistic way the emotional categories of the communities they studied.6 The historian of medieval linguistics Irène Rosier has written interestingly 1 See Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, particularly pt. I, ch. 3. 2 It is of course in the Rhetoric, not in the writings on ethics or physics, that Aristotle develops his most sustained theory of emotions. And from a reappraisal of Aristotle’s Rhetoric stems much of the recent ethical and philosophical reflection on emotion: see several chapters in Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric. 3 Darwin, The Expression of Emotion, 367; on the prosecution of Darwin’s approach to the study of emotions see Darwin and Facial Expression. 4 Ibid., 50. 5 For a skeptical take on the study of emotions in medieval texts, see White, “The politics of anger,” 127-52; a summary of the debate among medievalists in Ferente, “Storici ed emozioni.” 6 See the work of anthropologist Lutz, “The domain”; Rosenwein, Emotional Communities.

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on the way medieval grammarians conceived of interjections in speech.7 Metaphors, it has been noted, are often used to verbalise emotion.8 It is also increasingly accepted that the process of understanding metaphors interacts with emotional experience.9 Far from being mere rhetorical embellishment, metaphor is now recognised as playing a fundamental cognitive role. Two linguists, Lakoff and Johnson, advanced the theory in a book of 1980, that basic metaphors, often derived from bodily experience, are deeply ingrained in all languages (for example “anger is hot” and “anger is like a fluid”).10 Students of communication theory have suggested that metaphorical language is, under certain conditions, more persuasive than literal language.11 Metaphors are certainly ubiquitous; linguists have estimated that there are on average five metaphors every hundred words in ordinary language;12 indeed they appear so frequently that speakers lose awareness of the metaphorical nature of utterances such as such as “to spend time” or “your argument is shaky” (the conceptual metaphors here being, for example, “time is money” and “theories are buildings”). Metaphors can be a promising focus for the historical study of emotion if (although to my knowledge this hypothesis lacks the support of explicit neurological data at the moment13) a successful metaphor – that is, one that is understood and accepted – is capable of transferring emotional associations from its base to its target, this being part of its cognitive potential. The metaphor “time is money,” for example, which is one of those Lakoff and Johnson indicate as common conceptual metaphors (certainly in English), would not only provide a framework for understanding the abstract concept of time, but also project over the notion of time feelings connected with money or goods – for example, the desire to accumulate, the pleasure of spending or the anxiety about wasting. Such a property of metaphor would be particularly important in political language, which deals in abstract notions, such as “freedom,” “obedience,” or “the state,” with the aim of inspiring or justifying action, and therefore requires the stirring of sufficiently powerful emotions. Ordinary political language is the site where various technical “expert” languages converge, but 7 Rosier-Catach, “Discussions médiévales,” 201-23. 8 Lakoff, Women; Kövecses, Metaphors and Emotion. 9 Sabatinelli, Lang, Bradley, and Flaisch, “The Neural Basis of Narrative Imagery.” 10 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. 11 Sopory and Dillard, “The persuasive effects of metaphor.” 12 H. Pollio, Smith, and M. Pollio, “Figurative language.” 13 But see the experimental results in Bambini, Gentili, Ricciardi, Bertinetto, and Pietrini, “Decomposing metaphor.”

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also the site of shifting meanings, misunderstandings, slogans, and labels. Studying metaphors in the political languages of the past presents obvious challenges but may well carry advantages vis-à-vis similar analyses conducted on contemporary political communication.14 Successful political metaphors would therefore be one of the ties, perhaps the most important one, that bind together learned traditions of political thought with the understanding of politics available to the wider circles of society involved in politics, including, in certain contexts, those low on the social hierarchy or in principle excluded from the domain of politics. Late medieval Italy is always a privileged context for the analysis of political languages, because of the variety of constitutional forms that existed within an interconnected and intercommunicating political system, and because of the relative centrality of wide and literate urban audiences in political communication. A single source, an anonymous lamento, or poetic complaint, produced in Genoa at the end of May 1473 and originally exposed in a public place as a cartello or a poster, can illustrate the potential of a study of emotion that adopts metaphor as its unit of analysis.15

A Genoese lamento



+ yhs



Oyme che dogia lo mio chore sente ché non ti posso a mia voglia parlare; se tu sapessi la doglia che sento te veneria pietà de mei martiri. Io sono la tua Zenoa sagurata, o Illustrissimo signore, che sono tanto disconsolata, per la tua falsa suspicione. A te mi sono data per sposa e non per sclava, e tu mi voi sforsare cum soldati e fortilese,

14 A diachronic approach to metaphor has generally failed to interest linguists, but see Gevaert, “The ANGER IS HEAT Question,” 195-208. An entirely different tradition, which is enjoying its own revival, is represented by the work of Hans Blumenberg, whose concept of “absolute metaphors” goes back to the 1960s and stems from his reading of Husserl, Paradigms. 15 The document is in Archivio di Stato di Milano, Sforzesco, 449, attached to the letter of Giovanfrancesco Pallavicino to Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Genoa, 31 May 1473. It was published, together with other texts, by Neri, “Poesie Storiche Genovesi,” 75-6. It is written on a rectangular piece of paper measuring roughly 33x13 cm; there are three horizontal folding lines and four traces of a seal; the script is regular and legible, larger than average. The copy sent by governor Pallavicino to Milan may well be the very piece of paper found near the gate of the city. Another copy was sent to a Lombard merchant residing in Genoa, Biagio de” Gradi.

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e me le voi far pagare cum tante rigidesse. O perché non mi atendi li pati che ay promisso, dolce Signore e charo mio sposo! Ché sono disperata de tanta destrucione, che pare che vogli fare sansa iusta caxone. Malediti sien queloro chi cossì ti consiliano! Che ti prometto tosto se ne venderà vendeta crudele e sufficiente, per esempio d’ogniuno. O chari mei figioli, citadini d’ogni sorte, vogliate essere uniti in queste male sorte, e humilmenti pregare lo nostro padre signore, che non voglia seguire questa mala opinione; peroché altramenti dispersi resteressi, sensa conforto né bona cossa alchuna, e io resteria vidua et orfana derelita. Et sempre a Dio vendeta demanderia de voi, e d’ogni persona chi ne fosse caxone. E per certo yo ne seria exaudyta, ché sempre l’ò provato in lo tempo passato, che chi mi vole disfare non pò ben capitare.



O tu che lezi nota ben tuto che ti bis[ogna]



+ yhs



What a pain, alas, my heart feels for I cannot speak to you as I wish; if you knew the pain I feel you would take pity of my torments. I am your wretched Genoa, most illustrious lord, who am so disconsolate at your wrong mistrust. To you I gave myself as a wife, not a slave, and you want to force me with soldiers and fortresses, and so harshly make me pay for those. Oh why don’t you keep the pacts you swore to me, sweet lord and dear husband of mine! I am desperate at such ruin,

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which you want to bring upon me for no just cause. Damned be those who advise you so! I promise you that soon revenge will be taken, cruel and sufficient, as an example to all. O my dear children, citizens of every order, be willing to stay united in this ill hap, and humbly pray our father and lord, that he refuse to heed this evil opinion; or else you will be left scattered, with no help and no valuable thing left, and I will be left a widow and an orphan derelict. Forever I would beg God for revenge of you and anyone who is the cause of this. And I will have satisfaction, be assured, since I have showed it to be right many a time in the past that he who wants to slight me comes to a bad end fast.



You who read this take good note of everything you ne[ed]

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It is possible to describe the immediate historical context of this text in great detail. Genoa, one of the earliest cities in Italy to organise its government as a commune, by 1473 was subject to the lordship of the duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza. It was a peculiar type of lordship. The Genoese continued to elect most of the officials and the supreme magistrates, who ruled the city and its subject territory and communities together with a governor sent from Milan; the Genoese House of San Giorgio was fully independent and had control over Genoese finances, the very substantial public debt, and Genoese colonies in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The powers, prerogatives and compensation of Genoa’s Milanese lords were recorded in pacts of submission, subscribed by Genoese representatives and by the lords. Starting in 1471, Galeazzo Maria Sforza was becoming unpopular in Genoa: during his first visit to the city he locked himself in the fortress of Castelletto as if under threat, he then ordered new works added to the fortifications, and last but not least, was requesting ten thousand ducats in excess of the annual fee established in the pacts. These are the events that the poem alludes to. The poem itself was found “close to the Gate of the Vacca, near the [fortification’s] building site”; it was brought to the governor of Genoa, Giovanfrancesco Pallavicino, who attached it to his

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letter to the duke of Milan of 31 May 1473.16 The governor’s letter, like many that preceded and would follow, reported on the discomfort and malcontent of the Genoese citizens vis-à-vis Galeazzo Maria Sforza’s initiatives.17 The interest of such a text lies less in its limited literary quality than in its evident purpose as a tool of political communication addressing a wide public. Its anonymous author employs one basic conceptual metaphor, “government is marriage,” with further metaphorical extensions and powerful emotional implications. In the poem the relationship between Genoa and Galeazzo Maria, to whom the poem is initially addressed, is likened to that of a wife to her husband. I will break down the analysis into three distinct levels – three because such a structure is convenient, and not because I postulate that the levels of meaning and function are truly and essentially three. Level One of the analysis will be the deep cognitive level. Level Two, in the “government is marriage” metaphor, will be the level of discursive traditions, including traditions of political thought. Level Three, finally, would be that of the specific intention of this author at this point in time, his or her use of the metaphor (the author is likely to be a man, but the poem is anonymous). The three levels are distinct for heuristic purposes but not separate; the cognitive process is always one and of necessity different levels of understanding coexist and feed into one another.

Level Three: the Author’s Intention Level Three is where the specif ic agency of this author is situated, an individual writing in 1473 Genoa – this is the level of the specific political message the author was intending to send by using this metaphor in a poem destined to be read or heard by ordinary citizens gathering near one of the main gates of the city. The political arrangement in Genoa was the product of a century and a half during which the Genoese (or those Genoese that mattered) had experimented with voluntary subjection to foreign lords for more or less long periods, oscillating between Anjou-French royal candidates and, in the fifteenth century, the Visconti and Sforza dukes of Milan.18 The pacts of submission, signed by representatives of the people and 16 Neri, “Poesie storiche.” 17 Archivio di Stato di Milano, Sforzesco, 449, Giovanfrancesco Pallavicino to Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Genoa, 31 May 1473. 18 On fourteenth-century episodes of Anjou lordships over Genoa see Abulaf ia, “Genova Angioina,” 1-22. On the 1396 “dedition” to Charles VI of France see, Jarry, Les origines. On the Visconti lordship see Musso, “Le istituzioni ducali,” 65-111.

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other officials of Genoa, played an absolutely crucial role in the relationship and in the very definition of the state of subjection. This is why our author must have thought that the marriage metaphor was particularly adequate: like a fifteenth-century Genoese marriage, the one between Genoa and the Sforza was primarily the outcome a pact, an alliance, a contract, which implied a certain level of asymmetry, but was entered into voluntarily, and therefore presupposed free consent.19 Galeazzo Maria Sforza was the only foreign lord of Genoa who inherited the dominium from his father and mother, rather than accepting the “donation,” or dedizione, himself from the Genoese; the Genoese had insisted that he personally renew the pacts of submission when he took control of Milan, but clearly the two parties did not understand each other well (as it must have been fairly common, one imagines, also in real marriages). The relationship between Genoa and its foreign lords was a political relationship in need of a definition, particularly in a context of growing dissatisfaction, malcontent, and some very political anger mounting. The Genoese liked to think of their polity as a self-governing community, but clearly this author judged that they could not, or should not, use the common word for a self-governing republic in Italy at the time, libertas, as in the Liberty of Genoa, because they were subject to a lord.20 The Sforza lordship over Genoa was a contractual form of lordship, hardly an uncommon constitutional arrangement, but lacking a fitting theoretical categorization. It wasn’t kingship and it wasn’t a signoria, since the Genoese retained a great deal of political autonomy by electing their governing representatives and managing autonomously their own finances. The author’s suggestion was that the marriage metaphor could offer that definition, in a potentially emotional way. The marriage metaphor had no explicit role in the rebellions against Galeazzo Maria that did follow, three and four years later. One can easily find, however, in the correspondence between Genoa and Milan, language that reflects ideals of a good marital relationship, the Genoese promising loyalty, constance, devotion ( fedeltà, costanza, devozione) and requesting that Galeazzo hold the city dear in return (tenerla cara), offering and demanding love, even “ardent love.”21 This language is very compatible 19 An overview of the origins of the canonistic concept of marriage as based on consent is in Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian. 20 On the ambiguity of Genoese libertas under the French king see Ferente, “Guelphs! Factions, liberty and sovereignty.” 21 See Ferente, Gli ultimi guelfi.

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with an idea of the relationship between the lord and the city as akin to a marriage, but marriage itself is not a frequent explicit metaphor in the correspondence, and one has therefore to acknowledge that the author of this poem, as well as probably a longer one which had circulated ten years earlier,22 was indeed trying to make a point, offering marriage as a way of imagining and understanding, both rationally and emotionally, the peculiar constitutional situation of the city.

Level Two: Discursive Traditions Level Two of the “government is marriage” metaphor is the level of discursive traditions. This conceptual metaphor is part of a long-term Mediterranean and European tradition with religious and philosophical strands. The Book of Hosea in the Bible is all one extensive marriage metaphor, where the prophet and his wife Gomer represent God and Israel, their marriage being the first covenant. The main theme of the book is the unfaithfulness of the wife, which stands for the tendency of Israelites to adore pagan gods. The Book of Hosea, together with especially the Song of Songs, inspired a long commentary tradition, both Jewish and Christian, which created a thick layer of theological and moral meaning associated with the marriage metaphor.23 A different and textually unrelated use of the metaphor is, however, in Aristotle’s Politics, book I, 12, where the relationship of the wife and the husband is likened to that of the ruler and the ruled in a “political” or constitutional regime. For Aristotle, three principal forms of rule have their analogy in relationships within the family. If the relationship between master and slave is the model of despotic regimes, A husband and father ... rules over wife and children, both free, but the rule differs, the rule over his children being a royal, over his wife a constitutional (politikos) rule. For although there may be exceptions to the order of nature, the male is by nature fitter for command than the female. But in most constitutional states the citizens rule and are ruled by turns, for the idea of a constitutional state implies that the natures of the citizens are equal, and do not differ at all. Nevertheless, when one rules 22 See Neri, “Poesie storiche.” 23 On Hosea see Wünsche, Der Prophet Hosea”; on commentaries on the Song of Songs, which have attracted a vast modern scholarship, see Matter, The Voice of My Beloved, and Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages.

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and the other is ruled we endeavour to create a difference of outward forms and names and titles of respect... The relation of the male to the female is always of this kind.24

Aristotle is here positing that the rule over the wife is similar to the rule over citizens, in that they are both types of rule over free people. Whereas government in a politia, or a republic, creates temporary hierarchies between the rulers and the ruled, in the household that hierarchy is permanent (although, as he says, there may be exceptions to the order of nature). The paternal rule over children is not the same as the marital rule over women, since children are free but undeveloped human beings, while women are both free and perfect, at least inasmuch they express the design of nature, if not in comparison with the perfection of the male. This particular aspect of Aristotle’s theory of social/political relationships has received little attention, in part, to be sure, because of its ambiguity, which Aristotle’s medieval commentators inherited. A specifically Christian tradition intensively exploited the marriage metaphor to define the relationship of the husband/Christ with the bride/Church; this metaphor became particularly pervasive during the eleventh-century Reform, incorporating the connotations of both the biblical and the Greco-Roman traditions.25 Since the Church bride of Christ was also a freeborn woman, her status was opposed to that of the ancilla, or servant/slave, and this opposition became one of the representations of the libertas Ecclesiae. The contrast between wife and slave, which plays such a prominent role in the Genoese poem, is the subject of very early papal pronouncements on the nature of marriage, most importantly the reply offered by Pope Leo I to one of the questions raised by a bishop, Rusticus of Narbonne: “Not every woman joined with a man is the wife of the man.... Indeed one thing is a wife, another a concubine, as one thing is a slave (ancilla) and another is a freeborn woman (libera).”26 Leo referred to Roman Law generally, but illustrated his pronouncement, via Paul, with the biblical story of Abraham’s wife Sarah and his concubine and servant Hagar in Genesis, xxi, 10.27 24 Aristotle, The Politics and the Constitution of Athens, 26-7. 25 Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society, 126-49. 26 “Non omnis mulier iuncta viro uxor est viri, quia nec omnis filius haeres est patris. Nuptiarum atque fœdera inter ingenuos sunt legitima et inter æquales; multo prius hoc ipsum Domino constituente quam initium Romani iuris existeret. Itaque aliud est uxor, aliud concubina; sicut aliud ancilla, aliud libera”: S. Leonis Magni Opera Omnia, in Patrologia Latina, ed. by Jacques Paul Migne (Paris: Garnier, 1846), vol. 54, ECLXVII, col. 1204. 27 “Propter quod etiam Apostolus ad mandifestandam harum personarum discretionem, testimonium ponit ex Genesi, ubi dicitur Abrahæ: Ejice ancillam et filium eius: non enim hæres

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This polarity between wife and slave or ancilla, the wife representing freedom existed therefore in canon law, where it served the ecclesiastical insistence on the consent of both spouses as the foundation of the marriage pact, and through canon law had concrete consequences on women’s and men’s lives. An Aristotelian thinker such as Thomas Aquinas was acting under the impulse of both traditions, Aristotelian and Christian, when he tried to describe the specific nature of the equality existing between spouses in marriage, generated primarily by the conjugal debt (or the reciprocal duty to have sex), this equality being the foundation of Aquinas’ timid understanding of marriage as a form of friendship, and not only a union for the purpose of procreation.28 The equality that existed between spouses was clearly different from that existing between two male friends, in that it presupposed the natural inferiority of woman and at the same time her “perfection” for the purpose given to her by God/nature. What is interesting in the wife/slave dualism from a perspective of political theory is that it constitutes an alternative to the tradition of equating marriage itself to slavery for women – a strong tradition particularly in early modern contract theory and later in feminist thought.29 Nineteenth-century English and American feminist writers would liken the condition of the wife to that of the slave (and not, for example, to that of the paid servant) because her labour within the household is not remunerated, because of the husband’s duty to feed, clothe, and provide for her, because the wife is excluded from the civic arena but linked to it through marriage, and because of the lifelong duration of the marriage bond. To the same Level Two of the analysis belong also the literary traditions and formal constraints of the poetic genre the author adopted, that of lamenti, as well as more generally the traditions and practices of poetry destined for mnemonic recitation in the vernacular.30 The conventions of the genre lamenti, itself very old, both crystallise and rely on the rhetorical and emotional power of the act of complaining, publicly, about a disgrace or injustice; it seems significant that in late medieval Italy lamenti were almost exclusively reserved for dramatic

erit filius ancillæ cum filio meo Isaac” (Galat. iv, 30; Gen. xxi, 10): S. Leonis Magni Opera Omnia, col. 1204. 28 See McClusky, “An Unequal Relationship between Equals.” On Canon Law see Read, Power Over the Body. 29 See Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 116-53. 30 See in particular D’Ancona, La poesia popolare; Novati, Poesia politica popolare dei secoli XV e XVI; Flamini, La lirica toscana; Cardona, “Culture dell’oralità”; Martines, Strong Words; Rospocher and Salzberg, “Street Singers.”

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political events, such as the conquests of cities or the assassinations of princes.31

Level One: Cognitive Resonances Level One, finally, is the deep cognitive level. At Level One, the metaphor works because marriage was a fairly common experience in late medieval Genoa as in the rest of Europe at that time. Most adults were married. Most people, therefore, had, we can imply, practical and intimate experience of marriage: life together, sex, economic solidarity, respectability, adulthood, perhaps quarrels, annoyance, violence, love, companionship. Most potential readers or listeners of the poem could easily and subconsciously project all that they knew and felt personally about marriage onto the metaphorical target, that is the relationship between their city, Genoa, and Galeazzo Maria Sforza. The paradox, of course, is that the experience of marriage was strongly gendered and men even more than women were the author’s expected audience. In the poem, Genoa is a woman, lamenting, wretched, and disconsolate, that her husband unjustly mistrusts her (“per la tua falsa suspicione”), forces himself on her (“e tu mi voi sforsare cum soldati e fortilese”), and makes her pay (“e me le voi far pagare cum tante rigidesse”). This treatment demeans Genoa’s status as a wife, and with it the legitimacy of her marital relationship with Galeazzo Maria Sforza, as the most significant verse (in fact, one of the few felicitous verses) in the poem, asserts: “A te mi sono data per sposa non per sclava.” Genoa is a wife but she is being treated as a slave. This extension of the metaphor “government is marriage” relies on another basic metaphor, perhaps the most popular political metaphor of all in this period: the community is a body – a woman’s body in this, and many other cases.32 The metaphor must have resonated with fifteenth-century Genoese at a deeper emotional level because Genoa was one of those cities in late medieval Europe where domestic slavery was widespread, where many households, not only the richest, would have one or more female slaves.33 A slave woman was of course a commodity, her master bought and sold her, lent her and her 31 On lamenti in Italy see Medin, Lamenti del sec. XIV; Medin and Frati, Lamenti storici dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI; Alazard, Le lamento dans l’Italie de la Renaissance. 32 See Demandt, Metaphern für Geschichte, 17-123. On the possible “deep” neurological anchoring of the body metaphor see Smail and Shyrok, “Body,” 55-76. 33 A fairly recent overview of female domestic slavery is in Cluse, “Femmes,” http://med-slavery. uni-trier.de:9080/minev/MedSlavery/publications/Femmes.pdf, 2008. On Genoa in particular,

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milk for money to others, beat her and sexually exploited her if he wished, as it was in his right to do. In a household dominated by a husband/master the relationship between his wife, free servants, and slave servants could be an explosive cause of tension, particularly since the sexual subjection of these women to the same man had the endless potential of bringing confusion into the female hierarchy within and without the home.34 It was very important, therefore, for men but especially for women, to oppose the status of a wife to that of a slave. In fact, the very same expression Genoa uses in this poem could be used by a real wife against a real husband in a real early sixteenth-century Venetian divorce case, where Geronima, wife of the artisan Zuane Varoter, said before the Giudici del Procurator, on 19 May 1553, that: Debito et officio de christiano, de buon marito, che teme Iddio et l’honor suo, magnifici Signori Iudici de Procurator, essendo cum la moglie una istessa persona, non li manchar de cosa alcuna necessaria et tratarla come moglie et non come schiava [emphasis mine].35

Before accusing her husband of beating her savagely and preventing her from seeing her father and mother. A good Christian and a good husband has the duty, since he is one flesh (Geronima says “one person”) with his wife, to make sure that she has all that is necessary for life, and that he treats her as a wife, not as a slave. The contrast between marriage and slavery is seldom as explicit as in this example but underpins implicitly most of the late medieval and early modern Italian separation cases that historians of marriage have gathered in several decades of research.36 Canon Law contemplated several grounds for separation a mensa et thoro (from table and bed), including adultery, but the two that take prominence in late medieval courts as well as juridical literature, beginning in the thirteenth century, are the refusal of the husband to feed, clothe, and generally keep his wife according to her station, and saevitia, unrestrained violence. It seems clear that, despite the dominant legal and cultural discourse on see the resources gathered by Cristoph Cluse on the same website: http://med-slavery.uni-trier. de/minev/MedSlavery/sources/selected-documents-from-genoese-archives/. 34 The classic study is Origo, “The Domestic Enemy.” On domestic servants in Tuscany see Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Female Celibacy,” 165-77. 35 Rigo, “Interventi,” 519-36. 36 The four volumes issued from a large collaborative project on ecclesiastical archives in late medieval and early modern Italy, all co-edited by Diego Quaglioni and Silvana Seidel Menchi, are Coniugi nemici; Matrimoni in dubbio; Trasgressioni; I tribunali del matrimonio.

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the power and even duty of husbands to correct their wives with violence, some women found extreme violence unacceptable in a marriage, often left their husbands, and occasionally sued them or defended themselves in court. The boundaries of legitimate violence within marriage were the object of a conflict to which women participated actively and, in rare cases, victoriously.37 The historiography on domestic violence in court records of this period in Italy and in Europe has produced a general picture of which two aspects are of interest here: 1) the courts only rarely granted the request of separation even when they accepted as truthful the accusations of mistreatment, preferring instead to refer the plaintiffs to forms of private composition, and 2) the dowry system in use in Italy should invite us to read some of these cases as reflecting a complex dynamic involving not only the interests of the two spouses but also those of their respective natal families. A husband who treats a wife like a slave gives her cause to seek a separation and this in turn brings shame, vergogna, onto their families and indeed the whole community. Failed marriages were eminently capable of engendering private conflicts between families and parentele – occasionally long-lasting conflicts where the failure of the marriage became the narrative origin and justification of factional identities.38 Genoa is in this poem clearly offended in her honor by Galeazzo’s behaviour and therefore promises revenge on the evil counsellors of her husband (“Malediti sien queloro chi cossì ti consiliano! / Che ti prometto tosto se ne venderà vendeta / crudele e sufficiente, per esempio d’ogniuno”). Then, suddenly moving her attention from her husband to her children, she pleads with them directly: “O chari mei figioli, citadini d’ogni sorte, / vogliate essere uniti in queste male sorte.” This is a further extension of the “government is marriage” metaphor, in which the Genoese citizens (“of every sort,” that is, “of every party”) become the children of the couple GenoaGaleazzo. This extension relies on another popular conceptual metaphor (and political principle): “the ruler is a father.” Genoa in the poem is not asking her children to turn directly against their father, but against his evil counsellors instead, and warns them that should the offenses continue, should the citizens fail to unite, they will be left scattered, helpless and penniless, and she will remain a widow (and an orphan): “peroché altramenti dispersi resteressi, / sensa conforto né bona 37 For a rare case of a wife’s judicial victory see Chojnacki, “Il divorzio di Cateruzza,” 371-416. 38 See Dean, “Marriage and mutilation.” On the Buondelmonti-Amidei failed marriage and the mythic origins of the Guelph and Ghibelline parties in Florence see Faini, “Il convito del 1216.”

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cossa alchuna, / e io resteria vidua et orfana derelita.” As a mother and a slighted woman, she then threatens rather ominously her own children and all those who want to ruin her: “Et sempre a Dio vendeta demanderia / de voi, e d’ogni persona chi ne fosse caxone.” If they won’t protect her (by being united in resisting their father’s ill intentions), God will. A sequence of shorter verses increases the tempo of the poem in the finale: “E per certo yo ne seria exaudyta, / ché sempre l’ò provato / in lo tempo passato, / che chi mi vole disfare /non pò ben capitare.” The “city as a mother” extension of the metaphor makes explicit the immediate, urgent purpose of the author: the spurring of political action. The metaphor was designed to resonate with the emotions of guilt, honor, and revenge for abuses of kinswomen, so central in late medieval masculinity. In a society where the sexual purity of women’s bodies (and Genoa is here a mother) is the repository of men’s feelings of self-worth, this is a powerful emotional association if you want men, perhaps especially young men, to take action.

Successful and unsuccessful metaphors The Genoese lamento adopts a woman’s voice to speak primarily to men; it offers a framework for identification and, the author hoped, action – a procedure profoundly connected with deep-seated features of masculinity, as its enduring appeal suggests.39 In so doing, the metaphor also reveals intimate emotional expectations of what relationships between wives and husbands, mothers and children are like or should be like. Metaphors, even good metaphors, do not always produce the intended effects, however. In Genoa’s case, in fact, when open rebellion did explode in 1476 and 1477, the marriage metaphor was notably absent from ordinary political language: much more prominent was a republican language of political brotherhood, libertas and patria. Despite their contractual relationship with the Sforza lord, and perhaps because they had an idea of what it meant to be a wife and did not like it, the marriage metaphor, and its implicit promise of reconciliation between husband and wife, failed to persuade the Genoese. In this sense, it is possible to recognise the individuality of the author’s attempt to provide a cognitive and emotional political tool

39 On the political fortune of the metaphor of the slighted woman during the Italian Risorgimento, see Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento.

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precisely because it failed, despite both its long theological/philosophical tradition and its cognitive potential. Ultimately the agency and intention of writers, the long-term discursive traditions and the deeper cognitive associations all contribute to the same act of understanding and being moved. If metaphor is the unit of analysis, and if basic metaphors are an essential part of both cognitive and emotional processes, then it is possible to articulate the historical analysis of emotion in language – which can be easily extended to encompass other forms of symbolic communication such as ritual or images – in a way that brings together several levels of meaning and several pertinent historical contexts.

Works Cited Abulafia, David. “Genova Angioina, 1318-35: gli inizi della Signoria di Roberto re di Napoli.” In La Storia dei Genovesi, vol. XII, 1-22 Genoa: Associazione nobiliare ligure, 1996. Alazard, Florence, Le lament dans l’Italie de la Renaissance. “Pleure belle Italie, jardin du monde.” Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010. Aristotle, The Politics and the Constitution of Athens. Ed. by Stephen Everson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Astell, Ann W. The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Bambini, Valentina et al. , Gentili Claudio, Ricciardi Emiliano, Bertinetto Pier Marco, and Pietrini Pietro. “Decomposing metaphor processing at the cognitive and neural level through functional magnetic resonance imaging.” Brain Research Bulletin 86 (2011): 203-16. Banti, Alberto M. La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita. Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Brundage, James A. Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Cardona, Giorgio Robert. “Culture dell’oralità e culture della scrittura.” In Letteratura italiana, II, Produzione e consumo, ed. by Alberto Asor Rosa, 25-101. Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Chojnacki, Stanley. “Il divorzio di Cateruzza: rappresentazione femminile ed esito processuale (Venezia 1465).” In Coniugi nemici. La separazione in Italia dal XII al XVIII secolo, ed. by Diego Quaglioni and Silvana Seidel Menchi, 371-416. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000. Cluse, Christoph. “Femmes en esclavage: quelques remarques sur l’Italie du Nord (XIVe-XVe siècles).” In Medieval Mediterranean Slavery: Comparative Studies on Slavery and the Slave Trade in Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Societies (8th-15th Centuries), http://med-slavery. uni-trier.de:9080/minev/MedSlavery/publications/Femmes.pdf, 2008. D’Ancona, Alessandro. La poesia popolare: Studi. Livorno: Giusti Editore, 1906. Darwin, Charles. The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. London: John Murray Publishers, 1872. Dean, Trevor. “Marriage and mutilation. Vendetta in late medieval Italy.” Past and Present, 157 (1997): 3-36. Demandt, Alexander. Metaphern für Geschichte: Sprachbilder und Gleichnisse im historischpolitische Denken, 17-123. Munich: Beck, 1978.

126 Serena Ferente Ekman, P., ed. Darwin and Facial Expression: A century of research in review. New York: ­HarperCollins, 1973. Faini, Enrico. “Il convito del 1216. La vendetta all’origine del fazionalismo fiorentino.” Annali di storia di Firenze 1 (2006): 9-36. Ferente, Serena. “Guelphs! Factions, liberty and sovereignty: inquiries about the Quattrocento.” History of Political Thought 28 (2007): 571-98. —. “Storici ed emozioni.” Storica 43, 44, 45 (2009), 371-92. Flamini, Francesco. La lirica toscana del rinascimento anteriore ai tempi del Magnifico. Florence: Nistri, 1977. Gevaert, Caroline. “The ANGER IS HEAT Question: Detecting Cultural Influence on the Conceptualization of Anger through Diachronic Corpus Analysis.” In Perspectives on Variation: Sociolinguistic, Historical, Comparative, ed. by Nicole Delbecque, Johan van der Auwera, and Dirk Geeraerts, 195-208. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005. Husserl, Edmund. Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Jarry, Eugène. Les origines de la domination française à Gênes (1392-1402). Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1896. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. “Female Celibacy and Service in Florence in the fifteenth century.” In Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, ed. by XX, 165-77 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Kövecses, Zoltán. Metaphors and Emotion. Language, Culture and the Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Lakoff, George, and Johnson Mark. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lakoff, George. Women, Fire and Dangerous things. What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Lutz, Catherine. “The domain of emotion-words in Ifaluk.” American Ethnologist 9 (1982): 113-28. Martines, Lauro. Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Matter, E. Ann. The Voice of My Beloved: the Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity. Phila.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. McClusky, Coleen. “An Unequal Relationship between Equals: Thomas Aquinas on Marriage.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 24 (2007): 1-18. Medin, Antonio. Lamenti del sec. XIV. Florence: Sansoni, 1883. Medin, Antonio, and Ludovico Frati. Lamenti storici dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI. 3 vols. Bologna: Romagnoli-Dall’Acqua, 1887. Migne, Jacques Paul, ed. S. Leonis Magni Opera Omnia, in Patrologia Latina. vol. 54. Paris: Garnier, 1846. Musso, Riccardo. “Le istituzioni ducali dello “Stato di Genova” durante la signoria di Filippo Maria Visconti (1421-1435).” In L’età dei Visconti. Il dominio di Milano fra XIII e XV secolo, ed. by Luisa Chiappa Mauri, Laura De Angelis Cappabianca, and Patrizia Mainoni, 65-111. Milan: La Storia Editore, 1993. Neri, Achille. “Poesie Storiche Genovesi.” Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, 13 (1877-1884): 55-96. Novati, Francesco. Poesia politica popolare dei secoli XV e XVI. Ancona: Morelli, 1885. Origo, Iris. “The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.” Speculum 30 (1955): 321-66. Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988.

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Pollio, Horvard R., Michael K. Smith, and Marilyn R. Pollio. “Figurative language and cognitive psychology.” Lang. Cogn. Process 5 (1990): 141-67. Quaglioni, Diego, and Silvana Seidel Menchi, eds. Coniugi nemici. La separazione in Italia dal XII al XVIII secolo. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000. —. I tribunali del matrimonio (secoli XV-XVIII). Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006. —. Matrimoni in dubbio. Unioni controverse e nozze clandestine in Italia dal XIV al XVIII secolo. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002. —. Trasgressioni. Seduzione, concubinato, adulterio, bigamia (secoli XIV-XVIII). Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004. Read, Charles J. Power over the Body, Equality in the Family. Rights and Domestic Relations in Medieval Canon Law (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling. A Framework for the History of Emotions. London: Oxford University Press, 2001. Rigo, Angelo. “Interventi dello stato veneziano nei casi di separazione: i Giudici del Procurator.” In Coniugi nemici. La separazione in Italia dal XII al XVIII secolo, ed. by Silvana Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglioni, 519-36. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000. Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg, ed. Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. Rosenwein, Barbara. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Rosier-Catach, Irène. “Discussions médiévales sur l’expression des affects.” In Le sujet des émotions au Moyen Âge, ed. by Piroska Nagy and Damien Boquet, 201-23. Paris: Beauchesne, 2009. Rospocher, Massimo, and Rosa Salzberg. “Street Singers in Italian Renaissance Urban Culture and Communicatio.” Cultural and Social History 9 (2012): 9-26. Sabatinelli, Dean, Peter J. Lang, Margaret M. Bradley, and Tobias Flaisch. “The Neural Basis of Narrative Imagery: Emotion and Action.” In Understanding Emotions, ed. by Silke Anders, Gabriele Ende, Markus Junghofer, Johanna Kissler, and Dirk Wildgrube, 93-104. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Smail, Daniel Lord, and Shyrok Andrew. “Body.” In Deep History. The Architecture of Past and Present, ed. by Daniel Lord Smail and Andrew Shyrock, 55-76. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011. Sopory, Pradeep, and James Price Dillard. “The persuasive effects of metaphor. A meta-analysis.” Human Communication Research 28 (2002): 382-419. Tellenbach, Gerd. Church, state and Christian society at the time of the investiture contest. London: Humanities Press, 1948. White, Stephen. “The politics of anger.” In Anger’s Past. The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. by Barbara Rosenwein, 127-152. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Wünsche, August. Der Prophet Hosea übersetz un erklärt. Leipzig: Aug Wünsche, 1868.

7

Debt, Humiliation, and Stress in Fourteenth-Century Lucca and Marseille Daniel Lord Smail

The expansion of the European economy over the course of the long twelfth century had two consequences of immediate relevance for the theme of this paper. The first of these was an acceleration in habits of luxury consumption, as the kinds of goods formerly monopolized by the clerical and secular élite gradually cascaded down the social hierarchy. The Italian chronicler Galvano Fiamma, writing around 1340, described the transformation in a simple and memorable way: whereas a century earlier, the people of Lombardy had been accustomed to wearing unlined leathers and coarse woolens, today they bedeck themselves with gold, silver, and pearls.1 By the fourteenth century, luxury goods were routinely found in Mediterranean households, even the households of middling or lower status families, to judge by extant household inventories and other evidence. In these inventories, certain items stand out, notably clothing and fine fabrics as well as personal ornaments and metalwares made of gold silver and studded with gemstones. By the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, households were becoming more colorful, as finely dyed curtains, bedspreads, and cushions made their way into dining halls and bedrooms.2 How were these goods purchased? Herein lies the second transformation, namely, a dramatic expansion in the mechanisms for extending credit.3 We have long known about the banking practices and lending systems that emerged with long-distance trade. What has become increasingly clear in recent research is that the credit available in later medieval and early modern Europe also included small-scale consumer loans and distress 1 Fiamma, Opusculum, 37-8; cited in Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution, 196­7. 2 In general, see Braudel, Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme; Goldthwaite, Wealth and the demand for art in Italy; Stuard, Gilding the Market; Kowaleski, “A consumer economy,” in A Social History of England, 238-59; O’Malley and Welch, The Material Renaissance; Cohn, “Renaissance Attachment to Things.” I will be pursuing this material transformation in a forthcoming work. 3 Notaires et crédit dans l’occident méditerranéen médiéval.

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loans. 4 In this instance, we are speaking of micro-loans of less than one or two florins or their equivalent in other currencies. This was still a” significant sum, equivalent to perhaps two weeks’ wages for an unskilled laborer, but far smaller than the large commercial loans of hundreds of florins. Some of these micro-loans were guaranteed by a notarial contract, but the costs associated with notarization typically made the process too expensive for micro-lending.5 Small loans were usually processed in a different way. Shopkeepers, for example, routinely extended credit to their customers and kept track of obligations in shop cartularies. People consigned articles of clothing or household valuables to friends and relatives in exchange for small loans. More formal and regulated systems of pawnbroking emerged to handle some of the need for credit. Credit was extended involuntarily whenever a debtor asked his or her creditor for a delay in paying installments of rent or dowry payments. Practices such as these fly below the radar of documentation, and for this reason it is not easy to estimate the overall volume of micro-credit available in later medieval Europe. Even so, it is reasonable to suggest that the volume of consumer credit was continuously expanding from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries onward. The best evidence for this claim lies in records arising from courtsponsored debt recovery. Procedures for debt recovery begin to show up in Italian statutes by the early thirteenth century; within a few decades, practices of debt recovery were becoming routinized in the courts of law all over Europe.6 The registers that were kept to handle the necessary accounting, where preserved, exist in huge quantities in local archives. From these records, we learn that the coercion wielded by courts of law on behalf of creditors could take several different forms. Secular courts, for example, authorized the seizure of goods and/or the incarceration or even the banishment of debtors. Ecclesiastical courts issued excommunications for debt. Around 1300, the entire town of Ascoli, in Italy’s Marche region, was interdicted for a debt owed by an Ascoli merchant to a Florentine

4 See, inter alia, Jordan, Women and Credit; Groebner, Ökonomie ohne Haus; Fontaine, L’économie morale. 5 In Marseille, notarized loans typically began above a threshold of twenty shillings (a florin at the time ranged from twenty-six to thirty-two shillings in the local currency). For this and what follows immediately below, see Smail, The Consumption of Justice. 6 For the early Italian statute evidence, see Varanini, “Tra fisco e credito,” 215-46. The best general introduction to the literature on debt recovery is La dette et le juge. For Marseille, see Shatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered.

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merchant.7 These procedures could operate in tandem with each other, amplifying the overall effect. It is possible to interpret this multilayered system of coercion from a purely economic point of view. Debt recovery, in this view, was the necessary adjunct to a system of consumer credit, since creditors would have been unwilling to extend credit without the guarantee that force would be made available to them if needed. Beyond that, the seizure of goods released the store of value that accrued in objects and put that value back into circulation. For this reason, goods seized during the process of debt recovery arguably served as a kind of commodity money in a world lacking sufficient coinage. But the existence of these economic functions does not preclude the possibility that debt recovery was simultaneously performing another kind of social or political function. The goal of this paper is to show how the process of debt recovery in two fourteenth-century cities, Lucca and Marseille, could serve as a vector for the delivery of shame and stress.8 What is noteworthy is how this development in the system of debt recovery paralleled similar developments in the criminal justice system, which by the thirteenth century was also integrating spectacles of degradation into its sanctions.9 Importantly, the humiliations associated with debt recovery, if perhaps not as intense or as spectacular as those inflicted by the criminal justice system, were far more common and arguably much more visible on a daily basis. If Europe, in the fourteenth century, was becoming not just a persecuting society, but a humiliating society as well, it is important to acknowledge that one of the most significant components of this trend was the humiliation of debtors.10 Why humiliation? If we follow Avishai Margalit, it is difficult to explain humiliating institutions as anything other than an aberration from the institutions that ought to pertain to a decent society.11 The growing presence 7 For the case of Ascoli, see Clarke, The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century, 121; for excommunication for debt, see Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 38-40; Helmholz, “Excommunication as a Legal Sanction,” 204-12. 8 For perspectives on the distinction between shame and humiliation, see Miller, Humiliation. Humiliation, in English usage, is often treated as a process or a vector. Like violence, it is something that one person or institution inflicts on another. Humiliation, as Miller points out, is especially appropriate in contexts that involve social degradation or the affirmation of social boundaries. 9 See Wettlaufer and Nishimura, “The History of Shaming,” 197-228. 10 The growing density of shaming punishments after the thirteenth century can be taken as some measure of the condition of a humiliating society. On the persecuting society, see Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society. 11 Margalit, The Decent Society.

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of humiliating institutions in later medieval and early modern Europe, however, gestures to the grim fact that humiliation can be a useful tool of governance. Rather than treat humiliating institutions as if they were pathological, we need to assume that humiliation responded to a social or political logic. At the proximate or immediate level, it is all too easy to see why some creditors might have wished to coerce and humiliate their debtors and would therefore have been inclined to lend their support to public procedures that performed the task for them. Where criminal justice is concerned, it has been conventionally argued that kingdoms and communes deliberately promoted spectacles of humiliations so as to display their claims of sovereignty or to deter future crime. But these interests are not the same. Standing alone, they cannot easily explain why later medieval Europe as a whole, in realms as diverse as justice, penance, and popular culture, was becoming a humiliating society. In this contribution, I would like to engage in some speculations about the increasing presence of humiliating institutions, using as my platform some recent developments in the neuroscientific literature. The humiliation of one’s enemies is a characteristic component of the world of honor and vengeance.12 What is becoming increasingly clear is that honor and shame have neurobiological correlates. Honor is one of many cultural constructs that have been built on top of the dopamine-reward system. Shame and humiliation, in turn, are associated with the stress-response system, the system of special relevance for this paper.13 Like the reward system, the stress-response system plays an important role in human physiology. Challenges or threats generate a signal which is sent to the adrenal gland; in response, the eyes dilate, the heart rate increases, and the body releases endorphins to minimize any pain. Energy is diverted from digestion and sexual interest is diminished. All these responses are mediated by hormones that circulate in the blood stream such as cortisol. When the challenge is over, the body has devices for cleansing itself of stress hormones. The “cleansing” can feel good, which is why many people enjoy sports or horror films. But if challenging conditions persist, as is typical of psychosocial stress, then cortisol is not removed, and as it lingers in the bloodstream it begins to cause damage, creating a condition of debilitating or chronic stress. Stress is one of the many neurobiological correlates of social rank or position. Consider, in this vein, an experiment involving mice, which share 12 Miller, Humiliation. 13 In general, see Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. For a specific study correlating stress and humiliation, see Nisbett and Cohen, The Culture of Honor.

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the stress-response system common to all mammals.14 If a mouse is handicapped in such a way as to be the loser in a series of fights with other mice, it enters a condition of stress marked by high levels of stress hormones. The mouse loses initiative and becomes listless and compliant ; in a word, the mouse is depressed.15 Much the same happens among humans who suffer stress; an example is the condition known as battered-spouse syndrome. If given access to cocaine, which offers a boost to the dopamine-reward system, the mouse will medicate itself at a greater rate than control mice so as to alleviate the feelings of stress. How is this scientific understanding of stress relevant to the process of debt recovery? Katharina Behrens has vividly shown that hell, in later medieval Europe, was imagined as a world of constant shame and stress.16 To the extent that debt recovery was one of many stress-generating institutions in later medieval Europe, that hell also existed on earth. Stress is associated with poverty, ill health, and depression in Westernized societies.17 In certain primate communities, stress can be leveraged by dominants to maintain and enforce dominance hierarchies. The condition of stress, in short, can be understood as an order of power, and the capacity to deliver stress can be seen as an instrument of that power. This context, I suggest, helps explain why later medieval Europe, as a whole, was becoming a humiliating society. The threat of shame and humiliation was omnipresent where debt is concerned. In some Italian cities, as Paolo Grillo has described so vividly, the names of debtors were read out at Sunday mass in the city’s cathedral.18 In Como, the debtor, stripped down to a shirt and bereft of britches, had to stand on a podium before the crowd and expose his rear end three or four times to the public assembly. In Florence, the portraits of debt fugitives, the pitture infamante, were painted on the sides of houses.19 In Germany, irate creditors wrote letters to their debtors and subsequently publicized them so as to inflict shame.20 Using the registers of banishment for debt from thirteenth-century Bologna, Jean-Louis Gaulin has shown that many 14 Yap and Miczek, “Social Defeat Stress.” For an overview, see Zimmer, “The Brain.” 15 See Jason S. Snyder, Amélie Soumier, Michelle Brewer, James Pickel, and Heather A. Cameron, “Adult Hippocampal Neurogenesis Buffers Stress Responses and Depressive Behaviour,” Nature, 476 (2011): 458-61. 16 Katharina Behrens, “Zwischen Himmel und Hölle. Scham in spätmittelalterlicher religiöser Traktatliteratur” (presentation, La honte entre peine et penitence, Paris, 2010). 17 Sapolsky, “The Influence of Social Hierarchy.” 18 Grillo, “Indebitamento,” 183-84. 19 Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment. 20 Schuster, “The Age of Debt?,” 37-52.

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insolvent debtors escaped the threat of punishment by fleeing into exile, thereby mimicking the practices of criminal and political banishment.21 Exile was an acknowledgment of the disgrace that could accompany the condition of indebtedness.22 In records from the cities of Lucca and Marseille, direct evidence for the public shaming of debtors is thin. Here, a man excommunicated for debt lashes out at the abbess who engineered his excommunication. There, a debtor hounded by his creditors seeks sanctuary in a church.23 From other evidence, however, we can detect signs of the humiliation associated with debt. Debt recovery in the secular courts of law in both cities followed a highly public procedure that was also used, with variations, in other European secular courts. The process began when a creditor came before a court to lodge a simple claim against a debtor. Claims of this sort were not lawsuits; they are similar to the kinds of cases pursued today in small claims courts. Once a claim had been validated, the creditor’s intention to move against the debtor was typically conveyed by means of a public proclamation, to the sound of trumpets, delivered by one of the crier-sergeants (nuncii) before the house of the debtor and throughout the neighborhood. If the debtor owned or even rented more than one house or workshop, the proclamation could be repeated before each and every one.24 In Marseille, seals were placed on doors, warning people not to remove goods without the authorization of the court. If the debt remained unpaid, the creditor could then ask the court for a license to seize goods (in Lucca, a licentia predandi) or a license to incarcerate the debtor (licentia capiendi), or in some cases, both. In cases where there was risk of flight, the advanced warning could be skipped, but the seizure itself remained an eminently public spectacle. If the debtor continued to delay repayment, the court acted upon the license granted to the creditor, and the crier-sergeant charged with carrying out the task then provided a brief report to the notary of the court. It is these brief notices, typically a short paragraph in length, that constitute our major evidence for the practice of seizure and arrest. In cases of seizure, a list of the item or items seized was also written out in the court 21 J.-L. Gaulin, “Les registres de bannis pour dettes à Bologne au XIIIe siècle: une nouvelle source pour l’histoire de l’endettement,” Mélanges de l’ecole française de Rome. Moyen-Age, temps modernes, 109 (1997): 479-99. 22 See Claude Gauvard, Conclusion, in La dette et le juge, 193-97 (196). 23 See Smail, Consumption of Justice. 24 “Et publice et alta voce ad domum eius habitationis et per dictam contratam in vicinia publice et alta voce cum proclamatione dicti nuncii et tunc in dictis locis eidem Johanni locasse’: Archivio di Stato di Lucca, Curia dei Rettori 11, 290.

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register. These items, if they remained unredeemed within a few days, were sometimes auctioned off to liquidate the value of the seized goods. In both cities, rules stipulated that the auction, if conducted, had to take place in the accustomed and habitual sites, so as to avoid any appearance of impropriety or price-fixing. Where incarceration is concerned, the crier-sergeant’s report noted that the debtor had been consigned to the authority of the jailer. In many cases, the debtor was released immediately, owing either to the intervention of friends or patrons who stood surety or to an act of grace extended by the creditor.25 Others were not so lucky, and lingered in prison for weeks or even months. Bureaucratic records rarely record emotional states, and the evidence suggesting that debt recovery was felt to be humiliating is typically indirect. In the case of arrest, we can infer some degree of humiliation, both in the seizure itself and in the incarceration that sometimes ensued.26 Humiliation is also suggested by the curious fact that debtors were occasionally released by an act of grace after a few days in prison or even immediately, before jail delivery. Consider, by way of example, the case of Jannes Nardi. On 30 January 1333, Jannes was arrested for a debt of two florins owed to Piero, the servant of a prominent Lucchese gentleman, and brought to the debtors’ prison. A marginal notice records what then transpired: on the very same day, “the arrested man was released through special grace and favor, on the authority of the said Piero, the creditor.”27 Notably, Jannes was released without the guarantees provided by oathswearers, by far the more usual pattern in such cases. The details of transactions such as this one, alas, are lost to us. In such cases, however, it is implausible to assume that creditors like Piero had been planning all along to release their debtors. Here, it may be legitimate to imagine that, at the moment Jannes was brought to the prison, Piero received from him some acknowledgment of the debt as well as a sign of contrition or subjugation, and that this is what prompted him to extend his grace. For much of the fourteenth century, at least in Lucca and Marseille, the incarceration of debtors appears to have been less common than the seizure of goods. In Lucca in the 1330s, where the evidence is especially good, the crier-sergeants were arresting around two hundred debtors per year. This 25 On prison for debt, see Claustre, Dans les geôles du roi; Geltner, The Medieval Prison. 26 See Claustre, “La honte de l’endetté (Paris, XVe siècle),” in Shame Between Punishment and Penance, 229-46. 27 “Relaxatus est dictus captus de gratia speciali et amore licentia dicti Petri creditoris,” Archivio di Stato di Lucca, Podestà di Lucca 33, fol. 105 r.

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is almost an order of magnitude smaller than the number of seizures of household goods, which was close to eighteen hundred per year during the same decade.28 When the seizure of goods came into play, the object of humiliation turned from the person of the debtor to the object of seizure, and the humiliation itself became vicarious. The seizure itself involved sergeants entering a house, sometimes by force, rifling through chests and wardrobes and taking what they pleased. The goods were subsequently carted off through the streets to the houses of creditors or third-party sureties. Some were then exposed on the auction block. In Marseille, the auction was handled by Jewish brokers, which perhaps added to the indignity. As noted above, the seizure of goods was promoted by a simple economic logic. Goods represented the most obvious store of value in any household, and where small loans were concerned it was probably more efficient to seize goods than to arrest debtors in the hopes that friends or patrons would pay the debt for them. The court costs associated with seizure were small, typically around 5 percent of the value of the debt, which promoted use of the procedure.29 But goods were also much more than stores of value. In later medieval urban settings, in tandem with growing patterns of consumption and the so-called fashion revolution, goods of many types, and especially clothing, represented important investments in honor and distinction. In a world of artisanal production and familial transmission, a world in which all goods, even clothes, had relatively long life histories, goods had time to accrue sentimental value and embed themselves in households as if they were members of the family. By targeting items that served as extensions of the self, the court, spurred on by private creditors, engaged in an act that could have been as humiliating as the seizure and incarceration of the person of the debtor. Even when the goods seized consisted of food commodities, there may have been humiliation involved simply because the seizure required an invasion of the home by agents of the court. The humiliation associated with seizure is strongly suggested by the numerous cases of resistance that we find scattered across the records of the criminal courts in both Lucca and Marseille. To give one example from Lucca in 1337, a man named Niccolo del Tepa, whose house had been subjected to seizure by a sergeant named Jacopo Chellini, went to Jacopo’s house to insult his wife, Vannella, calling her a whore and crying out “go back to the bordello” along with other words that the notary primly 28 For these figures, see Smail, “Violence.” 29 This figure is explained in Smail, “Les biens comme otages,” in Objets sous contraintes, 365-84.

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described as being “disgraceful and shameful to the said Jacopo.”30 Niccolo later returned, accused Jacopo of being a traitor for having seized goods at night, and then seized a rock and beat him on the head and face. Women are commonly found among the people offering resistance to sergeants. In 1331 in Marseille, three women paid fines to the court for having resisted the sergeants who came to seize objects from their houses; in this register, no men were prosecuted for this misdemeanor. Another woman actually followed a sergeant and took a pawn from his possession, presumably one he had recently taken from her house.31 Lucchese women are just as prominent in their resistance. One example from 1334 is Cecchora, the wife of Nierucci Belochi, who assaulted a sergeant with a staff and closed the door in his face.32 In cases of resistance, people subjected to seizure were sometimes described as full of rage or fury. In Marseille in 1334, a Jewish man named Samiel of Nîmes, who had been subjected to a seizure by the ruling of a judge named Cerrutus de Gosalengo, “injuriously and full of wrath” (iniuriose and irate animo) entered the home and the dining hall of lord Cerrutus and threatened him, saying, “By God above, you have had me seized of goods, but you are not even a substitute for a judge since you stink in your body” (Per deum celi vos fecistis me pignorari, sed non estis tantum locumtenens judicis quin ematis de corpore).33 The language of fury found here and elsewhere is conventional and perhaps meaningless. Even so, it stands to reason that people like Samiel actually were full of rage. Why? First of all, the sergeants claimed the right to enter the household at will and pillage its goods. A sense of the sanctity of the house is revealed in a case from Lucca. On or near 5 April 1337, a group of servants and sergeants of the court went to a rural commune for the purpose of seizing all the goods of a man who had been banned for a criminal offense. The owner of the house, armed and “moved by wrath” (irato animo), moved aggressively against the men and declared, “You shall undertake no seizure here since this house is mine; nor shall you do your duty in any way – so get lost.”34 30 Archivio di Stato di Lucca, Sentenze e bandi, 7, entry made on 29 Apr. 1337. The expressions were “putana,” “va torna al bordello,” and “in dedecus et verecondia Jacobi predicti.” 31 For these cases, see Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, B, 1940, fols. 105 v, 109 v, 117 r, 134 v, and others. 32 Archivio di Stato di Lucca, Podestà di Lucca, 4725, fol. 4 v. 33 Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, 3B 29, fol. 24 r-v, case opened 14 June 1334. 34 “[V]os nullum sequestrationem hic facietis quia hec domus est mea nec aliud off icium facietis et ideo discedatis,” Archivio di Stato di Lucca, Sentenze e bandi, 7, 5 Apr. 1337.

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The second aggravating circumstance is that sergeants did not choose items at random. In the Lucchese countryside, they often took foodstuffs and other commodities, such as storage jars. This is some indication of the poverty of the peasants whose houses they were ransacking. But the sergeants, in general, show a marked preference for more personal objects. In a vivid case from Marseille, from 1453, a sergeant named Big John targeted a fine jug used to serve wine in a small household tavern. The taverness, who was pregnant, begged him to take something of equal worth but less importance. He refused, and in the ensuing scuffle kicked her in the belly, causing her water to break, a crime for which he in turn was prosecuted.35 A case from 1402 offers a curious counter-example. Here, the debtor, Esteve Blancart, a cleric in minor orders, had been made the subject of an ecclesiastical inquest when he supposedly resisted the efforts of a sergeant of the secular court to seize goods from his house. In his testimony, Esteve offered a more nuanced description of what had actually happened. It is true, he said, that he had refused to manually hand over the required pawn (noluit ... tradere aliquod pignus manualiter), but he did say to the sergeant, “I am assigning to you a pawn from within my house; take it” (dixit sibi ‘ego assigno tibi pignus infra domum meam; recipe ipsum’).36 A plausible reading of this curious exchange is that any contact with the object implied Esteve’s consent to the seizure; by refusing to touch the object, as the sergeant had asked, Esteve implicitly refused his consent. In a sense, he preferred to experience the seizure as a robbery. Goods seized from households cover the entire spectrum of objects, from jugs and jewels to books and even coins, with a few notable exceptions such as paternosters or other devotional objects. Despite the variation, we can detect a general preference for clothing in the records of seizure. In January of 1333, to take two examples from among the thousands, a sergeant of one of the Lucchese courts seized a tunic and a fancy parti-colored surcoat from a house for an undisclosed debt. A few days later, another sergeant took a blue-green ladies cloak trimmed with fine yellow muslin for a debt of forty Lucchese shillings.37 The targeting of clothing stands to reason, since dress was easily the most important symbol of personal status and identity. The seizure of clothing was symbolically equivalent to the public undressing of the debtor.38 35 36 37 38

Archives municipales de la Ville de Marseille, FF 21, fols. 1 r-18 v. Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, 5G 772, fol. 116 r, case dated 13 Dec. 1402. Archivio di Stato di Lucca, Podestà di Lucca, 33, 1333, fols. 4 r and 7 r. On the shame associated with nudity, see Wettlaufer and Nishimura, History of Shaming.

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One of the most distinctive features of the process of debt recovery is that it could not be countered. The culture of vengeance was and is predicated on the fact that an injury could be avenged; arguably, it was the hope of vengeance that alleviated some of the stress associated with the condition of humiliation. Alternatively, and more commonly, injuries were settled by means of an honorable peace. In the case of debt recovery, however, actions were carried out by sergeants of the court, not by the creditors themselves. The violence that was occasionally directed against the sergeants or, in the case of Samiel of Nîmes, the judge himself, can be seen as an attempt to humanize them – but the violence only led to further prosecution. The rules of the honor game, in short, were changing, for there could be no vengeance against faceless officialdom. The system of debt recovery assumed that goods seized in the course of seizure would be auctioned off to the highest bidder, with the value of the debt plus expenses transmitted to the creditor and the remainder returned to the debtor. Clothes predominate in records of auction, though we also find the occasional ring, or crown, or silver item, as well as storage jars of food from time to time. As Antoni Furió has noted for the case of Valencia, however, auctions were not common.39 A large register of seizures from Lucca in 1333 lists only twenty-three instances of auction over the course of the year even though this court, one of several operating in Lucca, supervised around eight hundred to nine hundred seizures that year. So what happened to the goods seized during the course of debt recovery? Some were redeemed within the allotted period of three days. Numerous entries in some of the registers of seizure have marginal notes indicating as much. If the goods were not redeemed, however, the consul released them to the creditor. The foodstuffs, I suspect, were simply consumed. The fate of the durable objects is difficult to trace, although records indicate that debtors were sometimes able to redeem the goods in question weeks or months after the seizure. As these cases reveal, goods seized for debt did not necessarily shed their identities. Like other objects left in pawn, they continued to bind the debtor to the creditor in a subservient or dependent relationship. One of the strangest features of seizure is that the act was almost entirely unnecessary. After all, the debtors clearly had sufficient assets to cover their debts. Systems of pawn-broking and auctioning that are well attested in the records would have allowed them to liquidate their own goods. The decision to allow the creditor to pursue seizure, therefore, was a decision that was freely 39 Antoni Furió, Crédit, endettement et justice: prêteurs de débiteurs devant le juge dans le royaume de Valence (XIIIe-XVe siècle), in La dette et le juge, 50.

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made by the debtor. The fact that sergeants often met with resistance shows that the decision was sometimes made reluctantly. Even so, it behooves us to ask why they chose to suffer the seizure of their goods. What I would like to suggest is the possibility that debtors chose to pay off their debtors using two currencies: first, the currency of their own goods, and second, the currency of humiliation. Put differently, creditors who were able to inflict humiliation on their debtors did not insist that the objects seized should carry the full value of the debt. Clues suggest that this was indeed the case; among other things, in the few cases where we have detailed records of auctions, the amount paid for goods sold at auction was consistently lower than the size of the debt. What was in it for Lucca and Marseille? Why did the cities, and their courts, generate the enormous apparatus necessary to recover debts on the scale that we have seen? There are two answers to this. The first is that seizure was profitable to the court itself. Sergeants, porters, and notaries were paid a small percentage of the transaction and made a good living off the business. The second answer turns on the way in which acts of humiliation indirectly generated sovereignty. The majority of creditors who used this system were private creditors who had their own axes to grind. But the court and the city benefited from the private interests of creditors because the sergeants and porters who supervised acts of seizure and arrest carried, on their clothing, the insignia of the court. In Lucca, where acts of debt recovery conducted in the rural district, the Sei Milia, were exceedingly common, the process served as a vehicle for carrying the symbols of Lucca’s domination into the countryside. An act of resistance to Lucca’s sergeants, accordingly, was treated as an act that dishonored Lucca itself. As one record put, a debtor “did not permit the servants and crier-sergeant to enter the house and carry out their office, to the disgrace and prejudice of the commune of Lucca and against the honor of the judge and the office described above.”40 In a case from 1334, as the members of a family were chasing a sergeant from their property, one of them called out that he would kill all sergeants who came to their village, a phrase insulting to the commune of Lucca, as the notary recorded. 41 As the volume of credit expanded in the later Middle Ages, so too did practices of debt recovery offered by the secular courts of law in all European jurisdictions. Lucca and Marseille, the cities explored here, are just 40 “[N]on permitendo ipsos familiares et nuncium ingredi dictam domum et dictum eorum officium exercere in dampnum et prejudicium Luce communis contra honorem dicti officialis et officii suprascripti,” Archivio di stato di Lucca, Sentenze e bandi, 7, 5 Apr. 1337, fol. 17 v. 41 Archivio di Stato di Lucca, Sentenze e bandi, 7, Apr. 1337, fol. 17 v.

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case studies representing larger trends. It is important to acknowledge that debt recovery was motivated by an economic logic. But economics alone cannot easily explain all the evidence, both direct and indirect, suggesting that the system operated in a way that inflicted humilation on its victims. The direct evidence is offered by the normative evidence of shaming rituals for debt that were similar to those inflicted on people found guilty of crimes. Indirect evidence, explored in this paper, comes from the publicity of the transaction, the patterns of resistance offered to agents of the court, and the types of goods that were favored for seizure. One of the most important features of the system of debt recovery was the scale of the phenomenon. During the 1330s, the courts of the city of Lucca were processing well over two thousand acts of seizure or imprisonment for debt per year. This figure does not include debt claims that were paid by debtors in time to forestall seizure or arrest. It is true that some of these cases concerned debtors sanctioned on more than one occasion. Even so, it is clear that a significant proportion of the households in Lucca and its rural district were affected by the threat or the reality of debt recovery on an annual basis. The economic implications alone are striking. But also striking is the way in which debt recovery served as a proxy device for the delivery of countless acts of petty humiliation. Although the scholarly literature has focused on criminal justice, and has emphasized the spectacles of degradation that formed part of the criminal law, it is clear that debt recovery was far more significant as a vehicle for the systematic delivery of humiliation. Moreover, whereas the criminal justice system frequently diverted disputes to the system of peacemaking, no such possibility to alleviate humiliation and stress was available where debt was concerned. This system, clearly, was not designed by a Machiavellian state, let alone by the the myriad creditors who used it. Like other human institutions, the system of debt recovery was exapted to perform a function beyond its immediate economic role. As I suggested earlier in this paper, that function, in part, was to generate governable subjects, on the principle that permanent stress induces a condition of governability. A humiliating society, on this principle, is a society whose institutions systematically deliver stress to persons of lower rank in the interests of governability. This argument can be made to dovetail with those offered by Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault though it offers a rather different mechanism for explaining the transformation, one that is rooted in our emerging understanding of the stress-response system. 42 42 Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation; Foucault, Surveiller et punir.

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As I have argued elsewhere, human history involves a complex dialectic between human institutions and human cultural patterns on the one hand and neurobiological systems on the other. 43 What is important about this dialectical or coevolutionary model is that it does not predict unilinear trends or simple outcomes. In this case, we should not imagine that debt recovery was part and parcel of an intensifying system of governmentality based on the leverage of stress, one that would lead inexorably to an Orwellian Panopticon. In my view, taking as a cue the battered spouse who self-medicates with cocaine, it is more likely that institutionalized patterns of stress unintentionally fostered the emergence of new reward systems that could ease stress, such as the penitential system explored elsewhere in this volume, or on a larger stage, the massive array of cultural practices and psychopharmacological substances characteristic of the emerging early modern world system that made pleasure and relief a marketable commodity.

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Edgerton, Samuel Y. Pictures and Punishment: art and criminal prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Elias, Norbert. Über den Prozess der Zivilisation; soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen. Basel: Verlag Haus zum Falken, 1939. Fiamma, Galvano. Opusculum de rebus gestis ab Azone, Luchino et Johanne Vicecomitibus, ab anno MCCCXXVIII usque ad annum MCCCXLII, ed. by Carlo Castiglioni, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, 3rd ed., vol. 12, pt. 4. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1938. Fontaine, Laurence. L’économie morale. Pauvreté, crédit et confiance dans l’Europe préindustrielle. Paris: Gallimard, 2008. Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir: la naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Geltner, Guy. The Medieval Prison: a social history. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Goldthwaite, Richard A. Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995. Grillo, Paolo. “Indebitamento, giustizia e politica nella Lombardia comunale (fine XII-prima metà del XIII secolo).” In La dette et le juge. Juridiction gracieuse et juridiction contentieuse du XIIIe au XVe siècle (France, Italie, Espagne, Angleterre, Empire), ed. by Julie Claustre, 169-86, here 183-4. Paris: Publication de la Sorbonne, 2006. Groebner, Valentin. Ökonomie ohne Haus: zum Wirtschaften armer Leute in Nürnberg am Ende des 15. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993. Helmholz, Richard A. “Excommunication as a Legal Sanction: the attitudes of the medieval canonists.” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fur Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 99 (1982): 204-12. Jordan, William Chester. Women and Credit in Pre-industrial and Developing Societies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Kowaleski, Marianne. “A Consumer Economy.” In A Social History of England, 1200-1500, ed. by Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod, 238-59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Margalit, Avishai. The Decent Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Mayade-Claustre, Julie, ed. La dette et le juge: juridiction gracieuse et juridiction contentieuse du XIIIe au XVe siècle (France, Italie, Espagne, Angleterre, Empire). Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006. Menant, François, and Redon Odile, eds. Notaires et crédit dans l’occident méditerranéen médiéval. Rome: École française de Rome, 2004. Miller, William Ian. Humiliation: and other essays on honor, social discomfort, and violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Moore, Robert Ian. The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Nisbett, Robert E., and Dov Cohen. The Culture of Honor: the psychology of violence in the south. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. O’Malley, Michelle, and Evelyn Welch. The Material Renaissance. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Sapolsky, Robert M. “The Influence of Social Hierarchy on Primate Health.” Science 308, 5722 (2004): 648-52. —. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2004. Schuster, Peter. “The Age of Debt? Private Schulden in der spätmittelalterlichen Gesellschaft.” In Schuldenlast und Schuldenwert. Kreditnetzwerke in der europäischen Geschichte 1300-1900, ed. by Gabriele Clemens, 37-52. Trier: Kliomedia, 2008.

144 Daniel Lord Smail Shatzmiller, Joseph. Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, moneylending, and medieval society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Smail, Daniel Lord. “Les biens comme otages. Quelques aspects du processus de recouvrement des dettes à Lucques et à Marseille à la fin du Moyen Âge.” In Objets sous contraintes. Circulation des richesses et valeur des choses, ed. by Laurent Feller et Ana Rodríguez, 365-84. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2013. —. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. —. The Consumption of Justice: emotions, publicity, and legal culture in Marseille, 1264-1423. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. —. “Violence and Predation in Late Medieval Mediterranean Europe.” Comparative studies in society and history, 54 (2012): 1-28. Snyder, Jason S., Amélie Soumier, Michelle Brewer, James Pickel, and Heather A. Cameron, “Adult Hippocampal Neurogenesis Buffers Stress Responses and Depressive Behaviour.” Nature, 476 (2011): 458-61. Stuard, Susan M. Gilding the Market: luxury and fashion in fourteenth-century Italy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Varanini, Gian Maria. “Tra fisco e credito: note sulle camere dei pegni nelle città venete del Quattrocento.” Studi storici Luigi Simeoni, 33 (1983): 215-46. Vodola, Elisabeth. Excommunication in the Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Wettlaufer, Jörg, and Nishimura Yasuhiro. “The History of Shaming Punishments and Public Exposure in Penal Law in Comparative Perspective: Western Europe and Japan.” In Shame Between Punishment and Penance. The social usages of shame in the Middle Ages and early modern times, ed. by Bénédicte Sère and Jörg Wettlaufer, 197-228. Florence: Sismel, 2013. Yap, Jasmine, and Miczek Klaus A. “Social Defeat Stress, Sensitization, and Intravenous Cocaine Self-Administration in Mice.” Psychopharmacology 192 (2007): 261-73. Zimmer, Carl. “The Brain: the switches that can turn mental illness on and off.” Discover 31 (2010): 26-7.

8

Renaissance Emotions Hate and disease in European perspective Samuel K. Cohn Jr.

Epidemics have always been pictured as hothouses of emotions, sparking the sudden rise of compassion, panic, fear, hate, and violence. Over the past sixty years or more, historians have seized on the last four of these traits, and have seen pandemics across time and space as giving rise to the stigmatization and blame of the “other.” As René Baehrel held in his classic article in Les Annales (1952), epidemics have always sparked hate and class enmity, such reactions are part of our “structures mentales ... constantes psychologiques.”1 With the eruption of HIV-AIDS in the 1980s, these conclusions gained force from a wide variety of well-known scholars across disciplines. According to Carlo Ginzburg, “the prodigious trauma of great pestilences intensified the search for a scapegoat on which fears, hatreds and tension of all kind could be discharged.”2 By the reckoning of Dorothy Nelkin and Sander Gilman, “Blaming has always been a means to make mysterious and devastating diseases comprehensible and therefore possibly controllable.”3 Roy Porter concurred with Susan Sontag: “deadly diseases especially when there is no cure to hand ... and the aetiology ... is obscure ... spawn sinister connotations.”4 And most recently, from earthquake-wrecked, cholera-plagued Haiti, Paul Farmer has proclaimed: “Blame was, after all, a calling card of all transnational epidemics.”5 Scholars post-AIDS have, moreover, introduced at least implicitly a new historical dynamic to this supposed universal “fact” of collective psychology: when the causes and cures of epidemic disease are unknown, hatred of the other becomes more likely, more pronounced.6 By this logic, the decline of magic in the sixteenth, the scientific revolution in the seventeenth, the Enlightenment in the eighteenth, and the laboratory revolution of the 1 Baehrel, “La haine de classe en temps d’épidémie.” 2 Ginzburg, “Deciphering the Sabbath,” 124. 3 Nelkin and Gilman, “Placing blame for devastating disease.” 4 Porter, “The case of consumption,” 179. 5 Farmer with Mukherjee, Haiti after the Earthquake, 191. 6 From the general literature, similar remarks can easily be found; for instance, Irwin, “Scapegoats and Epidemic Disease”: “Throughout history, societies have created scapegoats … innocent … to rationalize and explain the origins and course of disease outbreaks.” (II, 618).

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late nineteenth century, would have made diseases progressively more comprehensible. Consequently, the search for scapegoats to pin the blame of a disease ought to have been on the wane from early modernity on. The AIDS experience adds another ingredient to this cultural-psychological frame: sexual transmission of diseases has been postulated as especially explosive in propelling hate and suspicion.7 These three elements – the newness, mysteriousness, and sexual character of a disease – came together with syphilis’s appearance8 at the end of the fifteenth century. In the 1980s it became the perfect cultural antecedent of AIDS. Historians have rallied to it, reading from the various names contemporaries gave it, clear evidence of the search for scapegoats.9 This essay challenges this chorus of consensus and in so doing seeks to explore aspects of the history of emotions that do not easily square with present-day assumptions about the relationship between disease and hatred. Certainly, Europe’s most deadly and devastating disease, the Black Death of 1347-51, unleashed mass violence: the murder of Catalans in Sicily, clerics and beggars at Narbonne, and especially pogroms against Jews with over a thousand communities annihilated down the Rhineland, into Austria, Spain, and France. Yet subsequent strikes of plague in late medieval and

7 For instance, Johnson, Britain and the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic, 152-3, invokes Susan Sontag and others on the supposed universal and timeless tendency to name diseases after other peoples and nations and that such naming was in and of itself the blaming of the other for inflicting pain, disease, and death. Yet when he turns to the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 called in Britain, “the Spanish Flu,” he must admit that he can find no evidence of blaming or abuse of Spaniards for the disease. He then concludes that such blaming becomes “especially true with sexually transmitted diseases” (153). On the supposed significance of sexually transmitted diseases as the ones more prone to stir hate, see Eamon, “Cannibalism and Contagion,” and the interesting parallels between syphilis and AIDS in McGough, Gender, Sexuality, and Syphilis, 150-1. 8 Throughout this essay, I use various names interchangeably for venereal disease, lues vernera, despite the fact that we cannot isolate the causative agent of the venereal outbreaks of the sixteenth century. 9 This conclusion on naming and blaming is clear across the literature, even in the most sensitive handling of the disease within a broad and sophisticated framework – Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox – where the authors strenuously refrain from treating the disease in transhistorical or universal terms. See for instance, ibid., 166: “As during epidemics of plague, it was convenient to find a scapegoat to blame for the epidemic [the Great Pox]; and their conclusion: It is a truism of such societies that bad and new diseases come from somewhere else. They are generally brought by people with bad habits, especially your neighbours. Thus the Italians so effectively blamed the invading French.” (279).

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Renaissance Europe failed to spark waves of hatred against Jews or any other minorities – (a trend historians have yet to reflect upon).10 Even when plague in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries once again aroused collective violence against supposed plague spreaders, Jews rarely then appeared as the targets.11 Instead, a wide variety of individuals were 10 An exception occurred for parts of Poland around Kraków and Miechów in 1360-1 during the second wave of plague. However, these were areas that had escaped plague in 1348-51. In effect, 1360 was these regions’ 1348; see Cohn, The Black Death Transformed, 232. 11 After 1349, the only incidents of anti-Semitic riots sparked by plague in Italy that Preto, Peste e società a Venezia, 52-3), has uncovered were in Udine in 1511, when Jews were chased from town after the cessation of plague, and in 1556 when Jews were accused of bringing the plague to Padua. In contrast, he cites the example of the Jewish physician, David de Pomis, whose publications during the Venetian plague of 1576 received acclaim from the Venetian state and the public alike. A local Mantuan chronicle asserts that the plague of 1463 was carried there by Jews from Ferrara. But no action appears to have been taken against them (Schivenoglia, Cronaca di Mantova, 32). Bercé, Revolt and Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 19, cites the single example of the notorious massacre of Jews in Lisbon during the plague of 1506 to argue that sudden outbreaks of plague normally led to the scapegoting and massacre of Jews. (Also, Yerushalmi, The Lisbon Massacre of 1506, 7-8, 18; and others make similar claims, going so far as to assert that the plague “aroused suspicion that it was ‘punishment’ for secret Judaizing of converses”; see Isseroff, “Lisbon Massacre.” In fact, none of the seven sixteenth-century sources describing the Lisbon massacre even vaguely hints that plague was its trigger. Instead, it resulted from a “New Christian” questioning the appearance of a miracle that supposedly appeared in the Lisbon Domincan Church. By one eyewitness account, the chronicler Gaspar Correia, a German merchant, whose daughter had supposedly been cured by the miracle, instigated the massacre because of a New Christain’s doubts; see Soyer, “The Massacre of the New Christians of Lisbon in 1506.” Plague does not even appear in Solomon Ibn Verga’s contemporaneous Hebrew account (see Yerushalmi’s translation in The Lisbon Massacre, 1-3), and in the other primary sources it is mentioned only in the background to explain King Manuel’s absence from the city. The humanist Damião de Gois, writing a half century after the massacre, perhaps goes further, claiming that “the most honorable” citizens of Lisbon, because of the plague, had left the city and therefore were not around to protect the “New Christians: ‘Nestes dia perecerão mais de mil almas sem aver na cidadequem ousasse de resistir, pola pouca gente de sorte que nella avia por estarem os mais dos honrados fora, por caso da peste.’” (Chronica do feliccissimo rey dom Emanuel, 142. In late sixteenth-century Italy, several physicians accused Jews of spreading the plague, even if not intentionally, through their trade in secondhand cloth. The Udinese doctor, Gioseffo Daciano, claimed that plague in 1555-6 originated from “perfidious and damned Jews,” who brought their infected goods from Capodistra to Udine on the day of their Passover. The Milanese nobleman and government official, Asciano Centorio Degli Ortensi, traced the spread of plague in 1574-5 from Trent to the Ghetto of Venice and to Manuta as carried by Jews through their sale of infected secondhand clothing. And the Genoese physician Andrea Gabrielli called for the “stiff-necked Jews” to be segregated from Christians in plague time because of their flith and sin (Cohn, Cultures of Plague, 254, 251, 110, respectively.) Yet none of these accusations witnessed the promulgation of new special decrees against the Jews or the eruption of pogroms. A more elaborate case of anti-Semitism mixed with fears of the Turks appears in a report sent

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singled out and accused of perpetuating the disease. These were not only the poor – plague cleaners and gravediggers – or geographical outsiders as with Spanish soldiers in Milan as has been claimed.12 In the most studied case – that of Milan during its last plague of 1630-1, featured in Manzoni’s Promessi sposi,13 the targets of the city’s tribunals and its populace ranged across a wide spectrum. Native Milanese barber-surgeons, scissors makers, tailors, and dyers were brought to trial, tortured, and mostly executed along with indigenous and wealthy bankers, members of the clergy,14 and even the aristocrat don Giovanni de Padilla, son of one of Milan’s highest-ranking officials.15 Both the artisans and the rich and powerful, moreover, were in the main “insiders,” either geographically or in terms of economic and political entitlement.16 Milanese plague tracts and chronicles bring to light other cases not preserved in the judicial archives, such as a respectable eighty-year-old Milanese man who went to church to pray, and when he dusted off a bench by the Mantuan ambassador stationed in Milan back to the ducal secretary in Mantua: “certain circumcised Spanish (alcuni spagnoli circoncisi),” in other words, possibly converses, had been arrested in Milan under the suspicion that they had been sent by the Turks to inflict plague against the Christians. However, none of the plague chroniclers in Milan or Mantua refers to their arrest, and no evidence thus far has surfaced from the records that any judicial action was taken against these circumcised converts. However, a 1577 plague tract by the physician Giuseppe Mugino reports the case; see Preto, Epidemia, paura e politica, 28. I thank Marie-Louise Leonard for this reference. 12 See for instance Naphy, Plagues, Poisons and Potions. 13 Given the means of transmitting plague through items of clothing (as understood by contemporaries), Jews who specialized in second-hand clothing could have easily been the accused and persecuted. But they were not. For this recrudescence of terror, suspicion, and persecution associated with plague, see Naphy, Plagues, Poisons and Potions, who finds that the first signs of scapegoating during plague at Geneva were sparked only in 1545 (57). For Italy, see Preto, “Le grandi pesti dell’età moderna,” 125-6; idem, Peste e società a Venezia, ch. 2; idem, Epidemia, paura e politica; Pastore, Crimine e giustizia in tempo di Peste; and Processo agli untori. According to Preto, Epidemia, paura e politica, “the obsession with finding the causes and spread of plague by poisoning or other diabolic and artificial means was wholly absent from the fifteenth and most of the sixteenth century, not only in Italy but across Europe.”(10). Also, see Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tutor and Stuart England, 293-4; and idem, “Responses to Plague in Early Modern Europe, es117, who finds such scapegoating rare in England. For Italy, moreover, the plagues of late Cinquecento only anticipated what would become much more widespread during Italy’s last early modern plagues of the 1630s and 1656-7. On these late sixteenth-century anticipations, see Cohn, Cultures of Plague, 3, 101, 119, 271-2, and 277. 14 See the example of the Servite friar Giacinto condemned to death perhaps by an ecclesiastic tribunal; Nicolini, “Parte III: La Peste 1629-1632,” 527. 15 Processo agli untori, 76, 150, 480. 16 In the judicial records (other than the aristocrat Padilla), only one of the accused was identified as born outside the city of Milan: Carlo Vedano from the contado of Milan (Ossona).

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to sit, women screamed, attacked him as a plague-spreader, and with a swelling mob mauled him to death.17 Another incident concerned young French students interested in Milanese art. In admiring the bas-reliefs on the Duomo’s facade, they rubbed the figures and their caresses drew a suspicious crowd who would have lynched them had the police not arrived in time and carted them off to prison.18 The one group missing from the accusations were in fact the utterly impoverished – old widows, foreign beggars, the crippled and blind – or those most often pictured as the prime suspects, the lowest of the plague cleaners and carters (i monatti). The only accused plague worker was the infamous Guglielmo da Piazza, but he was a plague commissioner (commissario della sanità) and head of the carters in his neighborhood.19 Nor were the accused mainly marginal characters from the city’s criminal underworld, despite the name of the local tavern, where many of them met – l’hosteria dei Sei Ladri. The mestatore, or trickster, Stefano Baruello, born outside Milan’s walls, who earlier had suffered from mal francese, had been in and out of jail, had been accused of fratricide and even witchcraft before the Holy Office, perhaps could be considered part of Milan’s criminal underworld.20 The same might be said of his co-defendant, Gerolamo Migliavacca.21 But even they were property owners and skilled craftsmen. Baruello was a practicing barber as well as a master knife maker and employed his son and cousins. He owned his own home and shop, and had at least one apprentice and a domestic servant. Migliavacca was also a master knife and scissor maker who also owned his own shop and employed at least one worker.22 Both were of the upper echelons of the artisan classes, regulars at their local tavern and well-known figures of the neighborhood. Another candidate for Milan’s marginal lowlife may have been Carlo Vedano, from Ossona in the Milanese territory.23 Before being accused of plague spreading, he had been charged for assaulting his parents. But the court transcripts reveal that he was also a fencing master and owned his own school, hardly your usual riffraff.24 17 Ripamonti, La Peste di Milano del 1630, 80-2. 18 Ibid., 94-5. 19 Processo agli untori, 158, 242. 20 Ibid., 255, 257, 259; and Nicolini, “Parte III: La Peste 1629-1632,” 551. 21 Preto, Epidemia, paura e politica, 47; and Codero, La Fabbrica della peste, 82. 22 Processo agli untori, 80, 159, 168, 350, 358. 23 Ossona, 25 km west of Milan. 24 Preto, Epidemia, paura e politica, 50, lists Vedano as unemployed, but I find nothing in the transcripts to specify that he was unemployed or impoverished. Instead, he is described as having founded a school of fencing, where he was engaged in his coaching at the time of

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Perhaps most surprising is the absence of any women accused of spreading the plague in the surviving trial transcripts, and in the chronicles only one such woman emerges, the infamous Caterina Rossana, who supposedly confessed to having killed fourteen thousand.25 Their absence is especially surprising given charges of demonic activity and the association between plague spreading and witchcraft in the recent historiography.26 In late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice (as with most of early modern Europe), 70 percent of those accused of witchcraft were women.27 Instead, women stood on the other side of the fence as the prime accusers, who testified against the victims. These women, moreover, appear to have been among the poor – widows, launderers, or others identified only by their neighborhood parish. Perhaps the Milanese blame spreaders anticipated the poor in nineteenth-century cholera riots, who attacked doctors and high-ranking state officials, thought to have instigated the epidemic to cut costs by killing them off. Indeed, the longest and most detailed account of the Milanese plague – that by the canon Giuseppe Ripamonti – begins with the plebes attacking Milan’s most prominent doctor and protomedico of the Health Board – Lodovico Settala, while he visited his plague patients.28 Later, crowds also attacked another leading physician of the health board, Alessandro Tadino.29 Further popular insurrections erupted against Milanese health board officials in the countryside at Lecco,30 and on 23 April 1630 a riot spread through several city neighborhoods. With sticks and stones the populace attacked the city’s infamous plague cleaners and grave-carters (i monatti), as well as higher-ranking health authorities.31 In Milan, however, no straightforward class cleavage or conf lict emerges (in contrast to the mass of cholera riots of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe); instead the plague craze curiously allied the indigenous poor with the city’s highest officials against others difficult to his arrest (“facevo scola da scrimia’); Processo agli untori, 386. For other places that described Vedano’s character and profession, see 168, 169, 173, 174-5, 441. 25 Nicolini, “Parte III: La Peste 1629-1632,” 529; Preto, Epidemia, paura e politica, 39. 26 Monter, “Witchcraft in Geneva.” 27 Martin, Witchcraft and Inquistion in Venice, 226; and McGough, Gender, Sexuality, and Syphilis, 89. 28 Ripamonti, La Peste, 44-5. 29 Tadino, Raguaglio dell’origine et giornali successi della Gran Peste, 73 and 83. Preto, Epidemia, paura e politica, 67, has found other places in seventeenth-century Italy as at Pinerolo in Piemonte, where the population accused French doctors of the occupying French army of trying to exterminate the local population. 30 Nicolini, “Parte III: La Peste 1629-1632,” 504. 31 Ibid., 518.

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characterize by origin, profession, or social status. Nonetheless, it would be incorrect to classify these as being the marginal “other.” The medical chroniclers, however, suggest other fears and antimonies that operated in Milan during its last disastrous plague. At f irst, peasants from the surrounding countryside who came to town to hawk their goods were the prime suspects.32 Later, during a popular revolt for which the chroniclers could not understand the motives, cries against the French rang through the city.33 But no class or intellectual divide separated those who believed or disbelieved the stories of manufactured plague spreading. Individuals from Milan’s political and intellectual elites such as Tadino, head of the city’s Health Board Tribunal, Federigo Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, members of the health board, judges and lawyers, and Milan’s titular head, Philip IV, king of Spain,34 were convinced that only demonic forces implemented by human plague spreaders could explain Milan’s soaring mortalities in 1630. For the earlier plague in Sicily of 1624, Corrado Dollo has shown convincingly from published medical tracts that those at the forefront of medical science in the early seventeenth century argued that the plague was demonically and intentionally “manufactured.”35 Instead of primitive fantasies and folkoric magic nestled in isolated alpine hamlets that swept down the slopes to the nearby cities, as Yves-Marie Bercé has conjectured, urban intellectuals at the cutting edge of science and medicine (Fortunato Fedeli, Alessio Giarrusso, M. A. Alaymo, Jean Bodin, Paracelsus, and Athannasius Kircher) were the ones articulating clearly and forcefully these notions of “Peste demoniaca e peste mininstanti.” These intellectuals were also the ones imbued with the latest notions of contagion theory taken from Girolamo Fracastoro, Girolamo Mercurale, and others36

32 Ripamonti, La Peste, 80-2. 33 Ibid. 107-9. Also, suspicions of the French spreading the plague emerge as early as 1629, when two men dressed as friars were arrested in Milan; see Preto, Epidemia, paura e politica, 43; Tadino, Raguaglio, 102-3; and Nicolini, “Parte III: La Peste 1629-1632,” 542-3. 34 Nicolini, “Parte III: La Peste 1629-1632,” 542; and Preto, Epidemia, paura e politica, 43. 35 Dollo, Peste e untori nella Sicilia, 4. 36 Ibid., 21, 25, 37-8, 45, 64, 79. Also, see Preto, Epidemia, paura e politica,11-7, who supplies the names of many other physicians and notable intellectuals who believed in diabolic manufactured plague; and on Kircher’s explanations of plague spreading, 43. In the eighteenth century, even the great enemy of folk and religious superstition, Ludovico Muratori, when reflecting on the Milanese experience of 1630, accepted the official story, and condemned the supposed plague spreaders for their “enorme delitto,” “funesta memoria,” “inumani carnefici”; see Preto, Epidemia, paura e politica,104.

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Since the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s, historians have concentrated on syphilis more than plague as the early modern disease to have sparked blame and persecution. William Eamon, for instance, focused on sixteenthcentury syphilis to claim that “new diseases bring out a culture’s deepest phobias”37 But despite doctors’ “bewilderment” and syphilis’s gruesome signs – the stench, intense joint pain38 (compounded by the often suicidal mercury cures), screams, sleepless nights, crippling, loss of – Eamon can point to nothing worse than the various names given to the disease as evidence of the hate and blame that this new ailment supposedly engendered: the Neapolitan disease outside Naples, the French disease outside France, the Polish disease in Germany, and so on.39 Neither Eamon nor others have spotted pogroms against Jews or against any other minorities accused of spreading the disease and scapegoated for it. Further, the disease failed to spur indigenous populations to persecute foreign communities in their midst or the soldiers and prostitutes correctly identified as among the ones, who initially spread this disease. 40 Even the naming itself did not necessarily imply blame as has been assumed across time, space, and diseases. Chroniclers and medical writers record a wide repertory of terms for it. 37 Eamon, “Cannibalism,” 2. 38 In Francesco Guicciardini’s words “sottoposti a cruciati quasi perpetui”; Storia d’Italia, I, 233. 39 See among other places, Bloch, “The History of Syphilis”: “Each nation, too, named syphilis after the nation or country from which it first received the disease, e.g. the Indians and Japanese called it the Portuguese disorder ... the Russians, the Polish disease; the Turks, the Frank disease.” (18); Nelkin and Gilman, “Placing Blame for Devastating Disease,” 43, and McGough, Gender, Sexuality, and Syphilis, 6 and 48, who cites other recent examples. In addition, she argues that stigmatization in general and persecution of women, particularly prostitutes, did not arise with the disease’s initial eruption, newness, or mysteriousness in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, but only after the mid-sixteenth century when the disease had become endemic: “As the disease became endemic by the mid-sixteenth century, its ability to inspire fear diminished while its ability to stigmatize particular individuals, regarded as sexually immoral, increased” (71). However, she does not reflect that this rise in stigmatization coincided with a change in the disease’s naming, when it turned in just the opposite direction from what would now be expected. By the second half of the sixteenth century, physicians began avoiding the term Morbus Gallicus and in its place adopted terms that were territorially neutral, especially Lues venerea; see Proksch, Die Geschichte der venerischen Krankheiten, ii, 151. 40 Quétel, History of Syphilis, 66. Early on, physicians and the laity recognized that the disease appeared first in the genitals and derived from sexual intercourse, see Proksch, Die Geschichte der venerischen Krankheiten (the chronicle by the Venetian doge, Johannes Baptista Fulgosi, I, 318; the physician Antonio Benivieni II, 31; the Spanish physician, practicing in Bologna, Juan Almenar, II, 33; the Paduan professor and physician, Alessandro Benedetti, II, 41-2; the canon and chronicler of Orvieto, Tommasi di Silvestro, II,154, all of whom were writing at the end of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century).

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Among commoners and those outside the medical profession these appear not to have been the names of nations supposedly blamed for carrying it; rather, the commoners’ terms described the disease’s signs: “die bösen Blattern,” by German speakers, “de las Buas,” by Spaniards, 41 “lo male de le Tavelle,” or the stripes, in Genoa, “lo male de le Bulle,” in Tuscany, “lo male de le Brosulae,” in Lombardy, the Grandgor at Edinburgh, and so on. Morbus gallicus and variations on mal francese seem, instead, to have become standard in medical circles, but physicians and surgeons also resisted this nomenclature early on as with the pope’s physician Gaspar Torrella, who in four medical treatises at the beginning of the sixteenth century referred to it as “De pudendagra,” the disease of genitals. Moreover, by the middle of the sixteenth century, physicians had invented other terms – lues venera or la maladie vénérienne – to avoid any overtones of national blaming. By the seventeenth century, morbus gallicus had almost completely disappeared from medical discourse. 42 But even in the early sixteenth century, others apologized for using the term morbus gallicus and made clear they intended no blame. In the opening chapter to his De Morbo Gallico of 1519 – one of the most widely circulated medical tracts of the sixteenth century – Ulrich von Hutten called it the French disease so others would know what he was discussing, but “most definitely not because I bear any grudge against a most renowned nation which is, perhaps, the most civilized and hospitable now in existence.”43 In the Storia d’Italia, the Florentine Francesco Guicciardini ended his short chapter on the “male detto da,’ francesi,” by explaining why 41 Fernandez de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, I, 49 and 53. Also, citing Diaz, Proksch, Die Geschichte der venerischen Krankheiten, I, 384, argues that throughout Spain, “bubas” was the common word for the ailment. 42 This conclusion derives from a survey of 211 titles on syphilis and venereal disease dating from the earliest incurabili to 1820, compiled by Robert McLean and myself and held in Glasgow’s Special Collection. As early as 1527, the French physician Béthencourt had christened the disease Morbus venereus, or Lues venerea; Proksch, Die Geschichte der venerischen Krankheiten, II, 151; others such as Ambroise Paré used lues venerea by mid-century; Qualtiere and Sights, “Contagion and Blame in Early Modern England,” 7. 43 Similarly, no traces of persecution or blaming appear with another new disease of late medieval Europe, the so-called English sweats, a highly contagious and lethal disease that mysteriously appeared with the War of the Roses and mysteriously vanished eighty years later. Von Hutten, De guaiaici medicina et morbo gallico, 4r-v, and translated in Quétel, History of Syphilis, 27. Also, Eamon, “Cannibalism,” fails to note that the disease carried many other names, especially among the populace at the end of the fifteenth and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that were not associated with other nations and without any suggestion of blame, most prominently the ”Great Pox,” “les grosses pocques,” “la grande gorre,” ”la pancque denarre,” “les fiebvres Sainct-Job.” Also, in France, it was named after towns heavily afflicted

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it is appropriate to “remove the shame of the name ‘franzese.’” He argued that the disease was brought from Spain and not France to Naples and then adds that the disease was “not exactly of that nation” either; instead, it came from the islands (e.g., the West Indies), made possible by the “otherwise most fortunate (piú opportunamente) voyages of Christopher Columbus, the Genoese.” But certainly he did not then blame this Italian hero or the Indians. 44 Historians such as Anna Foa have gone further, claiming that sixteenthcentury Europeans blamed foreign “others,” for intentionally spreading the disease as was charged against the Jews during the Black Death. She points to the famous Modenese physician Gabriel Falloppio, who in narrating Francis I’s siege of Naples at the beginning of 1495, claimed that “cunning Spanish soldiers,” at night would leave their garrisons and poison wells in Naples. 45 But against Foa’s suggestions, the famous surgeon does not claim that these poisons had been concocted from the pus of victims’ sores as would later be charged against plague-spreaders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nor did Falloppio target a despised foreign “other.” The Spanish, after all, were the Neapolitans,” allies, sent by their king to defend the Italians. More strikingly, (and not mentioned by Foa), Falloppio’s charge of contamination during the Neapolitan siege was not limited to foreigners. He places more importance on reports that Italian bakers mixed gypsum in their dough to cheapen their bread in these hard times and thereby inadvertently abetted the disease’s spread. 46 But also here, it was again clear that no agent of the disease was intentionally spread to the enemy soldiers or the Neapolitan population. Instead, in what sixteenth-century physicians thought was good Galenic logic, contamination of foodstuffs weakened indigenous populations and thereby fuelled epidemics. 47 If Falloppio intended any blame, it was self-blame and not against any foreign “other,” or enemy. Finally, Falloppio blames the new disease’s spread on a by the disease but did not present overtones of blame: “peste de Bordeaux,” “mal de Niort,” “mal du Carrefour de Poitiers,” “gorre de Rouen”; see Quétel, History of Syphilis, 10 and 13. 44 Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia,I, 234. 45 Falloppio, De morbo Gallico: Tractatus, 663; idem, De Morbo Gallico, 2r. 46 Falloppio, De Morbo Gallico: Tractatus, I, 662-3; and idem, De Morbo Gallico, 2 r-v. In addition, the Cologne physician, Vochs, De pestilentia anni presentis, 120-1, saw the corruption of badly baked bread as infecting the blood and, after the sin of pride, causing the disease to spread in Germany. 47 Sixteenth-century physicians often saw the corruption of foodstuffs as a cause of pestilence and mistakenly cited Galen for support; however, Galen saw such corruption as the consequence and not the cause of plague. See Cohn, Cultures of Plague, 216.

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third cause – the terrible social conditions brought on by the siege that led to extreme poverty and food shortages. These social and economic conditions caused the “contagion,” “to take wings,” by “propelling” Naples’s “most beautiful girls,” into “secret prostitution.” Drawn by these women’s beauty, young French soldiers indulged in unbridled sex and infected them, and because of their extreme poverty, Naples’ beautiful women willingly obliged. Falloppio claims the entire French army became infected and, afterwards, all of Europe. But even here with sexual licence and promiscuity running rife, Falloppio, despite his Counter-Reformation milieu, expresses sympathy for the victims and refrains from blaming either a sinful and impoverished indigenous “other” or the enemy French for the calamity. 48 Another story from a medical source that has been used to demonstrate the connection between the sixteenth-century spread of syphilis and the blaming of the “other,” again points instead to self-blame. According to Foa and Eamon the maverick surgeon, Leonardo Fioravanti, who spent a great part of his medical career at the disease’s epicentre – Naples – did not blame fellow Christians, even foreign ones, but went further to attack “the most abominable other,” the New World Indian. Indeed, Fioravanti invented a novel thesis for the spread of mal francese, in Europe that got both the French and Spaniards off the hook.49 Although he held emphatically that the disease was not new; he saw its recrudescence as being centred on Naples. Its reemergence had little to do with Columbus’s voyage, Hispanic sex with Indians, or Charles’s crossing the Alps in 1494. Instead, it depended first on a previous war in Naples in 1456. By Fioravanti’s tale, no outside “other” brought the disease there; rather, its native butchers were the culprits. With food shortages of all sorts, but especially meat, they carved up humans felled in war and sold their butchered flesh to enfamished soldiers: cannibalism was the cause that gave rise to the characteristic pustules. By Fioravanti’s account, the siege of Naples in 1494-5 led to more severe shortages, prompting Neapolitan butchers to rely again on their old tricks. Fioravanti then claimed to have tested his theory by feeding various animals bits of their own kind. His experiment, so he says, proved positive: all the tested animals – a piglet, a small dog, and a bird of prey – broke out with the characteristic pox of mal francese. 48 Falloppio, De Morbo Gallico: Tractatus, I, 662-3; and idem, De Morbo Gallico, 2 r-v. On the myth of beautiful women and prostitutes as the origins of syphilis, see McGough, “Quarantining Beauty,” 211; and Gender, Sexuality, and Syphilis, 45. She argues persuasively that this myth did not arise until around the mid-sixteenth century. 49 Fioravanti, De.”Capricci Medicinali.

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Fioravanti concocted this novel thesis around the middle of the sixteenth century,50 when learned as well as lay audiences would have known that the disease was spread principally by sex, and had its most recent origins in the New World. Thus, to make the thesis sound not utterly absurd, he ended his story with a brief aside: in addition, the disease spread from the New World because the Indians also practiced cannibalism. This was not, however, the point of his long story. Yet it is, the only part of that story Eamon and others recently have cited to prove that Europeans placed their greatest blame for syphilis on the abominable non-Christian. Even during the nineteenth and twentieth century, new and mysterious diseases of pandemic proportion have not all had the same disastrous psychological consequences for hate and blame. Take cholera and yellow fever: under strikingly different political regimes and social contexts, cholera set off waves of social violence against the rich, doctors, hospital workers, and government officials in its first major spread across Europe and America, 1831-7. In Sicily, major insurrections of peasants, miners, unemployed workers, and vagabonds swept through the cities of Messina, Catania, Siracusa, Catania, and the countryside, threatening the stability of the Neapolitan regime.51 Moreover, unlike the Black Death, cholera’s dance with social loathing did not suddenly cease with its first appearance; instead, subsequent waves in the 1850s to its sixth in 1910-1 continued to provoke hate and collective violence (that is, after John Snow mapped its mode of transmission in 1854 or after Koch cultured the bacillus in 1884).52 Even with cholera’s seventh wave that reached Peru in 1991 – when this disease no longer presented any mysteries, and fatalities sunk below 1 percent – the old class hatreds of earlier cholera outbreaks resurfaced.53 Government ministries attacked the poor, calling them sick “pigs,”(cochinos)

50 Ibid. 51 Maggiore-Perni, Palermo e le sue grandi epidemie, 226; Sansone, Gli avvenimenti del 1837; Della Perutta, Mazzini e i rivoluzionari italiani, 220-77; and Preto, Epidemia, paura e politica, 121-64. 52 Riots against doctors and surgeons accused of spreading cholera erupted in Le Var, the region of Toulon, Arles, and Auriol in southern France in 1884 (Baehrel, “Epidémie et terreur,” 114-15, 128). Riots at Puerta del Sol in Madrid continued to June 1885, when angry crowds captured the queen; Vincent, “Le cholera en Espagne au XIXe siècle,” 54-5). Major revolts erupted in Naples, towns in Puglia, and as far north as Pontedera in Tuscany in 1910 and 1911, during which lazzaretti were burned, doctors murdered, and government officials attacked. See Snowden, Naples in the Time of Cholera, 154, 237-46. 53 Cueto, “Stigma and Blame,” 269.

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and accused them of spreading the disease by their filthy pig-like habits (los sucios). The poor retaliated with mass demonstrations against state officials.54 A year later cholera struck impoverished indigenous populations of eastern Venezuela, sparking claims of international genocide. The government blamed the disease’s spread on the poor’s dirty, uncivilized habits – especially their diet of crabs – while the poor in turn accused the government and multinationals of poisoning their water and contaminating their food (especially their crabs) to kill them off.55 On the other hand, despite scientists’ inability to discover yellow fever’s mechanism of transmission until the twentieth century, and its casual agent not until 1927, the psycho-sociological effects of this disease differed strikingly from cholera’s, even when racial and sectional tensions were stretched to their limits, as at New Orleans in 1853 during one of the worst epidemics in US history. Instead, this disease brought communities together, encouraging charity from the north to southern cities and prompted tolerance across class and race. The absence of social loathing and violence is all the more surprising given yellow fever’s patterns of immunity. Overwhelmingly, its victims were recent immigrants and the poor, more so than with cholera or any other disease of nineteenth-century America or Europe.56 Moreover, because of resistance gained from millennia of exposure in West Africa, blacks possessed greater immunity to it than whites – a fact that could have stirred suspicion and fuelled mounting racism as had happened to Jews in 1348-51, alleged to have escaped the Black Death.57 Instead, whites solicited blacks to provide basic services for the mostly white yellow-fever afflicted. Blacks volunteered, and racial tensions eased.58 54 Ibid., 281-3. 55 Briggs, “Theorizing modernity conspiratorially,” esp. 164-72. 56 On its patterns of immunity and effects on immigrant populations, see Pierce and Writer, Yellow Jack, 15, 38, and 47. In 1853, seven thousand of the eight thousand to eleven thousand victims at New Orleans were recent immigrants, in the main, the poor Irish; Duffy, Sword of Pestilence: “Even at the peak of the outbreak the newspapers maintained an incredibly calm and objective approach to local news.… [T]hey refrained from excessive criticism (93).... In view of the almost universal assumption by the middle and upper classes that the poor brought on disease by their dissolute, immoral, and intemperate lives, one can only assume that the yellow fever had had a sobering effect upon the poor or else had made the upper classes more tolerant (95)!” 57 See Preto, Epidemia, paura e politica, 9; and Pullan, “Plague and perceptions,” 117. 58 For New Orleans, 1853, Pierce and Writer, Yellow Jack, 38; for Memphis in the epidemic of 1878, Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South, 7. Crosby, The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, 79, alleges that Black’s immunity “had been fuel for racism for decades” but supplies no evidence for it, and I have yet to find it in other sources, primary or secondary.

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Another case in point is the Great Influenza of 1918-9, which in absolute numbers felled more people than any pandemic in world history.59 That it provoked no major riots or religious and sectarian hatred is more remarkable still. In 1918 its symptoms, seasonality, and the age structure of its victims differed radically from other examples, marking it as a new and mysterious disease.60 In addition, this pandemic exploded in the midst of war frenzy and nationalistic hatred. In the US, the great influx of immigrant workers fleeing Europe and the upsurge of racial and class tensions added fuel to the socioeconomic toxins soon to spark the bloodiest race riots in US history, and a hysterical red scare across America.61 Yet this general milieu of hate failed to Instead, the pandemic eased social tensions. With public services near collapse and unburied bodies left in heaps, elites (especially women) in cities such as New York, Washington, Philadelphia, and El Paso entered ghettoes and opened soup kitchens to feed the poor aethnic minorities. They joined motor corps, donated their automobiles for use as ambulances, scrubbed floors, cared for orphaned infants and children, and put their lives at risk by nursing the infectious, knowing full well the dangerSTET.62 Charitable organizations cut across accustomed denominational lines; people of all sorts became nurses and orderlies, “thrusting themselves into the presence of lethal disease.”63 Such a view does not emerge from any Panglossian sentiment among historians, just the opposite, as a recent work on “Spanish flu” in Britain illustrates. After concurring with the orthodoxy on big pandemics and blame – citing Sontag, Farmer, Nelkin, Gilman, and others – its author admi that despite the disease’s, the British experience of 1918-9 betrays no evidence whatsoever of any Spaniard being blamed for the disease or persecuted.64 59 Reeves, “Influenza”; and Quinn, Flu: A Social History of Influenza. 60 According to Johnson, Britain and the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic, 122, this influenza decimated those in good health and in early adulthood, failing to conform to flu’s usual U-curve of death that predominantly killed infants and the elderly. In 1918-9 it triggered pneumonia much more often than any pandemic of flu before or since, and inflicted much higher fatality rates – up to 40 percent in places such as western Samoa and other Polynesian islands. Also see among other places, Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic. In the US it was called that “strange prostrating malady”; see The New York Tribune, 12 September, 1918. Many at the time – such as the renowned US physician, pathologist, and historian of medicine, Sir William Osler – branded it a new disease. 61 Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic, 65. 62 These conclusions are based on evidence from hundreds of newspapers included in the online newspaper archive of The Library of Congress, Chronicling America, from September to November 1917 (3,440 pages investigated). 63 Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic, 82. 64 Johnson, Britain and the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic, 152-3.

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Despite the histories of yellow fever and influenza, the chronological patterns of the disease-hate nexus appears to be the opposite of what historians presently presume – that earlier on, when the causes and cures of pandemics were unknown, hatred was more prevalent.65 Over the past year I have begun to collect descriptions of epidemics in historical and literary sources back to the eighth century BC. The most famous of ancient pandemics, the fifth-century BC Plague of Athens, might suggest such a supposed pre-modern proclivity for blame. From origins in Ethiopia, this plague spread quickly to Greece, entering through the port of Piraeus. According to Thucydides, inhabitants here claimed that Peloponnesian soldiers at war with Athens spread the disease by poisoning cisterns.66 However, no more is heard of these accusations once the disease reached Athens, where it leveled a third of the population,67 and where Thucydides begins his detailed account of the disease’s signs and symptoms, as well as its social and psychological consequences: lawlessness in the city, carnal and material lust, loss of fear of the gods.68 The failure to blame any foreign or belligerent “other” as mortalities mounted in Athens is all the more surprising, given that this disease devastated Athenians (according to Thucydides) afflicting their Peloponnesian enemies “to any extent.”69 Despite the fragmented survival of early registers and written sources, reports of epidemics fill the annals of antiquity. Livy recorded fifty-six of them, mostly from 490 to 165 BC.70 The modern historian to pay the greatest attention to the representation of diseases in antiquity, R. P. Duncan-Jones, leaves the impression that blaming was the usual outcome of ancient plagues because, he argues, “societies [had] no effective medical explanation” for them.71 Yet he mentions only three such cases, and when we turn to the 65 For instance, Snowden, Naples in the Time of Cholera, 151, who relies on Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic. 66 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.48, 343; and see Longrigg, “Epidemic, Ideas and Classical Athenian Society,” 21-2. 67 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 343. 68 Ibid., 2.53, 353. 69 Ibid., 2.53, 355. Instead, with mortality rates rising and the defeat of the their navy at hand, the Athenians turned inward and placed the blame on their esteemed leader, Pericles, for continuing the devastating war with Peloponnesia and his failure to sanction his countrymen’s desires to negotiate with the enemy. Ibid., 2.57-59, 359-61. 70 Thus this would amount to about thirty-six epidemics mentioned by Livy. According to Duncan-Jones, “The Impact of the Antonine Plague”: “Major epidemics are so frequent in Roman annalists that contemporaries must have found them relatively commonplace” (109). Actually, overwhelmingly, they come from one author alone, Titus Livy (59 BC-AD 17), and his massive Ab Urbe Condita, even though only 35 of his original 142 books survive. 71 Duncan-Jones, The Impact of the Antonine Plague, 115.

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texts, all three prove problematic. His first is the best: the Peloponnesians’ poisonings at Piraeus, but as we have seen, it did not result in blaming Peloponnesians or any “Others” once plague gained momentum in upper Athens.72 A second case comes from Livy: deaths among the Roman ruling class in 329 BC were pinned on wealthy Roman matrons who were convicted of poisoning. But Livy was sceptical, calling it “a false story.”73 Moreover, if it were in fact an epidemic, even a disease (and there is no claim that it was), it did not spread beyond a limited number among Rome’s ruling class; nor were the alleged poisonings spurred on by ethnic or class hatred.74 As Livy comments, even those who found the matrons guilty believed their acts were ones “of madness rather than deliberate wickedness.” In a third case, one of 184 BC,75 Roman rulers attempted to justify their crushing of a rebellion of shepherds around Rome by accusing them of mass poisoning. Our sources, however, do not record any epidemic that then accompanied these alleged acts; instead, it was state propaganda to put down a shepherds’ rebellion.76 To evaluate the social and psychological reactions to pestilence in the past,77 I have thus far found over a thousand descriptions of epidemics 72 Ibid., 115. 73 Livy, 8, 18. 74 Duncan-Jones, The Impact of the Antonine Plague, 115. 75 Ibid., 115. 76 Finally, Duncan-Jones (ibid., 115) cites two references from Dio Cassius’s Roman History, arguing that plagues in Rome under the emperors Domitian (AD 81-96) and Commodus (180 AD-192 AD) were understood by contemporaries as having been instigated by criminals using poisoned needles. The first of these incidents, around 90 AD, however, does not refer to any plague at all, rather simply that “some persons made a business of smearing needles with poison and then pricking with them whomsoever they would.” Many of the culprits were later rounded up and punished. The second incident, nearly a hundred years later, refers back to the crimes of ca. AD 90, alleging that the malevolent practices had not completely disappeared; however, now in AD 189 they ran parallel with a pestilence, “the greatest of any the author had known with as many as two thousand dying in Rome in a single day.” Yet, despite these parallel developments of the same year, Dio never suggests that any Roman pinned the terrible pestilence’s origin or its spread on the criminals’ poisonous prickings. For these citations in Dio’s Roman History, see Cohn, “Pandemics,” 547-8. 77 Perseus 4.0, last updated in 2007, accessed July 30-August 3, 2011. The Perseus collection, however, is weak in the number of Greek and Roman texts it has thus far downloaded for late antiquity. For instance, it does not include the histories of Cassius Dio (ca. AD 155-ca. 229) or Paolo Orosius (ca. AD 383-ca. 420), which recorded several epidemics in the first centuries after Christ. I used keyword searches (epidemic, pandemic, plague, pestilence, pestilential, disease, poison, and variants of these words). Individual deaths, metaphorical usage, and legendary plagues that are difficult to pin down chronologically, such as ones in the Bible, were discarded from my tallies. I have supplemented the Perseus searches with ones for Livy in the Brepols Library of Latin Texts (A), finding six further epidemics, and have added two from skimming through Orosius, Seven Books of History.

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before the sixteenth century.78 While ancient authors seldom described the symptoms or epidemiological traits of diseases, they regularly pointed to the palliative nonmedical measures populations took to confront these disasters. Yet, despite this attention, hardly any ancient author hints that a population or government blamed an outsider, the poor, or the rich of wilfully spreading an epidemic. Instead, when a plague was particularly severe or mysterious, populations turned to their oracles and sacred texts. The answers received show that they saw the causes lodged in the heavens or brought on by themselves and not by any “other.” To placate the gods they called for united communal action with vows to stage games,79 build chapels,80 declare work-free holidays,81 and mass prayers at shrines with wealthy matrons sweeping temple floors with their hair.82 Instead of igniting class violence, plague came to Rome’s rescue, as in 433 BC when an epidemic “afforded a respite,” from strife between plebs and patricians. They offered vows to Apollo to build a temple for the people’s health and strove to import corn from Sicily to avert famine, and by these communal offerings, unity was temporarily achieved.83 In 403 BC a plague dumfounded Romans; their doctors could point to no causes and knew no cures. The mystery did not, however, lead to blame or persecution (as our historians presently would have predicted). Instead, it inspired the opposite: for eight days, Romans celebrated lavish festivities to propitiate the gods: throughout the City ... houses were thrown open ... all sorts of things placed for general use in the open courts, all comers, whether acquaintances or strangers, ... brought in to share the hospitality. Men who had been enemies held friendly and sociable conversations ... and abstained from all litigation, the manacles were removed from prisoners.84 78 Seventh century BC (2); sixth (0); fifth (19); fourth (14); third (12); second (16); first (2); first AD (5); and five in which the date cannot be determined. 79 Livy, 4.25; 27.23, and 27.4 80 Livy, 4.30. 81 Livy, 1,31; 40.19; 41.21; 41, pos. 256. 82 See Livy, 3.7, vol. 2, p24-8, in 462 BC In several incidences, the Romans offered sacrifices to the gods, and on two occasions these sacrifices specified the inclusion of humans as well as animals (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 1.10 [c.600 BC]; and Livy, 40.19 [181 BC]). But in no case did our authors, ancient governments, or their populations attribute blame to these victims or to the social or ethnic groups they may have represented. 83 Livy, 4.25. 84 Livy, 5.3.: As with antiquity, so with the Middle Ages, new and mysterious epidemics failed to spark blame and hatred. Instead, they led to charity and created temporary unity rather than division, as with the early Middle Ages’ first pandemic, that of plague, in 541. The

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For late antiquity, historians have asserted that the Pestilence of Cyprian, AD 252 to 266, incited Romans to persecute Christians.85 Yet the sources show little evidence of it. For a variety of reasons, Romans threatened to throw Cyprian to the lions, but his abundant surviving letters do not relate persecution of Christians to the plague named after him.86 Instead, this plague ended the persecutions of Emperor Valerius and inaugurated one of the longest periods of Roman tolerance of Christianity. It lasted to Diocletian’s edict of 303, when a decade-long persecution – Christendom’s bloodiest, the so-called “Great Persecution,” ensued. But no plague then was lurking behind the scenes to trigger it.87 The rise of Christianity, nonetheless, brings a new ingredient to the disease-hate relationship. Relying on Old Testament examples, Christian writers could now view plagues positively as God’s vengeance to punish their persecutors. By Paulus Orosius’s account, the Romans understood the plague of 253 as God’s fury against their persecutors, and it prompted an about-face in their policies, ending their half-century of persecution.88 Similarly, the early fifth-century church historian, Sozomen interpreted the pestilence of 363 as the “manifest token of God’s displeasure brought down against Julian the Apostate’s persecution of the church,” and in 409 a plague following Alaric’s siege of Rome was “Divine wrath sent to chastise [the Romans] for their luxury, debauchery, and manifold acts of injustice.”89 Yet before the Black Death of 1348, I have found few, if any, cases when a new epidemic spurred a community to persecute the outsider or any social group from within. Agobard, bishop of Lyon, reports a story that eye-witness historian of the Byzantine court, Procopius describes the traditional adversaries of Constantinople unifying in their effort to bury the plague dead, turning to charity or staying at home to tend the sick and the dead (Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars, 451-65). 85 ”Plagues of the Roman Empire,” II, 536. 86 His tract on the plague, De mortalitate, describes the signs and symptoms of the disease and claims that “Many of us died from it,” but fails to mention any persecution that supposedly ensued from it; Clarke, “Christianity in the First Three Centuries,” nonetheless, conjectures: “One can imagine orders for a public expiation against the plague, at a ceremony in the circus from which the notable figure of the leader of the Christians – popularly blamed for the visitation of the plague through their failure to worship “Roman gods”.”(647). He supplies no evidence, however, of any such persecution or blame placed on Christians for the plague. 87 Clarke, ”Christianity in the first three centuries,” 649-52. The later Christian chronicle of the ten persecutions from Nero to Constantine’s Edict in 313, does not allude to any persecution stemming from the eruption or spread of plague. Instead, the relationship was the other way around: the Romans paid for their persecutions by God’s vengeance, served on them in the form of plagues; see Orosius: Seven Books of History, 7.26, 364-6. 88 Orosius, The Seven Books of History (Deferrati translation), 316-7. 89 Sozomen, The Ecclesiastical History, book VI, ch. 2, and IX, ch. 6, 247 and 412-3.

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circulated around 810: Grimoald IV, duke of the Beneventans, had supposedly sent some of his people to spread a special dust on fields, mountains, meadows, and springs of northern Europe to kill the cattle of his enemy, Charlemagne. Many were apprehended and confessed to have scattered the poisonous dust.90 But this was an epidemic of cattle, not of men, and was a matter of warfare, not of internal anxieties leading to the supposed diabolic actions or the persecution of insiders or outsiders living within the affected society. In 1172 the Venetian doge claimed that those on their occupied island of Chios (Scio) in the Aegean Sea revolted against tax rises by poisoning wells to kill off Venetian soldiers, but there were no claims of spreading any epidemic other than the poisoning itself.91 Most significant was the 1321 slaughter of lepers in southern France, partly instigated by the king himself on grounds that they had poisoned wells. But, even though this may have been the blueprint for the mass murder of Jews in 1348-51, no new epidemic, a sudden increase in leprosy, or of any other disease sparked the atrocities. Nor do we hear of any other mass riots against lepers during the Middle Ages. Instead, (as Zachary Gussow was first to stress and which the more detailed research of François-Olivier Touati, Carole Rawcliffe, and Luke Demaitre have more recently and authoritatively underscored), the medieval persecution of lepers was largely a myth created by nineteenthcentury politicians and governments to justify their own brutal segregation and treatment of lepers.92 90 Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache, 170-1, 185. I wish to thank Jennifer Davis for this reference. 91 Marino Sanuto, Vitæ Ducum Venetorum italice scriptæ ab origine urbis, sive ab Anno CCCXXI usque ad Annum MCCCCXCIII, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, ed. Lodovico Muratori, XXII (Milan, 1733), col. 501. 92 Gussow, Leprosy, Racism, and Public Health. The 1321 massacre of lepers is often assumed to have been typical of medieval fear and hate of the leper and certainly not as a unique event of the Middle Ages. I have yet to find any further cases of mass slaughter of lepers during the Middle Ages or in Antiquity, even of a minor or localized sort. Nor do any mention of such atrocities surface in the secondary literature, even in the recent exhaustive studies by Touati, Maladie et société au Moyen Age; Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England; and Demaitre, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine. Touati enthusiastically combats the old myth that authorities and the general population despised and ruthlessly segregated lepers throughout the Middle Ages. Instead, he shows the rise of a positive attitude towards lepers in eleventh- and twelfth-century France, that their communities flourished economically and were held in esteem as exemplars of sanctity by the populace and religious authorities alike. However, as early as the mid-thirteenth century, in works such as the Summa pastoralis, attitudes towards lepers began to shift, becoming more negative. Increasingly, they were perceived as a moral and pathogenic threat to the healthy. The social, economic, and ecological disasters of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century and the plagues and heightened awareness of contagion with and after the Black Death into the early modern period stimulated their enforced isolation. By the fifteenth century, the harsh

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By contrast, early modernity with its scientific breakthroughs and rise of naturalistic explanations was a fillip for increased blaming and scapegoating as in times of bubonic plague from the early sixteenth century to at least the plagues of 1656-7. As we have seen, accusations, torture, and execution of supposed plague spreaders during these centuries were not limited to cities and alpine plains above Milan, Geneva, and Lyon, supposedly susceptible to “ideas and fantasies” of ancient magic tumbling forth from isolated alpine foyers.93 Instead, such accusations arose also in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Toulouse, Rouen, Palermo, Messina, Madrid, Rome, and other places awaiting to be studied, and their impulse had nothing to do with imported ideas or individuals from backward places outside the city. Instead, universityeducated judges and physicians compiled and authorized the accusations, imposed the tortures, and executed the victims. In Milan, where the trials have been best studied, the accusers and judges were Milanese inhabitants, including some from its oldest families, and were backed by members of one of Europe’s most advanced health boards, steeped in the latest scientific knowledge about the plague’s contagion and its mechanisms of transmission. Nor did the blaming game abate with the laboratory revolution, and cholera was not the only culprit. To take North America alone: with the Milwaukee smallpox epidemic of 1894-5, “mobs of Pomeranian and Polish women armed with baseball bats, potato mashers, clubs, bed slats, and butcher knives” patrolled streets against health inspectors who attempted to remove patients to hospitals.94 Similar uprisings occurred at Montreal with smallpox in 1885.95 For Honolulu and San Francisco in 1900, the disease that caused ethnic tensions and social violence to flare was plague, even though the aetiology of the disease was then known.96 On the east coast, tuberculosis was branded the “Jewish disease,” despite Jews’ previous exposure to it in segregation and degradation of lepers had obtained more or less the negative values exemplified in the Biblical and that was not so distant from the nineteenth-century picture of the leper. Yet, Touati still supplies no evidence of riots or mass persecution by the state or any social group against lepers beyond that of the events in France of 1321. As he states (and which historians seem not to realize), this incident was “unique” to medieval and early modern Europe. More recently, Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England, has shown no such transition in attitudes of the economic and social fate of leper communities at least in England. 93 Bercé, ”Les semeurs de peste.” 94 Leavitt, Politics and Public Health: Smallpox in Milwaukee, 1894-1895, 406. 95 Craddock, City of Plagues, 108. 96 Echenberg, Plague Ports,183-241; Mohr, Plague and Fire; Craddock, City of Plagues, ch. 4. Plague riots also erupted in other temperate zones as in Porto and Lisbon in 1899 against the Health Board’s stringent controls, cordon sanitaire, rampant disinfection, and destruction of

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overcrowded cities of eastern Europe, which gave them greater resistance to it than those born in America.97 More ironic still, New York City’s Italians, because of their supposed filth, were blamed for the polio epidemics of 1907 and 1916.98 These incidents of violence and blame, however, pale by comparison with one disease of modernity and its vilification of the “other”: typhus. To quell fears of lice-borne pathogens, German governments from the late nineteenth century to the Nazis quarantined and attacked the poor from eastern Europe and ultimately the Jews, first with the development of new chemicals to cleanse bodies and defend borders, then with the Nazi extermination of the supposed human carriers themselves.99 Yet by 1909 typhus was no longer a mysterious disease or a demographic threat: instead it had almost disappeared from western Europe and from Germany in particular.100 As this last, most horrific nexus of disease and hate shows, neither an epidemic’s severity, transmission by sex, mystery, nor newness necessarily determined its likelihood to spark mass hatred and murder as historians now assume. In conclusion, as far as hate goes, the interrelations between society and disease are more complex than presently suspected or than mere mortality figures can tell. At least in part, pandemics’ probabilities to stir hate depend on the character of the disease. Secondly, the “other” needs to be analyzed property, with assaults on members of the medical profession and Portugal’s chief medical officer, Dr. Ricardo Jorge; see Echenberg, Plague Ports, 113-29. 97 Kraut, Silent Travellers, ch. 6. 98 Ibid., ch. 4. In New York these epidemics were called the “Italian disease.” 99 Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 70-1; and Roland, Courage Under Siege: “From the beginning of the war, typhus became the great whipping boy for the Nazis, the rationalization of their ghetto policy, and a “scientific” explanation for the forced isolation of the Jews” (120); also, see 125 and 154. 100 By the 1930s incidences of epidemic outbreak had become the creation of the Nazis themselves, conf ined to local occurrences within starved Jewish ghettoes. On statistics for the decline of typhus in Germany, Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine, see Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, Appendix I, 428-36; on its exaggerated and localized epidemics and the Nazi policies and epidemic outbreak at Warsaw and other ghettoes in the early 1940s, 10, 14, 87, 298, 393, 425, 426-7; and Roland, Courage Under Siege, 123 and 127; on Europe in general and Victorian cities in Britain in particular, see Hardy, “Urban Famine or Urban Crisis?” It is not clear that typhus had such power to ignite hatred in other areas of Europe or the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries or earlier. With the typhus epidemic in New York City of 1892, blame was placed on the influx of Russian Jews and certain journalists and politicians drew anti-Semitic conclusions, but despite unequal treatment, health board officials issued no official proclamations of anti-Semitism, and with the quick decline in typhus deaths, public opinion linking the disease to Russian immigration disappeared; Markel, Quarantine!, 50, 60, 76.

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with greater care. As our survey demonstrates, epidemics’ cultural toxins afflicted insiders as readily as outsiders. The Jew, the foreigner, the poor, or any other “other” was not always or even most often the butt of disease-inspired hate. Finally, the disease-hate nexus was not a Whig history of progress and civilization. Instead, its trajectory was the near opposite: diseases’ cultural toxins became more virulent with modernity, after explanations of disease causation and transmission had become more scientific, and not less so, as historians post-AIDS presently presume. Epidemics were collective experiences that sparked strong, sometimes chaotic, but also well-channelled, emotions. These have not always been the emotions that our present-day preoccupations would predict. Instead, the emotional life of pandemics had a history, and that history, I maintain, has yet to be written. Our next assignment is to unravel when, where, and why certain diseases have inflicted hate, while others inspired selfless acts of heroism and compassion, and led, at least temporarily, to the healing of deeply rooted class, ethnic, racial, and religious divides in society. In our current crazy climate of “impact” and the humanities, here may lay an area of current concern where ancient and medieval history has something to teach us.

References Arrizabalaga, Jon, John Henderson, and Roger French. The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Baehrel, René. “Epidémie et terreur: histoire et sociologie, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, xxiii (1951): 113-22. —. “La haine de classe en temps d’épidémie.” Annales: E.S.C., VII (1952): 351-60. Bercé, Yves-Marie. Revolt and Revolution in Early Modern Europe: An essay on the history of political violence. Trans. by J. Bergin. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987 [1980]. —. “Les semeurs de peste.” In La vie, la mort, la foi, le temps: Mélanges offerts à Pierre Chaunu, ed. by Jean-Pierre Bardet, and Madeleine Foisil, 85-94. Paris: Presse universitaires de France, 1993. Bloch, Iwan. “The History of Syphilis.” In A System of Syphilis in Six Volumes, ed. by D’Arcy Power, and J. KeoghMurphy, I, 3-19. London: Henry Frowde: Hodder & Stoughton, 1908-10. Briggs, Charles L. “Theorizing Modernity Conspiratorially: Science, scale, and the political economy of public discourse in explanations of a cholera epidemic.” American Ethnologist, 31 (2004): 164-87. Byrne, Joseph P., ed. Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues, 2 vols. , s.v. “Plagues of the Roman Empire.” Westport, CT, 2008. Cassius, Dio. Dio’s Roman History, ed. Earnest Carey, Loeb Classical Library, 9 vols. London: Heinemann,1914-27. Clarke, Graeme. “Christianity in the First Three Centuries.” In Cambridge Ancient History, 12, 2nd ed., ed. by A.K. Bowman, P. Garnsey, and A. Cameron, 589-671. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

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Codero, Franco. La Fabbrica della peste. Bari: Laterza 1984. Cohn, Samuel. The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. —. Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. —. “Pandemics: Waves of Disease, Waves of Hate from the Plague of Athens to A.I.D.S.” Historical Research, 85, no. 230 (2012): 535-55. Craddock, Susan. City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Crosby, Alfred. America’s Forgotten Pandemic: the influenza of 1918. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Crosby, Molly. The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever. The Epidemic that shaped our history. New York: Berkeley Books, 2006. Cueto, Marcos. “Stigma and Blame during an Epidemic: Cholera in Peru, 1991.” In Disease in the History of Modern Latin America: From Malaria to AIDS, ed. by Diego Armus, 268-89. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Cyprianus, De mortalitate. In Corpus Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, III, pt 1: S. Thasci Caecili Cypriani opera omnia, 297-314. Vienna: C. Geroldi, 1868. Demaitre, Luke. Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Dollo, Corrado. Peste e untoßri nella Sicilia Spagnola: Presupposti teorici e condizionamenti sociali. Testi inediti di A. Giarrusso, M.A. Alaymo, F. Fedeli, F. Guerreri, G.B. Hodierna. Naples: Morano, 1991. Duffy, John. Sword of Pestilence: The New Orleans Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853. Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1966. Duncan-Jones, R.P. “The Impact of the Antonine Plague.” Journal of Roman Archaeology, 9 (1996): 108-36. Dutton, Paul. Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004. Eamon, William. “Cannibalism and Contagion: Framing syphilis in Counter-Reformation Italy.” Early Science and Medicine, 3 (1998): 1-31. Echenberg, Myron. Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894-1901. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Falloppio, Gabrielle. De Morbo Gallico. Padua: Luca Bertelli, 1564. —. De Morbo Gallico: Tractatus. In De Morbo Gallico omnia quae extant apud omnes medicos cuiuscunque nationis, ed. by Luigi Luisini, 2 vols, I, 661-720. Venice: Giordano Ziletti, 1566-7. Farmer Paul, with Joia S. Mukherjee. Haiti after the Earthquake. New York: Public Affairs, 2011. Fioravanti, Leonardo. De ’Capricci Medicinali. Venice: Michele Bonibelli, 1595 (first published in Venice in 1568). Humphreys, Margaret. Yellow Fever and the South. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Ginzburg, Carlo. “Deciphering the Sabbath.” In Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, ed. by Bengt Ankarloo, and Gustavo Henningsen, XX-XX. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. de Gois, Damião. Chronica do feliccissimo rey dom Emanuel da gloriosa memoria. Lisbon, 1619. Guicciardini, Francesco. Storia d’Italia. Ed by S. Seidel Menchi, 3 vols. Turin, Einaudi, 1971. Gussow, Zachary. Leprosy, Racism, and Public Health: Social Policy in Chronic Disease Control. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989.

168 Samuel K . Cohn Jr. Hardy, Ann. “Urban Famine or Urban Crisis? Typhus in the Victorian City.” Medical History, 32 (1988): 401-25. Irwin, Julia. “Scapegoats and Epidemic Disease.” In Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues, ed. by Joseph P. Byrne, 2 vols., II, 618-20. Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 2008. Isseroff, Ami. “Lisbon Massacre.” In Zionism and Israel – Encyclopedic Dictionary: Zionism and Israel on the Web Project. 31 March 2009. Johnson, Niall. Britain and the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic: A dark epilogue. London: Routledge, 2006. Kraut, Alan M. Silent Travellers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace.” New York: Basic Books, 1994. Laertius, Diogenes. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, ed. by Tiziano Dorandi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Leavitt, Judith Walzer. “Politics and Public Health: Smallpox in Milwaukee, 1894-1895.” In Sickness and Health in America: readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health, ed. by Leavitt and R. Numbers, 403-13. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. Previously published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 50 (1976): 553-68. Livy, Titus. Ab Urbe Condita, Loeb Classical Library, various editors, 14 volumes. LondonCambridge, MA, 1919-. Longrigg, James L. “Epidemic, Ideas and Classical Athenian Society.” In Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the historical perception of pestilence, ed. by Terrance Ranger and Paul Slack, 21-44. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. Maggiore-Perni, Francesco. Palermo e le sue grandi epidemie dal XVI al XIX secolo (Palermo: Stab. Tip. Virzi, 1894). Markel, Howard. Quarantine!: East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. McGough, Laura J. “Quarantining Beauty: The French Disease in Early Modern Venice.” In Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Kevin Siena, 211-37. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. —. Gender, Sexuality, and Syphilis in Early Modern Venice: The Disease that Came to Stay. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010. Mohr, James. Plague and Fire: Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu’s Chinatown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Monter, E. William. “Witchcraft in Geneva, 1537-1662.” The Journal of Modern History, 43 (1971): 179-204. Naphy, William. Plagues, Poisons and Potions: Plague-spreading conspiracies in the Western Alps c. 1530-1640. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Nelkin, Dorothy, and Sander L. Gilman. “Placing blame for devastating disease.” Social Research LV (1988): 362-78. The New York Tribune, accessed through the online newspaper archive of The Library of Congress: “Chronicling America.” Nicolini, Fausto. “Parte III: La Peste 1629-1632.” In Storia di Milano, directed by G. Treccani degli Alfieri, X, 497-557. Milan: Fondaxione Treccani degli Alfieri per la storia di Milano, 1957. Orosius, Paulus. The Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, trans by. Roy J. Deferrati. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1964. —. Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, trans. by A. T. Fear. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. de Oviedo, Fernandez. Historia general y natural de las Indias, 5 vols. Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, t. CXVII-CXXI. Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1992.

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Pastore, Alessandro. Crimine e giustizia in tempo di Peste nell’Europa moderna Bari: Laterza, 1991). Perutta, Franco Della. Mazzini e i rivoluzionari italiani: Il “partito d’azione” 1830-1845. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974. Pierce, John R., and Jim Writer. Yellow Jack: How Yellow Fever Ravaged America and Walter Reed Discovered Its Deadly Secrets. Holboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005. Porter, Roy. “The case of consumption.” In Understanding Catastrophe, ed. by J. Bourriau. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Preto, Paolo. Peste e società a Venezia nel 1576. Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1978. —. “Le grandi pesti dell’età moderna 1575-77 e 1630-1.” In Venezia e la peste 1348/1797. Venice: Marsilio, 1979. —. Epidemia, paura e politica nell’Italia moderna. Bari: Laterza, 1987. Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars: Book I: The Persian War, ed. by H.B. Dewing. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann, 1914-35. Proksch, Johann K. Die Geschichte der venerischen Krankheiten: Eine Studie, 2 vols. Bonn: Hanstein, 1895. Pullan, Brian. “Plague and Perceptions of the Poor in Early Modern Italy.” In Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the historical perception of pestilence, ed. by Terrance Ranger and Paul Slack, 101-23. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. Quétel, Claude. History of Syphilis, trans. by J. Braddock, and B. Pike. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Quinn, Tom. Flu: A Social History of Influenza. London: New Holland, 2008. Rawcliffe, Carole. Leprosy in Medieval England. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006. Reeves, Carol. “Influenza.” In Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues, ed. by Joseph P. Byrne, 2 vols., I, 304-13. Westport, Ct., 2008. Ripamonti, Giuseppe. La Peste di Milano del 1630. Milan: Pirotta e C., 1841. Roland, Charles G. Courage Under Siege: Starvation, Disease, and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Sansone, Alfonso. Gli avvenimenti del 1837 in Sicilia.Palermo: Carlo Clausen, 1890. Sanuto, Marino. Vitæ Ducum Venetorum italice scriptæ ab origine urbis, sive ab Anno CCCXXI usque ad Annum MCCCCXCIII, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores. Ed. Lodovico Muratori, XXII (Milan: Ex typographia Societatis Palatinae in regia curia, 1733), col. 501. Schivenoglia, Andrea. Cronaca di Mantova dal 1445 al 1484, ed. by Carlo d’Arco. Mantua: Edizioni “Baldus,” 1857. Slack, Paul. The Impact of Plague in Tutor and Stuart England. 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. —. “Responses to Plague in Early Modern Europe: The Implications of Public Health. In Time of Plague: The History and Social Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Disease, ed. by Arien Mack, 111-31. New York: New York University Press, 1991. Snowden, Frank. Naples in the time of Cholera 1884-1911. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Soyer, François. “The Massacre of the New Christians of Lisbon in 1506: A New Eyewitness Account.” Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas 7 (2007): 221-43. Sozomen, The Ecclesiastical History of Sozomen, Comprising a History of the Church, from A.D. 324 to A.D. 440, trans. Edward Walford. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Loeb Classical Library, Books I and II, ed. and trans. by Charles Forster Smith. London: Heinemann, 1928.

170 Samuel K . Cohn Jr. Touati, François-Olivier. Maladie et société au Moyen Age: La lèpre, les lépreux et les léproseries dans la province ecclésiastique de Sens jusqu’au milieu du XIVe siècle, Bibliothèque du Moyen Age, no. 11. Paris, De Boeck & Larcier, 1998. Vincent, Bernard. “Le cholera en Espagne au XIXe siècle.” In Peurs et terreurs face à la contagion, ed. by Jean-Pierre Bardot, Patrice Bourdelais, Pierre Guillaume, François Lebrun and Claude Quétel, 43-55. Paris: Fayard, 1988. Vochs, Ioannes. De pestilentia anni presentis (1507). In Aphrodisiacus sive De Lue Venerea in duas partes divisus… Aloysius Luisinus…, ed. by Christian Gothridus Gruner, 120-1. Jena: Chr. Henr. Cunonis Heredes, 1789. Von Hutten, Ulrich. De guaiaici medicina et morbo gallico liber unus. Mainz: Ionnis Scheffer, 1519. Weindling, Paul. Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe 1890-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Yerushalmi, Y.H. The Lisbon massacre of 1506 and the Royal Image in the Shebet Yehudah. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1976.

9

The Emotive Power of an Evolving Symbol The Idea of the Dome from Kurgan Graves to the Florentine Tempio Israelitico Ori Z. Soltes

Preliminaries: Complementarity and Contradiction It is a truism within the history of art and architecture that a given visual form may symbolize more than one idea simultaneously – even ideas that contradict each other, although there is usually a logic to the apparent contradiction. Thus in abstract Islamic art, for example, the relationship between God and humanity might be symbolized by a monumental structure – such as a domed building or the mihrab form on a prayer rug – overrun with minutely detailed decoration. In that case, the decoration, in being minute, symbolizes humanity, while its monumental framework symbolizes God. But simultaneously, the framework, in being, as a frame, finitizing, symbolizes humanity, while the infinitizing pattern truncated by the frame symbolizes the God who is infinite. Thus “monumental” versus “minute” and “infinite” versus “finite” are visually presented in an interwoven array of apparent contradictions that nonetheless offer a logic to their interweave. For God is by definition utterly other than humanity, yet, according to the Muslim – and Jewish and Christian – tradition, God breathes the soul into us that makes us more than a clod of earth (Bible) or a blood clot (Qur’an), which means that, in some sense, we are like God. And therefore in some sense God must be like us. So the simultaneous similitude and absolute alterity of that relationship is effectively conveyed by the relationship among these abstract visual elements. We may see this principle well articulated by the dome form. From the beginning of our existence, humans have looked up at the heavens and observed the changing patterns of night and day, winter and summer. Men have watched points of light moving slowly across the skies and those that race across them, suddenly disappearing into the darkness – and the infinite pattern of lights that shifts gradually from one horizon to the next without apparent change of its order. We have wondered, as we have recorded the

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shifting shapes: what underlies them? What forces move the heavens and how might those forces affect what happens to us, here on the earth. Myriad religious traditions assume that the dome of heaven contains secrets that, because it is the inhabitation of gods, can improve or upset our lives – if we can unravel them. Virtually every tradition of which we have a coherent record looks to the soaring space above us to guide us, both in the world through which we move while alive and that to which we might accede when we are dead. The patterns of the stars and planets and the very shape of the vast dome above our heads is a mystery which, if we might penetrate it, can assure well-being in both realities, the here and now and the endless beyond. One means of unraveling and penetrating is replication and imitation – emulation on a scale commensurate with limited human capabilities. To make a dome makes us, in part, like the gods we seek to understand; it satisfies a strong emotional need and has the potential to empower us by associating us with them. The creative process itself offers a dangerous adventure – because in seeking to understand the gods by imitating them we tread perilously close to the sacrilege of presuming to be like them. But humans are intrepid. Knowing the dome can only come about by making the dome; to experience heaven is to emulate its architecture. Not surprisingly, the form of the dome moves in two parallel directions of purpose. The earliest, underground, supported by the earth itself, are passageways into the realm of death or resting places for the dead. Underground dome forms appear in a number of different places across Europe throughout the pre-Christian millennia. The kurgan graves in prehistoric Ukraine, as early as 3000 BC; the much larger, so-called beehive or tholos tombs of the Mycenaean warriors of Homeric renown, (ca. 1300 BC); and the necropolis of myriad, smaller earthbound Etruscan domed graves (ca. 675-275 BC) at Cerveteri, Italy – the ultimate city of the dead of the ultimate people of mystery – may all be argued to have served a dual symbolic purpose, consistent with the principle of simultaneous complementary or even mutually contradictory messages. Such structures, offering a dramatic setting for the transition to the Underworld for kings and for clans, connote the pregnant female belly, embedded as they are within the womb of mother earth herself, with implications evidenced by their decor and/or their surviving archaeological contents for beliefs regarding post-mortem rebirth. 1 But these 1 I am referring on the one hand to objects found in Ukrainian Kurgan graves and at Etruscan Cerveteri, and on the other to relief carvings at Cerveteri that reinforce the idea that these

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Figure 9.1 Mycenaean Tholos tomb (“Treasury of Atreus”) seen from dromos (ca 1300 BCE)

Photo by Ori Stoltes

Figure 9.2 Cerveteri: typical Etruscan domed grave (ca 700 BCE)

Photo by Ori Stoltes

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terrestrial domes – particularly larger ones, as at Mycenae – also suggest the dome of heaven. They are thus reminders of the close relationship between the realms of death and divinity – both aspects of what lies beyond our everyday, living, awake, human-mortal realm of knowledge and experience. This second idea, of the dome’s relationship not to the earth but to the sky, becomes more obvious and even emphatic when the domed form is moved from within the earth out into the air above its surface.

From Earth’s Belly to the Arc of Heaven The Romans, by way of their command of the freestanding arch, were able to raise the dome above the earth as a freestanding structure, released from the earth. In the later republican and early imperial periods they experimented with freestanding conical and domed forms, from the small aedicule that surmounted the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste (second century BC) to the “Temple of Mercury” at the baths in Baiae (midfirst century BC), to the so-called “Round Temples” at Tivoli and Rome itself (both from the first century BC), to the domed structure that was part of Rome’s first public baths, built by Agrippa (ca. 19 BC) – son-in-law and general of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. The enormous temple to all the gods – the Pantheon – dwarfed all of these earlier efforts in both size and spherical purity. It was built as a dome under the Emperor Hadrian’s patronage in ca. AD 125, on the site of an earlier, non-domed, temple built by Agrippa, well over a century earlier – and was the center of the city which was the center of the ultimate empire. The Romans saw their success through the lens of divine imprimatur, and understood their law-and-order imperium to be the microcosm of the lawand-order universe. Their temple articulated that sensibility; it symbolized both Roman power across much of the known world and the source of that power: the approving gods. It was not just the general form – a perfect sphere – that accorded with an idealized vision of the dome of heaven, but specif ic details. The large opening at the top of the dome is an oculus, an eye, echoing the “eye of heaven,” which is the sun. And as the sun moves across the arc of the sky it yields a circle of light that moves across the interior of chambers were intended both to reflect life as it had been lived by the deceased and to anticipate life as it would hopefully continue in the next world.

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Figure 9.3  Pantheon interior, Rome (ca 120-25 CE)

Photo by Ori Stoltes

the temple dome, emulating its heavenly source. A series of seven rows of niches and coffers – perhaps originally vetted in bronze, or possibly decorated with bronze stars or rosettes, so that the ceiling must have been resplendent – def ine the wall/ceiling that leads from the floor to the oculus. These rows symbolize the seven “planets”: the seven wanderers (derived from the Greek verb planeo, “to wander”) across the heavens against the backdrop of the sphere of “fixed” stars. These in turn correspond to seven deities. We still call most of them by god-names: Mercury, Venus, Mars,

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Jupiter, Saturn (all visible with the naked eye)2 – the remaining two are the sun and the moon. So, too, niches along the lower registers offered spaces in which the images of Olympian and other gods could be placed. The fact that the sun is both the eye of heaven and one of the planets – and that is travels across the sky by day whereas the others move by night – or that some of the planets have acquired names of some of the Olympians (in other words, there is overlap between the group of seven planetary deities and those Olympians) is consistent with the principle of internal inconsistency and even contradiction that defines religious sensibility and the processes of addressing, exploring, and explaining that realm of the “other.” But the point is to be connected to that other – bound to the gods – in order to assure ongoing Roman success at maintaining order over the political world around them. The connection between the eye of heaven and the eye of the dome thus includes the symbolic notion of an umbilical tie between the two realms – that of the divine-maintained macrocosmos (great order) with that of the human-maintained microcosmos (small order) – thus also reinforcing the conceptual identity of the structure as the very womb of the earthbound empire that was born and continues to be nurtured through divine agency, even as it emulates the god-dominated sky. The structure represents the emotive power inherent in the interweave of religious and political sensibilities. One might note an important parallel to the development of the freestanding dome out of the freestanding arch that Roman engineers perfected, a parallel that reinforces this god-focused sensibility from a different perspective. Amphitheaters such as the Roman Colosseum (built by the Emperors Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, ca. AD 72-82) pulled the half-moon theater structures of the Greeks out of the mountainside and doubled them as freestanding structures by piling one series of elliptically extended arcades upon another.3 The Colosseum (so-named for the colossal statue of Emperor Nero that once stood near it) itself offers a series of orders – Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian pilasters and their capitals – in an ascending pattern that flanks the arches from ground to roofline, underscoring the idea of this structure as a microcosmos. 2 Subsequent planets – Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and Tyche (I am ignoring the recent debates regarding the last two of these as “planets” or not) – only became visible with the development of the telescope. 3 “Amphitheater” means “both – amphi – theater” in Greek; “theater” comes from the Greek verb, theao, meaning “to look at.”

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Within this consummately ordered structure, and protected from chaotic weather elements by sailcloth extending from poles over the seating area, some fifty thousand spectators could sit comfortably above the action. God-like, they could see what the human and animal contestants could not, within the landscaped arena below: the life and death possibilities posed by other contestants lurking behind shrubbery or hillocks. God-like, the audience – most of whom lived all-too-ordinary human existences the rest of the time – could anticipate or even, at times, pass judgment on the survival or demise of those contestants. Thus the extended freestanding arch form like its freestanding dome counterpart symbolized a connection between human and divine realms, helping to articulate a temporary sense of power to everyday Romans and an emotionally satisfying diversion that helped to turn the people away from revolutionary thoughts. Later Christian tradition would falsely assert that scores of martyrs were devoured by lions in such settings during the time when Christianity was persecuted as politically subversive by the pagan Roman authorities. Another tradition maintained that scores of martyrs were buried within the Pantheon floor. This situation would in any case change as Christianity became legal under Constantine in AD 313 and the state religion under Theodosius, around AD 380-81. Eventually the Pantheon – given in AD 609 as a gift by the Byzantine Emperor Phocas to Pope Boniface V – would be rededicated to the memory of Christian martyrs and to the virgin mother and queen of heaven, Mary, whose son’s spiritual acolytes would come to rule substantial parts of the world. Well before this redirection of the building’s spiritual purpose, the Pantheon had inspired and become a model for a structure – the third built on the same site in the Byzantine capital of Constantinople – named in honor of the Christian Holy Spirit, the Logos, the third member of the Trinity, associated with consummate wisdom. Thus the Byzantine Emperor Justinian’s Christian Hagia Sophia – the Temple to Holy Wisdom – built between 532 and 537, rearticulated both architectural and spiritual principles first expressed by the Pantheon, but from a Christian perspective. The Hagia Sophia (Aya Sofia in Turkish) was designed for the emperor by Isidore of Miletus, a physicist, and Anthemius of Tralles, a mathematician. Their dome offers a flatter, more umbrella-like structure than does the Pantheon, resting on four enormous pendentives that absorb the outwardpushing pressure from above and are in turn visually absorbed into the walls. Put otherwise, they enable a rather graceful transition from the circular dome form to the square form of the walls. The dome-on-square shape underscores the role of the structure: to intermediate between

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God (like the dome’s circular, heaven-emulating form, without beginning or end) and humans (like the base’s squared shape: four-sided and thus four-directioned, and with its corners – stop-start, stop-start, stop-start, stop-start – offering a finitizing configuration). But what is perhaps most visually arresting is the series of forty windows that separate the dome from and yet connect it to its base, in lieu of a single oculus at the peak. Thus the relationship between the heavenly world outside and above the church – God’s world – and the human world below, between which two realms the edifice mediates, is underscored by the blaze of light that fills the interior. Light as the ordering principle (God’s first act in shaping the universe was to say “Let there be light,” in Gen 1:3) and as a symbol of the divine presence, offers a transformation of an important concept with a history several thousand years old by the sixth century. The eyes have long been recognized as windows to the soul – and thus sculpted and painted images of individuals with a divine connection offer enlarged, intensely focused eyes, from Sumer to Byzantium – and within and beneath the dome of the Hagia Sophia, forty windows are eyes (oculi) that connect the souls of those within to the ultimate One who filled the first human, Adam, with a soul that transformed him from an earth (Hebrew: adamah) clod or a blood clot into a breathing, sentient, thinking being. As the God-given soul looks out from the human body through the eyes, so the light of heaven brings God’s pure soul presence into the church interior through those forty oculi. Moreover, forty resonates as a biblical number from the period of the flood (forty days and nights) to that of the Israelite wandering in the wilderness (forty years) to the time spent by John the Baptist and Jesus respectively in the wilderness (forty days). Forty also symbolizes nonspecific “many” (be it days or years) within the biblically focused Byzantine Greek tradition, so the apertures that connect finite humans to the infinite are themselves, as it were, infinite. The importance of dome and light in combination as an expression of the divine-human connection is clear – and the political importance of that connection concretized by a structure shaped by imperial decree. As the Pantheon eventually became a church, the Church of Holy Wisdom was eventually transformed into a mosque sometime after the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453. But by then, the Muslim world of which the Ottomans had become part – whose key prophetic figure, Muhammad, began to experience revelation at the age of forty years – had centuries earlier absorbed the dome form into its architectural and symbolic vocabulary. Caliph Abdul Malik continued the

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Figure 9.4  Hagia Sophia interior, Istanbul (Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles, ca 535)

Photo by Ori Stoltes

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history of the freestanding dome in AD 691 with his Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. He offered Islam’s first major effort along these architectural lines, while establishing Jerusalem as an important political as well as spiritual focus for the Umayyad Imperium. This edif ice was intended to elevate Jerusalem as a Muslim sacred site and to reinforce his role as caliph, whose political position interwove his responsibility for religious sites. The structure repeats the principle of earth-heaven contact, for it marks an essential umbilical point of Muslim significance. The spiritual inspiration for the Dome of the Rock is the story of Muhammad’s miraculous isra (night ride) – from Makka to Jerusalem and back – alluded to in Qur’an 17:1. That story, together with the account of the Prophet’s mir’aj (ascent) to the throne of God, during which he surpassed other, prior prophets, who all encouraged him – is discussed in a series of hadiths that appear within the first generations after the Prophet’s death in 632. The rock over which the edifice stands is understood to be the precise point from which Muhammad ascended and to which he returned to earth with important divine instructions – such as how many times a day Muslims must pray. Figure 9.5  Dome of the Rock (ca 591)

Photo by Ori Stoltes

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As one of Islam’s ultimate points of divine-human contact (together with Makka and Madina), the site of the rock of Muhammad’s ascent and return was encompassed within a structure that leads from a square base to octagonal walls to a dome – that is, from a base that connotes our fourdirectional realm to a dome that emulates the without-beginning-and-end structure of God’s heavenly realm. The intermediating octagon is, formally speaking, the interior of an eight-pointed star; the eight-pointed star is the result of rotating one square forty-five degrees over a second square. This bespeaks the complex and paradoxic nature of the divine-human relationship: God is utterly other than we, yet God made us and instilled within us a soul, which means that an essential part of all of us is somehow like God – and therefore in some sense God must. be like us. So if a square can represent our reality in symbolic terms, then a second square can represent God’s reality, but rotated, so that it is not the same as the first square – even as it is the same. This sensibility is reinforced by the decor of the Dome of the Rock, in which the monumental (like God) structure is overrun in its lower parts with minute (like humans) details – geometric and vegetal, in diverse colors (contrastive, as humans and God are contrastive) – but the details are also infinitizing (like the infinite God) in their patterns, and those patterns, overrunning blind arches along the octagon (that echo the form of the dome itself), are truncated by finitizing (like finite humans) frames, that are themselves overrun with minute, infinitizing (like God) patterns. Thus the structure and its details simultaneously express human, God-like power and underscore human powerlessness compared with God.

From Jerusalem to London to Washington, DC The Dome of the Rock, in both overall structure and decorative details, further transforms the visual-conceptual pattern of the heaven-earth, divine-human interrelationship begun at the beginning of antiquity. Coming chronologically on the cusp between the ancient and medieval worlds, it not only draws from the past but it also looks toward the future. It would be emulated in mosques, tombs, and monuments across the Muslim world over the centuries that followed, from the Blue Mosque in Istanbul to the Taj Mahal in Agra. Moreover, the domination of the Jerusalem skyline by this monument over the centuries also led to an interesting development within Christian (and eventually, Jewish) art and architecture: when the Temple in Jerusalem was pictured, it was imagined as domed,

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or quasi-domed. Thus famous moments within biblical and post-biblical lore – from the marriage of Mary and Joseph (e.g., in Raphael’s 1504 panel painting in Milan); to the presentation of the Christ child to the high priest the Temple (e.g., in Melchior Broederlam’s Champmol Altarpiece, 1394); to Jesus’ handing of the keys to Peter (e.g., in Perugino’s 1481 fresco in the Sistine Chapel) – are frequently depicted as taking place within or before such a structure. Figure 9.6 “Handing of the Keys to St Peter,” Sistine Chapel (fresco, Pietro Perugino, 1481-2)

Photo by Ori Stoltes

Moreover, as Rome became more emphatically conceived as the New Jerusalem, and as a new St. Peter’s basilica was being shaped from the late fifteenth century onward4 – particularly as that process spilled into the time of the Protestant Reformation’s threat to Rome’s spiritual hegemony and to the time of the Catholic Counter-Reformation – the symbolism of the dome as the crown for the new edifice was importantly echoed by the structure begun by Bramante (and Sangallo) and reconceived by Michelangelo (and Giacomo della Porta and Carlo Fontana) (1506-90). 4 Pope Nicholas V (1447-55) appears to have initiated the idea of radically renovating or completely replacing the old St. Peter’s Church, engaging Alberti and Rossellino to effect extensive renovations and the latter even to prepare designs for a potential new structure, but actual new construction did not begin until 1506 during the pontificate of Julius II.

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The center of the New Jerusalem (Rome) was emphatically presented as the New Temple (St. Peter’s Church), marking the burial site of St. Peter, ultimate apostolic intermediary between God and humanity. Thus divinehuman and living-dead concepts interweave each other in a manner that carries all the way back to the conceptual interweave between kurgan graves and Etruscan tombs on the one hand and the Pantheon and Hagia Sophia on the other. And the interweaving of religion and politics marking earlier edifices resonates from the dome of St. Peter’s Church. Spiritual “correctness” and authority (and their relationship to human ego as an instrument of emotional and psychological power) is asserted. Figure 9.7  St Peter’s Basilica dome, Vatican City (Michelangelo Buonarotti, 1547)

Photo by Ori Stoltes

The implications of this constantly evolving symbolic language follows variously into the next centuries. It is felt in key Protestant structures such as Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral (1711) strongly rooted in the design of Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s, and built in London. That city had begun the process, for a century and a half, by then, of being conceived as a counter-New Jerusalem to that offered by Rome. Indeed, the Protectorate

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of Oliver Cromwell (1653-58) that preceded Wren’s f irst designs for St. Paul’s by less than a generation had received an important part of its support from the “Fifth Monarchy Men.” This group saw the England being shaped by Cromwell since 1649 as the last earthbound kingdom – after Babylon, Persia, Macedonian Greece and Rome – during which time the Messiah would return to earth, as predicted in Daniel 2. Partially with this in mind, in 1657 Cromwell rescinded the 1290 edict that had expelled the Jews from England, in order to effect an “ingathering of the exiles” to a “New Israel.” The aftermath of such sensibilities would help point to the domed design of St. Paul’s by Wren, the fifth structure on the same site since AD 604. The Jerusalemic symbolism of the dome would extend geographically outward and chronologically forward to be recombined with symbolic references to pagan Rome in the US Capitol dome a century after the formation of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and shortly after the successful revolution that detached the American colonies from England. That Jerusalemic symbolism would interweave both architectural and political allusions to Rome for the new United States asserting its own incipient political power. The structure that would begin to rise in 1792 on the capitoline by the Potomac River – as the capital city of the new republic, constructed on territory belonging to none of the thirteen original states within the new nation, and connected to the White House by a small river named the Tiber (that currently flows under Pennsylvania Avenue) – offered two assertions. One is that the new republic would operate in a benevolent manner symbolized by the Jerusalem of David and Jesus, anticipating the motto that would much later repeat “in God We Trust.” The other is that the new state would be a republic – “the people’s (publica) thing (res)” – modeled on Rome in the middle part of its mytho-history (509-27 BC). There is some unintended irony here: the dome-as-Jerusalem-Temple began its evolution with the dome of the Pantheon, originally built to honor all the pagan gods at the time when the republic had culminated a century of being subverted and transformed into an empire under Augustus, and subsequently rebuilt (as a dome) when the empire was at its greatest geopolitical extent under Hadrian. There are other ironies, perhaps, that pertain to the construction process as much as to the conceptual underpinnings of the structure. The original architect, William Thornton, never got the chance to build according to his dome design of 1792. Neither did his successor, Benjamin Latrobe. The third Architect of the Capitol, Charles Bullfinch, did manage to complete a green copper dome – complete with a Pantheon-emulating oculus – by

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Figure 9.8  St Paul’s Cathedral dome, London (Christopher Wren, 1677-1710)

Photo by Ori Stoltes

1823. But by the 1850s, the expansion of the United States – largely at the expense of the Native American population that kept being pushed aside in a relentless land rush spurred by the notion of divinely sanctioned Manifest Destiny – and the consequent inclusion of many more members of Congress,

186 Ori Z. Soltes Figure 9.9  Capitol dome, Washington, DC (Thomas U. Walter, 1855-66)

Photo by Ori Stoltes

necessitated the expansion of the congressional buildings and therefore, in the interests of aesthetic proportions, of the Capitol dome. The forth architect of the Capitol, Thomas U. Walter, undertook that project in 1851 inspired by the more vertical – heaven-scraping – proportions of edifices like St. Peter’s in Rome and St. Paul’s in London (among others), than by the shape of the Pantheon. Work proceeded through the American Civil War that threatened the survival of the republic. In 1863, a bronze statue titled “Freedom” was hoisted atop the small aedicule that surmounts the dome, and the project was completed by 1866. This took place under Edward Clark, who succeeded Walter as Architect of the Capitol the previous year (1865), the year in which the Civil War ended. In that year, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, who, after firing the fatal shot, leapt onto the stage at Ford’s Theatre and yelled out a Latin phrase. The words are popularly attributed to Marcus Brutus at the moment when he stabbed Julius Caesar, leading to the dissolution of the Roman republic and the advent of the empire: sic semper tyrannis (“thus always to tyrants”).

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The Tempio Israelitico, Emancipation and the Bindings of History The Jerusalemic symbolism of the dome, though, may be said to have come full circle within a few years of the completion of the US Capitol building. It would begin to be expressed in synagogues in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries both in Europe and eventually in the United States. Among the first of these was Florence’s Tempio Israelitico, built between 1874 and 1882 according to the designs of the architects Mariano Falcino, Vincenzo Miceli, and Marco Torres (the last of whom was Jewish). The shaping of a soaring dome reflected the expanded acceptance into the larger Italian community of its Jewish minority between 1848 (when the Florentine ghetto gates were opened up) and 1871 (the year of Italian unification). The Italian Jewish community and its leaders who funded the project were making a statement: they no longer considered themselves a community in exile, a fragment of a diaspora of eighteen centuries awaiting a messianically orchestrated return to the Holy Land. The synagogue structure and decor offer an expression of psychological and emotional well-being for a community arriving at a state of empowerment after the Italian Risorgimento and the state that emerged from that movement. Thus the dome structures associated with the Israelite and Judaean temples in Jerusalem accentuated by the long-term presence of the Dome of the Rock on the Jerusalem skyline inspired a bold architectural statement to reflect a conceptual-spiritual conviction. That conviction, evident in labeling the synagogue a tempio (temple), and not a synagoga (synagogue) – the term temple having been reserved for eighteen centuries for the long-destroyed edifice in Jerusalem – was, simply put, that “we are here to stay; our synagogue here and the Jewish life we lead in its environs is as valid in our time as the Temple in Jerusalem and the life led in its environs were in antiquity.” Which is to say: every synagogue plays an equally valid role – as valid as the Temple alone once did – in umbilically connecting the community that prays within it to the God found everywhere. Thus like the term “tempio,” the dome form is ideological and not merely architectural. The lower part of the Via Farini Tempio dome is pierced by multiple windows, reminiscent of the Hagia Sophia.5 Moreover, the decorative 5 There are only sixteen of these, not the forty in the earlier structure. But the number sixteen functions well as a symbolic statement, since it multiplies four – the number of Hebrew letters in the tetragrammaton, primary version of God’s ineffable name (YHVH) – times four, the number of directions to human reality (or put another way: four each in each of the four directions), thus underscoring the role of the dome and the structure upon which it sits as intermediating between God and the congregation praying within.

188 Ori Z. Soltes Figure 9.10 Tempio Israelitico. Via Farini, Florence, Italy, (Mariano Falcino, Vincenzo Miceli, Marco Torres, 1874-82)

Photo by Ori Stoltes

schema of the Tempio diversely emulates Arabo-Islamic style, from the keyhole arches on the exterior to the elaborate, minutely detailed abstract wall designs contrived by Giovanni Panti on the interior. These details are intended to tie the structure to the decor of the Middle East and therefore to reinforce the Jerusalem connection, and thus the Jerusalemic validity of the synagogue. That connection is further reinforced by a schema that combines these elements with temple-specific allusions that were reflected in ancient Judaean and Galilean synagogues, such as Capernaum and Cfar Bar’Am, with their three doorways to connote the three courtyards and threefold interior division of the Jerusalem Temple (which motif had also been adopted in early churches as an allusion to the Trinity).

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Figure 9.11  Synagogue, Essen, Germany (Edmund Koerner, 1913)

Photo by Ori Stoltes

The schema further includes visual elements endemic to central Italy, most obviously the alternating bands of dark and light stones on the exterior. The inclusion of such a feature, found in Florence’s own cathedral – with its Brunelleschi-designed dome (1419-36) – as well as in other cathedrals, such as those in Siena and Orvieto, emphasizes the sense of being a part

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of, and not apart from, the Italian community at large.6 The New Jerusalem for Jews is here – in Florence or wherever else a community with deep roots has emerged into the post-emancipation light. The sense of power derived from emancipation and the emotional sense of being part of the large community were profound. This sensibility would be architecturally expressed widely. Over the next half century, Jewish congregations from Rome and Essen, Germany to Cleveland, Ohio and Los Angeles, California would build temples dominated by rounded or faceted domes.7 Each of these diasporic communities was confident that, in the post-emancipation world, it was spiritually complete centered on its synagogue as had been its ancestors in Jerusalem and its Temple. The enormous synagogue built in Essen by Edmund Koerner in 1913 adapts the dome form and places it over a structure the entirety of which is intended to echo the form of Jerusalem in the time of King Solomon. Thus it contains a Temple-like structure (the Essen sanctuary, crowned by the dome) and also a “palace complex” (the Essen synagogue offices and Sunday school classrooms). So, too, its fronton, crowned by the carved relief image of the Tablets of the Decalogue and its overall burly, mountainous form was also intended to suggest the Tabernacle in the wilderness where the Tablets were originally kept – and Mount Sinai itself. Given the twentieth-century European Jewish experience, there is some irony in this, too, particularly with regard to the community of Essen. Not only would that sense of self-confidence prove falsely grounded, from France’s Dreyfus affair (1894-1906) to the rise of German Nazism, but the Nazis would point to large synagogues as proof of the sort of material Jewish power that they needed to crush. The temple domes became a focus of secular-Christian emotional negativity toward their Jewish neighbors. The 1913 Essen edifice would be severely damaged on Kristallnacht (November 9-10, 1938), which marks one of the beginning points of the Holocaust. But a fragment of the Essen Jewish community would survive, return and build a new – albeit smaller – synagogue in 1959. The design – defiantly, one might say – features a dome, extending virtually from floor to ceiling; 6 On the other hand, all of these edifices used darker stone; the Via Farini Tempio alternates white travertine with a lighter, pinkish stone more reminiscent of the rose granite of Verona and its structures. The Florentine duomo, moreover, offers a more complex, both horizontal and vertical, handling of the dark and light stone than do the cathedrals in Orvieto and Siena, where the contrast is limited, as it is in the Via Farini Tempio, to horizontal alternating bands. 7 The architecture of the 1892 Eutaw Place Temple in Baltimore, MD, was specifically inspired by the Via Farini Tempio.

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the interior decor, toward the Holy Ark, connotes the Tabernacle as it had been expressed by the fronton of the earlier synagogue. The structure was therefore tied in conception to the 1913 building being renovated in 1959 as a museum, and also to the history of the modern synagogue dome with its own chain of associations – as if the Nazi segment of the community’s recent past had almost been forgotten, or perhaps overcome. Thus the original symbolic intentions of the dome form as a connector between heaven and earth have remained present over the course of the millennia, but the specifics of those intentions have shifted, both subtly and dramatically. The varied connotations of connectedness – between life and death and humanity and divinity – have evolved over time to include the interweave between religion and politics and to encompass a sense of binding to Jerusalem understood from parallel and crisscrossing perspectives. The most recent of these perspectives offers a statement of release from Jerusalem in a particular way that is consistent both with the history of the symbolism of the dome and the history of art. For the release intersects an ongoing sense of connection; being bound and liberated therefore coexist as spiritual phenomena in a logical pattern of simultaneous complementarity and contradiction. The emotional power of this architectural form has carried from antiquity to the rebirth of ancient visual and literary ideas in the renaissance – and from that dynamic era into the ongoing struggle to shape modernity in the present day.

Works Cited Balfour, Patrick. Hagia Sophia. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1972. Boorsch, Suzanne. “The Building of the Vatican: The Papacy and Architecture.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, XL (3), (1982): 4-64. Brend, Barbara. Islamic Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Brown, Frank Edward. Roman Architecture. New York: George Braziller, 1967. Cimok, Fatih. Hagia Sophia. Istanbul: Milet Publishing Ltd, 2004. Goriansky, Lev Vladimir, Hagia Sophia: Analysis of the Architecture, Art and Spirit Behind the Shrine in Constantinople Dedicated to Hagia Sophia, Boston: Adamant Media Corporation, 1933. Hartt, Frederick. History of Italian Renaissance Art, 6th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 2006. Kahler, Heinz. Haghia Sophia. New York: Praeger, 1967. Lancaster, Lynne C. Concrete Vaulted Construction in Imperial Rome: Innovations in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Lees-Milne, James. Saint Peter’s. The Story of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. London: Hamilton, 1967. MacDonald, William L. The Pantheon: Design, Meaning, and Progeny. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.

192 Ori Z. Soltes Mainstone, Rowland J. Hagia Sophia: Architecture, Structure, and Liturgy of Justinian’s Great Church. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997. Paolini, Claudio. Florentine Architecture. Florence: Polistampa, 2009. Soltes, Ori Z. Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source. New York: Westview Press, 2005. —. The Glory of Ukraine: Golden Treasures and Lost Civilizations. Bethesda, MD: Foundation for International Arts & Education, 2010. Thomas, Edmund. “The Architectural History of the Pantheon from Agrippa to Septimius Severus via Hadrian.” Hephaistos, 15 (1997): 163-86. Wilson-Jones, Mark. Principles of Roman Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

10 The Emotions of the State A Survey of the Visconti Chancery Language (MidFourteenth-Mid-Fifteenth Centuries) Andrea Gamberini Although emotions as a field of historical research have come to the fore since the late 1990s, the interest aroused by this subject among the scholars of the Italian Renaissance state has been limited, at least so far. Apart from an important study on Lombard factions by Marco Gentile, and the very recent insight of Isabella Lazzarini into the Florentine diplomatic records, nothing else has been published.1 On these grounds I have decided to take up some suggestions coming from scholars of other periods of the Middle Ages to analyze the case study of the duchy of Milan from the angle of the relationship between politics and emotions.2 Unlike Isabella Lazzarini, I am not going to predominantly focus on diplomatic records, which also represent an extraordinary source for the duchy of Milan; I am more interested in probing into the relations between governors and governed – between the duke and his subjects. In order to appreciate the distinctive features of the latter, it is probably necessary to take the former as a starting point, to have a term of comparison. Therefore let us have a very quick look at the language of diplomatic practice and its emotional register. Since the beginning of their rise to power in the first half of the 14th century,3 the Visconti deployed emotionality in their diplomatic correspondences. 1 Marco Gentile, “Discorsi sulle fazioni, discorsi delle fazioni. ‘Parole et demonstratione partiale’ nella Lombardia del secondo Quattrocento,” in Linguaggi politici nell’Italia del Rinascimento, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, and Giuseppe Petralia (Roma: Viella, 2007), 381-408; Isabella Lazzarini, “Argument and Emotion in Italian Diplomacy in the Early Fifteenth Century: the Case of Rinaldo degli Albizzi (Florence, 1399-1430),” in The Languages of Political Society, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, Jean-Philippe Genet, and Andrea Zorzi (Roma: Viella, 2011), 339-64. 2 Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press, 2006); Daniel Lord Smail, “Hatred as a Social Institution in Late Medieval Society,” Speculum 76 (2001), 90-126; Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice. Emotions, Publicity and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (Ithaca-London, Cornell University Press, 2003); Carol Lansing, Passion and Order: restraint of grief in the medieval Italian Communes (Ithaca-London, Cornell University press, 2008). 3 A synthesis is in Andrea Gamberini, “Milan and Lombardy in the Era of the Visconti and the Sforza”, in A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Milan. The Distinctive Features

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Politics was, and still is, the art of persuading, so it is hardly surprising that foreign affairs were edged by the Visconti’s chancellors within the framework of friendship/enmity, love/hatred, or happiness/sadness. Let us consider first a letter sent by Galeazzo II to Ludovico Gonzaga and brothers, lords of Mantua in 1366. It concerns a very minor subject, the Visconti laments the bad treatment received in Mantua by a merchant from Monza, but in its very ordinariness rests its significance: Magnifici fratres carissimi (= close familiarity). Mercatores nostri Modoetie nuper coram nobis lacrimabiliter sunt conquesti (= sadness and complaint) … die quarto seu quinto mensis instantis ipsa mercimonia conductoribus eorum fuerunt per vestros super teritorio vestro Mantuae nequiter derobate et in civitate Mantue violenter conducte (= frustrated rage). 4

In a sole document, moreover a routine document, the Visconti’s chancery could display a very large gamut of feelings and emotions. Let alone in letters concerning state affairs, like a declaration of war. We can think of the letter by Gian Galeazzo to Antonio Della Scala in 1387, which is entirely formed on the contrast between the love of Gian Galeazzo for Antonio and the hatred of Antonio for Gian Galeazzo. For the record, Antonio’s reply turned around the argument: in line with the platonic philosophy, he calls on mankind’s distinctive features, sense and reason, which are supposed to tackle passions. Gian Galeazzo is represented as being gripped with disordered feelings, which are contrasted to the purity of Antonio’s emotions. Indeed, it is with a bleeding heart and after renewing his love for Gian Galeazzo that Antonio pleases the lord of Milan by restraining himself from taking revenge. It is also interesting that the Visconti’s chancery immediately got possession of this argument and in a letter sent just a few days later to the Florentine signoria, the decision to wage war on Della Scala could be justified by arguing that it was Antonio who was excited by war and got carried away by disorderly passions.5 of an Italian State, ed. by Andrea Gamberini (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 19-45. See also Federico Del Tredici, “Lombardy under the Visconti and the Sforza,” in The Italian Renaissance State, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, and Isabella Lazzarini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 156-76; Francesco Somaini, “Processi costitutivi, dinamiche politiche e strutture istituzionali dello stato visconteo-sforzesco,” in Storia d’Italia, gen. ed. Giuseppe Galasso, vol. VI, Comuni e Signorie nell’Italia settentrionale: la Lombardia (Torino: Utet, 1998), 681-786. 4 Luigi Osio, ed., Documenti diplomatici tratti dagli archivj milanesi, I (Milano: Tip. G. Bernardoni di Giovanni, 1864), 136-7; 1368 novembre 22, Milano. 5 For Gian Galeazzo’s letter and Antonio’s reply see Bernardino Corio, Storia di Milano, ed. by Anna Morisi Guerra, I (Torino, Utet 1978), 887 ss. On moral legitimacy or illegitimacy of anger for a prince see Gerd Althoff, “Ira regis. Prolegomena to the Royal Anger,” in Anger’s Past:

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The Visconti’s chancery could also switch to a different emotional register, depending on the effect desired. Let us consider the letter sent in 1428 by Filippo Maria Visconti to the emperor, who had just reported his decision to set off to Italy, after a long period of vacillation: Liberarunt me littere serenitatis vestre, quas cum debita reverentia nuper accepi, a multa expectatione et cura, in qua meus erat animus constitutus. Prestolabar enim dietim cum desiderio ea grata nova sentire, que nunc scribit vestra maiestas de suo ad has partes accessu, et exinde quidam ita letus et consolatus factus sum ut iam oblitus videar omnium malorum eventum, qui michi actenus contingerunt [sic]. Gratulor, princeps invictissime, et ultra modum exulto. Ridet animus, ridet spiritus, cum iucundam scriptionem literarum vestrarum intueor, que non solum pollicentur quod semper optavi, sed affirmant et in actu esse dicunt.6

In summing up, it is possible to argue that there are three main aspects that emerge from this quick look at the Visconti’s diplomatic records: – First, the chancery was very familiar with the emotional register. – Second, the chancery could deploy the entire scale of emotions, none excluded, depending on the occasion and relevant audience. – Third, discoursive resources became, at the turn of the f ifteenth century, richer and more subtle than in the late fourteenth century, mainly thanks to an increased prevalence of a sophisticated humanistic culture. The revival of classics offered a wider array of argumentative strategies.7 If we bear in mind these features and turn our attention to the Visconti’s communications with their subjects, we cannot help noticing the stark difference – in terms of tones, emotions displayed, categories, and constructions – between the diplomatic records and the internal correspondence. The letters addressed by the Visconti to their subjects, especially at the outset of the Signoria, in the 1330s and 1340s, were very bald and dry. There was little room for emotions.8 The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. by Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 59-74. 6 A rich collection of letters can be found in Documenti diplomatici tratti dagli archivj milanesi, II, 362 ss.; 1428 March 2, Milano. 7 See Lazzarini, “Argument and Emotion in Italian Diplomacy.” 8 Caterina Santoro, ed., Santoro dei Visconti (Milano: Giuffrè, 1976), passim.

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We must not be misled by the letter sent in 1329 to the twenty-four presidents negociorum Communis Mediolani, which is a very peculiar document that needs to be put in context. After the Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian in 1327 had ordered Galeazzo Visconti to be arrested and the commune of Milan to be taken over by an imperial vicar assisted by a council of twenty-four Milanese nobles, Azzone managed to reconcile with the emperor and to get the appointment of imperial vicar over Milan. In the letter announcing the novelty, Giovanni, Azzone, and Marco Visconti addressed the presidentes negotis Communis Mediolani as amicis carissimis (dearest friends) and appealed to the happiness that the twenty-four members were supposed to feel on the grounds of their friendship for the Visconti’s family (ad gaudium amicitiae vestrae).9 In actual fact, the joy attributed to the members of the council was wishful thinking, or someone else would say “an emotive,”10 as the council of the twenty-four represented a sector of the Milanese society which traditionally did not smile on the Visconti’s signoria (and indeed a few weeks later some of those nobles were arrested).11 From then on, the idea of friendship was no longer deployed on the subjects but was limited to foreign political players, both individuals and communities. A letter of Bernabò Visconti, bestowing a pass to Conradolo da Ponte, makes plain this point: Nos Bernabos etc. Cum mittimus Conradolum de pontem, familiarem nostrum, ad diversas partes, rogamus amicos et nostri subditis percipiendo mandamus, quatenus.12

On the one hand, the lord of Milan asks the friends (who are outside the dominion), and on the other hand he orders imperatively to his subjects. It must be noted that under Azzone (1329-39), Giovanni (1339-54), and Luchino Visconti (1339-49), not only feelings of friendship, but any other kind of emotions can hardly be gleaned from the internal correspondence. The letters are very dry, their tone imperative. The only exception is represented 9 Federica Cengarle, “La signoria di Azzone Visconti tra prassi, retorica e iconografia (13291339),” in Tecniche del potere. Regimi comunali e signorie in Italia, ed. by Massimo Vallerani (Roma: Viella, 2010), 94. 10 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: a Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 205, and also Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 17. 11 Somaini, Processi costitutivi, dinamiche politiche e strutture istituzionali, 694 ff. 12 Alfio R. Natale, “Frammenti di un registro dell’archivio signorile (Reg. di Bernabò, a. 1364),” Archivio Storico Lombardo CII (1977), 74.

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by some letters of grants, whose recipients generally represented individuals and not communities as whole, used to be addressed dilecto, dilectis (beloved). But there is nothing else.13 This is striking, not only because the Visconti’s chancery was familiar with the emotional register, but also because the lords of Milan were well aware of the importance of communication in their relations with their subjects, as it results for example from the analysis of the prologues of the city statutes, which are quite often very weighty and imbued with philosophical principles that underpin the Visconti’s power. But once again, the arguments claimed are rational and do not play on emotions.14 In actual fact, communication could also chart its way through fields different from writing: let us think of artistic representations and of architecture. And it is in this very area that traces of emotion first surface. Scholars have effectively teased out Azzone Visconti’s monumental policy, stretching from the building of new urban fortresses in the subject’s cities to the appropriation, through signs of the signorial power, of places once symbolizing the autonomy of the communes, like the walls or the city halls. Azzone’s magnificentia has been pointed out by many contemporaneous chroniclers, from Bonincontro Morigia to Pietro Azario to Galvano Fiamma. It is the last of these who suggests a key reading to interpret Azzone’s policy. As Galvano writes, “Magnificentia est pars fortitudinis.” Deeply influenced by Thomas Aquinas, Galvano Fiamma portraits magnificentia as a virtue connected with strength. As Patrick Boucheron has put it, magnificentia was intended to arouse admiration as well as fear. This is why he could forge the expression architecture d’intimidation (architecture to intimidate).15 But it is worth noticing that Azzone, as Boucheron has put it, did prefer to represent his monumental policy alongside the communal one, rather than separate them. The lords of Milan seem concerned not to make explicit the intimidating message which was embedded in their monumental policy. Let us think of Luchino Visconti, who in 1347 encircled the square of Parma with walls but decided to term the enclosed space Sta’ in pace (be at peace).16 13 Santoro, passim. 14 Federica Cengarle, “Il reato politico contro la civitas come crimine di lesa maestà in due statuti cittadini dell’età di Azzone Visconti (Como, 1335; Piacenza, 1336),” in Medioevo dei poteri. Studi di storia per Giorgio Chittolini, ed. by Maria Nadia Covini, Massimo Della Misericordia, Andrea Gamberini, and Francesco Somaini (Roma: Viella, 2012), 36-75. 15 Patrick Boucheron, Le Pouvoir de bâtir. Urbanisme et politique édilitaire à Milan (XIVe-XVe siècles) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1998). 16 Andrea Gamberini, “Il contado di fronte alla città,” in Storia di Parma, III/1, Parma medievale: poteri e istituzioni, ed. by Roberto Greci (Parma: MUP, 2010), 198. But see also Maria Nadia Covini,

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It is a very reassuring message, which covered up the underlying reason for that building. Emotions were displayed but filtered. The real turning point is represented by the signoria of Giovanni Visconti’s nephews, Bernabò (1354-85) and Galeazzo (1354-78): not only did the emotions pass from the artistic area, but to the area of internal correspondence, where they became more explicitly a device to rule. I think there are some contributory causes, starting from the tandem government of the two brothers, Galeazzo and Bernabò, with each of them carving out his own profile as a ruler so as to differ to one another. Indeed the two brothers tried out different, barely opposite, ideas of government, as shown by the ways they dispensed justice. On the one hand Galeazzo promoted himself as upholder of local customs, never pardoning in order not to overrule local laws; on the other hand Bernabò reserved the right to overrule local laws and customs, in the name of a superior idea of justice that the lord intended to embody.17 It is important to recall these aspects because some clues of the diverging ideals which drove the two brothers are also echoed in the internal correspondence and directly affect the emotional sphere. In Galeazzo II’s missives, for the first time in the Visconti’s history, a feeling of love pours out towards not just a single person but to a whole community. Likewise to the beloved (dilectis) villagers of Palestro, or to the beloved inhabitants of Bra. In both cases Galeazzo granted privileges to the communities: a new one for the former, a confirmation for the latter. (And it is telling that in this confirmation Galeazzo added the term “beloved,” which is missing in Giovanni’s first privilege).18 Of course, on the face of it, it seems an attempt to create a special relationship, maybe an emotional community, with some subjects rewarded for their loyalty, but I suggest there is another reason. During the fourteenth century, legitimacy of power was a crucial matter for the Visconti and if under Azzone – as Federica Cengarle has recently pointed out – his claims “Cittadelle, sbarramenti e compartimentazioni dello spazio urbano nell’Italia padana. La platea communis fortificata di Parma (sec. XIV-XV),” in Marquer la ville: signes, traces, empreintes du pouvoir (XII-XVI siècles), ed. by Patrick Boucheron, and Jean-Philippe Genet (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2013), 41-59. 17 Andrea Gamberini, La città assediata. Poteri e identità politiche a Reggio in età viscontea (Roma: Viella, 2003), 249 ff. Also Federica Cengarle, Il crimen lease maiestatis all’ombra del biscione. Dalle città lombarde ad una “monarchia europea”, 1335-1447 (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2013), 94 ff. As a matter of fact, since the beginning of fifteenth century, even the Specula Principum started profiling different images of the ideal prince. Angela De Benedictis, “Introduzione,” in Specula Principum, ed by Angela De Benedictis (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1999), XVII. 18 Santoro, I, 42-3 (1349 March 23, Milan); 201 (1369 June 2, Pavia); 248-9 (1373 February 9, Pavia)

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were underpinned by the ideal of politicum dominium.19 In a nutshell: sovereignty belongs to the people, who can transfer its authority to a lord. His successors shifted to the ideal of naturale dominium, whereby the lord’s power descends from God and is not bound. Of course this was a way to free the Visconti’s authority from popular election – which no longer took place: at best the signore was acclaimed, but not elected. It must be noted that this doctrine was very consequential even on emotional grounds. Despite its growth and tendency to become absolute, the lord’s power still clung on to the achievement of a major pursuit: the well-being of his subjects. This point was so crucial that the subjects who abstained from obeying the lord were thought to be delinquent. It was in this very context that love became pivotal. As for the lord, love was at one with common good, a way to highlight that he was embarking upon the well-being of his subjects. It is no accident that such displays of love are generally associated with the granting of privileges. The ducal love is something tangible, not an abstract principle. As for the subjects, their professions of love were recognition of the lord acting well and trying to establish a special relationship. As I mentioned before, the earlier steps of this new course can be detected during Galeazzo II’s government, but it was under his son Gian Galeazzo (1378-1402) that the emotional register centered on the mutual love between the lord and the subjects and this became a distinctive feature of the internal correspondence.20 In a surviving letter the nexus between the lord’s policy and his subjects’ feelings is made plain: Quoniam sacro testator eloquio, quod cui plus dimititur et ille magis diligit, idcircho ut nostrorum subditorum dilectionis fervor et amoris in nos ampius ascendatur, per quod et nos ad uberiores gratiarum impenssiones erga illos inclinemur, volumus et mandamus.21

Even more interestingly is the case of the citizens of Asti, whose conditions of submission to Gian Galeazzo are imbued with the language of love. The citizens of Asti begged Gian Galeazzo for some grants: 19 See Cengarle, Il crimen lease maiestatis all’ombra del biscione. 20 In 1378 Gian Galeazzo wrote to the Commune of Pavia: on this occasion not only were the inhabitants called “fideles nostri dilecti,” but the lord showed himself sympathetic with them. “Compatientes vestri gravibus conditionibus et angariis, quibus casibus variis emergentibus actenus pressi estis, et cupientes, sicut nobis semper cordi fuit, super gravitatibus huiusmodi vestrorum onerum spontaneo et grato animo de alienationibus providere.” Santoro, I, 310. 21 Santoro, I, 310.

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atento quod populous et universitas et comunis et civitatis Ast ex suis meritis quam maximam affectionem ad ipusm (Iohannem Galeaz) gessit et gerit quodque sibi fuerunt fideles.22

But the inhabitants of Asti were not the only ones ready to promote themselves as fond of the lord: in 1389 the citizens of Belluno proclaimed themselves zelatores status sui augmenti and Gian Galeazzo promptly retorted that he was aware of and happy about their love: de cordiali affectione dictorum civium et communitatis certi personaliterque contenti.23

We can even trace a scale of fondness. The height was reached on the occasion of the submission of two large and for a long time autonomous cities, Pisa and Siena, whose dwellers were called dilecti filii (beloved sons) by the prince.24 It is self-evident that by calling these citizens “beloved sons,” the prince forged an unparalleled relationship with them, which echoed the terms of the special pacts signed with them.25 Actually the emotional register was a double edged sword and the subjects also learned quickly how to make use of feelings to affect the ducal policy. One of the most interesting instances comes from the pleas that some cities addressed to the new duke Filippo Maria Visconti in 1412. During his brother Giovanni Maria’s government (1402-12), Milan and Como – but also other cities – had seen the dismemberment of their contadi, where many lords of castle and rural communities had gained independence.26 This is why after Filippo Maria’s rise to power these cities pleaded to the lord to restore the territorial organization which was in force tempore prefati quondam domini genitoris vestri.27 It is worth noticing that in these pleas also the memory of Giovanni Maria Visconti’s government was recalled, but 22 Ibid., I, 335. 23 Ibid., II, 90. 24 Who this way implemented the Aristotelian teaching whereby the relationship of father to children is monarchic. 25 See Sarah Favale, ‘Siena nel quadro della politica viscontea nell’Italia centrale,’ Bullettino senese di storia patria XLIII (1936): 315-82, and Pietro Silva, “Ordinamento interno e contrasti politici e sociali in Pisa sotto il dominio visconteo,” Studi Storici XXI (1913): 1-56; Gino Scaramella, “Nuove ricerche sulla dominazione viscontea in Pisa,” Bollettino della Società Pavese di Storia Patria XIV (1914): 3-29. 26 Del Tredici, “Lombardy under the Visconti and the Sforza,” 158. 27 Andrea Gamberini, Lo stato visconteo. Linguaggi politici e dinamiche costituzionali (Milano, 2005), 179.

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never in association with happiness (for the record, Filippo Maria generally granted the cities what they had claimed). So, love (or fondness) was one of the major common threads of the Visconti emotional policy since the time of Galeazzo II. But it was not the only one. Let us go back to mid-fourteenth century and focus on Galeazzo II’s brother, Bernabò. He also made use of emotions, but in a completely different way. In looking at Bernabò it can be useful to take as a starting point the many stories which circulated, especially in Tuscany. Franco Sacchetti, who was among the most famous storytellers of the time and was also a Florentine ambassador to the Visonti’s court, wrote: Questo signore ne’ suoi tempi fu ridottato da più che altro signore e comechè fusse crudele, pure nella sua crudeltà aveva gran parte di iustizia.28

As Sacchetti clearly pointed out, two main elements of Bernabò’s behavior hit the imagination of the storytellers: justice and fear, which were generally presented as being strictly interconnected. As for the former, tales limited themselves to echoing and taking up the emphasis used by Bernabò to promote himself as an upholder of justice. He had been deprived of the imperial vicariate, repeatedly excommunicated by the pope: in a nutshell the bases of his legitimacy as a signore were faltering. So it was to compensate this weakness in the eyes of his subjects that he played on his role as avenger.29 As for fear, his punishments were horrific, as they were intended to strike terror into his subjects. But – and this is the point I would like to highlight – Bernabò’s letters also reflected this feature. Not only were they extremely dry and authoritative, but they contained explicit threats. Under his predecessors the lord’s disappointment was simply expressed by the conventional words (valde miramur or admirati sumus), but Bernabò was used to writing in a more colorful and straightforward way. I could cite a number of instances. For example to induce the podestà of Cremona to comply with the lord of Milan’s will Bernabò wrote: Avisamus vos quod si de cetero non observabitis decreta et mandata nostra, faceremus vobis solvi de veteri et novo testamento.30 28 “This Lord was feared more than any other of the time.” Franco Sacchetti, Cento novelle, ed. by Raffaele Fornaciari (Firenze: Sansoni, 1907), 8 (Novella IV). 29 Gamberini, La città assediata, 249 ff. 30 Francesco Cognasso, “Ricerche per la storia dello stato visconteo, I, Lettere di Bernabò ai suoi officiali in Cremona,” Bollettino della Società Pavese di Storia Patria XXVI (1926), 178; 1381 November 26, Desio.

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The subjects also experienced Bernabò’s harshness. When some peasants dared to ask the lord not to grant some privileges to a family of local nobles, Bernabò’ chancellar retorted: “Hoc est dicere quod servus imponat legem domino suo, quod est crudele”: on the basis of this reply, the subjects are nothing more that serfs and their claims are labeled as crudelitas (cruelty), that is to say an inhuman subversion of the natural order.31 It is clear the aim that Bernabò intended to pursue by displaying such a language, but we can also try to tease out its origins. Contrary to common belief, the language of fear did not rely upon (or just upon) Bernabò’s alleged bad temper, which many chroniclers lingered on and described in detail. In actual fact it was the outcome of a way of thinking which was still widespread more than a century later, as Machiavelli testifies to. Let us think of chapter seventeen of Il Principe, where he wonders whether it is best for a prince to be feared or to be loved. In polemics with a tradition which stretches back to Cicero and Lucretius and passes through Petrarca, Machiavelli argues for the latter and cites the example of Duke Valentino.32 But quite a lot earlier, Bernabò had taken such a path, not by chance or simply following his nature, but in the wake of a very defined political ideal. Like his brother Galeazzo II, Bernabò also drew on the theory of dominium regale, but he pushed its boundaries in a different direction. In Bernabò’s view the lord’s power does not simply result from God: the lord himself is a mirror of God. Even more: somehow the lord himself is God. Let us consider Bernabò’s monument that he commissioned from Bonino da Campione, one of the most famous sculptures of the day. It portrays the lord riding a horse, but next to the animal it is possible to see, even in a smaller size, two (of the four) cardinal virtues: Justice and Might (which of course suggests fear). The two remaining virtues, Prudence and Temperance, are not represented, as they were not instrumental in conveying Bernabò’s message. So the message is very straightforward, but to fully understand it we have to put the statue in its original architectonic context. Historical sources reveal that it was placed in a church – that of San Giorgio al Palazzo (the palace of Bernabò) – and it was in a very telling position, as remarked by an anonymous French traveler: 31 See: Andrea Gamberini, “Aequalitas, fidelitas, amicitia: dibattiti sulla fiscalità nel dominio visconteo,” in The Languages of Political Society: Western Europe, 14th-17th Centuries, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, Jean-Philippe Genet, and Andrea Zorzi (Roma: Viella, 2011), 436. 32 Allan H. Gilbert, Machiavelli’s Prince and its Forerunners. The Prince as a Typical Book de Regimine Principum (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1938), 98 ff.

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Nonne in Mediolano vidi abominabole idolum super altare Dei, hominis scilicet armati imaginem, sedentis super equum de candido marmore fabricatum, et in loco ubi Corpus Christi sacratum consuevit locari vel reponi collocatum?33

So the statue occupied the place traditionally reserved for the son of God. But the analogy pursued by Bernabò goes beyond, as the very fear which Bernabò strikes into his subjects seems to echo the fear of God.34 This political language, which can be considered as a Bernabò’s hallmark, was no longer successful in the decades to follow. Although statements about fear can be found here and there in the surviving records, the dukes of Milan did prefer to take up the language of love, in the wake of Galeazzo II and Gian Galeazzo tradition. As a matter of fact as early as the death of the count of virtues, one of the most senior members of the Visconti court Carlo Malatesta, addressed to the new young duke Giovanni Maria (1402-12) a letter about the art of government, reminding him of the love he was supposed to nourish for his subjects.35 In actual fact, fondness became more and more important, especially at the time of his brother Filippo Maria (1412-47): it is no accident that in the formula used for enfeoffments, the love of the recipient was always recalled and emphasised.36 But under Filippo Maria the language of fondness was used as a tool to forge political obligations on the subjects on a new basis. In this respect an incident concerning one of the most powerful aristocratic lineages in Lombardy, the Scotti, is really telling. In the middle of the fifteenth century, at the height of a political and judicial offensive taken by the prince to deprive the Scotti from their jurisdictions, the family responded by drawing up a huge parchment cartulary in which they transcribed an accurate selection 33 I have focused on that aspect in Gamberini, La città assediata, 251. See also Graziano Alfredo Vergani, L’Arca di Bernabò Visconti al Castello Sforzesco di Milano (Milano: Credito artigiano, 2001). 34 On this belief see David Woottom, “The Fear of God in Early Modern Political Theory,” Historical Papers – Communications Historique 18/1 (1983): 56-80. The emotional register of fear can be found also in Giovanni Visconti’s epitaph (1354), but it should be noted that in that case fear spreads all over Italy and beyond (land and sky), not over the archbishop’s subjects. See Andrea Gamberini, “Orgogliosamente tiranni. I Visconti, la polemica contro i regimi dispotici e la risignificazione del termine tyrannus alla metà del Trecento,” in Tiranni e tirannide nel Trecento, ed. by Andrea Zorzi (Roma: Viella, 2013), 77-93. 35 Gino Franceschini, “L’insegnamento di Giangaleazzo Visconti e i consigli al principe di Carlo Malatesta,” Bollettino Storico Bibliografico Subalpino XXXVI (1934): 452-87. 36 See Federica Cengarle, Feudi e feudatari del duca Filippo Maria: repertorio (Milano: Unicopli, 2007).

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of documents. The aim, as we can figure that out by looking through the acts, was to confirm the bounds of the contract between the family and the Visconti that had always been maintained. The relationship was effectively originated as an arbitration, which the juridical doctrine considered as a pact. In 1337 this arbitration had defined the conditions of the cession of the city of Piacenza from the Scotti to the Visconti, providing privileges for the Scotti. However, through the years both parties had moved from the pact. The Visconti by a gradual restriction of the privileges granted to the Scotti and the latter, in particular moments of their history, by attempting to legitimize their political position in the county of Piacenza by using other languages. Sometimes they used the language of factions by presenting themselves as the chiefs of the Guelph faction of Piacenza and sometimes they used the language of the imperial authority whom they asked to sanction their power.37 This is why in the 1420s Filippo Maria, irrespective of the Scotti’s claims, repeatedly attacked their privileges, in a bid to impose heavier fiscal contributions. The matter was very delicate and the awareness that they were acting on a slippery slope prompted the Visconti’s chancery to change strategy and forge new representations of the relationship between the duke and the Scotti. In some ducal letters the linguistic register of authority, which the lords of Milan have made use of since 1330s – and which have been expressed by both command verbs (volumus, edicimus, mandamus, iubemus), and menacing expressions (statim et indillate; sub pena nostre indignationis) – started being weaved with the thread of fondness and friendship. It was a big twist, as the latter was evocative, if not of a relationship between peers, at least of more closeness. The earliest example comes from a letter sent in 1422 to the Scotti where the duke made it clear that: quam presentem numerationem quam celerius fieri facens, tanto grandius nos iuvabit cognoscere ardentem affectionem tuam solitam circa nostra beneplacita adimplenda.

Speed in paying was, according to the duke, a barometer of the fondness that he places as the basis of the relationship with the Scotti. In another letter the prince added: “Scis tu quod in necessitatibus cognoscuntur amici.” And with regard to the tax required: “nec illa unquam ex memoria nostra delebitur.”

37 Gamberini, Lo stato visconteo, 243.

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In these letters the language of patronage (above all friendship) permeates the relationship between the prince and the Scotti, giving a different image. Although it was extraordinary, the playing on love was balanced in the same letters by authoritative expressions which were to make clear the asymmetry in the relationship, the distance between that who commands and that who has to obey. A centuries-old tradition could not be abandoned overnight: hence the coexistence of two opposite linguistic registers. As a matter of fact, the swing of tones in the ducal letters lasted for a long while and friendly missives alternated with other much harsher, like the one in which the prince, after reproaching the Scotti for its negligence in paying the levy on salt, reminded them that everybody was due to pay that tax, “nullo penitus reservato, non etiam si frater aut filius nobis esset.”38 But time passed and the Scotti continued to put up a fight. It was then that the duke started making use of the language of love in a different way, to lay the foundation of their relationship on a new basis. After he reclaimed his rights to infringe upon pacts and promises, the duke recognized the Scotti’s fiscal privileges, but only by virtue of the fondness they had displayed for him: cum tamen civitas ipsa [Piacenza] postmodum a Sacro Imperio fuerit in vicariatum collata dominis maioribus nostris et illustrissimus numquam delende memorie genitor noster ducatus dignitate redimitus licet nobis, si volemus, cuiusmodi pacta et promissiones infringere et cognoscentes tale avisamentum ex quadam subtili indagatione et affectionem quas circa nostras res continue habuistis et habetis … comendamus vos…. Itaque disponimus et volumus quod immunitatem et exemptionem ipsam … integraliter observari.39

In Filippo Maria’s words the recognition of the Scotti’s privileges ends up relying only on his subjects’ love: a category which absorbs and cancels the fourteenth-century pact, but above all introduces for the prince the possibility of a constant check.

38 Archivio di Stato di Reggio Emilia, Archivi Privati, Malaspina Torello, Cartulario Scotti, f. 274 r; 1437 July 14, Milan; 1437 November 3, Milan; 1338 December 4, Abbiate. 39 Archivio di Stato di Reggio Emilia, Archivi Privati, Malaspina Torello, Cartulario Scotti, f. 173 r; 144 November 19, Cusago.

206 Andrea Gamberini

On the grounds of this survey, it seems to be possible to formulate some brief concluding remarks. Of course deploying the language of emotions was a way to affect the relationship between governors and governed, which both the players steadily made use of. But for the state, in particular, it was also an effective conveyor belt of a political message, truly fundamental in underpinning the role of the lord. If we look at how in a broader context the authorities tried to legitimize themselves, we can appreciate that there has always been a mismatch between the way the political players underpinned their powers on legal grounds, generally to justify their placement on the international stage (let us think of devices like the papal vicariate, the ducal title, etc.) and the way they used to build up their legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects, which often drew on different arguments and ideas. As for the latter, the discovery of emotions as a discoursive resource, that in the Visconti’s state can be dated around the mid-fourteenth century, represented a very fruitful and consequential thing. Frequently the scholars who have investigated the prologues of the city statutes, which the Visconti always revised, or the Visconti’s decrees, wonder who could really understand the very complicated philosophical principles that those historical records transmit. 40 It is a matter of interpretation by the audience. I suggest the display of the emotional register in written records could help not only fit the purpose of addressing a larger audience – as emotions are easily understood – but it would help us understand how the lord was able to get in touch with the gut feelings of his subjects, even when behind those emotions it is possible to identify sophisticated doctrines. Many layers of reading and interpretation were possible, but all of them conveyed the same message.

Works Cited Althoff, Gerd. “Ira regis. Prolegomena to the Royal Anger.” In Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. by Barbara H. Rosenwein), 59-74. Ithaca-London: Cornell University press, 1998. Boucheron, Patrick. Le Pouvoir de bâtir. Urbanisme et politique édilitaire à Milan (XIVe-XVe siècles). Rome: École française de Rome, 1998. Cengarle, Federica. Feudi e feudatari del duca Filippo Maria: repertorio. Milano: Unicopli, 2007. —. Il crimen lease maiestatis all’ombra del biscione. Dalle città lombarde ad una “monarchia europea,” 1335-1447. Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2013.

40 Federica Cengarle, “Le arenghe dei decreti viscontei (1330 ca. 1447): alcune considerazioni,” in Linguaggi politici nell’Italia del Rinascimento, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, and Giuseppe Petralia (Roma: Viella, 2009), 55 ff.

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—. “Il reato politico contro la civitas come crimine di lesa maestà in due statuti cittadini dell’età di Azzone Visconti (Como, 1335; Piacenza, 1336).” In Medioevo dei poteri. Studi di storia per Giorgio Chittolini, ed. by Maria Nadia Covini, Massimo Della Misericordia, Andrea Gamberini, and Francesco Somaini, 36-75. Roma: Viella, 2012. —. “La signoria di Azzone Visconti tra prassi, retorica e iconografia (1329-1339).” In Tecniche del potere. Regimi comunali e signorie in Italia, ed. by Massimo Vallerani, 89-116. Roma: Viella, 2010. —. “Le arenghe dei decreti viscontei (1330 ca. 1447): alcune considerazioni.” In Linguaggi politici nell’Italia del Rinascimento, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, and Giuseppe Petralia, 55-88. Roma: Viella, 2007 Corio, Bernardino. Storia di Milano, ed. by Aanna Morisi Guerra, 2 vols. Torino: Utet, 1978. Covini, Maria Nadia. “Cittadelle, sbarramenti e compartimentazioni dello spazio urbano nell’Italia padana. La platea communis fortificata di Parma (sec. XIV-XV).” In Marquer la ville: signes, traces, empreintes du pouvoir (XII-XVI siècles), ed. by Patrick Boucheron, and Jean-Philippe Genet, 41-59. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2013. De Benedictis, Angela, ed. Specula Principum. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1999. Del Tredici, Federico. “Lombardy under the Visconti and the Sforza.” In The Italian Renaissance State, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, and Isabella Lazzarini, 156-176. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Franceschini, Gino. “L’insegnamento di Giangaleazzo Visconti e i consigli al principe di Carlo Malatesta.” Bollettino Storico Bibliografico Subalpino XXXVI (1934): 452-87. Gamberini, Andrea. “Aequalitas, fidelitas, amicitia: dibattiti sulla fiscalità nel dominio visconteo.” In The Languages of Political Society: Western Europe, 14th-17th Centuries, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, Jean-Philippe Genet, and Andrea Zorzi, 429-60. Roma: Viella, 2011. —. “Il contado di fronte alla città.” In Storia di Parma, III/1, Parma medievale: poteri e istituzioni, ed. by Roberto Greci, 177-219. Parma: MUP, 2010. —. La città assediata. Poteri e identità politiche a Reggio in età viscontea. Roma: Viella, 2003. —. “Milan and Lombardy in the Era of the Visconti and the Sforza”, in A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Milan. The Distinctive Features of an Italian State, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, 19-45. Leiden: Brill, 2015. —. “Orgogliosamente tiranni. I Visconti, la polemica contro i regimi dispotici e la risignificazione del termine tyrannus alla metà del Trecento.” In Tiranni e tirannide nel Trecento, ed. by Andrea Zorzi, 77-93. Roma: Viella, 2013. Gentile, Marco. “Discorsi sulle fazioni, discorsi delle fazioni. ‘Parole et demonstratione partiale’ nella Lombardia del secondo Quattrocento.” In Linguaggi politici nell’Italia del Rinascimento, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, and Giuseppe Petralia, 381-408. Roma: Viella, 2007. Gilbert, Allan H. Machiavelli’s Prince and its Forerunners. The Prince as a Typical Book de Regimine Principum. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1938. Lansing, Carol. Passion and Order: restraint of grief in the medieval Italian Communes. IthacaLondon, Cornell University Press, 2008. Lazzarini, Isabella. “Argument and Emotion in Italian Diplomacy in the Early Fifteenth Century: the Case of Rinaldo degli Albizzi (Florence, 1399-1430).” In The Languages of Political Society, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, Jean-Philippe Genet, and Andrea Zorzi, 339-64. Roma: Viella, 2011. Natale, Alfio R. “Frammenti di un registro dell’archivio signorile (Reg. di Bernabò, a. 1364).” Archivio Storico Lombardo CII (1977): 35-82. Osio, Luigi, ed. Documenti diplomatici tratti dagli archivj milanesi. I. Milano: Tip. G. Bernardoni di Giovanni, 1864.

208 Andrea Gamberini Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: a Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Rosenwein, Barbara. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca-London: Cornell University press, 2006. Santoro, Caterina, ed. La politica finanziaria dei Visconti. 3 vols. Milano: Giuffrè, 1976-83. Scaramella, Gino. “Nuove ricerche sulla dominazione viscontea in Pisa” Bollettino della Società Pavese di Storia Patria XIV, (1914): 3-29. Silva, Pietro. “Ordinamento interno e contrasti politici e sociali in Pisa sotto il dominio visconteo.” Studi Storici XXI (1913): 1-56. Smail, Daniel Lord. “Hatred as a Social Institution in Late Medieval Society.” Speculum 76 (2001): 90-126. —. The Consumption of Justice. Emotions, Publicity and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423. Ithaca-London, Cornell University press, 2003. Somaini, Francesco. “Processi costitutivi, dinamiche politiche e strutture istituzionali dello stato visconteo-sforzesco.” In Storia d’Italia, gen. ed. Giuseppe Galasso, vol. VI, Comuni e Signorie nell’Italia settentrionale: la Lombardia, 681-786. Torino: Utet, 1998. Vergani, Graziano Alfredo. L’Arca di Bernabò Visconti al Castello Sforzesco di Milano. Milano: Credito artigiano, 2001. Woottom, David. “The Fear of God in Early Modern Political Theory.” Historical Papers - Communications Historique 18/1 (1983): 56-80.

11

Control of Emotions and Comforting Practices before the Scaffold in Medieval and Early Modern Italy (with Some Remarks on Lorenzetti’s Fresco)* Gennaro Ferrante

Introduction As preliminary remarks, I would find it useful to come back to the detail of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco figuring as front image of the conference for which this paper was originally written [fig. 1]. The winged woman flying just over the countryside is Securitas (“Security”), embodying the political response of Justice to the “anxiety of the Republics.”1 Such anxiety is in turn represented by Timor (“Fear”), which is put in the fresco just in front of Securitas, on the opposite side of the room. Here’s a transcription of Security’s cartiglio (“scroll”): Sença pavra ognvom franco camini elavorando semini ciascvno mentre che tal comvno manterra qvesta do(n)na i(n) signoria chel alevata arei ogni balia.2 * Since its first presentation at the 2012 Georgetown University Conference on “Emotion, Passions and Power in Renaissance Italy,” this paper has been subjected to some little textual adjustments and bibliographical updates. In one of these latter, in particular, the very recent Prosperi, Delitto e perdono, 100-101, there is a wrong reference to the present paper (already known to the author by a digital draft) as printed by another publishing house. This error is due to a misunderstanding with the author of the book. 1 See in this volume the paper of Andrea Zorzi, whom I thank along with Fabrizio Ricciardelli for inviting me to this meeting. I would like to thank also Matthew Gregory for his precious editing of the text and Sarah Fitton for her kind revision of all the translated passages quoted in the paper. 2 “Senza paura ogn’uom franco camini / e lavorando semini ciascuno, / mentre che tal comuno / manterrà questa donna in signoria, / ch’el à levata a’ rei ogni balìa” [Without fear every man may travel freely / and each may till and sow, / so long as this commune / shall maintain this lady sovereign, / for he [the commune] has stripped the wicked of all power]. For the text I follow the edition by Brugnolo, “Le iscrizioni in volgare,” 385.

210 Gennaro Ferr ante Figure 1 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Effetti del Buon Governo nel contado,1338-39, fresco, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena (detail of angel and hanged man)

The image vividly shows how the signoria (“dominion”) of this lady (the Justice) is possible: this delicate angel-shaped figure fierily exhibits on its hand a gallows with a hanged man. The essential condition that allows a citizen to walk free (ogn’uom franco camini) is that the criminal justice efficiently works. Why, however, is such the only virtue represented outside the city, in the so-called effects of good government in the countryside? I’d like to propose a little suggestion, hopefully convincing, for that. If we better take a look at the whole fresco [fig. 2], Securitas is actually not flying in the open country, but just outside the city walls. Indeed, that was the place where criminal justice usually achieved its office: a parallel look at the famous Pianta della Catena [fig. 3], for instance, shows that the scaffold for public executions was normally placed just outside the city walls, in Florence as well in Siena and in almost all the Italian cities. There is however another subtler – but not less meaningful – hint in Lorenzetti’s detail, which I think was completely ignored until now.3 By focusing a little more on the silhouette of the hanged man, we can in fact easily figure out a devil’s face in what normally seems to be a white simple dress stirred up by the wind [fig. 4]. In medieval imagery, it’s not unusual to find civil offenders surrounded or even goaded by devils, as the Leggenda of Caterina from Siena shows (emphasis mine):

3

I would like to thank Elise Wilk for helping me discover this.

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Figure 2 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Effetti del Buon Governo nel contado,1338-39, fresco, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena (entire wall)

Figure 3 Pianta della Catena, 1471-’82 (detail of Porta della Giustizia, Chiesa di Santa Maria della Croce al Tempio and scaffold)

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212 Gennaro Ferr ante Figure 4 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Effetti del Buon Governo nel contado,1338-39, fresco, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena (detail of hanged man)

[Caterina] guardando dalla finestra [coloro che andavano al patibolo], in brevissimo tempo non solamente considerò l’asprissima pena di coloro; ma ella vide grande multitudine di demoni essere intorno a loro più che mosche, che con grandissima importunità gl’inducevano a desperazione.4

Even the proximity of devilish figures to hanged persons is not a novelty: the image of Giotto’s Desperatio (“Desperation”) in the Scrovegni Chapel [fig. 5], as well as the illustrated story of Antonio Rinaldeschi [fig. 6], and 4 [Caterina, watching from the window those going to the scaffold, not only considered very quickly their terrible pain, but she saw also a big amount of devils being like flies around them and bothering them up to the desperation], Leggenda minore, 89.

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also some of the accounts reported in Gherardo Ortalli’s study on the pittura infamante (“defaming painting”)5 reveal, as now Lorenzetti’s Securitas, a very specific meaning: those condemned to death are guilty of breaking the unity and the liberty of the Commune. Their faults, as social evils, have to be considered not only capital crimes, but also deadly sins. So those guilty, as disperati (“hopeless”), have – or rather wear – a kind of demonic, for they should be totally eliminated from the civil community.6 However, the hiding of the devil’s face by Lorenzetti in the dress-folds of the hanged man seems to disclose a more peculiar sense, which draws this finding up to that – more famed – made in Assisi Giotto’s fresco by Chiara Frugoni [figs. 7, 8], and which is perhaps to be related with the presence of the positive figure of the “angel” Security and, in general, with the positive message of Buon Governo. Evil, even if subdued by the triumph of Good, appears then to be not completely “erased”: its presence still keeps threatening, this time in a hidden way, by the effects of Good.7 Trusting the specialists will give much more elaborate explications than mine, it is however more prominent to my subject to say that, beside devils and angels and other superhuman beings, at the end of the Middle Ages some other positive (human) figures appeared as witnesses of an extreme reconciliation of those offenders with God and the community: they are the members of the so-called companies of justice. Following those condemned all the way to the death, those merciful assistants tried to give an ultimate chance of redemption to the disperati, which essentially lies in an open confession of all the sins of those guilty, as well as in their readiness to die willingly, that is without any resistance to public power. Such act of reconciliation eventually joined the ritual of death execution, in order to 5 Ortalli, “... pingatur in Palatio ... ,” see part. 126-7. I am very grateful to Benedetta Chiesi, who addressed me toward this peculiar iconographic genre. The reference to Lorenzetti’s Securitas appears, along with that to Giotto’s Desperatio, in Ortalli’s book (see 108: no. 37), yet no mention of the hidden devilish face is made there (see tav. IV of the illustration section). In fact, no mention of such hint, either, seems to be made by any specialists of Lorenzetti’s work, even more recently, see Donato, “Buon governo,” 7-20, and also Donato, “Gli effetti del buon governo,” 244. However, this latter volume shows some other talking details of the relative scene (246) and of its main actors: the she-wolf statue (248), the winged woman (251), and the hanged man (253). 6 See now Prosperi, Delitto e perdono, 74 ff. 7 It must be noticed – and such remark can perhaps entail some fruitful consequences ­in the global interpretation of the scene – that the monstrous face hidden in the hanged man’s dress doesn’t really stare menacingly at the Securitas, but actually at the she-wolf statue, the symbol of the Senese commune, placed at the entry of the city gate as warranty for the criminal justice (“mentre che tal comuno / manterrà questa donna in signoria”). Thus, the devilish desperatio smouldering in the reo (“guilty”), seems to directly threat the communal institution and its stability.

214 Gennaro Ferr ante Figure 5  Giotto, Desperatio, 1306, Cappella degli Scrovegni, fresco, Padua

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Figure 6 Filippo Dolciati (attr. to), Storia di Antonio Rinaldeschi, 1502, tempera on wood, Museo Stibbert, Florence (the hanging of Rinaldeschi)

Figure 7 Giotto, Morte di san Francesco, 1295-99, fresco, Basilica superiore, Assisi (entire scene of devil’s face)

216 Gennaro Ferr ante Figure 8 Giotto, Morte di san Francesco, 1295-99, fresco, Basilica superiore, Assisi (detail of devil’s face)

better control and channel all the “emotional waves” springing out from what is commonly defined as a magnificent public drama. Nevertheless, there was still something which didn’t allow achieving a “perfect synthesis” between this ceremonial and a drama: the protagonist of a death execution is in fact someone not acting, whose body is still living, whose conscience is still working and reacting. As a “polysemous system”,8 such ritual prefigured different visual, sound and gestural effects, all of them aiming at two main targets: the body and the soul of that condemned. Both indeed appear to be a key issue for understanding how mercy and comforting practice becomes in Italy, from the mid-fourteenth century, a crucial instrument of mediating emotions in public executions.

The body factor Comforting practice started to dawn between fourteenth and fifteenth century, in relation with new forms of mercy, as well as with the rediscovery of the body, since physical pain started to gain a positive function of 8

Zorzi, “Le esecuzioni delle condanne a morte,” 16.

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redemption. Such practice, aiming for the care and salvation of the soul of those sentenced to death, becomes then complementary to the repressive power of justice, which aimed instead for the bodily pain of those condemned.9 In particular in Italy, from the late fourteenth century, several huge Christian associative movements started to dawn, often involving baseborn laypeople in collective practices of body disciplining and in different works of mercy. The Florence comforting company, for instance, raised in the mid-fourteenth century, was probably inspired, as well as that of Bologna, to the movement of the Disciplinati.10 For those adopting a gospel-like way of life, stories like that of John the Baptist or Jesus were directly mirrored in the sentenced to death’s experience. Then, their passion appeared exemplary among the iconographic themes of the tavolette (“small wooden board”), a sort of portable painted square panels showed by comforters to the condemned during his last night, and kept close to his face all along the walk to the scaffold. Such process of sympathy between the comforter and that sentenced is already evident in the fifteenth-century Bolognese Manuale della Conforteria di Santa Maria della Morte, the oldest document of its genre, recently edited by Alfredo Troiano.11 In these instructions for the confreres, the dialectic between body and soul appears from the opening words addressed to the sentenced man, who is always called, by the way, “fratello mio.”12 This sympathetic attitude was increasingly codified along the centuries in formularies expressly prepared for the work of confreres: evidence of that is the Florentine Instruzione Generale del modo che deve tenere ogni fratello nell’atto del confortare (seventeenth century) of Confraternity of San Giovanni Battista, also known as Company of Santa Maria della Croce al Tempio or Compagnia de’ Neri.13 Here’s the first instruction (emphasis mine):

9 Ibid., 53. 10 On the history of the Bologna Confraternity, see at least Fanti, “La Confraternita di S. Maria della Morte.” On Florence, see Fineschi, “La rappresentazione della morte.” On the sources of the Florentine company and on a statistic treatment of death executions in Florence, see the important work of Luttazzi Gregori, “La “morte confortata.” An exhaustive bibliography about the comforting companies of these and other Italian cities is in Prosperi, “Morire volentieri,” 54-70. An accurate historical synthesis of the comforting companies in Italian Quattrocento is now in Prosperi, Delitto e perdono, 125-53. 11 Troiano, “Il manuale quattrocentesco.” I am very grateful to the author for his extreme generosity and availability in providing materials and bibliographical references. 12 Troiano, “Il manuale quattrocentesco,” 369. 13 BNCFi, II I 138, ff. 167 r-175 r. The hand of manuscript is much more recent (eighteeth century), but internal evidences brings back the composition of the text to the seventeenth century.

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Primieramente, subito che il confortatore anderà dall’afflitto, chiamandolo con il nome proprio, o con quello di fratello afflitto, lo saluterà dicendogli: “Il Signore Iddio sia con voi,” o altre simili parole, e dolendosi dello stato in cui si trova si sforzerà o mansueto o ostinato che ha di trattar con esso con tutta la carità e docilità e di acquistarsi la confidenza del medesimo, tanto con le parole, quanto con l’opere, fino ad abbracciarlo se bisognerà, ed anco baciargli le mani ed i piedi in darli a dimostrare che, quanto si dice e si fa, il tutto è senza alcuno interesse o propria passione, ma solo per carità e zelo dell’anima sua.14

Such process of identification with the suffering body of that condemned is not a negligible fact, if we think that until very late in Italy, as well as in other European countries, not only the public authorities, but also the majority of people were reluctant to consider the man condemned to death otherwise than an infected and accursed body.15 In addition to that, the period of dawning of such comforters’ companies was also, according to Kathleen Falvey, a period when vernacular religious plays flourished throughout Italy, with plays of Christ’s Passion and of saints’ martyrdoms becoming common in the very areas where the confraternal comforting of prisoners was established and well known.16

Of great importance are also some accounts of those heretics who were very close to the evangelic movements, like the anonymous Storia di Fra’ Michele Minorita (1389), in which the trial and the following execution of this friar is told like a profane Passion, while his walk to the stake is portrayed as a Florentine via Crucis.17 The sacrifice of Christ and the role 14 [First of all, as soon as the comforter joins the suffering man, he will greet him by calling him by his name or by that of “afflicted brother,” and saying to him: “The Lord be with you,” or other words like that. Then, he will have pity on his condition and try to deal with him – regardless if he is obedient or obstinate – as gently and sweetly as possible; moreover, he will gain his confidence both with words and actions, in so far as he will hug him, when needed, and also kiss his hands and feet, so to show him that he’s speaking and acting selflessly and serenely, and only for his soul’s sake], BNCFi, II I 138, f. 178 r. Such instruction is now also reported by Prosperi, Delitto e perdono, 157, to illustrate the “function” of comforting the people sentenced to death. 15 See Zorzi, “Le esecuzioni delle condanne a morte,” passim; Fineschi, “La rappresentazione della morte,” 809. 16 Falvey, “Scaffold and Stage,” 13. 17 Anonimo Trecentista, Storia di fra Michele.

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of body and blood in the redemption of those sentenced are also crucial in the famous letter of Caterina da Siena to Raimondo di Capua (1375), in which the mystic reports how she comforted one sentenced to beheading from the night before the execution until the scaffold.18 There we find all the crucial steps of comforting practice: the visit during the last night, in which the comforter prepares the condemned man to the confession and assures him her assistance until his end: Andai a visitare colui che vui sapete: onde egli ricevette tanto conforto e consolazione, che si confessò, e disposesi molto bene. E fecemisi promettere per l’amore di Dio che, quando venisse il tempo della giustizia, io fussi con lui. E così promisi e feci.19

A second visit before the calling at execution, in which the comforter administers the sacrament, prepares the condemned “to die well” and tries to relieve his sudden anguish with consoling acts and words: Poi, la mattina innanzi la campana, andai a lui; e ricevette grande consolazione. Menailo a udire la messa; e ricevette la santa comunione, la quale mai più aveva ricevuta. Era quella volontà accordata e sottoposta alla volontà di Dio; e solo v’era rimasto uno timore di non essere forte in su quello punto. Ma la smisurata e affocata bontà di Dio lo ingannò, creandoli tanto affetto e amore nel desiderio di Dio, che non sapeva stare senza lui, dicendo: “Stà meco e non mi abandonare, e così non starò altro che bene, e muoio contento.”20

18 Le lettere di S. Caterina, 871-5 (E CCLXXIII). I must thank Nicole Bériou for first suggesting this impressive reference. The English translation is that provided by Vida Scudder in her Saint Catherine of Siena, 236-41. 19 [I went to visit him whom you know: whence he received such comfort and consolation that he confessed, and prepared himself very well. Then he made me promise by the love of God that when the time of the sentence should come, I would be with him. So I promised, and did], Le lettere di S. Caterina, 873. 20 [Then in the morning, before the bell rang, I went to him: and he received great consolation. I led him to hear Mass, and he received the Holy Communion, which he had never before received. His will was accorded and submitted to the will of God; and only one fear was left, that of not being strong at that moment. But the measureless and glowing goodness of God deceived him, creating in him such affection and love in the desire of God that he did not know how to abide without Him, and said: “Stay with me, and do not abandon me. So it shall not be otherwise than well with me. And I die content”], Le lettere di S. Caterina.

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Lastly, the comforting acts before the scaffold, with orations: Aspettailo dunque al luogo della giustitia, e aspettai ivi, con continua orazione e presenza di Maria e di Caterina vergine e martire,21

physical proximity to the body of that sentenced, and further soothing words: io gli distesi el collo, e chinàmi giù e ramentàli el sangue dell’agnello: la bocca sua non diceva, se non “Gesù” e “Caterina,”, e così dicendo ricevetti el capo nelle mani mie, fermando l’occhio nella divina bontà, dicendo: Io voglio!22

Nevertheless, in Caterina’s words and acts, despite any apparent analogies with the lay practice, there is something strongly distorting and even disrupting the official idea of comforting practice. As Kathleen Falvey remarked: It is quite clear what Caterina wanted: her own martyrdom.... She desired to imitate the martyr, to accompany Niccolò in his bloody passage, or to take his place so that she too could assume the iconographic epithet cephalophorus.23

This uncontrollable desire seems actually to have very little to do with the peace-making role of comforting companies. Caterina’s acts appear very revolutionary and risky if compared with the rigid restraints to which comforters were subject: they essentially lie in inducing that condemned to consider and appreciate his own bloodshed as a sacrifice rejoining him to God. Indeed, in one of her mystic rapture, she gets excited in so far as showing him all her desire of martyrdom: E teneva il capo suo in sul petto mio. Io allora sentiva uno giubilo e un odore del sangue suo; e non era senza l’odore del mio, il quale io desidero di spandere per lo dolce sposo Gesù. E crescendo il desiderio nell’anima 21 [I waited for him then at the place of justice; and waited there with constant prayer, in the presence of Mary and of Catherine, Virgin and martyr], Le lettere di S. Caterina, 874. 22 [I stretched out his neck; and bowed me down, and recalled to him the Blood of the Lamb. His lips said naught save “Jesus!” and “Catherine!”, and so saying, I received his head in my hands, closing my eyes in the Divine Goodness, and saying, “I will!”], Le lettere di S. Caterina. 23 Falvey, “Scaffold and Stage,” 24.

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mia, e sentendo il timore suo, dissi: “Confòrtati, fratello mio dolce; perocchè tosto giungeremo alle nozze. Tu v’anderai bagnato nel sangue dolce del Figliuolo di Dio, col dolce nome di Gesù, il quale non voglio che t’esca mai dalla memoria. E io t’aspetto al luogo della Giustizia.”24

At the place of justice, just before the condemned man arrives, Caterina showed again her mystic anxiety by getting down and stretching her own neck on the block, spurred on by the strong desire to be executed: Prima che giugnessi elli, io mi posi giù, e distesi il collo in sul ceppo: ma non mi venne fatto che io avessi pieno l’affetto di me.25

In fact, her staying very close to the head of the man sentenced, as well as her keeping his head during the beheading, is clearly disruptive for the strict rituals of comforters. The end of the account confirms all the “destabilising” features of Caterina’s comforting attitudes. As in a gory orgy, the mystic from Siena enjoys being filled by the blood of that sentenced and totally smelling it: Riposto che fu, l’anima mia si riposò in pace e in quiete, in tanto odore di sangue, che io non potevo sostenere di levarmi il sangue, che mi era venuto addosso, di lui.26

How should an “official” comforting practice be then? Actually, the more visible the emotions of a comforter are, the more risky the success of comforting practice turns out to be. In the Instruzione universale per la Compagnia de’ Neri in occasione d’esecuzione di condannato a morte, held in the same manuscript of the 24 [Therefore, he held his head upon my breast. I heard then the rejoicing, and breathed the fragrance of his blood; and it was not without the fragrance of mine, which I desire to shed for the sweet Bridegroom Jesus. So, as the desire was waxing in my soul by feeling his fear, I said: “Comfort thee, sweet my brother; since we shall soon arrive at the Wedding Feast. Thou shalt go there bathed in the sweet Blood of the Son of God, with the sweet Name of Jesus, which I will never to leave thy memory. And I await thee at the place of justice”], Le lettere di S. Caterina, 873 25 [However, just before he came, I prostrated me, and stretched my neck upon the block; but my desire did not come there, for I had too full consciousness of myself], Le lettere di S. Caterina, 874. 26 [Once his body put back, my soul rested in peace and in quiet, in so great fragrance of blood that I could not bear to remove the blood which had fallen on me from him], Le lettere di S. Caterina, 875.

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above mentioned Instruzione generale,27 there’s a special paragraph on the confreres behaviour during a sentence of beheading. This document testifies as well a century-long codified conduct of comforters about the sentenced to death’s body. There we see their mercy working in silence or at the most in whispers, using discreet acts and gesture (their movements for hiding the axe of executioner to the condemned) and adopting tools which should preserve both the confreres (the hats covering their faces) and the victim (the painted wooden boards and the blindfold) from showing any perturbing emotions: Taglio della testa. Quando doverà tagliarsi la testa ... salita che sarà la compagnia su il Pratello dell’esecuzione, i primi fratelli dopo le torcie, tanti quanti bastino, anderanno intorno alla mannaia, e stando in piedi useranno ogni maniera di coprirla, acciò arrivato su il detto Pratello l’afflitto et andando come se ad inginocchiarsi in faccia al tabernacolo del detto Pratello non la veda, e gli altri andaranno ad inginocchiarsi al solito. Quando il carnefice haverà bendato l’afflitto allora i fratelli che saranno stati attorno la detta mannaia anderanno al loro luogho, et i confortatori, messi in mezzo l’afflitto lo seguiteranno al patibolo, tenendogli la tavoletta alla faccia, e giuntivi s’inginochieranno con esso e ritirando la detta tavoletta dalla di lui faccia seguiteranno a confortarlo, et allora il carnefice farà mettere all’afflitto la testa sotto la mannaia.28

Unlike Caterina’s extreme proximity to the body of that condemned during that supreme act, comforters shall step back to allow “justice” achieving its function in the best possible way: il confortatore ch’ haverà la tavoletta terrà questa vicino alla terra davanti alla testa del detto afflitto, dalla parte esteriore della detta mannaia, con fargli fare quegl’atti di pietà e dire quell’orazioni iaculatorie che stimerà 27 BNCFi, II I 138, ff. 167 r-175 r. 28 [Beheading. During a beheading ... after the company has been reached the Pratello (“little field”) of the execution, the brothers coming soon after those holding the torches will encircle the axe, and by standing up they will make every effort to hide it, so the afflicted man coming on the Pratello can’t see it, while he’s kneeling down in front of the tabernacle of the Pratello. The rest of the company will kneel down too, as is customary. After the executioner has blindfolded the afflicted man, then the brothers standing around the axe will come back to their place, and comforters will put the afflicted man amongst themselves and follow him to the scaffold, by keeping the board in front of his face. Once at the scaffold, they will kneel down with him, and while pulling back the board from his face they will keep comforting him, and then the executioner will make the afflicted man put his head under the axe], BNCFi, II I 138, f. 175 v.

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convenevoli sin’ a che il Carnefice non si prepara a tagliare la corda del ceppo, et allora il detto confortatore si scosterà con la persona et con la tavoletta dicendo in modo che l’afflitto possa sentire: In manus tuas Domine commendo spiritum meum, e lascierà ch’el carnefice eseguisca il suo ofizio. Rescissa che sarà la testa dal suo busto, il confortatore ch’ haverà la tavoletta prenderà quella con tutt’e due le mani per le guance di essa rivoltata in su, e la porrà nel cataletto già preparato, dove nello stesso tempo quattro altri fratelli eletti a portar detto cataletto prenderanno due dalle braccia e due dai piedi il cadavere e lo metteranno in detto cataletto, e coperto al solito partirà con esso la detta Compagnia dal detto Pratello et anderà nella detta Chiesa del Tempio, recitando i soliti suffragii.29

As shown, the foremost aim of comforters was to mediate all the possible emotions springing out from the public ceremonial of death sentence and not to exalt them, as the crowd, the mystics and even the confessors were inclined to do. The extreme prudence by which they handled comforting practice was firstly an effect of human mercy. On the other hand, it represented also an act of compliance with the official power allowing them to perform in a situation, which could become at any moment emotionally disrupting and socially destabilising.

The “soul” factor According to Adriano Prosperi: in these conversations between the comforters and that condemned, one word echoed more loudly than the others: grace. It is an ambiguous word with a double meaning: grace on earth and the grace of eternal life came 29 [The comforter holding the board, will keep it close to the ground, in front of the afflicted man’s face, staying outward said axe, and he will let that condemned do the merciful acts and prayers he deems appropriate, until the executioner will be ready to cut the rope of the stum. Then, the comforter, still holding the board, will move over and say so that the afflicted man can hear: In manus tuas Domine commendo spiritum meum; afterwards, he will let the executioner accomplish his task. Once the head is cut off from his neck, the comforter holding the board will take it by the cheeks with both the hands, and keeping it pointed upwards, he will put it on the pre-prepared stretcher. Four other brothers, who were intended to carry the stretcher, will take the body, two by the arms and two by the legs, will put it on the said stretcher and cover it, as is tradition. Then the stretcher will leave along with the company of men from said Pratello, and they will go in the “Church of the Temple,” accompanied by the usual prayers], BNCFi, II I 138, ff. 175 v-176 r.

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face to face... Divine grace in exchange for accepting public condemnation: this is the paradoxical argument that comforters ... advanced ever more determinedly in their work of counselling and conversion at the beginning of the modern age.30

Therefore, while on the one hand comforters claim their work of mercy before the secular judge in order to hope for a pardon, on the other hand, as devoted people, they address God, the supreme judge, for he eventually gives those guilty eternal grace. Such tension between mercy and justice, both secular and divine, brings back another legendary exemplum concerning Caterina from Siena, whose miraculous effects of devotion were very widespread at that time. The account is about an old Senese unrepentant sinner at the deathbed. After hearing of his total reluctance to confess, Caterina engages in an obstinate debate with God in order to obtain pardon for him. Firstly, God, like a merciless judge in a secular trial, lists all his sins (which were by the way also charges liable to a death sentence): Le iniquità di costui per lo quale tu mi prieghi sono tante che sono venute in cielo dinanzi da me; però che egli è giocatore, bastemmiatore di Dio e de’ santi, et in tutto è ostinato nel male. E per mio dispetto e dispregio arse una tavola nella quale era la figura mia, e quella della mia Madre, con tante altre sua iniquità, che la mia giustizia nol può nè vuole più sopportare. Unde cosa degnissima è che sia condennato allo eterno fuoco; e però figliuola non merita che tu più t’impacci de’ fatti suoi.31

Such is God’s prosecution: all the charges he enumerates are so evident and terrible that no way of mercy seems to be possible. Yet this is, in turn, the pleading of Caterina, whose obstinate devotion and powerful sense of mercy remind of those of comforters: E quando il Signore allegava la divina giustizia, la vergine prudentissima rispondeva: “Grazioso Signore mio, io non sono venuta nel tuo sacratissimo 30 Prosperi, “Consolation or Condemnation,” 100. 31 [The sins of this man, whose sake you are praying for, are so many, that they reached the Heaven and came before me: he is a gambler, a blasphemer of God and saints, he is obstinate in evil. In spite of me, he burned a wooden board portraying me, and another one portraying my Mother, and he did so many other enormities, which my justice cannot and does not want to bear anymore. Therefore, he deserves more than ever to be condemned to eternal fire. At the same time, my daughter, he doesn’t deserve that you are anymore interested in his issues], Leggenda minore, 89.

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conspetto per disputare con la tua giustizia; ma per dimandarti misericordia per questo mio fratello. Io so che la tua misericordia, della quale è pieno el cielo e la terra, è maggiore che l’altre tue operazioni. A te è propio di fare misericordia. Tu per la bontà tua mi promettesti ch’io sarei cagione della salute di molte anime, e però da’ tuoi santi piei non mi partirò mai, se prima non fai misericordia a questo mio carissimo fratello.” Queste e molte altre cose allegava questa prudentissima vergine. Et in effetto questa piatosa disputazione bastò tutta la notte infino all’aurora. Infine la misericordia vénse la giustizia.32

Caterina’s wilfulness, as well as her arguments before the supreme judge, was probably well retained by the workers of mercy during their practice.33 However, such disputatio of mercy and justice entailed further judicial and theological questions of crucial importance, namely the relationship between crime and sin and the trust in a second life (and so even in a second death, much more frightening than the first), which became all along the Middle Ages a matter of a fraught controversy between public and religious authorities: should an earthly outlaw be definitely a heavenly outlaw? Prosperi, among the others, has very well outlined how crime and sin, otherwise theologically and legally well separated, were in history often confused or identified, and how public executors looked at this identity as the only way to warrant the strength of their authority and the total control over their subjects. That is why in many countries (e.g., Germany, France, and England) public power was mostly reluctant in granting the sacraments to those sentenced to death: it indeed planned a total dissolution of his body, as the “hanged, drawn and quartered,” the “four-horses dismemberment” and the public anatomy rituals clearly show.34 Neither torture nor any type of capital punishment, on the other hand, could really inflict on the sentenced-to-death mind a more intimate anguish than the fear of a second 32 [Then while the Lord produced arguments of divine justice, the wise maiden answered: “Gracious Lord, I didn’t came in your holy presence to argue with your justice, but to demand your mercy for this brother of mine. I know that your mercy fills up Heaven and Hearth, and that it is bigger than any other of your exploits is. It is to you being merciful. You promised me, by your goodness, that through me many souls would be saved: so I will not take leave, until you will have mercy of my dearest brother. Such and many other words were said by this wisest maiden. Indeed, the debate went on all the night long, until dawn. Lastly, mercy prevailed over justice”], Leggenda minore, 90. 33 I am very pleased to see that, after my brief analysis, Prosperi, Delitto e castigo,104-12, has also highlighted the importance of Caterina’s model in inspiring and strengthening the “function” of comforting those sentenced to death (see in part. 110). 34 Prosperi, “Morire volentieri,” passim.

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death. Such fear created a kind of pervading desperation for those going to the scaffold, exponentially increased by the glare of almost always hostile onlookers they had to endure on their march towards death. This is the crucial moment in which comforting practice becomes necessary, both for those condemned and for a successful conclusion of such spectacle of terror. Some studies on the libri dei giustiziati of Ferrara company have already showed, for instance, how desperation and obstinacy of those condemned could sometimes rip the subtle emotional veil impending before the scaffold by transforming the rigid ceremonial of execution into a tragic escalation of emotion and violence.35 My examination of documents concerning the Florentine comforting company has confirmed those case studies as well as the confreres’ aim at easing as much as possible the spiritual pains of the condemned person and his tendency to desperation. The twenty-four articles of the above mentioned Instruzione Generale represent a well-settled exposition of how a comforter can envisage and possibly face the potential subversive desperation and affliction of a person facing the death sentence. For instance, article two essentially recommends passivity to and tolerance of any kind of emotional outburst of that condemned and discourages any form of severity (emphasis mine here and after): Cercherà di mostrare al reo ogni più tenera compassione per la di lui disgrazia e gli approverà li suoi lamenti e lagrime, e mai l’insulterà o braverà o tratterà male di parole o di fatti, se non quando esso fusse del tutto ostinato e non vi fusse altro rimedio che lo strapazzo ed il rigore, nel qual caso ognuno sarà tenuto a darne parte ai suoi superiori per far ciò che sarà stimato più giovevole all’anima del paziente, come sotto si dirà al n.° 11.36

In addition to that, article four shows for example how any attempt of the condemned at carrying his desperation against God or the comforter shall be tolerated and appeased: Se esso darà in smanie e in scandescenze e anche di bestemmie ed imprecazioni, lo lascerà da principio alquanto sfogare senza parlare, e 35 Prosperi, “Mediatori di emozioni”; Mazzi, Gente a cui si fa notte. 36 [The comforter will try to show to the guilty the tenderest sympathy for his adversity and will approve his laments and tears; he will never insult him, nor challenge him, nor abuse him with words or actions, unless he is completely obstinate and there is no other remedy but mistreatment and severity. In such case, everyone will be bound to inform his superiors, so to decide what will be more fruitful for his soul’s sake, as said below at no. eleven], BNCFi, II I 138, f. 178 r.

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subito che esso sarà punto quieto, con carità ed a poco a poco li farà conoscere l’errore ed il grave peccato in cui è incorso collo strapazzare il nome di Dio e de’ santi, e senza mostrare ira verso di lui, lo correggerà suavemente, mostrandoli avere il Sign.re Iddio permesso con ciò salvare l’anima sua, e se trattasse male il confortatore con parole ingiuriose, o in altro modo, non lo corregga in altra forma che con ringraziarlo per l’occasione che gli dà di poter soffrire simili strapazzi a gloria d’Iddio od in salute dell’anima sua.37

Controlling emotions of a man sentenced to death needs an endless patience. Comforters shall be aware that conversion or preparation of a good death may be achievable only step by step. Hence the high frequency of adverbs, like a poco a poco (“little by little”) in this kind of manuals (art. eight): O sia convertito o ostinato, procurino tutti i modi di andare incontro particolarmente a quella passione che più dominerà il povero afflitto, o sia di vendetta, o di disperazione, di amore verso i figlioli, moglie e parenti, d’avversione all’infamia o altra, e con tutta carità cerchi mitigargliela a poco a poco con quelle ragioni e modi che gli detterà la propria perizia, e non bastandoli l’animo di ottenere il suo intento, chiamerà altri fratelli più pratichi, acciò tra tutti lo riduchino all’intiera quiete.38

Any radical obstinacy of the condemned is considered as a devil’s temptation, and it must be treated as an illness needing increasingly effective remedies, like prayers and lauds (art. nine): 37 [If the guilty man shows some agitation and flies into a rage by cursing and swearing, the comforter will firstly let him unload for a while without talking; then, once he’s calm again, he will make him know, gently and little by little, his faults and the sin which he succumbed to by mistreating the names of God and of the saints; and without showing any anger against him, he will redress him sweetly, by explaining to him that the Lord has so allowed him to save his soul. In the event that he mistreats the comforter with offending words or in some other way, the comforter shall redress him in no other way but by thanking him for the opportunity he gave him to bear such mistreatments for God’s glory and for his soul’s sake], BNCFi, II I 138, ff. 178 r-v. 38 [Whether is that guilty converted or not obstinate, comforters shall make every effort to consider that passion particularly prevailing in the poor afflicted man, whether is revenge, desperation, the love for his children, wife, or parents, the repulsion of the infamy, nor any other passion; the comforter will thus try any kindness to mitigate it little by little, with the reasons and ways which are considered most suitable by his experience. If courage is not enough, then he will call other more skilled brothers, who can bring him back to complete calmness], BNCFi, II I 138, f. 179 r.

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Lo stesso faranno, se scopriranno avere il medesimo gran tentazione diabolica, alla quale rimedieranno con palesargli l’astuzia del demonio ed il fine che ha con esso, e con farli fare espressamente atti contrari alla detta tentazione, insieme con qualche orazione alla SS. Vergine, a S. Giovanni Battista, al suo angiolo custode, ed ad altri santi sua devoti.39

Otherwise, converting efforts may come to more serious remedies, like the calling of company’s Governor or even the using of harsher words (art. eleven): Se poi il reo non volesse confessarsi o stesse ostinato nella sua perversità, o generale o particolare, allora il servo, richiesto da’ confortatori, avviserà di ciò il Provveditore, che lo partecipi al Governatore, il quale ... userà ogni maniera ed ogni atto di carità per rimovere detti ostacoli; e non bastando questo chiameranno altri fratelli de’ più pratichi, che facciano lo stesso, cercando principalmente di torre al reo ogni speranza di vita, con dirli che deve morire, o beato se si converte, o dannato se nega di farlo. 40

On the other hand, they may even resort to some aspects of theatrical acting, so to emotionally strike that condemned (art. eleven): Dettoli questo i confortatori lo lasceranno in silenzio senza dirgli alcuna cosa, e dopo qualche tempo, all’improvviso, gli presenteranno d’avanti agl’occhi qualche santa imagine di Giesù appassionato, e con tutta pietà lo persuaderanno a corrispondere alle divine chiamate, con minacciarlo che quel sangue che scaturisce da quelle piaghe per la sua salute, servirà tra poco tempo ad accendere maggiormente il fuoco della sua dannazione. Gli faranno anco vedere all’improvviso qualche teschio di morto, insinuandogli come doverà essere esso tra poche ore. Potranno anche portarli esempi di 39 [They will do the same, in the case that they find the guilty man possessed by a strong temptation of the Devil: then, they will remedy this by showing him Devil’s guile and purpose, and make him perform acts which are contrary to temptation, along with some prayers to the Holy Virgin, to St. John the Baptist, to his guardian angel, and to other various saints to whom he is devoted], BNCFi, II I 138, f. 179 v. 40 [If the guilty man would not confess his sins, or was obstinate in his wickedness, in general or in particular, then the servant, called by the comforters, will apprise the Supervisor of that. In turn, the supervisor will inform the Governor, who ... will use any possible way and act to remove such obstacles; if it’s not enough yet, then they will call the most experienced brothers, who will do the same, especially by trying to take any hope of being alive away from him. Furthermore, they will say to him that he has to die, blessed if he converts, or not damned if he is reluctant], BNCFi, II I 138, f. 179 v.

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re, di regine, e di altri signori grandi che, condennati a morire per mano di Boia, vi si sono preparati con quiete e rassegnazione, riconoscendo il tutto dalla mano di Iddio, e che esso che è un vile, un plebeo, un infame abbia a recalcitrare contro la Giustizia divina et umana, con altre cose che concludano l’argumento. 41

Before the most tenacious man, eventually, the work of comforters may even come to the point of a collective insulting and an out-loud condemnation of his obstinacy (art. eleven): Et se tutto ciò non giovasse allora et in tal caso doveranno i confortatori usare i rigori, cominciando dalle cattive parole, chiamandolo peccatore ostinato, traditore dell’anima sua, ingrato a Dio ed al suo sangue, figlio del demonio, anima dannata, vano, scelerato, e nell’istesso tempo lo lasceranno tutti, con dichiararsi di lasciarlo in mano del demonio e al Carnefice, che prontamente lo strangolerà e manderallo all’inferno da esso voluto e meritato. 42

Therefore, every single act or speech by the comforters is strictly controlled and carefully measured, in relation with the situation and with the occurring needs. Comforters don’t have to exceed in their practice (art. nineteen): Non doveranno i confortatori esser prolissi e confusi nel parlare, ma doveranno parlare uno per volta, e con pausa uno dall’altro, e doveranno lasciare stare il reo con quiete bene spesso, e aspettare alle volte che esso introduca il discorso, e con moderazione risponderli, particolarmente se 41 [Having said that, comforters will leave him in silence, without saying a word; then, after a while, they will suddenly show some images of Jesus’ Passion before his eyes, and with all the possible mercy they will persuade him to return the divine calls by warning him that Jesus’ blood, originally springing from the sores to save him, could rapidly turn out lighting up the fire of his damnation. Moreover, they will suddenly show him some skulls, suggesting to him how he will be in few hours. Then, they may adduce some examples of kings, queens and other great lords who faced their death sentence with calm and resignation, by acknowledging that God wanted it, and that only cowards, plebeians, and villains baulk against divine and human Justice. Then, they will end such arguments with other similar words], BNCFi, II I 138, ff. 179 v-180 r. 42 [If that would not be sufficient, then comforters will be allowed to use some rigours, by starting with harsher words and calling him obstinate sinner, traitor of his soul, ungrateful to God and to his blood, son of the Devil, damned soul, demented, heel; at the same time, everybody will leave him alone, by saying they will leave him to the Devil and to the executioner, who will promptly strangle him and send him to Hell, which he really wanted and deserved], BNCFi, II I 138, f. 180 r.

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esso sarà ridotto e contrito, nel qual caso potranno anco lasciarlo dormire e riposare alquanto, e svegliato che sia potranno farli fare qualche atto di virtù, ma breve ed efficace. 43

Neither shall they avoid any movement quickening the step to the scaffold of that sentenced (art. twenty): Si guarderà ogni confortatore e fratello di fare o dire cosa che possa accelerare anche per momenti la morte al paziente, siccome di tirare, toccare, sollevare, e sollecitare il reo in caso che non potesse o non volesse andare avanti, ma solo con le parole in tal caso l’esorterà a rassegnarsi nella volontà di Dio e de suoi superiori, colla virtù dell’obbedienza, e suggerire a quanto da essi è stato risoluto col prendere tal gastigo volentieri in sconto de’ suoi peccati, o con altre simili e generali parole. E dato il caso che per la strada o altrove, purché questo non segua sulla forca, il reo inciampasse o cadesse o venisse meno per qualche deliquio, allora i confortatori potranno aiutarlo, reggerlo e soccorrerlo, particolarmente quando ciò non potesse comodamente farsi dal servo o altri assistenti, e questo per non mancare a quella cristiana carità, che ci comanda che facciamo bene e difendiamo dal male, patendo il nostro prossimo. 44

As a matter of fact, these practical suggestions helped comforters to achieve their aim more easily, by converting the suffering person (afflitto) and preparing him to eventually die well and wholeheartedly. 43 [When talking, comforters must not mumble and be imprecise, but shall talk one at a time, with pauses between one another; moreover, they shall leave the guilty man in quiet very often, waiting until he starts speaking, so they can sparingly answer to him, especially if he is well redressed and penitent. In that case, they may let him sleep and rest for a while, and when he’s awake, the may let him do some virtuous observances, but only if they are short and efficient], BNCFi, II I 138, f. 181 r. 44 [Every comforter and brother will avoid doing or say anything can hasten, even for an instant, the death of the suffering man, such as pulling, touching, lifting, and stressing the guilty man in case he couldn’t or wouldn’t go on; in that case, he will exhort him, by words only, to resign himself to God’s will and to his superiors by the virtue of obedience; also, he will suggest to him how his superiors accept to determine such punishment in reduction of his sins, and other similar and general words. And in the event that the guilty man would stumble, fall, or even swoon in the street or somewhere else but at the gallows, then comforters can help him, hold him up, and assist him, especially when this operation is not easy to be done by the servant or any other assistant: so, they will do it in order to not lack that Christian charity, which orders us to do right and to defend ourselves from evil, by sympathizing with our neighbour], BNCFi, II I 138, f. 181 r-v.

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A codicologic survey on the execution registers of Florence comforting company As well as for those cases of obstinacy at the point of death, several cases of “good death” were also considered exemplary by comforters and showed as historical evidence of both the necessity of confession and the efficacy of the company’s practice. Such a use of these cases is proven by the peculiar manuscript tradition of execution registers held by comforting companies. An overview of the huge corpus of manuscripts concerning the Florentine company (more than thirty items) has showed that its registers of executed people can be divided in two main types:45 – a type α, that is an extended version, going from 1420 to 1745 (or 1752), reporting 1958 executed persons; – a type ß, that is a reduced version, often going back to the mid-fourteenth century and finishing as well around the mid-eighteenth century, and reporting about three hundred executed persons. 46 Now type α is represented, along with some others, by the most important manuscripts for the history of the company, namely the BTMi, 207 (sixteenth century) and the already mentioned BNCFi II I 138 (eighteenth century), which also gather other essential documents for the company. On the other hand, type ß is represented by the remaining tradition, uniquely formed by recent manuscripts (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). My hypothesis is that type ß is a selection of type α originally made by comforters for practical purposes, and then diffused for devotional and historical interests. The aim was probably to create a case record for internal use, by selecting entries which were relevant both for the history of the company and for comforting practice. The diffusion of this selection in the eighteenth century is due to devotional purposes and to an increasingly widespread interest in crime news in history, as we can see in the case of 45 Here is the list of the manuscripts directly examined: BNCFi, mss. II 71; II I 138; II III 502; II IV 157; II IV 327; II IV 377; II VI 59; Capponi 207; Capponi 305; Cappugi, 170; Cappugi 272; Cappugi 428; Magliab., VII 859; Magliab. VIII 43; Magliab. XXV 42; Magliab. XXV 159; Magliab. XXV 418; Palatino, 454; Passerini, 55; Passerini, 55 bis; BMFi, mss. Moreni 13; Moreni 58; Palagi 174; BTMi, ms. 207. For the remaining Florentine mss., see Luttazzi Gregori, “La ‘morte confortata,’” 35: no. 31. Should be added to them now the two registers published by Fabbri, E fece buona morte, which are very similar to those held in the Biblioteca Moreniana. 46 A similar distinction Adriano Prosperi noticed for Ferrara and Bologna registers, as I can see in his recent “Statistiche criminali,”508 ff. I am very grateful to the author for allowing me to read it before its issue date.

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Cesare Beccaria, who made use of the registers of the Milan comforting company to begin his consideration of the death penalty. The evidence of this hypothesis lies in the fact that in the two most important manuscripts of type α, those entries appearing also in type ß are either highlighted by the use of maniculae (BTMi, 207), or underlined (BNCFi II I 138). That means that the selection was originally made from the extended list of those manuscripts. I can’t yet definitely say whether the Florentine ms. is a direct copy of that Milanese. However, the Trivulziano codex figures to be the most ancient of the manuscript tradition and probably the original register of the company after the Arno’s flood in 1557 badly damaged the ancient one. What are, then, the selection criteria? There are cases exemplary both for history of the comforting company and the comforters’ work. In some type ß registers, sometimes the record of executions starts long before the origin of the company: that reveals the comforters’ aim at falsely predating the very beginning of their work, in order to give more prestige to their company. In some other type ß manuscripts, the first entry is that of Delfo (or Dolfo) di Antonio “che batteva la bambagia.” He is actually the first executed person (23 October 1423) who was comforted by the company after this latter was reformed (from that date comforters started to wear the traditional black copes and hats): 1423 Dolfo d’Antonio che batteva la bambagia del popolo di san Piero. Fu dicapitato pel podestà addì 14 ottobre, et sepolto in san Piero detto. Costui fu il primo ch’ hebbe e47 battuti cioè e nostri con le veste nere, et furono dieci. 48

Another interesting entry for the history of the company dates from 1531. From that year, executions were made in a new place, which is just outside Porta alla Croce (currently Piazza Beccaria), and not anymore outside Porta al Tempio (currently Piazza Piave). The entry also reports the change of the way (“le cerche”) from the Bargello until to the scaffold: 47 The ‹e› form, here and in the following transcription, refers to the masculine plural determinative article. 48 [Dolfo d’Antonio, cotton wool beater of the neighbourhood of St. Peter. He was beheaded by the authority the 14th of October, and buried in the said St. Peter. This man was the first one to have the battuti (“flagellant”) with him, that is our people with black cloaks, and they were ten], BT 207, f. 103 v.

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1531 Giuliano di ... dal Ponte Arignano; Domenicho di Gostanzo del Perugino, detto Mencho. Addì primo di dicembre furono inpicchati al luogo della Iustitia nuovamente ordinato, cioè fuori di Firenze, tra la Porta a’ Pinti e la Porta alla Croce, alle Torre a’ tre Conti, et furono e primi che morirno in detto luogo. Feciono le cerche, le quali a farsi si cominciorono al contrario, cioè da’ Lioni, dal Sale in piazza, et per Vacchereccia in Merchato nuovo et vecchio al Canto alla Paglia, lungho e fondamenti di Santa Maria del Fiore, et po’ al Canto de’ Pazzi, et per il Borgho degl’Albizi, sino al luogo della Iustitia, nuovamente da gl’ Otto di Guardia et Balia, et furono sepolti a Santo Ambrogio. 49

Some other cases were selected in order to build a reference book for comforting practice and to better manage what Prosperi has called “the politics of emotions’.50 In those cases the selection focuses, among different type of crimes, mainly on those subversive of economic, social, political and religious order: servants killing their masters; lower class people killing nobles; falsifiers of coins and of credit letters; heretics (e.g., Giovanni di Cane da Montecatini or Savonarola); executions “per stato or per tradimento.” In addition to that, some other figures and accounts lend themselves to building hagiographical profiles: Turks and Jews converting before the scaffold; cases of people who, after surviving to the execution, were executed again some days later for recidivism; cases of executed persons with a strong presumption of innocence; cases of “revolution” of the ceremonial of death sentence; lastly, natural or prodigious events occurring in conjunction with the execution. To conclude, this huge corpus of historical passions, gathered throughout the centuries by devoted hands of different companies’ members, became essential for building a reference book in which selected cases were easily transformed into moral and hagiographical exempla, so that companies could better handle that subtle politics of emotion, which 49 [Giuliano of ... from Ponte Arignano; Domenico di Costanzo del Perugino, said Mencho. On the first of December, they were hanged at the place of Justice recently allocated, that is outside Florence, between Porta Pinti and Porta alla Croce, at the Torri ai tre Conti. They were the first to die in this place. They did the cerche (“circle”), but on the contrary way, that is starting from the Lioni, from the Sale in piazza, passing through Vacchereccia at Mercato nuovo and vecchio to the Canto alla Paglia, along the foundations of Santa Maria del Fiore, and then to Canto de’ Pazzi, and through the Borgo degli Albizi until the place of Justice, and then back to the Otto di Guardia e Balia, and they were buried in St. Ambrogio], BT 207, f. 140 r. 50 Prosperi, “Statistiche criminali,” 501.

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they were born for. On the other hand, the same sober historicity of those documents became increasingly interesting for some careful readers like Cesare Beccaria, who “could contemplate in that way the violent side of his city, and eventually read what can be called ‘the anti-history’ of his country.”51

Bibliography Manuscripts Firenze, Biblioteca Moreniana (BMFi in the text and footnotes) – Moreni 13. – Moreni 58. – Palagi 174. Firenze, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (BNCFi in the text and footnotes) – II 71. – II I 138. – II III 502. – II IV 157. – II IV 327. – II IV 377. – II VI 59. – Capponi 207. – Capponi 305. – Cappugi, 170. – Cappugi 272. – Cappugi 428. – Magliabechi, VII 859. – Magliabechi, VIII 43. – Magliabechi, XXV 42. – Magliabechi, XXV 159. – Magliabechi, XXV 418. – Palatino, 454. – Passerini, 55. – Passerini, 55bis. 51 Ibid., 512. On the importance of the registers of comforting companies for Beccaria’s considerations on death penalty, see now also Prosperi, Delitto e perdono, 19-32.

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Milano, Biblioteca Trivulziana (BTMi in the text and footnotes) – 207.

Printed works Trecentista, Anonimo. Storia di fra Michele minorita, ed. by Francesco Flora (Florence: Le Monnier, 1946). Brugnolo, Furio. “Le iscrizioni in volgare: testo e commento.” In Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Il Buon Governo, ed. by Enrico Castelnuovo, 381-91. Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Castelnuovo, Enrico, ed. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Il Buon Governo. Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Donato, Maria Monica. “Buon governo: una lettura.” Accademia dei Rozzi, 23 (2005): 7-20. —. “Gli effetti del buon governo in campagna.” In Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Il Buon Governo, ed. by Enrico Castelnuovo, XX-XX. Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Fabbri, Carlo. E fece buona morte. Memorie sui condannati alla pena capitale in Firenze in due “libri neri” inediti del Settecento. San Giovanni Valdarno: Aska, 2004. Falvey, Kathleen. “Scaffold and Stage.” In The Art of Executing Well, 13-30. Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2008. Fanti, Mario. “La Confraternita di S. Maria della Morte e la Conforteria dei condannati a Morte in Bologna nei secoli XIV e XV.” In M.F., Confraternite e città a Bologna nel Medioevo e nell’età moderna, 61-173. Rome: Herder, 2001. Already in Quaderni del centro di ricerca di studio sul movimento dei disciplinati, 20 (1978): 3-101. Fineschi, Filippo. “La rappresentazione della morte sul patibolo nella liturgia fiorentina della congregazione dei Neri.” Archivio storico italiano, 150 (1992): 805-46. Gregori, Elsa Luttazzi. “La ‘morte confortata’ nella Toscana dell’età moderna (XV-XVIII secolo).” In Criminalità e società in età moderna, ed. by Luigi Berlinguer, and Francesco Colao, La Leopoldina, vol. 12, 25-91. Milan: Giuffré, 1991. Grottanelli, Francesco, ed. Leggenda minore di s. Caterina da Siena e lettere dei suoi discepoli. Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1868. Mazzi, Maria Serena. “Gente a cui si fa notte innanzi sera”: esecuzioni capitali e potere nella Ferrara estense. Rome: Viella, 2003. Ortalli, Gherardo. “... pingatur in Palatio...” La pittura infamante nei secoli XIII-XVI. Rome: Jouvence, 1979. Prosperi, Adriano. “Consolation or Condemnation: Debates on Withholding Sacraments.” In The Art of Executing Well, ed. by Nicholas Therpstra, 98-117. Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2008. —. Delitto e perdono. La pena di morte nell’orizzonte mentale dell’Europa cristiana, XIV-XVIII secolo. Torino: Einaudi, 2013. —, ed. “Mediatori di emozioni. La compagnia ferrarese di giustizia e l’uso delle immagini.” In L’impresa di Alfonso II. Saggi e documenti sulla produzione artistica a Ferrara nel secondo Cinquecento, ed. by Jadranka Bentini, and Luigi Spezzaferro, 279-92. Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987. —. “Morire volentieri: condannati a morte e sacramenti.” In Misericordie. Conversioni sotto il patibolo tra Medioevo ed età moderna, ed. by Adriano Prosperi, 3-70. Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007. —. “Statistiche criminali italiane di antico regime.” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, s.V, 3/2 (2011): 497-525.

236 Gennaro Ferr ante Scudder Vida, Dutton, trans. and ed. Saint Catherine of Siena as Seen in Her Letters. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1911. Therpstra, Nicholas, ed. The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy. Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2008. Troiano, Alfredo. “Il manuale quattrocentesco della Conforteria di Bologna. Il ms. Morgan 188 della Pierpont Morgan Library (New York).” In Misericordie. Conversioni sotto il patibolo tra Medioevo ed età moderna, ed. by Adriano Prosperi, 347-479. Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007. Zorzi, Andrea. “Le esecuzioni delle condanne a morte a Firenze nel Tardo Medioevo tra repressione penale e cerimoniale pubblico.” In Simbolo e realtà della vita urbana nel tardo Medioevo. Atti del V Convegno storico italo-canadese, Viterbo 11-15 maggio 1988, ed. by Massimo Miglio and Giuseppe Lombardi, 153-253 [1-99 in separately paginated offprint, from which I quote]. Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1993.

12 “Bene Comune e Benessere” The Affective Economy of Communal Life Stephen J. Milner In seeking to understand and account for the emotional landscape of the medieval and Renaissance Italian communes one is faced with a range of problems that confront any writer seeking to capture something as omnipresent and yet ephemeral as everyday feeling. For the historian, the problem of the ephemeral nature of emotions and feelings is compounded by the additional loss that is consequent on the passage of time. Relatively recently an increasing body of critical work has turned its attention to the interrogation of the world of experience rather than the interpretation of symbolic forms. In sociology and human geography, the emergence of the field of so-called “nonrepresentational theory” and the publication of a number of studies that examine and analyze the aesthetics of presence has seen an attempt to foreground “being” rather than “meaning” in the description of affects rather than the reading of texts, privileging phenomenology over hermeneutics.1 One consequence of this approach has been to describe presence as a form of transcendental experience that escapes social and cultural mediation and is immune to time and space in an almost mystical manner. Areas as diverse as medieval metaphysics and modern day neuroesthetics are invoked to prove the thesis.2 Yet the fact remains, that however much such critical approaches seek to distance themselves from the realms of social and cultural analysis in arguing for an unmediated transcendental aesthetic, emotions, and “the felt immediacy of sensual experience” are unavoidably socially mediated and culturally specific.3 To a medieval and Renaissance readership versed in faculty psychology and the basics of moral philosophy, such a disaggregation of mind and body was unimaginable. In fact the current return to the senses and the so-called “affective turn” in cultural theory can be read as little 1 Although a relatively recent development, the questions were earlier posed by Sontag, Against Interpretation. See Gumbrecht, Production of Presence; Thrift, Non-Representational Theory. The standard indication that a critical approach has crystallized is the production of readers. See The Affect Theory Reader; The Affective Turn; Empire of the Senses; and Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader. 2 See for example, Gumbrecht, Production, 21-49 and Freedberg and Gallese, “Motion.” 3 See the excellent critique in Wolff, “After Cultural Theory.”

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more than the reestablishment of the premodern link between cognition and sensation, a return to the long held assertion of the interdependence of psychology and physiology in the reading of human behavior. This link was trenchantly refuted by Cartesian mind-body dualism with its exclusive investment in reason as the only means whereby universal truths could be established. Descartes’ assertion that rational enquiry properly executed left no space for doubt was premised on the belief that emotions and the senses were so contingent and susceptible to deception as to require removal from consideration, the mantra “Cogito ergo sum” describing perfectly the exile of feelings from the search for truth about being. 4 In many ways Cartesian method shared much in common with the scholastic method as carried out in the medieval classroom which privileged logical and dialectical argumentation in the analysis of set questions which sought to resolve philosophical and theological contradictions in the search for universal truths. In what follows, however, I want to argue that in communal Italy emotion was always socially and culturally mediated and that sophisticated technologies existed for the management of the emotional economy of the self-determining urban centres of the peninsula. The Aristotelian assertion that man was fundamentally a social animal whose being was most fully realised through civic association took philosophy from the classroom and placed it in the contingent, particular and social realm of the street.5 For medieval Aristotelianism, as mediated through his commentators from Avicenna, Averroes, and Thomas Aquinas, furnished a sophisticated but coherent psychological, physiological and ethical interpretative framework that sought to make sense of the “self in society” whilst acknowledging the susceptibility of the self to external stimulus.6 This framework conditioned how contemporaries read the world and sought to make sense of human interaction, from Dante to Machiavelli. Whilst feelings themselves might not be recuperable, the social and cultural discourses, or what Foucault termed “technologies,” that were deployed to both elicit and suppress, or manage them, are recoverable and allow us to imagine an historical space, or landscape, within which they circulated.7 What we can do, therefore, is examine the marketplace within 4 See Rozemond, Descarte’s Dualism, and Descartes, Passions of the Soul. 5 Gentili, L’uomo; Kessler, “The Transformation of Aristotelianism,” 137-47 and the sections on Aristotle and natural philosophy, philosophy of mind and action, ethics and politics in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. 6 An excellent summary of Aristotle’s writing on physics and psychology is in Boyde, Perception and Passion in Dante’s “Comedy,” 11-58 and 173-92. 7 See Technologies of the Self.

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which emotional capital circulated and the media that sought to condition emotional investment. Understood in these terms, emotion is seen as an effect of circulation, the product of encounter and interaction rather than something possessed or internalised. As will become clear, this mutual relation between the psychic and social foregrounds the mediated nature of all emotion and allows us to explain the accumulation of affective value within the civic sphere.8 The writing of a fuller history of the “embodied” self through a turn to the senses pays attention to the function of all the senses in the sensorium, presenting the self as a porous and sensate body that impinges, and is impinged upon, by the world in the accumulation of experience. As it moves through space and time, such a self is radically contingent as it is called into being through its bodily motility and sensitivity to different environments and encounters as a self in community.9 Aristotelian physics was wholly concerned with understanding the nature of change and movement in bodies, what were termed “corpora mobilia”; his psychological writings, specifically De anima, with the animation of these bodies through the life giving force of being: as Dante put it in Convivio citing Aristotle: “vivere è l’essere de li viventi.”10 The faculties of the soul were what furnished the “motus” or engine of movement. As Aristotle states, “the essence of life consists in the power to initiate self-change.”11 The psychological was linked to the moral/ethical, Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, in so far as the moral was a branch of practical knowledge that drew together the fruits of experience in order to guide individuals down the correct path in particular situations. Within the field of late medieval and Renaissance psychology there was a broad consensus, referred to by Park as an Aristotelian koine, concerning the understanding of the faculties of the soul as anima: that which animates and gives life force to living things.12 The tripartite division of the soul into vegetative, sensitive and intellective parts saw the sensitive, or organic, soul host the motive faculties of movement and appetite as well as the ten perceptual faculties which were in turn divided into the internal and external senses. Whilst the internal senses enabled the perception of 8 See Ahmed, “Affective Economies.” 9 See for example Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity; and Sennett, Together. 10 See Boyde, Perception and Passion, 11-12 and 32-33. Alighieri, Convivio, 304, IV, 7, 11. This is Dante’s translation of Aristotle, De anima, II 4, 415b 13: “vivere autem viventibus esse est.” 11 Cited by Boyde, Perception and Passion, 33 translating Aristotle, De anima, II, 1, 412a 15: “Propria autem ratio vitae est ex hoc, quod aliquid est natum movere seipsum, large accipiendo motum.” 12 Park, “The Organic Soul,” 464-84.

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absent sense objects through cogitation, memory (sense image), fantasy, imagination, and common sense, the external senses of vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch enabled the body to perceive present sense objects. Similarly, whilst the progressive faculties produced physical movement, the appetitive faculties produced emotion. Common sense was located in the frontal lobe of the brain and drew together the sense data from the individual senses to form a composite impression “imago” in a process referred to as “apprehension.”13 Sense experience was stored in sensitive memory which conditioned what was sought and avoided in terms of pleasure and pain as those feelings were literally “re-cognised,” brought back to the front of the mind, or as image “re-presented,” in order to compare with the current situation to determine action. Passion, therefore, was the “feeling aroused by ‘apprehension’ leading to either ‘pursuit’ or ‘flight’ (consecutio or fuga).”14 Consequently passion was understood as the realisation of appetite, that which put it into movement or activated it either away from or towards a good or an evil. The bridge between the soul and body, and the source of all movement, was provided by spiritus, a vapor which was produced from blood and spread through the body by the arteries and nerves. Passion, therefore, effected a bodily change (transmutatio corporalis) which involved expansion or contraction, warming or cooling, drying or moistening which then caused the muscular movements which animated the limbs.15 The disposition of the four body fluids (“humors”) – blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm – were also held to condition character type and predisposition to certain emotions and moods in keeping with Galenic temperament theory.16 Overall the kind of faculty psychology outlined furnished premodern philosophers and commentators with an explanatory system through which to make sense of human behavior prior to the advent of the social sciences. Particular, contingent, and socialized, such a self sought to understand the nature of its being less through abstract philosophical speculation than as a freestanding instrumental philosopher who was repeatedly called upon to make his/her own judgments within a demanding and unstable social world which offered a mass of advice on self-management when faced by a multiplicity of possible scenarios. Whilst animals and man shared a sensitive soul, what differentiated humans from beasts in 13 Boyde, Perception and Passion, 49-50. 14 Boyde, Perception and Passion, 52. 15 Boyde, Perception and Passion, 53-4. 16 Harvey, The Inward Wits.

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reaching judgments was the possession of an intellective soul composed of the faculties of intellect, will, and memory (conceptual). As such man was not only a self-moving body, or corpus seipsum movens, but also had potential as a self-governing body, a corpus seipsum dirigens, to read situations and make decisions on account of his intelligence. Human decision making, therefore, was informed by reasoning understood as intelligence from intus and leggere “to read between or beneath the surface” and hence “under-stand.”17 The human ability to comprehend as well as apprehend is the difference between the faculties of the intellective and sensitive soul, and the space in which human will, the ability to choose and exercise judgment, resides. The practical intellect’s ability to make judgments, therefore, describes a process of psychic deliberation in which it finds possible solutions (inventio), weighs up the advantages and disadvantages of a particular course of action (deliberatio or concilio) prior to reaching a decision (giudizio) in the mind’s own court of arbitration.18 Only then does wilful action occur. The sheer number of schools of moral philosophy in the Renaissance with their varying advice on how to order one’s life can therefore be read as an index of the heterogeneity of ends in a contingent world, offering different pathways to the self-governing body depending upon conditioning circumstance rather than proposing universal rules which transcend the particularities of place and time as was the case in the identification of an a priori “summum bonum”. The different positions assumed, Stoic honesty and self preservation, Epicurean pleasure, Augustinian self-sacrifice, and so on, depended on the prejudices of specific teachers, their forms of argumentation conditioned by the particularity of the circumstance in which their audience found themselves.19 Similarly, the guidance found in late medieval and Renaissance medical texts and commentaries, such as the Latin pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum and the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum, placed the care of the self squarely with the decision-making individual in their holistic approach to physical and mental health.20 Of the six non-naturals over which individuals had agency – environment, diet, exercise, rest, balance of humors, and emotions – it was the final category which contained advice concerning 17 Boyde, Perception and Passion, 175-6. 18 Ibid., 182-5. 19 See Kessler, “The Method of Moral Philosophy”; Zak, Petrarch’s Humanism. 20 See Mikkeli, Hygiene, 1-68, Rather, “The ‘Six Things Non-Natural’”; Niebyl, “The NonNaturals,” and the useful discussion in Jackson, “A History of Melancholia,” 443-60.

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the regulation of joy, anger, fear, and distress as part of a regime for the effective management of everyday life.21 The communal experience of late medieval and Renaissance Italy, therefore, offers an inviting context when beginning to think around the dynamic relation between social life and affective life, between action and emotion, being and feeling, within a civic environment.22 According to historical anthropologists of the Italian communes, doubt, uncertainty, and anxiety were the defining characteristics of a civic experience vitiated by an awareness of the mutability of fortune, themes that still exercise contemporary commentators on urban experience.23 As face-to-face societies which were highly socialized, the sophistication of their institutional, economic, and political infrastructure was complimented by an equally complex web of overlapping associational bonds to the point where they have even been characterized as suffering from “an excess of intimacy and community.”24 If we add to the mix the increasing levels of lay participation and literacy, increased social mobility through the loosening of both feudal ties and the formal structures which had traditionally policed social hierarchies, a broadening of the social distribution of wealth, and the increase in intercommunal and dynastic rivalry, we are describing a social world in which the consequences of contiguity were as contestatory as they were consensual, and where the forces which drew some people together simultaneously differentiated them from others.25 It was this social world which caused those caught up in its vagaries to advise, celebrate, and lament, as well as chronicle and reflect, on what it meant to live communally, to be a social being. As testaments to their engagement in civic life, the texts they produced looked both backwards as judgments of the events they experienced and forwards as guidebooks to navigating the uncertainties which lay ahead, a dynamic reflected in the plethora of “speculum” texts which sought to convert accumulated experience into prudent action; in the innumerable 21 The parallels between the classical and medieval six non-naturals and a 2008 report by the New Economics Foundation entitled “Five Ways to Well Being” are striking. Drawing on data collected by the UK government’s “Foresight Project on Mental Capital and Wellbeing” the five imperatives for wellbeing are: Connect, Be Active, Take Notice, Keep Learning, Give. See http:// www.neweconomics.org/projects/entry/five-ways-to-well-being 22 See the collection of essays in La ricerca del benessere individuale e sociale.. 23 See Marris, The Politics of Uncertainty; and Judith Butler, Precarious Life. 24 Weissman, “The Importance,” 271. See also Trexler, “Honor Among Thieves,” 317-34. 25 For a suggestive attempt at recreating the experience of moving through the everyday in the medieval Italian city, albeit without the theory, see Frugoni, A Day in a Medieval City.

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chronicles which recounted events of note; and in the many notebooks and zibaldoni into which the free-literates of the lay communes pressed the flowers of learning in their bespoke arrangements of so-called florilegia.26 Prime position amongst the technologies for the management of affect in the communal realm was the art of rhetoric understood as the art of persuasion, from per-suadere to strongly urge or induce. Rhetoric put the specificity of situation, the contingency of action, back into the frame as it uses emotions to affect judgment. In this respect the psychic deliberations undertaken in making judgments were directly linked to the external factors that conditioned such decision-making processes. Learning how to move people was an art that could be taught, a skill with a definite premium and value, and a techne that saw a particular revival in late medieval and Renaissance Italy. The combination of the Aristotelian concern with instrumental philosophy that stressed the importance of reasoning and speaking, ratio and oratio, with the related revival of the performative civic oratory of Ciceronianism placed the emotions at the heart, as well as at the soul, of social life and the everyday experience of communal living.27 Significantly, it also configured rhetoric as a medium through which bodies and wills could be moved, and as such as the go-between in the continual dialogue between the senses and the intellect, desire and reason, appetite and will. Given that rhetoric alone embraced “the undeniable reality and vitality of the irrational,” it was key that the orator secured an “understanding of the economy of man’s emotional system and the functioning of the volitional generation of virtues and vices, of values and habits.”28 It was this belief in the instrumental capacity of rhetoric to engage the senses, to move individuals and communities that led Brunetto Latini (ca. 1220-94), ideologue of the communal polity, to assert that although rhetoric was subordinate to politics it constituted its most valuable part.29 As the handmaiden to ethical discourse, it delivered right reason concerning the obligations and duties of the good citizen in persuasive form, stressing the virtue of action over the attainment of knowledge, the primacy of the good over the identification of the true. Unlike logical and dialectical argumentation, rhetorical argumentation and invention were far more suited to the contingent world of communal political and social life. Whilst the former method deployed demonstrative syllogism to prove the truth-value of its principles, the 26 See the essays in Il codice miscellaneo; and Miglio, “L’altra metà della scrittura.” 27 On the Ciceronian tradition see the essays in The Rhetoric of Cicero. 28 Kessler, “The Method,” 120 29 Carmody, Li livres dou Tresor, 317.

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latter had recourse to the more contingent enthymeme which was based on premises that were probable rather than definite and relied more heavily on induction rather than deduction in seeking to persuade its audience. Where the former mode of reasoning was speculative and abstract, rhetorical argumentation was applied and situated, taking on cases in which the outcome was always in doubt.30 It was rhetoric’s appeal to the governing powers of the intellect and will, and supported by the embedding of those beliefs within conceptual memory, that saw man exercise his rational powers. But to get there required the appeal to the sensitive soul and the channelling of its desires and appetites. Unlike logic and dialectic which solely concerned themselves with rational argumentation, rhetoric called on the irrational forces of emotion to move the will, requiring the orator to possess a level of emotional intelligence if he was to carry the hearts, as well as the minds, of his audience. To understand the instrumentality of rhetoric, therefore, required an account of the susceptibility of the self to persuasion, to being moved, as rhetoric’s potency was dependant on its ability to engage with the senses and emotions. Just as psychological writings broadly shared a common frame of reference, the same can be claimed for rhetorical precept literature. In terms of winning over an audience this was achieved by means of educating, entertaining, and moving: docere, delectare, and movere. Whilst the first appealed to the intellect (rational soul), the other two were achieved by appealing to the emotions (the sensitive soul). The intellectual form of persuasion was largely carried out in the narratio and argumentatio; persuasion through delectatio or conciliatio was achieved by establishing an empathy with the audience in the exordium, through the use of humor, and through the power of a speaker’s personal charisma or ethos; and persuasion through the moving of an audience by the use of pathos, in Latin affectus, which is a form of emotional shock which seeks to draw the audience to the speaker’s side and is especially effective in the conclusion, or peroratio, of any speech when, as Quintilian puts it, “all the floodgates of the emotions can be opened.”31 So let us now turn to the relation of rhetoric to the emplaced subject. Although knowledge of, and familiarity with, the rhetorical works of Cicero (including the Ad Herennium), Quintilian and Aristotle varied in 30 See Milner, “A War of Words”; Nauta, “Lorenzo Valla,” vol. II, 417-42; and Kessler, “The Method,”115-18 31 See Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, 112-9 and 153-60.

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time and place, they all shared a similar frame of reference and the Italian communes proved eager consumers of their classical rhetorical theory. To briefly rehearse the situated nature of rhetoric as an art of persuasion within specific civic contexts, we can return to the sort of divisions and subdivisions already seen in relation to psychology and the faculties of the soul. The three genres of rhetoric, the judicial, deliberative, and demonstrative were situated respectively in the law courts, communal assemblies, and public fora. All three were controversial in as much as they involved the judgment of the issue under discussion: guilty or not guilty; to do or not to do; to praise or to blame. In terms of audiences, judicial rhetoric sought to persuade a judge or jury, deliberative rhetoric the members of a political assembly, and demonstrative rhetoric the general audience. Success depended upon the ability to marshal the strongest arguments but also deliver them in a manner that secured the empathy of the audience with one’s position. Bartolomeo Cavalcanti (1503-62) in Book four of his oft-reprinted Della Retorica entitled “De gli affetti” amplified Aristotle’s discussion of the place of emotion in rhetorical instruction noting: Queste passioni sono senza alcun dubbio potentissime, et acconciamente usate, maravigliosi effetti producono: perche si come gli argomenti il consentimento dell’intelletto efficacemente cercano; cosi le passioni l’ubbidienza dell’appetito violentemente si procacciano.32

Similarly, Orazio Toscanella (ca. 1510-80) also drew on Aristotle’s Rhetoric in his 1569 diagrammatic exposition of rhetorical precepts Armonia di tutti principali retori et migliori scrittori degli antichi e nostri tempi, laying out the eleven “affects” and listing the mental disposition which gives rise to them, the persons to whom they are directed and the reasons for their arousal.33 In the case of anger, ira, for example, Toscanella lists four conditions which predispose men to anger, eighteen classes of people who elicit anger, and eighteen occasions which give rise to anger (figure 1). Significantly, the vast majority are concerned with honor and respect for social station. Through understanding the nature and causes of emotion in specific contexts and by appealing to both the intellectual and emotional faculties of the audience, the speaker was better able to win over or secure advantage for his specific position or case, what was known as the utilitas causae or “party interest.”34 32 See La Retorica di Messer Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, 175-248 (175). 33 Toscanella, Armonia, c. E2. 34 See Lausberg, Handbook, 34.

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The structural DNA of rhetoric was therefore fundamentally controversial and partial. It requires the taking of sides. In this respect the agonistic social world of the communes was homologous with the agonistic classical rhetorical paradigm that was revived in Italy during the communal period. The optimistic assumption in much writing is that the application of reason to probabilistic argumentation will lead to a consensus concerning the best course of action to take. But the reality is that rhetoric, as a system for the marshalling of emotion as well as reason in the pursuit of victory for one’s side, parte or causa, revealed its amoral status as a language art which was ethically neutral. For it was equally equipped to stigmatize, abject, and exclude opposing views, those “not of the same persuasion” as we say in English.35 The Rhetorica ad Herennium in particular taught the means for pursuing security (securitas) or utility (profitability/interest) (tutum or utile) over virtue or honor (honestum).36 Aristotle was even more direct in his Rhetoric: the political orator’s primary consideration in offering council was to commend the useful and warn against the harmful. Whether a course of action was just or unjust, honorable or dishonorable was the primary concern of forensic and demonstrative rhetoric but not deliberative rhetoric. Machiavelli’s mantra to a prince to hold on to his power, “mantenere lo stato,” even at the cost of injustice and dishonor drives wholly out of this tradition.37 Even the exchange of invectives between the Florentine and Milanese Chanceries that formed the bedrock of Baron’s thesis concerning civic humanism is premised upon the use of controversial demonstrative rhetoric of praise and blame in which Florentine civic values are lauded, especially in Bruni’s Laudatio, whilst the Visconti are characterized as rapacious serpents.38 Both the classical rhetorical tradition and contemporary cultural theory, therefore, work on the basis that identities are generated as much by saying what you are not as by saying what you are. The identification and abjection of the threatening “other” simply serves to strengthen the bonds of association and adherence amongst one’s fellow citizens (and by extension one’s family members, social groupings, neighbors, and personal communities).39 This is why hate can be read as a manifestation of love. 40 Rhetoric was therefore a key medium through which emotional communities were created and sustained by the repeated statement of values that 35 See Milner, Exile, 162-91. 36 Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium, 161-3, III, ii, 3. 37 See Cox, “Machiavelli,” 1109-41. 38 The polemic is implicit in the subtitle of the study: Baron, The Crisis. 39 See the essays collected in Identity and Difference; and Identity. Community, Culture. 40 Ahmed, Affective Economies, 119-24.

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accumulated emotional capital through ritual “re-presentation” in a form of cognitive rebooting. 41 The more you presented, the easier it was for the audience to “re-cognise” what was being presented and make use of it in their decision making. The repeated imprinting of concepts into the wax of the intellectual and sensitive memory ensured audiences “got a good impression” and were guided in terms of what to pursue and what to avoid. The same dynamic underlay the techniques and practices of the mendicant preachers. 42 After all, the passion of Christ was a narrative episode that only “made sense” when contemplated empathetically and staged in such a way that the narrative was broken up into specific moments, stations, which focused attention on the changed physical and emotional state of the suffering redeemer. The bene comune, was one another object of contemplation that required repeated representation in communities where individuals were required to make so many decisions. 43 As the least immediate but most important obligation, all media were mobilized to impress upon the people the importance of considering the good of the community ahead of their own particular, more localized interests (utile). In the affective economy of the communes the sole purpose of demonstrative rhetoric was the accumulation of emotional interest and its investment in a concept as abstract as the commonwealth. 44 Foremost in the attempts to regulate and contain the appetites and passions of these hyper-communal communities, therefore, was the articulation and propagation of a distinct civic ethic. 45 As Trexler outlined in typically pithy fashion in relation to Florence, the commune was characterized by an enduring tension between the ethical ideal of sacrifice, both in classical and Christian terms and the mercantile principle of contract. 46 I take this to mean the irreconcilability of the moral imperative to give away, to let go, in an exchange economy that was regulated through legally binding acts drawn up to facilitate accumulation, to store up. Expressed in terms of emotional capital, this relationship can be presented as the tension between caritas understood as the giving of 41 On the application of this process to medieval meditative communities see Carruthers, The Craft of Thought. 42 See Milner, “Rhetorics of Transcendence,” 235-51, De Matteis, La “teologia politica comunale,” 84-94. 43 See Schiera, “Dal bencomune,” 113-31, the survey by Bruni, La città divisa; and Kempshall, The Common Good. 44 On the economy of salvation see Bacci, Investimenti per l’aldilà. 45 Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community. 46 Trexler, Public Life, 263-78.

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self, or unconditional love, and reciprocity, the expectation of mutual benef it from the Latin reciprocus, moving backwards and forwards, a tension reflected in the numerous tracts on the nature of true friendship. 47 Faced with the reciprocal exchange economy of favors in the securing of personal profit and advantage, it was communally sponsored rhetoric as a discourse, from discurrere – to run backwards and forwards – that sought to compete for citizens’ attention and impress upon them the validity and utility of investing in the commonwealth, either financially through the purchasing of Monte bonds or affectively through making an emotional investment to increase the “bene,” the emotional well-being, or capital, of the commune. In foregrounding the importance of rhetoric as an art of persuasion, humanists and preachers embraced the emotions and recognized the partiality of audiences as a function of their attachment to a host of associational groupings that inevitably came into conflict. In their scepticism concerning the stoic belief that mental well-being was not necessarily connected to material and physical well-being, they admitted to the interrelation of the psychological, the physiological, and the social in the pursuit of happiness for an embodied and emplaced self. In addition, by embracing the concept of love, whether as Christian caritas, Platonic love or a fusion of the two, they privileged an emotion that transcended reason without compromising virtue. Our passions, therefore, were deemed central to what made us human and were not guided solely by reason. In stressing the connection between psychology and physiology they showed that happiness was also a result of taking care of our physical selves, the corpus seipsum dirigens, through attention to diet, exercise, the place we live, and our relationships with our friends and loved ones. Our well-being, benessere, therefore was dependent upon our being well, physically, and psychologically. To believe otherwise, I would argue, would be perverse and wholly irrational. 48

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text, 79 (2004): 117-39. Alighieri, Dante. Convivio. Ed. by Franca Brambilla Ageno, II. Florence: Le Lettere, 1995.

47 See the discussion in Kent, Friendship. 48 For two recent studies on happiness see McMahon, Happiness and Bartolini, Manifesto per la felicità.

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Bacci, Michele. Investimenti per l’aldilà. Arte e raccomandazione dell’anima nel medioevo. RomeBari: Laterza, 2003. Baron, Hans. The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955. Bartolini, Stefano. Manifesto per la felicità. Come passare dalla società del ben-avere a quella del ben-essere. Rome: Donzelli, 2010. Boyde, Patrick. Perception and Passion in Dante’s “Comedy.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Bruni, Francesco. La città divisa: le parti e il bene comune da Dante a Guicciardini. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London-New York: Verso, 2004. Carmody, Francis J. Li livres dou Tresor de Brunetto Latini. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948. Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium. Trans. by Harry Caplan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1964. Clough, Patricia Ticineto, and Jean Halley, eds. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. DurhamLondon: Duke University Press, 2007. Cohen, Anthony P. The Symbolic Construction of Community. London: Routledge, 1985. Cox, Virginia. “Machiavelli and the ‘Rhetorica ad Herennium’: Deliberative Rhetoric in ‘The Prince.’” Sixteenth Century Journal, 28 (1997): 1109-41. Cox, Virginia, and John O. Ward, eds. The Rhetoric of Cicero in its Medieval and Early Renaissance Commentary Tradition. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006. Carruthers, Mary, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Crisci, Edoardo, and Oronzo Pecere, eds. Il codice miscellaneo: tipologie e funzioni. Cassino: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 2004. De Matteis, Maria Consiglia. La ‘teologia politica comunale’ di Remigio de Girolami. Bologna: Pàtron, 1977. Descartes, René. Passions of the Soul. Trans. by Stephen Voss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Freedberg, David, and Gallese Vittorio. “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience.” Trends in Cognitive Science, 11, 5 (2007): 197-203. Frugoni, Chiara. A Day in a Medieval City. Chicago-London: Princeton University Press, 2005. Gentili, Sonia. L’uomo aristotelico alle origini della letturatura italiana. Rome: Carocci, 2005. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham-London: Duke University Press, 2010. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Harding, Jennifer, and E. Deidre Pribram, eds. Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2009. Harvey, Ruth E. The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, 1975. Howes, David, ed. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005. Iannella, Cecilia. Giordano da Pisa: etica urbana e forma della società. Pisa: Ets, 1999. Jackson, Stanley W. “A History of Melancholia and Depression.” In History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology, ed. by Edwin R. Wallace, and John Gach, 443-60. New York: Springer, 2008.

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Rutherford, Jonathan, ed. Identity. Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. Schiera, Pierangelo. “Dal bencomune alla pubblica felicità. Appunti per una storia delle dottrine in Italia e Germania.” In Liber amicorum Arnold Esch, ed. by Hagen Keller, Werner Paravicini, and Wolfgang Schieder, 113-31. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001. Schrag, Calvin R. The Self after Postmodernity. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1997. Sennett, Richard. Together: the Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Thrift, Nigel. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge, 2008. Toscanella, Oratio. Armonia di tutti principali retori et migliori scrittori degli antichi e nostri tempi. Venice: Varisco, 1569. Trexler, Richard C. “Honor Among Thieves: The Trust Function in the Urban Clergy in the Florentine Republic.” In Essay Presented to Myron P. Gilmore, 2 vols., ed. by Sergio Bertelli, and Gloria Ramakus, vol. 1, 317-34. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. —. Public Life in Renaissance Florence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. Weissman, Ronald E. “The Importance of Being Ambiguous: Social Relations, Individualism, and Identity in Renaissance Florence.” In Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. by Susan Zimmerman, and Ronald E. Weissman, 269-80. Newark, NJ: Delaware, 1989. Wolff, Janet. “After Cultural Theory: The Power of Images, the Lure of Immediacy.” Journal of Visual Culture, 11 (2012): 1-17. Woodward, Kathryn, ed. Identity and Difference. London: SAGE Publications, 1997. Zak, Gur. Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Contributors Barbara H. Rosenwein, Loyola University, Chicago, is professor of history at Loyola University of Chicago. Author of three books on medieval monasticism, Rosenwein has more recently turned to the history of emotions. In 2006 she published Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell University Press), and she is now working on a book tentatively entitled Emotions Past: A History. Rosenwein is author or co-author of several textbooks and has edited or co-edited three books. She has also published a primary source documents reader that brings together materials from medieval Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world. Fabrizio Ricciardelli, Kent State University, is director and professor of Renaissance European history at Kent State University Florence Program. He received his degree in history at the University of Florence and his PhD from the University of Warwick. His research focuses on Italian city-states when they were strikingly unusual features of the social landscape of late medieval Europe, distinguished by the sophistication of their economic activities, the forms of government they adopted, their rich cultural life, and their unusual social structure. He has published several articles on late medieval and Renaissance history in journals such as Argomenti storici, Archivio Storico Italiano, Annali Aretini, Reti Medievali, and others. He is the author of The Politics of Exclusion in Early Renaissance Florence (Turnhout, 2007), and has edited I luoghi del sacro. Il sacro e la città tra Medioevo ed Età moderna (Florence, 2008), The Culture of Violence in Renaissance Ital, (Florence, 2012), Umanesimo e università in Toscana (1400-1600) (Florence, 2012), and Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual. Studies in Italian Urban Culture (Turnhout, 2013). His new book on The Myth of Republicanism in Renaissance Italy will be published by Brepols in 2015 (Cursor 22). Andrea Zorzi, Università di Firenze, is professor of hedieval history at the University of Florence. In 1993 he was fellow at Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome, in 1994 at the Warburg Institute in London, and in 1996-97 at The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. In 1998 founded the e-journal Reti medievali. Online Initiatives for Medieval Studies, of which he continues to serve as the editor-in-chief. From 2006 he is member of the Scientific Committee of Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo. His research focuses on Italian political history of the late Middle Ages. Main publications: L’amministrazione della giustizia penale nella Repubblica

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fiorentina. Aspetti e problemi, Florence 1988; Florentine Tuscany. Structures and Practices of Power, co-editor W. J. Connell (Cambridge, 2000); Pratiques sociales et politiques judiciaires dans les villes de l’Occident à la fin du Moyen Age, co-editors J. Chiffoleau and C. Gauvard (Rome, 2007); Le signorie cittadine in Italia. Secoli XIII-XV, Milan 2010; Les historiens et l’informatique. Un métier à réinventer, co-editor J.-Ph. Genet (Rome, 2011). Carol Lansing, University of California, Santa Barbara, is a historian of the politics and culture of the late medieval Italian towns. Often, she has sought to draw on archival sources to explore the intersection of understandings of identity with the exercise of power. Her first book on the Florentine magnates centered on noble patrilineal identity as it collided with the guild-based popular regimes. She turned then to popular religion, and asked why nobles were drawn to Cathar dualism, with its harsh condemnation of the physical world and the human body. Working in richly documented Orvieto, she found that Cathar leaders and sympathizers belonged not to an older nobility but rather the rising urban elite, including civic officials and prosperous artisans. More recently, Lansing has worked in criminal court records. She uses inquest testimony from Bologna to examine the intersection of legal process and social practice, including competing ideas about the identity of low status women living as concubines. Her most recent book, Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Communes (Ithaca, 2008), explores legal sentences in which elite men were fined for histrionic public mourning to think about state formation and changing understandings of male decorum. Carol Lansing is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Isabella Lazzarini, All Souls College, Oxford; Università del Molise (Mantova, 1964), graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. She is associate professor of medieval history at the University of Molise, Italy. Her research interests focus on the political, social and cultural history of Italy from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, with an emphasis on Renaissance diplomacy and the growth of different political languages in documentary sources. She has been a research fellow at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), the Warburg Institute (London), Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Harvard-Florence), and a Leverhulme Trust visiting professor at Durham University. Her main publications include monographs (Fra un principe e altri stati. Rapporti di potere e relazioni di servizio a Mantova nell’età di Ludovico Gonzaga [1444-1478] [Rome, 1996]; L’Italia degli stati territoriali [secoli XIII-XV] [Bari and Rome,

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2003]; Amicizia e potere. Reti politiche e sociali nell’Italia medieval [Milan, 2010]; miscellaneous volumes – Scritture e potere. Pratiche documentarie e forme di governo nell’Italia tardomedievale [secoli XIV-XV], ed. by I. Lazzarini, RM-Rivista, IX [2008], http://www.storia.unifi.it/_RM/rivista/2008-1. htm#Saggi; Europe and Italy. Essays in honour of Giorgio Chittolini, ed. by P. Guglielmotti, Isabella Lazzarini, and Gian Maria Varanini [Florence, 2011]; The Italian Renaissance State, ed. by A. Gamberini and I. Lazzarini [Cambridge, 2012] – and the edition of diplomatic sources [Carteggio degli oratori mantovani alla corte sforzesca [anni 1450-1500], vol. I-IV [1450-62], ed. by I. Lazzarini [Rome, 1999, 2000, 2002]). A complete list of her publications can be found at http://docenti.unimol.it/index.php?u=isabella.lazzarini&id=4 Serena Ferente, King’s College, London, is a lecturer at King’s College London. She studied at the Scuola Normale of Pisa, the EHESS of Paris and the European University Institute of Florence. She has published on the social and political history of late medieval Italy, particularly on faction and partisanship. Her two latest research projects focus, respectively, on the notion of “passion” in the political languages of late medieval Europe, and the role of gender in juridical debates about sovereignty in the same period. Daniel Lord Smail, Harvard University, is professor of history at Harvard University, where he works on the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600. His current research approaches transformations in the material culture of later medieval Mediterranean Europe using household inventories and inventories of debt recovery from Lucca and Marseille. His latest article is “Violence and Predation in Late Medieval Mediterranean Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 54 (2012), 1-28. His books include Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (Ithaca, 1999); The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (Ithaca, 2003); On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2008), and, with Andrew Shryock and others, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2011). Samuel K. Cohn Jr., University of Glasgow, is professor of medieval history at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of works on the history of women in late medieval and early modern Italy, the Black Death, labor legislation, plague writing, popular protest in late medieval Italy, France, and Flanders, and the massacre of Jews in fourteenth-century Spain, France, and Germany. His latest books are Creating the Florentine State: Peasants

Contributors

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and Rebellion, 1348-1434 (Cambridge, 1999); The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London and Oxford, 2002); Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe: Italy, France, and Flanders (Manchester, 2004); Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425 (Cambridge, 2006); and Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance (Oxford, 2009). Ori Z. Soltes, Georgetown University, is Goldman professorial lecturer in theology and fine arts at Georgetown University, and former director and curator of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, where he curated more than eighty exhibitions. He was educated in classics and philosophy at Haverford College, in classics at Princeton University and The Johns Hopkins University and in interdisciplinary studies at Union University. He is the author of more than 150 articles, exhibition catalogs, essays and books on a wide range of topics, and the writer and narrator of over thirty documentary videos. His most recent books are Our Sacred Signs: How Christian, Jewish and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source (Cambridge, MA, 2005), The Ashen Rainbow: Essays on the Arts and the Holocaust (Laurel, MD, 2006), Searching for Oneness: Mysticism in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Traditions (Lanham, MD, 2008), and Untangling the Tangled Web: Why the Middle East is a Mess (Savage, MD, 2009). Andrea Gamberini, Università di Milano, is professore aggregato of medieval history at the University of Milan and has been a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. He is a member of the editorial board of Quaderni Storici. His main publications include monographs: Oltre la città. Assetti territoriali e culture aristocratiche nella Lombardia del tardo Medioevo (Rome, 2009); Lo stato visconteo. Linguaggi politici e dinamiche costituzionali (Milan, 2005); and La città assediata. Poteri e identità politiche a Reggio in età viscontea (Rome, 2003); as well as edited volumes: (with G. Badini, eds.) Medioevo reggiano. Studi in ricordo di Odoardo Rombaldi (Milan, 2007); (with G. Petralia, eds.) Linguaggi politici nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Rome, 2007); (with J.-Ph. Genet and A. Zorzi, eds.), The Languages of the Political Society (Rome, 2011), and (with I. Lazzarini eds.) The Italian Renaissance State (Cambridge, 2012). Gennaro Ferrante, Università del Salento, has a PhD in medieval literature (Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane). His research field is mainly Italian literature from Dante to the Renaissance. For his PhD thesis, he wrote a critical edition of a Latin commentary on Dante’s Inferno made by the Quattrocento Franciscan theologian Giovanni da Serravalle. He was engaged

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in a three-year postdoctoral research at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, mainly focusing on the unknown autograph manuscript of the medieval Florentine merchant Luigi Peruzzi, which contains two relevant biographies of Dante and Petrarch. He also worked on the “Censimento degli Antichi Commenti danteschi” project, whose aim was to draw up an accurate finding list of uncataloged and incompletely cataloged manuscripts of commentaries on Dante’s Divine Comedy from 1322 to 1480. He is now working in a multidisciplinary team aiming to give critical editions of the early chronicles of the Kingdom of Naples. During his wanderings in the European libraries he discovered a French medieval chronicle (Bourges), an unknown letter of Guicciardini (Florence), and some notes on Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (Rome), which belong to the humanist Giovanni Brevio. He has recently given lectures on Dante in Rome, Ravenna, and Paris. Stephen J. Milner, University of Manchester, is currently Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Manchester having previously held posts at the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge. His research interests focus on the interrelation between politics, rhetoric, and space in communal Italy with specific focus on Tuscany; on social and artistic patronage in Renaissance Pistoia; and on the nineteenth-century reception of the Italian Renaissance in the industrial cities of northern England. He has edited and co-edited a number of volumes including The Erotics of Consolation: Distance and Desire in the Middle Ages (New York and Basingstoke, 2008); At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy (Minneapolis, 2005); and Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City (Cambridge, 2004). He is currently co-organizing a six-month exhibition to be held at the John Rylands Library in Manchester 10 July-24 November 2013 to celebrate the seven hundredth anniversary of Boccaccio’s birth and is co-editing The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio.