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Trevor Dean is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Surrey, Roehampton.
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The New Cambridge Medieval History: Volume 5, c.1198-c.1300 (1999) — Mitwirkender — 70 Exemplare

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Overall, this is a very good collection of articles on issues related to homicide in renaissance Italy. The first article, about pictures and reliefs of Cain's murder of Abel, is straight art history and not very relevant to the rest of the articles. The second article is vendettas in late medieval Sicily, in which men used knives and women, at least allegedly, used poison. The third article is a very vivid microhistory of one killing in a small Italian village, when a man found his daughter was having sex with the village schoolteacher (who roomed in the man's house) the man killed both of them, an action considered justified as the daughter was formally engaged to another man, so her conduct dishonored her family. The next two articles are about homicides in Bologna; one a group analysis of all homicides recorded 1350 -1440, observing general trends, and the other about how it became more difficult to prosecute murder in the city as it became more bitterly divided by factions. The next section on sensational murders includes a short version of STehen D'anglio's account of the murder of Duke Alessandro d' Medici of Florence by his kinsman Lorenzino, which is discussed more fully in the same scholar's book The Duke's Assassin. His main point is that the widely accepted account by Varchi is probably not accurate on several points. The following article is about a woman convicted (on what appears to me to be good evidence) of killing and partially eating a young girl. This was later equated with a witchcraft trial and Enlightenment scholars thought she was innocent, but the physical evidence (discovery of the girl's remains in her house) appears solid, though she may not have eaten other children earlier as alleged, The following article discusses crimes reports in sensational murder ballads, a popular form of (not necessarily accurate) news media. Some of these cases were political killing, which leads into the next study of alleged suicides concludes that some of the cases were probably killings of opponents of the various ruling regimes. The following article on violence involving Jews makes the interesting point that at least until the fifteenth century, most attacks on Jews were made by other Jews; when there were attacks by Christians on Jews, the (Christian) authorities often attempted to do real justice, though in the fifteenth century (under the influence of the preaching of Observant friars) there were more Christian attacks on Jews and the authorities were less committed to protecting the Jews. The next article on poisoning makes the point that (contrary to popular belief) many poisoners were men, not women. Popular poisons were arsenic and mercury sublimate (which produced very nasty effects) and doctors (like Watson in Study in Scarlet) fed suspected poisons, or vomit from victims, to animals, preferably dogs, to test their deadliness. In a section on mass killings, a study on civilian deaths during sacks of cities concluded that these tended to be downplayed in accounts of the sacks (which increased in ferocity during the Italian Wars after 1494).A study of executioners in Italy found that they were usually low-class outsiders, often criminals granted their lives in return for executing others.The last study on butchers finds that in general Italian opinion of the time did not equate butchering animals with murder, despite a few high-profile vegetarians like Leonardo da Vinci.… (mehr)
 
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antiquary | May 14, 2018 |
This is a useful survey of current ideas about medieval crime and how authorities deal with it., but on wide reading in research by scholars studying the history of crime in a number of different nations. To me as a specialist in medieval English crime, it was helpful for showing that although much of the crime was very similar -- lots of tavern brawls for example --punishment wee quite varied; in England theoretically a lot of major crimes were punished by hanging (though people got pardoned or acquitted on various excuses) but in Central and Eastern Europe apparently banishment for few years was more usual. It seems a lot of the gruesome stuff popularly thought of as "medieval" was really more renaissance.… (mehr)
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antiquary | Feb 15, 2017 |

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