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Plague and Violence in Early Modern Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Colin Rose
Colin Rose*
Affiliation:
Brock University
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Abstract

Following the plague of 1630, which struck Northern Italy particularly hard, the erosion of social norms and hierarchies led to an outbreak of homicidal violence in the city and province of Bologna. In particular, urban nobility resumed practices of vendetta and revenge as politics that had lain dormant for some decades; while in the countryside, the heightened stresses of endemic rural poverty led to homicides over resources such as land, food, and employment. This article examines that outbreak of violence in the context of natural disaster, employing a selection of seventy-seven homicide trials prosecuted by the Tribunale del Torrone, the criminal court of Bologna, in 1632.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , Fall 2018 , pp. 1000 - 1035
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Renaissance Society of America

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References

Bibliography

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Angelozzi, Giancarlo. La giustizia criminale a Bologna nel XVIII secolo e le riforme di Benedetto XIV. Bologna: CLUEB, 2010.Google Scholar
Aspects of Violence in Renaissance Europe. Ed. Jonathan Davies. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.Google Scholar
Barker, Sheila. “Poussin, Plague, and Early Modern Medicine.” Art Bulletin 86.4 (2004): 659–89.10.2307/4134458CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bellettini, Athos. La popolazione di Bologna dal secolo 15 all’unificazione Italiana. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1961.Google Scholar
Benedictow, Ole Jørgen. “Morbidity in Historical Plague Epidemics.” Population Studies 41.3 (1987): 401–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Black, Christopher. Early Modern Italy: A Social History. London: Routledge, 2001.Google Scholar
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Blanshei, Sarah Rubin. “Homicide in a Culture of Hatred.” In Murder in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe, 106–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
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Cohn, Samuel, and Guido Alfani. “Households and Plague in Early Modern Italy.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38.2 (2007): 177–205.10.1162/jinh.2007.38.2.177CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Hughes, Steven. “Fear and Loathing in Bologna and Rome: The Papal Police in Perspective.” Journal of Social History 21.1 (1987): 97–116.10.1353/jsh/21.1.97CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacoby, Russell. Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present. New York: Free Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Logette, Aline. Le prince contre les juges: Grâce ducale et justice criminelle en Lorraine au debût du XVIIe siècle. Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1993.Google Scholar
Madden, Amanda. “‘Una Causa Civile’: Vendetta Violence and Governing Elites in Early-Modern Modena.” In Aspects of Violence (2013), 205–24.Google Scholar
Mauch, Christof, and Christian Pfister, eds. Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies toward a Global Environmental History. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009.Google Scholar
Mendes-Victor, Luiz. The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake: Revisited. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010.Google Scholar
Muir, Edward. Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Muir, Edward. “The Sources of Civil Society in Italy.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29.3 (1999): 379–406.10.1162/002219598551751CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muir, Edward. “The 2001 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: The Idea of Community in Renaissance Italy.” Renaissance Quarterly 55.1 (2002): 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Niccoli, Ottavia. Perdonare: Idee, pratiche, rituali in Italia tra Seicento e Cinquecento. Rome: Editori Laterza, 2007.Google Scholar
Nubola, Cecilia. “Supplications between Politics and Justice: The Northern and Central Italian States in the Early Modern Age.” International Review of Social History 46.9 (2001): Supplement, 35–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pastore, Alessandro. Crimine e giustizia in tempo di peste nell’Europa Moderna. Rome: Laterza, 1991.Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking, 2011.Google Scholar
Povolo, Claudio. “Processo Contro Paolo Orgiano E Altri.” Studi Storici 29.2 (1988): 321–60.Google Scholar
Povolo, Claudio. L’intrigo dell’onore: Poteri e istituzioni nella repubblica di Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento. Verona: Cierre, 1997.Google Scholar
Pullan, Brian. “Wage-Earners and the Venetian Economy, 1550–1630.” Economic History Review, n.s., 16.3 (1964): 407–26.Google Scholar
Roth, Randolph. American Homicide. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Sahlins, Peter. Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
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. M. Bellabarba, G. Schwerhoff, and A. Zorzi, 345–64. Bologna: il Mulino, 2001.Google Scholar
Schwerhoff, Gert. “Criminalized Violence and the Process of Civilisation: A Reappraisal.” Crime, Histoire et Sociétés / Crime, History and Societies 6.2 (2002): 103–26.10.4000/chs.418CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwerhoff, Gert. “Early Modern Violence and the Honour Code: From Social Integration to Social Distinction?” Crime, Histoire et Sociétés / Crime, History and Societies 17.2 (2013): 27–46.10.4000/chs.1426CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spada, Bernardino. I bandi di Bernardino Spada durante la peste del 1630 in Bologna. Ed. Pietro Malpezzi. Faenza: Casanova, 2008.Google Scholar
Spierenburg, Pieter. A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present. Boston: Polity Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Terpstra, Nicholas. Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Walker, Charles F. Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weiner, Gordon. “The Demographic Effects of the Venetian Plagues of 1575–77 and 1630–31.” Genus 26.1–2 (1970): 41–57.Google Scholar
Archivio di Stato di Bologna (ASBo), Tribunale del Torrone, 5806–5972.Google Scholar
ASBo, Bandi, Serie I, No. 3, No. 4, No. 6.Google Scholar
Alfani, Guido. “Population and Environment in Northern Italy during the Sixteenth Century.” Population 62.4 (2007): 559–95.10.3917/pope.704.0559CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alfani, Guido. “The Effects of Plague on the Distribution of Property: Ivrea, Northern Italy 1630.” Population Studies 64.1 (2010): 61–75.10.1080/00324720903448712CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alfani, Guido, and Marco Percoco. “Plague and Long-Term Development: The Lasting Effects of the 1629–30 Epidemic on the Italian Cities.” IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University, 2014: https://ideas.repec.org/p/igi/igierp/508.html.Google Scholar
Angelozzi, Giancarlo, and Cesarina Casanova. La nobiltà disciplinata: Violenza nobiliare, procedure di giustizia e scienza cavalleresca a Bologna nel 17. secolo. Bologna: CLUEB, 2003.Google Scholar
Angelozzi, Giancarlo. La giustizia criminale in una città di antico regime: Il tribunale del Torrone di Bologna, secc. XVI–XVII. Bologna: CLUEB, 2008.Google Scholar
Angelozzi, Giancarlo. La giustizia criminale a Bologna nel XVIII secolo e le riforme di Benedetto XIV. Bologna: CLUEB, 2010.Google Scholar
Aspects of Violence in Renaissance Europe. Ed. Jonathan Davies. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.Google Scholar
Barker, Sheila. “Poussin, Plague, and Early Modern Medicine.” Art Bulletin 86.4 (2004): 659–89.10.2307/4134458CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bellettini, Athos. La popolazione di Bologna dal secolo 15 all’unificazione Italiana. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1961.Google Scholar
Benedictow, Ole Jørgen. “Morbidity in Historical Plague Epidemics.” Population Studies 41.3 (1987): 401–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Black, Christopher. Early Modern Italy: A Social History. London: Routledge, 2001.Google Scholar
Blanshei, Sarah Rubin. “Crime and Law Enforcement in Medieval Bologna.” Journal of Social History 16.1 (1982): 121–38.10.1353/jsh/16.1.121CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blanshei, Sarah Rubin. “Homicide in a Culture of Hatred.” In Murder in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe, 106–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Braun, Theodore, and John Radner, eds. The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: Representations and Reactions. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2005.Google Scholar
Carroll, Stuart. Blood and Violence in Early Modern France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199290451.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carroll, Stuart. Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.10.1057/9780230591820CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carroll, Stuart. “Revenge and Reconciliation in Early Modern Italy.” Past & Present 233.1 (2016): 101–42.10.1093/pastj/gtw045CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Castan, Nicole. “The Arbitration of Disputes under the Ancien Regime.” In Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. J. Bossy, 219–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Cipolla, Carlo. M. Faith, Reason, and the Plague: A Tuscan Story of the Seventeenth Century. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Cipolla, Carlo. M. Fighting the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Italy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Cohn, Samuel, and Guido Alfani. “Households and Plague in Early Modern Italy.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38.2 (2007): 177–205.10.1162/jinh.2007.38.2.177CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dani, Alessandro. Il processo per danni dati nello Stato della Chiesa (secoli XVI–XVIII). Milan: Monduzzi, 2006.Google Scholar
Davis, Diana K. Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Fagan, Brian. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850. New York: Basic Books, 2000.Google Scholar
Faggion, Lucien. “Violence, Rites and Social Regulation in the Venetian Terra Ferma in the Sixteenth Century.” In Aspects of Violence (2013), 185–204.Google Scholar
Gauvard, Claude. “Les Clercs de la Chancellerie Royale Française et l’écriture des lettres de remission aux XIVe et XVe siecles.” In Écrit et pouvoir dans les chancelleries médiévales: Espace français, espace anglais, ed. K. Fianu and D. J. Guth, 281–91. Louvain-la-Neuve: Fidem, 1997.Google Scholar
Hanlon, Gregory. Human Nature in Rural Tuscany: An Early Modern History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.10.1057/9780230603035CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hughes, Steven. “Fear and Loathing in Bologna and Rome: The Papal Police in Perspective.” Journal of Social History 21.1 (1987): 97–116.10.1353/jsh/21.1.97CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacoby, Russell. Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present. New York: Free Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Logette, Aline. Le prince contre les juges: Grâce ducale et justice criminelle en Lorraine au debût du XVIIe siècle. Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1993.Google Scholar
Madden, Amanda. “‘Una Causa Civile’: Vendetta Violence and Governing Elites in Early-Modern Modena.” In Aspects of Violence (2013), 205–24.Google Scholar
Mauch, Christof, and Christian Pfister, eds. Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies toward a Global Environmental History. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009.Google Scholar
Mendes-Victor, Luiz. The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake: Revisited. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010.Google Scholar
Muir, Edward. Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Muir, Edward. “The Sources of Civil Society in Italy.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29.3 (1999): 379–406.10.1162/002219598551751CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muir, Edward. “The 2001 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: The Idea of Community in Renaissance Italy.” Renaissance Quarterly 55.1 (2002): 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Niccoli, Ottavia. Perdonare: Idee, pratiche, rituali in Italia tra Seicento e Cinquecento. Rome: Editori Laterza, 2007.Google Scholar
Nubola, Cecilia. “Supplications between Politics and Justice: The Northern and Central Italian States in the Early Modern Age.” International Review of Social History 46.9 (2001): Supplement, 35–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pastore, Alessandro. Crimine e giustizia in tempo di peste nell’Europa Moderna. Rome: Laterza, 1991.Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking, 2011.Google Scholar
Povolo, Claudio. “Processo Contro Paolo Orgiano E Altri.” Studi Storici 29.2 (1988): 321–60.Google Scholar
Povolo, Claudio. L’intrigo dell’onore: Poteri e istituzioni nella repubblica di Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento. Verona: Cierre, 1997.Google Scholar
Pullan, Brian. “Wage-Earners and the Venetian Economy, 1550–1630.” Economic History Review, n.s., 16.3 (1964): 407–26.Google Scholar
Roth, Randolph. American Homicide. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Sahlins, Peter. Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
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. M. Bellabarba, G. Schwerhoff, and A. Zorzi, 345–64. Bologna: il Mulino, 2001.Google Scholar
Schwerhoff, Gert. “Criminalized Violence and the Process of Civilisation: A Reappraisal.” Crime, Histoire et Sociétés / Crime, History and Societies 6.2 (2002): 103–26.10.4000/chs.418CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwerhoff, Gert. “Early Modern Violence and the Honour Code: From Social Integration to Social Distinction?” Crime, Histoire et Sociétés / Crime, History and Societies 17.2 (2013): 27–46.10.4000/chs.1426CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spada, Bernardino. I bandi di Bernardino Spada durante la peste del 1630 in Bologna. Ed. Pietro Malpezzi. Faenza: Casanova, 2008.Google Scholar
Spierenburg, Pieter. A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present. Boston: Polity Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Terpstra, Nicholas. Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Walker, Charles F. Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weiner, Gordon. “The Demographic Effects of the Venetian Plagues of 1575–77 and 1630–31.” Genus 26.1–2 (1970): 41–57.Google Scholar