How does a society cultivate local peace, whose interests does peacemaking serve, and how does that society explain conciliation practices to itself? Paolo Broggio tackles these questions with gusto in a compelling account of peace in early modern Europe, ranging thematically from discourses and representations to the complex realities of local vendetta and peacemaking in Italy and beyond.
Broggio's approach emphasizes containment and conciliation, rather than the social discipline paradigm more common to studies of criminal justice. Deep-seated animosities based upon conflicts over resources and status were taken for granted in the early modern world: elites and governments aimed not at eliminating vendettas, but rather at channeling them into state-supervised forums and procedures.
How did they do so? Broggio showcases the multiple discursive and judicial tools that ecclesiastical, seigneurial, and central authorities deployed to constrain interpersonal conflicts. The book's first chapter introduces premodern European thinking on vendetta, justice, and peace. It provides a solid grasp of the conceptual tools early modern Italians had available when pursuing their own feuds and/or peacemaking efforts, and justifying them to each other and themselves.
Chapters 2 and 3 are the book's social history core: Broggio deploys a range of sources—from Italy's local communal archives, council deliberations of papally governed cities such as Bologna, and reports of itinerant papal troubleshooters to localities—to provide a close look at how peacemaking worked in practice. Central to Broggio's analysis is the potestas oeconomicus, granting a ruler power to fine subjects in order to keep the peace. The de non offendo procedure, whereby the accused was required to post a surety with the issuing authority for good behavior, highlights Broggio's approach: peacemaking was not an alternative to, but a financial variant of, coercion. This lay in the collective responsibility that it imposed on the accused's relations. Because they were liable for payment and ensuring good behavior, the procedure incentivized the social containment of conflict before it produced a full investigation. Throughout, Broggio is sensitive to the medieval antecedents underlying the containment mechanisms discussed and stresses the enduring utility of mechanisms such as arbitration-based peacemaking. This reader was surprised and amused to find English justices of the peace enforcing summary arbitration on conflicting parties in preference to common law processes around the time of Trafalgar (1805).
Chapter 3 uses Bologna's fraught relationship with the papal curia as a showcase for how disputes over the right to impose fines crystallized struggles between center and periphery. The papacy's aim was not to suppress so much as absorb local peacemaking practices into the pope's jurisdiction (and treasury). The Papal States’ unique, ecclesiastical-secular status allowed papal troubleshooters to devise a variety of hybrid magistracies, such as the Congregation of Concord, to foster peace.
The book's last two chapters pull back to address comparative European cultures of judicially and socially imposed social containment, and the ways in which post-Reformation Europeans valorized peacemaking and condemned legal caviling as un-Christian behavior. Broggio highlights changing representations of peacemaking in iconography, stressing the general opprobrium in which legal procedure and cultures of caviling was held.
Two issues are worth noting. The lack of chapter conclusions sometimes leaves the reader grasping for a through line. The transition from the chapters on Italy to those on wider European and Christian cultures of peace and violence-interruption felt particularly abrupt. The general conclusion rectifies this, but it's a long wait for enlightenment. Second, Broggio is largely silent on the sordid side of the system of pardons and deposits he so richly evokes. What role did official opportunism and practices of resource extraction—graft, in other words—play in perpetuating Broggio's peacemaking mechanisms? One would like to know how the frequency of use and alterations to such mechanisms varied with changing patterns within the pontifical tax system, for example.
These are quibbles, however. The book more than compensates in thematic and empirical breadth. Broggio's ability to weave together local case studies of Central Italian surety-based justice with theological, philosophical, and iconographic evidence from a variety of European countries is impressive: the work of a scholar in peak form.
