Il ministro censurato: giustizia secolare e diritto d’asilo nella Firenze di Ferdinando II

Un eclatante caso di violazione del diritto d’asilo nella Firenze di Ferdinando II apre un aspro scontro tra il Principe e le autorità ecclesiastiche (romane e fiorentine). La politica giurisdizionalista del sovrano mediceo non cede alle pressioni della Chiesa e si arroga il diritto di punire i delinquenti sommariamente. La fulminazione della scomunica contro i violatori della libertas Ecclesiae non fa arretrare il Granduca il quale, pur temendone gli effetti sulla popolazione, la considera illegittima e non esita a rispondere con una memoria indirizzata ai ministri romani. L’indagine è prova del costante compromesso che caratterizza il rapporto tra stato e chiesa nella Toscana dell’età moderna

Giurisdizionalismi. Le politiche ecclesiastiche negli stati minori della penisola italiana in età moderna

I contributi riuniti nel volume intendono dar conto delle “prassi” giurisdizionaliste che la documentazione d’archivio fa emergere in ambiti geopolitici definibili come “minori”. Il panorama mosso e frastagliato che tra Cinque e Settecento offre la penisola italiana, se è pur vero che sembra non evidenziare linee nette di conflittualità marcata, presenta tuttavia una dialettica di lungo periodo che la paziente ricerca negli archivi ha potuto finalmente restituire, rendendo in tal maniera necessaria una meditata revisione di interpretazioni storiografiche ormai datate

"Monstrous and indefensible"? Newspaper accounts of sexual assaults on children in nineteenth-century England and Wales

This material has been published in Women's Criminality in Europe, 1600–1914 edited by Edited by Manon van der Heijden, Marion Pluskota, Sanne Muurling, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108774543. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution or re-use. © 2020 Cambridge University Press.Popular crime reportage of sexual violence has a long history in England. Despite the fact that from the 1830s onwards newspapers and periodicals – and sometimes even law reports – were increasingly liable to skim over the reporting of sexual offences as ‘unfit for publication’, this does not mean that such reportage vanished entirely. Instead, certain linguistic codes and euphemisms were invoked to maintain a respectable discourse. Given the serious problems with gaps in the surviving archival record for modern criminal justice, newspapers remain an essential tool for understanding the history of sexual violence in nineteenth century England and Wales. Using keyword searches in digitized newspaper databases such as the British Newspaper Archive and Welsh Newspapers Database, this chapter examines the continuities and changes in the reporting of sexual violence against children between 1800 and 1900, and explores what these euphemisms and elisions reveal about attitudes to gender and crime in nineteenth-century England and Wales.Peer reviewe

Gender and release from imprisonment: Convict licensing systems in mid to late 19th century England

This paper draws on the research undertaken into the lives and prison experiences of around 650 male and female convicts who were released on licence (an early form of parole) from sentences of long term imprisonment (three years to life) in England in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Our project confirmed the patterns of offending seen in other studies of female and male offending, namely, that women were committed to periods of long-term imprisonment overwhelmingly for crimes of larceny and sometimes low-level violence (or their criminal backgrounds indicated this type of low-level disorderly behaviour) and only in the minority for crimes of serious interpersonal violence. Similarly, the majority of men were also committed to the convict system for larceny. Yet how male and female offenders were treated by the prison licensing system did differ significantly. The vast majority of all prisoners, male and female, were released early on licence from their prison terms, even those who had committed very serious offences. All licences had several conditions in them and licence-holders were free so long as they met these conditions. Any breach of the above conditions meant that the individual would be returned to prison to serve out the remainder of their sentence.However, a proportion of female offenders were released slightly earlier than their male counterparts, though not directly into the community but on a conditional licence to Female Refuges. Out of the 288 women researched in our project, 200 of them were released in this manner; under further confinement in a refuge. Women stayed in such refuges for on average between six and nine months, before their final release was then approved by the Directors of the Convict Prisons

Ad statutum florentinum. Esegesi statutaria e cultura giuridica nella Toscana medievale e moderna

Tra Quattrocento e tardo Settecento vennero redatte decine di copie manoscritte degli statuti fiorentini del 1415, in particolare riguardo al libro sulle cause civili, spesso corredate di annotazioni marginali con osservazioni, commenti, aggiornamenti sulla legislazione e la prassi forense. Una consuetudine che già a metà XV secolo avrebbe dato luogo a veri e propri trattati di commento statutario sulla materia processuale, le obbligazioni e il diritto successorio. Sulla base di oltre sessanta manoscritti di numerose biblioteche italiane, il volume analizza questa tradizione sia nei suoi aspetti materiali che nei contenuti specifici dell'opera dei postillatori e commentatori, con alcuni approfondimenti tematici riguardo alla giurisdizione sulle persone ecclesiastiche e alla successione femminile. Un simile percorso documentario consente di affrontare la storia della cultura giuridica toscana di età moderna non da una prospettiva astratta, ma nell'effettivo svolgersi degli strumenti pratici di interpretazione e applicazione del diritto della "dominante", contribuendo a riformulare alcune categorie storiografiche come la proiezione territoriale del diritto fiorentino e la problematica costruzione di un "diritto patrio" toscano

Le privilège comme forme de protection des communautés juives dans la péninsule italienne à l’âge moderne

The essay analyzes the ways in which the states of the Italian peninsula accepted Jewish communities within their borders in the early modern age. The main instrument that guaranteed the Jews were able to live with some civil and religious rights was the privilege, a unilateral act of the sovereign, which in reality was often preceded by an agreement between the prince and some groups of Levantine Jews. The study traces the spread and development of privileges, as well as the evolution of the ancient condotte into franchise charters that increasingly articulated provisions and protections reserved for Jews. In the last quarter of the 1700s, many of these privileges had a similar scope to the best known European acts of tolerance