Suchergebnisse

What is the difference between a stabbing in a tavern in London and one in a hostelry in the South of France? What happens when a spinster living in Paris finds knight in her bedroom wanting to marry her? Why was there a crime wave following the Black Death? From Aberdeen to Cracow and from Stockholm to Sardinia, Trevor Dean ranges widely throughout medieval Europe in this exiting and innovative history of lawlessness and criminal justice. Drawing on the real-life stories of ordinary men and women who often found themselves at the sharp end of the law, he shows how it was often one rule for th

Cover; Half-title; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; PART ONE Sources; CHAPTER 1 Trial records; CHAPTER 2 Chronicles; CHAPTER 3 Fiction; CHAPTER 4 Statute law; CHAPTER 5 Consilia; PART TWO Description and analysis; CHAPTER 6 Insult and revenge; Appendix: List of insults as recorded in the sources; 7 Sex crimes; CHAPTER 8 Potions and poisons; CHAPTER 9 Violence; CHAPTER 10 Theft; Conclusion; Bibliography; PRINTED PRIMARY SOURCES; B. SECONDARY WORKS; Index.

Bigamy trials in medieval secular courts were rare and rarely documented. Where they do survive, they raise interesting questions about the relation between penal law and social practice, about knowledge of church laws on the legitimate forms and processes of marriage, and about gendered aspects of how this crime was perceived, prosecuted and punished. The incomparable riches of the criminal court in Bologna supply a set of nearly thirty cases in the period 1350–1500 which allow these questions to be investigated.

ABSTRACTThe historiography of epidemics and crime suggests that we might find effects of plague on criminal behaviour in the years of the Black Death and its aftermath, yet this question has not been systematically investigated by late medieval historians. For the first time, a continuous series of trial records covering the 1340s – for the city of Bologna – is here analysed, and the issue of a 'breakdown in law and order' is addressed. The particular patterns of criminal prosecution are revealed and explained, including unusual and unexpected features of continuity in 1348, and surprising developments in the years following, with changes in political context and judicial procedures outweighing any ongoing effects of plague.

This article aims to challenge the prevalent presentation and analysis of gender in studies of theft in the Middle Ages. Female thieving is usually differentiated from men's – by motivation and mode, by venue and value – and these differences are related either to women's physical inferiority or to their nurturing roles (thieving to support the domestic economy) or to inequalities of access to such elements as weapons (for robbery) or tools (for burglary). When studying theft, historians have focused on male thieving as the norm, and they have tended to differentiate thieving according to gender: women mainly commit petty theft, often for immediate consumption, and do not steal on the highways, in gangs or with weapons and violence. Men, on the other hand, operate in groups: their motivation is more diverse and they use a more varied repertoire of modus operandi, which includes highway robbery. To re‐examine these characterisations, I have taken data from three twenty‐year periods from the criminal court of the city of Bologna in northern Italy (one of the most complete series of judicial records for the period). These yield a total of over 700 prosecutions and over 1,300 accused. The focus of the analysis is on elements of differentiation, such as the numbers of individual and gang thefts, the nature of goods stolen, the use of violence, et cetera. These show that, while there was some differentiation between male and female thieving, this was mainly quantitative, and that qualitatively there were more shared features of behaviour. What are often seen to be the distinguishing features of male thieving – robbery, violence, gangs, professionals – turn out to be a small, untypical group. What is often seen to be the distinguishing features of female thieving – petty theft for immediate consumption – turns out to be equally or more true of male theft.

The aim of this paper is to combine two types of source that are usually kept apart in the study of the Italian later Middle Ages: direct tax assessments and local court records. The purpose of putting these two sources together is to discover more about the operation of the local vicariate courts (another neglected element of Italian states) and about wealth distribution and litigation in the Italian countryside. The tax assessments are first analysed for what they reveal of agriculture, migration and wealth, then the court records for the identity of plaintiffs and defendants, and the nature of pleas. To interpret the resulting pattern of debts and credit, cooperation and conflict, concepts from English medieval historiography are used to explore the relationship between debtors and creditors.