Description

Law as Life in Italy consists of twelve innovative essays that redefine the possibilities of socio-legal history in medieval and early modern Italy. Exploring topics including gender, agency, inheritance, property, political conflict, and material culture, the contributors illuminate how legal categories and assumptions shaped life across six centuries. Their studies draw on an array of sources, from juristic consilia and statutes to testaments and household inventories, revealing the importance of law as a medium through which people conceived and negotiated their most meaningful social relationships. Together, the essays extend the groundbreaking methods pioneered by Thomas Kuehn, whose scholarship has transformed how historians understand the entanglement of law, family, and society in the premodern world.

WILLIAM CAFERRO is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History and Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Petrarch’s War: Florence and the Black Death in Context (2018) and is currently completing a study of the economy of fourteenth-century Florence.

ROBERT FREDONA is Research Associate at Harvard Business School. He is co-editor of New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy (2018), Italy and the Origins of Capitalism (a special issue of Business History Review, 2020), and other volumes; and the author of numerous articles on premodern law and business.

504 pp.

ISBN 9780772773524

Published: 2026

Contents

Introduction

William Caferro and Robert Fredona

Thomas Kuehn Bibliography

1. Standing in the Market Place: The Pomaiole of Late Medieval Cortona

Daniel Bornstein

2. (Im)possible Choices? The Maternal Tutela of Sienese Widows over Orphans

Elena Brizio

3. “Voluit, iussit, et mandavit testatrix”: Agnola Baroncelli’s Testaments, 1414–1430

Lawrin Armstrong

4. Practices of Women’s Literacy and Patrimonial Agency in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Florence

Isabelle Chabot

5. Between Family and Succession: Women in the Consilia of Giasone del Maino

Maria Gigliola di Renzo Villata

6. Private Lives and a Seventeenth-Century Supreme Court in Early Modern Tuscany

Giovanna Benadusi

7. Jurists and Politics in Late Thirteenth-Century Bologna: Consilia on the Property of Banniti

Massimo Vallerani

8. Jurists in the Shadow of the Black Death: Bartolo of Sassoferrato and Francesco Tigrini of Pisa

Osvaldo Cavallar and Julius Kirshner

9. Castle Lords of Southern Lazio

Edward English and Carol Lansing

10. Legislation and Popular Organization in Early Renaissance Florence

Joseph Figliulo-Rosswurm

11. Reading and Interpreting Household Inventories from Mediterranean Europe

Daniel Lord Smail

12. How to Argue Against Evil: Cesare Beccaria Confronts Doubting Readers in On Crimes and Punishments (1764)

Caroline Castiglione

Contributors

Index

Praise

The twelve articles in this collection examine a series of legal opinions, distinguishing with care, confidence, and generous explanations the specific concerns and context of each case. The result is a chorus of voices from the past that sheds new light on the circumstances—some changing, some constant—that conditioned the lives of Italians across six centuries. —William J. Connell, Seton Hall University

Law and legal records in Italy during the premodern era are the focus of this erudite collection of essays in honour of the important work of the prolific historian Thomas Kuehn. The essays are effectively grounded in a range of legal sources and draw innovative and sometimes surprising conclusions. —Roisin Cossar, University of Manitoba