4 - Humiliation and the Exercise of Power in the Florentine: Contado in the Mid-Fourteenth Century

Summary

Medieval historians have long been preoccupied with the relationship between state authority and cultures of violence, as for example in the debates over the identity of the Italian magnates. The last few decades have also seen a turn to understanding violence in terms of emotionality, recognizing that emotional expression could be an aspect of the exercise of power. Gerd Althoff explored this question in terms of how people, particularly rulers, “staged emotions,” using them as a form of ritual communication. One vivid instance is noble anger and violence. Richard Barton argued that nobles in eleventh-century France at times used a show of anger to enforce claims about their prerogatives. A lord might put on a display of affront and rage, to threaten and perhaps seek violent retribution. This contribution builds on the literature on noble anger and the exercise of power by showing its connection with forms of humiliation, drawing on a rich although complex body of sources, mention of emotions in court records. I examine representations of anger and humiliation in mid-fourteenth century denunciations to the Florentine Executor of the Ordinances of Justice. My focus is on three cases in which lords were denounced for the rape and abduction of women. Denouncers to the Executor depicted this in terms of the shame and humiliation of the women's kinsmen. For the denouncers, these abductions and rapes were, in Susan Brownmiller's phrase, “messages between men.”

Of course, the language of the denunciations was very much shaped by cultural and legal categories. I argue that while the three cases probably reflect social experience – elites using anger, sexuality, and humiliation to dominate – the denunciations also reveal rhetorical strategies. One example is a denunciation that depicted a noble driven by rage. It survives in the sentences of the criminal court of the Florentine podestà, and was explicitly adjudicated according to the Ordinances of Justice. Chele Nutini from San Godenzo, in the Mugello, the region north of Florence, had both denounced and accused Count Guido Domestico, of the Guidi counts, a old feudal family with extensive rural holdings.