This interesting study of criminal justice in the Sienese context offers a new exploration of tensions between Christian education about peace and penance, the idea of public justice, and the culture of revenge. Zanetti Domingues proposes a penitential model of medieval criminal justice, using as a case study the Italian commune of Siena in the years 1260–1330. The author argues that criminal justice reform had among its aims penance and moral reintegration, goals that are fundamentally religious in nature. She proposes that “a penitential discourse on criminal justice [. . .] coexisted alongside the other ones based on revenge or on notions of public order”(2).
The introduction provides an historiographical overview that considers criminal justice reform as well as notions of peace, penance, and their connections to ideas of justice. It also outlines the Sienese context for the period of the study, emphasizing the vibrancy of religious life. The author considers homiletic sources as well as hagiographical accounts of three local, non-canonized saints to construct a penitential model of criminal justice. She considers these sources alongside archival documents from the courts of the Podestà and the Capitano del Popolo, the minutes of the Consiglio Generale, chronicles, and statutes.
The thematic organization of the book focuses on different elements of the influence of religion on the development of criminal justice. Chapter 1 describes three models of responses to crime and violence: the first model, based on the idea of a “culture of revenge,” focuses not on punishing morally wrong acts but rather on restoring honor. The second model, based on the “ideology of public order,” holds punishment central and accepts a division of public and private power. Using hagiographical sources, Zanetti Domingues argues that penitential spirituality and the sacrament of confession form a third model by which to understand criminal justice. This penitential model regards violence and revenge as major social problems, not as acceptable responses to injury, for which contrition and peacemaking are appropriate remedies. Zanetti Domingues argues that this model of penitential criminal justice helps explain the broad diversity of attitudes and ideas about criminal justice in late medieval society.
Subsequent chapters examine emotions, virtues, and vices in Sienese reflections on violence and the influence of penitential theology on Sienese criminal justice. Zanetti Domingues contends that the focus on limiting public display of potentially dangerous male emotion was as accountable to pastoral teaching as it was to a revived interest in Stoic thought, and that the Church's emphasis on humilitas and patientia as necessary virtues for containing negative emotions had some influence on Sienese legislation. This shift in attitudes about male emotionality in religious thought influenced the new emphasis in Sienese lay sources on masculine emotional self-control. Political elites encouraged repression of negative feelings in the service of public order, while the penitential model encouraged repentance as the proper outlet for those emotions. Vengeance, Zanetti Domingues argues, was meted out by the state acting as representative for God's justice, and the vendetta was outlawed. Zanetti Domingues uses the oblatio, a ritual in which prisoners were released, to interpret communes’ general amnesties as manifestations of religious ideas of mercy. She sees evidence for this in the oath taken by the released criminal and the role played by the clergy in the ritual itself. Making mercy one of its attributes, the commune of Siena not only powerfully asserted its own legitimacy but also increased its flexibility. The government could “conveniently shift from a retributive model of justice to a restorative one, depending on what was best suited to a specific circumstance, without weakening its ideological claims” (175).
Zanetti Domingues offers an important perspective on penitential thought as an influence on the Sienese criminal justice system, asserting that hagiographical and pastoral sources are necessary for the study of criminal justice. Some readers may question the use of a relatively limited number of local hagiographies and pastoral sources to propose a new model for the study of criminal justice. However, no criminal justice system operates outside the context of its society, and the focus on these Sienese examples allows Zanetti Domingues to fully contextualize the operation of the justice system in its local environment. In its proposal of a penitential model for medieval criminal justice, and especially in its call to broaden the sources used for an understanding of medieval justice systems, this interesting book provides lots of food for thought.
