Medieval Public Justice

Medieval Public Justice
Massimo Vallerani (Auteur), Sarah Rubin Blanshei (Traduction)

Acheter neuf : EUR 53,65 (as of 02/02/2013 20:48 PST)
10 neuf & d'occasion a partir de EUR 42,31 (as of 02/02/2013 20:48 PST)

(Consultez la liste Cadeaux les plus demandes dans la rubrique Medieval pour des informations officielles sur le classement actuel de ce produit.)

Description du produit

In a series of essays based on surviving documents of actual court practicesfrom Perugia and Bologna, as well as laws, statutes, and theoreticalworks from the 12th and 13th centuries, Massimo Vallerani offers importanthistorical insights into the establishment of a trial-based publicjustice system. Challenging the long-standing evolutionary paradigm ofmedieval legal procedures, Vallerani argues that public justice was notthe triumph of strong inquisitorial procedure over weak accusatory procedure,but rather a process in which the two procedures developed intandem. He demonstrates that inquisition and accusation shared manyfeatures in their intertwining goals of punishment and reconciliation.The grand narrative of the evolution of criminal justice is dismantledin this work, originally published in Italian and widely cited as agroundbreaking study of legal procedure. Vallerani contends that accusatioand inquisitio were formed simultaneously to address differentneeds: to seek and construct different "truths" -- the truth of the factthat occurred outside the courtroom as revealed by the probing of thejudge, and the truth that emerges inside the triadic model of the courtroomas a result of negotiations between the disputing parties underthe guidance of the judge.Vallerani's rich approach to his sources includes statistical analysisof the court records, revealing the functioning of the courts in terms ofthe incidence of torture, the proportions of trials initiated by accusatioand inquisitio, and the percentage of trials suspended at differentstages of litigation. Furthermore, he sets legal procedures within thecontext of a society and political world immersed in violence and conflictand shows how the supplica, or petition for pardon, played a majorrole in the transformation from communal to signorial government inthe early fourteenth century.