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Accounts of public justice in the Italian communes emphasize mediation of urban conflicts, overlooking interactions between rural communities and civic tribunals. Foregrounding the countryside reveals how nonelites responded to public courts and procedures such as anonymous denunciation and ex officio inquisition. This article argues that a Florentine court's outcomes resulted from the intersection of institutional structures, local power relations, and rural inhabitants' in-court behavior. It uses procedural records in conjunction with notarial cartularies and public documentation to explicate the local dynamics shaping testimony. Claiming ignorance was rural peoples' tactical response to elite malefactors' enmeshment with the commune as rural proxies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents research relating to the will of Silvestro di Tano Pantaleoni, a Florentine merchant operating in Verona. His testament, dated April 11, 1342, recently resurfaced briefly on the antiquities market. The document is of interest to scholars because it cites the judge Pietro Alighieri, and provides a profile of the Pantaleoni family, which was involved in the failure of the Florentine Nerli company and shared common experiences with Dante Alighieri, moving in the same circle of acquaintances in Florence and Verona. The article retraces the document’s history, and presents biographical data uncovered around the main figures mentioned in the will. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article has two main aims. First, it assesses recent developments in Dante scholarship and calls into question the validity of some of the critical, historical, and methodological premises that these trends have fostered. Second, it proposes ways in which the study of the poet ought to be historically and methodologically more sensitive to the nuances and specificities of medieval culture than is generally the norm in Dante studies. To illustrate how such an approach might be articulated, the article focuses on the poet’s intellectual formation in Florence, especially around 1295, paying particular attention to Dante’s self-presentation inConvivioII. xii, to the nature of his possible relationship to the institutions of the mendicant orders, to his ties to Brunetto Latini, and to his knowledge of the Boethian and Aristotelian traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Leonardo Bruni’s well-known oration, the Laudatio Florentinae urbis, has long stood at the center of discussions on the emergence of the modern republican state. Recent historiographical trends have emphasized the degree to which Bruni’s oration represents a propagandistic attempt both to portray Florence as a territorial power of Northern Italy keen to impose its sovereign authority on neighboring polities and as a republic intent on fashioning an image of itself as a popular sovereignty. It is in this second element of Bruni’s oration that we can discover his rhetorical purposes: he needed to give a distorted image of Florence as enjoying “popular” rule precisely because Florence was in fact moving in the opposite direction towards a more oligarchic concentration of political authority. The essay investigates the changes contemplated in revisions to Florence’s juridical codes at precisely the time of the oration’s composition, suggesting that when these two sources are juxtaposed, Bruni’s oration appears as a strongly ideological literary work the rhetorical gestures of which camouflage the actual historical and legal developments of Florence’s political life in the early fifteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the nineteenth century, Dante studies have been dominated by variations on a contextualizing philological and historicist critical method. The article examines the implications, and especially several of the shortcomings and blind spots, of this approach. It focuses on two closely inter-related areas of investigation that hold positions of prominence in modern-day dantismo: the study of Dante's literary and doctrinal sources and of his intellectual formation. Rather than a rebuttal of historicist scholarship, the article proposes ways in which this might be refined, in particular by paying greater attention to the practical realities of medieval (Florentine) culture, including education and scholastic institutions, the circulation of manuscripts and modes of reading, and contacts between clerici and laici. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the historical antecedent of Cardinal Latino’s specific interdiction against women’s clothing that exhibited frontal exposure as evoked by Forese Donati in Purgatorio 23, situating this interdiction within the history of sumptuary counsel and legislation. This gendered aspect of Dante’s history of Florence is informed by the political discourse of sumptuary excess amongst Florentine elite families and the tensions amongst such families, both those which had true claims to nobility (such as the Donati), and the upwardly mobile mercantile elite (such as the Cerchi). Dante’s choice of Forese Donati as the speaker of this invective carries implications for Dante’s political thought, as it reflects the concerns of the popolo more than those of elite families. This essay relates the intersection of political critique, concupiscence, and virility to the insufficient covering of Nella in the tenzone between Dante and Forese Donati and elsewhere in the Purgatorio, reading the exposed female body as a signifier of civic decadence and church corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1285 a group of giullari presented the city government of Florence with a petition. The petition, the contents of which are unknown, was rejected by the Special Council of the Commune. This article examines this record for what it reveals about the social position of entertainers in late medieval Florence. Consideration of the 1285 petition in light of corporate bodies formed by minstrels elsewhere in Europe, statutes regarding minstrels in other Italian cities, and evidence of ad hoc associations of Tuscan entertainers, sheds light on how the labour of giullari was viewed both by the performers themselves and by their fellow Florentines. Given the power dynamics unleashed by the adoption of guild-based structures of governance during Florence's Secondo Popolo, the 1285 petition of the Florentine minstrels may well constitute the earliest evidence of an assertion of guild-like corporate identity by minstrels in medieval Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]