Contexts
Scaffold and Stage: Comforting Rituals and Dramatic Traditions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy.....Kathleen Falvey
Comforting with Song: Using Laude to Assist Condemned Prisoners.....Pamela Gravestock
Mirror of a Condemned: The Religious Poems of Andrea Viarani.....Alfredo Troiano
In Your Face: Paintings for the Condemned in Renaissance Italy.....Massimo Ferretti
Consolation or Condemnation: The Debates on Withholding Sacraments from Prisoners.....Adriano Prosperi
Theory into Practice: Executions, Comforting, and Comforters in Renaissance Italy.....Nicholas Terpstra
Contemporary Texts
The Bologna Comforters’ Manual—
Comforting by the Books: Editorial Notes on the Bologna Comforters’ Manual.....Nicholas Terpstra
Book 1.....trans. Sheila Das
Book 2.....trans. Sheila Das
Book 3: Laude and Prayers.....trans. Sheila Das and Nicholas Terpstra
Book 4: Authorities.....Nicholas Terpstra
Luca della Robbia’s Narrative on the Execution of Pietro Paolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi.....Alison Knowles Frazier
Public Execution in Popular Verse: The Poems of Giulio Cesare Croce.....Meryl Bailey
Nicholas Terpstra, professor of history at the University of Toronto, is a historian of early modern social history in Italy whose work has focused on the intersection of religion and politics, and particularly confraternities, charitable institutions, and the networks of care available to marginal populations. He has written many articles and is the author of Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna (2005) and Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (1995), which was awarded the Howard Marraro Prize of the Society for Italian Historical Studies.
“The Art of Executing Well offers a disturbing picture of what went
on behind the scenes at executions in Renaissance Italy. Companies
of patrician laymen consoled the condemned during the dark night
before an execution, whispered prayers into his ear as he marched
through the streets on the way to the scaffold, and stood by him
right up to the moment of death. Only in Italy did “companies of
death” offer professionals, merchants, and political leaders an
intimate experience with the horrors of judicial executions. This
fascinating volume, which conveys all the psychological and
spiritual intensity of these dramatic personal encounters between
the condemned and the political figures who supported capital
punishment, suggests why, long before other Europeans Italian
elites became skeptical of the benefits of judicial executions,
Tuscany was the first European state to abolish capital
punishment.”—Edward Muir
“This multiplicity of perspectives—condemned prisoners, comforters,
public spectators, and scholars of various disciplines—makes this
book deeply interesting and an important contribution to studies of
ritual, piety, and society in Renaissance Italy.”—Sixteenth Century
Journal
“This excellent book quite belies the very series title under which
it was published. Indeed, the included essays regarding the
elaborate rituals by which criminals were put to death in Italy
from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, and
especially the contemporaneous manuals instructing volunteer
laybrothers in how to comfort the condemned and convince them to
accept and even appreciate their fate, indicate remarkably just how
medieval still were the judicial systems of that so-called age of
cultural enlightenment.”—Catholic Historical Review
“[Terpstra] has identified and brought important primary texts to a
wider audience. The volume will hopefully spur more scholars to
study how public executions shaped Italian religious life and
perhaps changed early modern attitudes toward crime and
punishment.”—Renaissance Quarterly
“There was an art to it, born of tradition and compassion. The act
of execution in Renaissance Italy was not purely to punish the
prisoner and entertain the public but also to affirm religious and
social concepts that comforted some and warned others. Based upon
an extended period of research, particularly of a rediscovered
manuscript on the Beinecke collection of Yale U., this collection
of essays reflects the political, religious and social complexity
of execution. The contributors detail the comforting (and
disturbing) rituals associated with executions and dramatic
traditions, the uses of sacred song or other forms of worship to
assist the condemned, the commercialization of executions through
the sale of printed broadsheets and other products, and the works
of artists and writers to preserve memories of the condemned and
their acts.”—Book News
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