Violence and the Politics of Everyday Life

Abstract

On Tuesday 17 March 1705 a notary from Bologna’s Tribunale del Torrone visited Maddalena Faesini at her sickbed in the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Vita to interrogate her about the life-threatening wounds to her face that brought her there.1 She stated that she had received many blows to the head and jaw with an unidentified blunt object from a woman called Domenica Gombi. They knew each other and lived in the same street, and Maddalena suggested having been beaten up so badly because Domenica believed she had badmouthed her to the merchant they both worked for, presumably as spinners or weavers. The investigation of this injury, which had not only slashed the skin on Maddalena’s face but also caused her teeth to fall out, was halted when the two made peace roughly two weeks later. The casebooks of Bologna’s criminal court’s notaries are filled with violent altercations similar to this incident. Though discordant with normative expectations of women, these aggressions were an integral part of the day-to-day lives of male and female artisans, peddlers and labourers in Bologna’s dense urban fabric. These violent altercations were also considered an unwelcome interaction worth denouncing to the court. This chapter explores the gendered dynamics of these quotidian violent behaviours recounted in the Tribunale del Torrone’s denunciations and processi between the middle of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through the examination of these criminal court records, this chapter will draw attention to the distinguishing features of early modern Italy’s culture of violence and, importantly, establish women’s place in it. It will ultimately argue that women’s violent behaviour was far too common to be viewed as an anomaly. To this end, this chapter will first discuss the particular place of Italy, as a representative of the ‘southern pattern,’ in European comparisons of longterm patterns of violence. It will deal with how violence was regarded in the eyes of the law and how it was dealt with in practice, as the culture of violence went hand in hand with that of reconciliation throughout the early modern period. The next sections scrutinise women’s participation in homicide as well as verbal aggression and, importantly, a wide range of non-fatal physical acts of violence. This chapter builds on recent scholarship that includes the pettier forms of violence in its analysis, which were far more common than their