Denunciations and the Uses of Justice

Abstract

On 6 March 1755 Lucia Tessoni, a married spinner of stockings, was treated for a head wound at the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Morte, nearby what is known today as Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore.1 Notified by the surgeon who treated her ‘suspicious wounds,’ a notary from Bologna’s criminal court visited Lucia at her bedside to ask what had put her in this precarious position.2 The situation she described was that of a quarrel that escalated between her and her neighbour Gertrude Carolini. It started out with simple verbal insults, which Lucia decided to denounce to the criminal court. A month later, the two women encountered each other each other again in the loggia of their apartment building and Gertrude started insulting her once more. Lucia warned her that it would be wise to leave her alone; otherwise she would lodge a further complaint against her. As Gertrude replied that she feared nobody, the heated exchange escalated into a fight in which Lucia received blows to her head with a hammer; an attack from which Lucia died later that month. While Lucia’s recourse to the court ended up being in vain for her personally, this example stands as a testament to the agency of ordinary women as litigants – latitude that has had only little attention in earlier scholarship. The previous chapter discussed the offences that came before Bologna’s early modern criminal court primarily from the perspective of the prosecution policies of the authorities. Like other early modern criminal courts, however, the Torrone was more than an instrument for the authorities to impose top-down control on its inhabitants. Examining in detail the separately stored denunciations will demonstrate the importance of Bologna’s early modern criminal court as a forum for conflict resolution, employed instrumentally and strategically by men and women to pursue their grievances. It will also bring to the fore a richer tableau of women’s crimes more representative of their everyday lives than the formal investigations could depict. This chapter begins with the historiography on women’s use of justice in early modern Europe. Together with prescriptive literature, the relatively weak legal position women had in Roman law has provided fuel for notions of a North-South divergence related to the access to and uses of justice. The first section will discuss recent works that call for caution and indicate that the