Death penalty in late-medieval Catalonia. Evidence and significations

Abstract

This book is a major contribution to the analysis of the development of criminal institutions in the Late Middle Ages. The book is framed within the context of the author’s in-depth debates about sources and is sensitive to changes on the European continent from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. It fills a gap in scholarship about the varied mosaic of jurisdictional rivalries that explain criminal practices on the imputability and evolution of legal institutions, such as the death penalty. As the author explains in his introduction, the book’s entire subject was conceived through academic events in which he participated. Under the sponsorship of the Laboratoire de Médiévistique Occidentale de Paris, Sabaté presented the first results of his research at a seminar organised at the invitation of Claude Gauvard, a renowned expert on the history of violence in France. Subsequently, both scholars participated in the next congress at the Crime History Centre of the Basque Country, alongside other prominent specialists such as Andrea Zorzi and Martine Charageat. At this event, an essential comparative focus was applied to the subject of the death penalty in late-medieval societies. From this meeting emerged the first version of this book, which led the author to expand his research material to the current version that is now published. Coincidentally, in the same year that Death Penalty in Late-Medieval Catalonia was published, Gauvard also released a book conceived at the same meeting: Condamner à mort au Moyen Âge. These two monographs have much in common with the interpretation of the creation of the modern state developed by Jean-Philippe Genet and Wim Blockman in recent decades. Both books present reasoning concerned with the symbolic aspect of violence as an instrument of social pacification, as well as its incorporation into a state’s political discourse. According to its prospectus, Sabaté’s book claims to be a synthesis covering the late medieval period, during which Catalonia’s historical advent took place. That is, Sabaté is delimiting a historical period beginning with the formation of the first counties as the Carolingian rule gradually lost control from the tenth