Fuori dalla città. Documenti e pratiche della giustizia dei conti Guidi nel XIV e XV secolo

Lorenzo Tanzini

2020-01-01

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Abstract

The essay aims to focus on a particular context of the criminal justice, different from the well known case of the urban courts, that is the seigneurial lordship of the Conti Guidi, a powerful lineage of rural lords of the late medieval Tuscany. The Guidi family maintained untill the 15th century a large though very scattered complex of rural lordship over castles and villages, and thanks to the notarial practice an important amount of records has been preserved to shed light on the judicial activity of their courts. Sometimes the records were copied in single parchment acts, sometimes they were included in more miscellaneus notarial books, and in one case (Poppi) there is a small archive of libri maleficiorum of the lords. The essay analyses all these different kinds of records in order to outiline a comparison with the practice of urban courts.