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Penitential Themes in 14th-Century Sienese Petitions for Amnesty: How Can They Contribute to the Debate on the ‘Voices’ of Medieval Court Records?

“…Using contradictory arguments could have the effect of strengthening one's case by making sure that at least one would encounter the approval of the councillors. The judicial rhetoric of late medieval courts allowed pleaders to resort to an accumulation of arguments that did not need to be linked by a stringent relation of logical necessity (Hohmann, 1998). In the case of Vanna and her brother Andrea, in particular, the judicial context in which the petition was produced made it especially advantageous to juxtapose the motivations of the ' old' and 'new' man.…”