Supplications between Politics and Justice: The Northern and Central Italian States in the Early Modern Age

Abstract

“Those who think to do away with petitions would overthrow the entire system of the State”. This remark – taken from an anonymous eighteenth-century account of the political organization of the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza – describes well the importance attributed to complaints in the organization of the state. Through complaints, or petitions, it is generally possible to verify a number of fundamental forms and modes of communication between society and the institutions of the ancien regime, and to reconstruct the procedures of mediation, repression, acceptance, and agreement adopted by princes, sovereigns, or magistracies in response to social demands.

“Parere contrario”

“…Il punto di partenza della ricerca nasce da una preliminare constatazione: il potere di grazia, tema di rilevanza interdisciplinare (Pisani 2007;Ruckman jr. 2012) e oggetto di analisi in chiave comparativa (Sebba 1977;Novak 2016;Udofa 2018), è stato studiato, oltre che in ambito giuridico, soprattutto in quello storico (per l'Italia, cfr. fra gli altri Stronati, 2009;Nubola 2001Nubola , 2011Nubola , 2019 e specificamente di history of crime and criminal justice (Verreycken 2019), mentre più limitatamente in ambito sociologico e, in particolare, sociologico-giuridico (per es. MacEvoy, Mallinder 2012; Norton 2018).…”

An Italian Aristocracy in Arms: The Duke of Parma Goes to War 1635–1637

“…24 This does not take into account the thousands of petitions that the Duke and his functionaries received from subjects of every status requesting a vast array of exemptions and derogations of the law in their favour. 25 The Duke had a complete monopoly on pardon over all the laymen in his territories, and could award it to his feudatories and their clients, just as he could withhold it at his pleasure.…”