The Art of Executing Well. Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy

Abstract

This collection of six articles and three different sets of texts is a unique and innovative contribution to scholarship on early modern Italian comforting confraternities. Assembled under the expert guidance of Nicholas Terpstra with contributions from an international team of scholars, it offers a well-focused analysis of the rituals, practices, iconology, and philosophy that not only characterized but actually underpinned the work of confraternities dedicated to helping the condemned come to terms with, and then face their imminent execution. While in other areas of Europe such comforting was carried out by members of the clergy, on the Italian peninsula it was often lay men who assumed this unenviable responsibility-though not without the occasional interference from the Church or the State, as Terpstra notes in his contribution to the collection (esp. pp. 150-152).Starting in Bologna in the 1330s, but then spreading rapidly to cities such as Ferrara, Florence, Venice and Rome, the idea that fellow lay men should comfort the condemned caught the imagination of the urban population in Italy's most advanced and prosperous cities. This led to the creation of comforting confraternities that quickly became a key participant in the theatre of justice that was enacted with frightening regularity and frequency well into the late eighteenth century. As Terpstra tantalizingly suggests in the concluding paragraph of his introduction (p. 9), perhaps it was exactly because of such lay participation in a task as mentally and spiritually challenging as the conforteria that Italian political and cultural leaders were able, in the eighteenth century, to advance a more humane understanding of the relationship between crime and punishment. In November 1786 the Grand Duchy of Tuscany became the first sovereign state in Europe to formally abolish capital punishment. Perhaps it is also not a coincidence that just over a year before, in March 1785, it also abolished all confraternities, including the confraternity of Santa Maria della Croce al Tempio and its famous comforting sub-group, the "Blacks."In the first article in the collection, "Scaffold and Stage. Comforting Rituals and Dramatic Traditions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy" (13-30), Kathleen Falvey examines the intersection of comforting rituals and religious plays in late medieval and Renaissance Italy. A revised and expanded version of her 1991 article in Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities, the current version uses the Bolognese and Florentine texts published in chapter s 7 and 8 of this collection to argue for a "profound correspondence … between dramatic traditions and the efforts of dedicated laymen to transform a brutal penal event, public execution, into a ritualized and very 'real' reenactment of the death of Christ or one of the martyrs" ( 14). Falvey's contribution

Senses of Space in the Early Modern World

“…Jeers and catcalls greeted some of the condemned and wails of sorrow and mercy greeted others. Purgation of the condemned included a public reading of the charges and the condemned's own gallows confession or cries along the route (Terpstra 2008). Amsterdam conducted executions from a wooden platform extending from a window at the front of its monumental City Hall, where prisons, torture rooms, and courts were all located.…”

“…Its medical students paid for additional masses to be sung for the souls of those condemned who consented to this use of their corpses. Its curious elites bought tickets to witness the anatomical exercises, perhaps wondering like the doctors whether the force of the sounds around the execution had left physical marks inside the body laid out before them (Terpstra 2008).…”

“…They used the gentle touch of familiars to give meaning to their words in the prison cell, on the procession to the scaffold, and up to the point of death. Their touch ushered him in to communion and on to heaven (Terpstra 2008).…”