Oxford University Press

Gender and Civic Authority: Sexual Control in a Medieval Italian Town
Author(s): Carol Lansing

Source: Journal of Social History, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 33-59
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3789856 .
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GENDER AND CIVIC AUTHORITY: SEXUAL CONTROL IN
A MEDIEVAL ITALIAN TOWN
By Caroi Lansing University of Califomia, Santa Barbara
One of the changes that marks the rise of effective self-governing communes
in late medieval Italy is a new attention in the civic courts to cases involving
sexual morality. Town officials began active pursuit of offenses that included
not only prostitution and sodomy but adultery. These efforts suggest that the
creation of civic authority was influenced by understandings of sexual morality
and sexual difference. Most scholarship on the late medieval Italian towns still
effectively divides public from private spheres. Women, family, and sexuality are
all understood as private life, distinct from questions of state authority.1 This
division has at times prevented scholars from grasping fascinating and revealing
connections.
One example is research on the medieval Italian magnates, noble patrilineages
considered by their contemporaries the worst threats to public order. Scholars
have not examined the links between laws restraining the magnates and laws
on issues like sodomy and female dress.2 Lawmakers addressed noble violence
and faction as threats to public order, and then turned directly to women's
hems. The connection seems odd to modern readers, but thirteenth-century
understandings of violent disorder were different from modem ones. Society and
politics were grasped in terms of moral theology. Medieval lawmakers considered
women's hems and factional warfare closely linked: a root cause of the lack of
order was concupiscence, sensual appetites resistant to rational control.3 Further,
concupiscence at least since Augustine of Hippo was associated with attributes
considered feminine. Medieval Italian lawmakers in some ways based the new
guild republics on an analysis of public order that linked violent disorder with
gendered attributes.
This article is an effort to open up a new avenue for analysis of medieval
state formation. Medieval historians have been slow to respond to Joan Scott's
1985 call for research into the use of gender to signify relations of power.4 But
in fact, the medieval Italian city-states invite this kind of analysis because of
their use of the vocabularies of the patriarchal family and of Christian moral
teaching. I would like to suggest that town governments pursued sexual crimes
in part because lawmakers believed that one cause of disorder?in the state as
within the family?was concupiscence, which they associated with feminine
nature. The creation of just order and authority required the restraint of sensual
appetite.
L Sexual criminality, gender and state formation
This approach brings together material from three ftelds of research in me?
dieval history: sexual criminality, state formation and gender. The last two
decades have seen a number of studies of late medieval sexual criminality, al?
though research on adultery cases remains scanty.5 The emphasis has been on

34 journal of social history fall 1997
the targets of the laws. Michael Rocke, in a major study of sodomy cases in
Florence, suggests that laws on sodomy were not to asssure the restriction of a
deviant group; he found little evidence of a gay subculture or a concept of sexual
identity in fifteenth-century Florence. Rocke does link changing legislation and
the degree of enforcement of laws on sodomy to specific transitions in Florentine
rule.6 There are a handful of recent studies of prostitution. Most emphasize the
fifteenth and even sixteenth centuries, and center on institutionalization, the
late medieval creation of civic brothels.7 The work of Ruth Karras has been
most influential. Karras views the regulation of brothels in terms of the control
of female sexuality: a woman who was not under the control ofa single man had
to be a "common woman" available to all.8 As Luise White has argued on the
basis of her research on prostitutes in colonial Nairobi, studies of prostitution
tend to be shaped by ideas about victimization. She urges instead an emphasis on
women, their earnings and their families, analysis that does not "isolate women
in the categories of deviancy and subculture."9
These studies of late medieval sexual criminality raise questions about con?
temporary political ideas. Why did town governments put themselves in the
thankless business of seeking to police sexual morality? Karras' analysis of pros?
titution laws in terms of control of female sexuality is a useful starting point, but
from the perspective of thirteenth-century Italy, there are two stumbling-blocks.
First, the courts sought to police not only female but male sexuality, including
sodomy and male adultery.10 Second, social control is not obviously the best
explanation for laws and court decisions that were enforced weakly or not at
all, given a town's meager police power. More generally, why did the control
of sexuality in the late thirteenth century become the job of the state? What
does this reveal about the ways in which ruling elites understood authority and
political order?
Scholars working on late medieval and early modern Italian state formation
have been slow to think in terms of gender, despite considerable recent attention
to aspects of what used to be regarded as private life. Many Italianists have
concluded that legal and institutional forms were often empty appearances, in
part because revelations ofthe corruption ofthe modern Italian state have simply
rendered older statist models untenable. Scholars have turned instead to analysis
ofthe state in terms of informal sources of power, notably clientelism.11 This has
led not to a collapse of the distinction between public and private, but rather
to a boundary shift.12 This shift is evident in a magisterial recent survey of the
field by Giorgio Chittolini. Chittolini explicitly excluded from his survey "all
the rich literature on 'the private' that does not bear directly on 'the public' and
the state."13 The category of private life persists, and women's history is for the
most part located within it. Feminist studies of sumptuary legislation, notably
the work of Diane Hughes, have reinforced this division by analyzing laws on
dress and behavior in terms of controls on women.14 This relegates the laws to
the history ofthe restriction of women.15 The point is simply that the laws and
their enforcement are also important to the history ofthe state.
Late medieval Italian politics offers rich material for gender analysis. One
possibility would be to take seriously the patriarchal nature ofthe state, evidenced
for example by the Florentine state dowry fund.16 The approach adopted here is
to explore one way in which society, politics and human nature were understood

GENDER AND CIVIC AUTHORITY 35
in terms of Christian moral teaching. This influence has been under-studied,

perhaps because it is not consonant either with a Weberian bureaucratic model
or with the Burckhardtian image of the Italian Renaissance state as a work of
art.17 But in the thirteenth century the friars in great preaching campaigns in
the Italian towns explained social and political disorder in terms of sin: the lack
of just order resulting from aspects of human nature that are the consequence
of the Fall. The friars' political influence could be direct; in the mid-thirteenth
century, preachers were sometimes invited to write a town's laws.
There has been extensive research on late medieval gender, defined in various
ways as contemporary understandings of sexual difference. This includes the work
of Caroline Bynum and Joan Cadden's recent Meanings of Sex Difference in the
Middle Ages, as well as research by historians of theology, notably Pierre Payer's
The Bridling ofDesire.18 This study draws on this rich research to examine one
question, the influence of the association of concupiscence with female nature
and disorder on lawmakers and civic courts. The argument is that when urban
elites sought to restrict adultery, as well as prostitution, sodomy, and articles
of female dress, they defined the city-state and their own authority through
the exclusion of threats that they understood as feminine. What ultimately was
their purpose? I will argue that this was not a serious effort at social control; civic
judges had neither the police power nor it seems to me the motivation genuinely
to control these actions. The laws and court cases were as much a conversation
about disorder and about elite male self-restraint as an attempt at social control.
I have sought to bridge the gap between discussions of politics and morality and
social practice by looking not only at the ways in which lawmakers and preachers
talked about morality and authority in their statutes, treatises and sermons, but
at the choices of men and women represented in judicial sentences.19 Surely the
two were interwoven, and elite perceptions of disorder derived not only from
ideas preached in sermons but from experience.20 When lawmakers associated
disorder with qualities considered feminine, they were reacting to social change
and the presence in the towns of large numbers of poor women who were not
clearly under patriarchal control and despite other constraints had freedom of
movement and considerable agency.
The evidence for practice for late thirteenth-and early fourteenth-century
Italy is fragmentary at best. For the most part, research on these issues in un?
published judicial records and council minutes has not been done.21 For these
reasons, I have not sketched a general account for all of late medieval Italy.22
Instead, I have attempted a detailed look at a single community, though in ex-
ploring contemporary discussions I have drawn of necessity on evidence from
other towns. I have first explored normative legislation and then judicial sen?
tences for one crime, adultery. Adultery cases are especially revealing about
connections between the concerns of lawmakers about passion as a source of
disorder and people's actions. An adulterous couple did threaten order, since the
choice to have sexual relations that violated the marriage bond defied patriarchal
authority.
The article will first briefly sketch the growth of town populations and judicial
institutions in the thirteenth century. Then, I will turn to legal and theolog-
ical sources to argue that Orvietan legislators in the late thirteenth and early
fourteenth century understood political and social disorder in gendered terms.

In the second half ofthe article I will turn to the specific case ofthe extension
of civic jurisdiction to adultery in Orvieto, and argue that abstract understand-
ings of gender and disorder were grounded not only in contemporary preaching
but in social experience, and that the Orvietan court cases over adultery reveal
links between lawmakers' concerns about concupiscence and their experience
of genuine threats to authority, disorderly sexual relations between men and
women.
Orvieto, the focus of this study, is a spectacular hill town about halfway be?
tween Rome and Florence. The town is now an exquisite backwater, but in the
thirteenth century it was an important cultural crossroads. Orvieto from 1157
was a self-governing commune within the Patrimony of St. Peter, and became
a popular residence of the papal curia.23 The great Roman houses that domi-
nated the papacy had considerable cultural and political influence in the town,
depending on the ins and outs of their complex rivalries.24 The Orvietan courts
reflected this influence. Medieval Italian town governments were run by a form
of hired city manager termed a podesta, typically an outsider who served a year's
term and then moved on. In Orvieto the podesta were often papal nominees,
and brought with them to the town by the jurists who decided adultery cases.
For example, one member of the Roman Orsini family named Bertoldo served
as podesta during the pontificate of his kinsman Nicholas III. He was back in
office in 1287-88 and it was in fact his judges who decided the bulk ofthe extant
adultery cases. Orvieto despite its small size was a sophisticated and influential
place: thirteenth-century struggles over religious, political and gender identities
were in part worked out in the town.25 It is also the case that the extant statutes
and court records are particularly rich, allowing us glimpses of this contest.
IL Social growth and civic authority
Orvieto, like the other towns of medieval Tuscany, underwent a gradual social
and political revolution beginning in the late twelfth century. The rapid growth
of the towns was driven by local emigration, as individuals and families moved
from the countryside to take advantage of urban economic opportunity. The
city of Florence roughiy doubled in size during the century. For Orvieto, the
proportions of growth can be traced through the gradual appearance in the
course of the century of new neighborhoods and churches, first on the plateau
and then in new suburbs below it. By 1292, the town numbered close to 17,000,
the immediate countryside close to 32,000.26
Towns bristled with recent emigrants, including landless laborers, male and
female. The bustling urban life of the late thirteenth-century town offered not
only men but women new opportunity and mobility. The judicial records give
a sense of the ebb and flow of the streets and piazze and are full of independent
women who bash thieves over the head, serve drink after hours or peddle fruit
and insult each other in the market.27 Many worked at modest jobs outside of
elite households and guild structures, serving as laundresses, spinners, resellers of
fruits and vegetables. 8 Some supplemented meager incomes with sexual services
for pay, in this period before the imposition of strict controls marked prostitutes
as a distinct social group and moved them into civic brothels.29 Research on
late medieval Italian women has focused on women under patriarchal control,

elite women and women working as domestics in elite households. Women who
were more independent because they were widowed or undowered and too poor
to marry often escape our attention because they escaped most records.30
Women with occupations were usually poor, as contemporary tax records sug?
gest. In the 1292 tax records in Orvieto, only 4.2% of heads of urban households
wealthy enough to own rural land were women, who tended to own small garden
plots, tiny bits of high-value land.31 The real number of female-headed house?
holds in the town was perhaps three times as high, since all those without rural
land were omitted. They were included in the Florentine estimo of 1352, reveal-
ing their numbers and also their poverty: over two-thirds of women identified
with occupations were classed as miserabiles, poor people with no resources of
any value.32 Women at low social levels who were not domestics in wealthy
households had more independence than the closely guarded wives and daugh?
ters of the elite, though to be outside of patriarchal control meant that they
were less protected by family and community and more at risk. Thus one effect
of rapid growth and immigration was a substantial population of poor women.33
Many of them lived in households that were not headed by men. This visible
female presence was the background to elite male association of a lack of order
with concupiscence and women.34
Rapid social and economic growth led to a shift in the structure of political
power. In the late thirteenth century, most towns established authority based
in guilds. Even in smaller towns like Orvieto where elite wealth was always
based on agricultural land, power was shifting from an older landed nobility to
men who combined wealth from agriculture with banking, commerce and mod?
est manufacture. Corporate economic associations gained a new importance.35
Strengthened urban institutions included a considerable expansion of the judi?
cial powers of government. It was during the mid-thirteenth century that Italian
city governments first achieved anything resembling a monopoly on justice.36 Le?
gal historians document a shift from law used to establish consensus and peace, to
law used to assert state authority during this period.37 Judicial authorities began
to develop an investigative function. By 1277 the Orvietan podesta Raynaldo
Leonis had numerous officers charged with uncovering violations. Members of
his familia denounced curfew violators and gamblers; special officials safeguarded
the markets, fountains and butcher shops. A pig officer denounced those who
let their pigs run loose in the streets.38 This expansion of investigative powers
defined the city government as protector of the local economy, public order
and safety.39 It also enabled the city to adjudicate and even investigate cases
involving sexual morality, including not only rape, prostitution and sodomy but
adultery.
This expansion of the town's judicial powers was both an effort to construct
and justify civic authority and also a pragmatic response to real threats. The
great problem for the late medieval Italian towns was the creation of an orderly
self-governing urban society, a vita civile. The worst threats to order came not
from outside powers?armies of the papacy, Hohenstaufen emperors, Angevins
or even neighboring cities. Rather they were internal: violence, crime, discord,
faction. Violence was common: the judicial records are full of evidence of after
hours' drinking, gambling, concealed weapons, insults and brawls, as well as
theft, assault, rape and homicide.40 And in the thirteenth and early fourteenth

centuries, factional division and civil war were endemic. Towns were torn apart
by conflicts in which men butchered their enemies in the streets and torched
their palaces.
Civic governments despite their judicial innovations were ill-equipped to
control violence. Their police power was minimal; when individuals chose not to
comply with the court, judges typically had little power to enforce their rulings.41
Most people convicted in court were simply contumacious. Presumably, they
then calculated the advantages and disadvantages of paying the fine.42 Andrea
Zorzi has argued that in the communal period systems of policing were based on
neighborhood inquests, at least in Florence. Extant inquests from thirteenth-
century Bologna suggest that the reports of the neighborhood representatives
were shaped by local power relations. Not surprisingly, they were reiuctant to
report dangerous or powerful neighbors.43
Civic authorities were capable of occasional dramatic exemplary punishments
but did not have the police power required to carry out heavy sanctions with
consistency.44 It was especially difficult to punish elite violence. For example,
in a notorious case from Orvieto, some Filippeschi nobles in 1272 butchered
three Pandolfini rivals and an unlucky tavernkeeper. When the court summoned
twenty-two men as witnesses?many of them villagers from nearby Fabro?they
simply failed to appear, surely fearing repercussions. The podesta slapped twenty
men considered implicated in the homicides with huge 7000 libra fines and
banned them. This was largely unenforced, and in 1273 the podesta reduced
the penalties to a few temporary exiles and smaller fines. Even these were not
enforced, and a year later the podesta arranged a public reconciliation and the
murders went unpunished. This institutional weakness is important because of
its implications for the nature of contemporary legislative efforts and judicial
process. This simply was not effective social control.
III. Understandings of order: Orvietan statutes on sexual offenses
In Orvieto a broad-based guild regime with executives termed the Seven was
established in 1292.45 These guildsmen-lawmakers, like their counterparts in
Florence, Bologna or Siena addressed the need to establish order in a number of
ways. They blamed the nobility; it was the magnates who disdain the law and use
force for private ends. Stringent laws were passed and at times even enforced that
sought to curb noble violence and limit noble access to power.46 They also took
measures to counteract what they perceived to be growing threats from sexual
offenses. The most dramatic was a new concern with sodomy. As late as 1295,
sodomy was treated mildly, judging from the startling case of a former policeman
accused of an attempt to kidnap, imprison and rape the young son of a master
barber. He was contumacious and was sentenced in absentia to a fine of 50 libra
for the kidnap, 200 for being a known highway robber and a "vachabundus," and
100 for attempted sodomy. By comparison, the fine for heterosexual rape was
200 libras. If captured and unable to pay, he was to be either
hanged until dead
or blinded, the penalties not for sodomy but for repeated theft.4' The victim's
father served as a guild consul the same year, and it was perhaps because of his
influence that a new statute on sodomy was passed.48

By 1308, the Seven considered "that the vice of sodomy is increasing in the
city of Orvieto, an insult to God and man." They left the exact practice undefined
and simply called it a sin against nature. The Seven respbnded to this increasing
threat with a cruel and imaginative humiliation for those unable to pay the fine.
A person convicted of sodomy was to be paraded around the city with trumpets
sounding before him, holding a cord tied to his male member "in such a way that
the member was publically visible." Men guilty of sodomy were banned from
public honors or offices. Pimps for sodomy were to be punished as sodomites
but if unable to pay were to be branded on the throat with the eagle, symbol
of the commune.49 The threat of sodomy was so serious that the normal rules
restricting torture were to be waived.50 The Seven, apparently concerned that
these cruel laws would not be enforced, charged the podesta with investigating
and punishing sodomy, with a 500 libra fine if he failed to do so.
The sodomy law punished men who did not control a sensual appetite that
was considered against nature. Contemporary laws from other towns were more
specific, distinguishing between active and passive partners, although in the
thirteenth century they were often punished equally; in Bologna, both were to
be burned alive, unless the passive partner was underage or could prove violent
rape.51 The Orvietans instead devised a punishment that dramatized the loss
of male political privilege consequent upon a sodomy conviction. The planned
punishment of a man guilty of sodomy was an elaborate public humiliation, a
parade that parodied the formal processions of civic officials, with trumpeters
blowing, the man's penis displayed to view while he lost the privileges of access
to public office and honors.
Prostitution laws were passed during these same decades. The apparent intent
was not to eliminate prostitution but to limit it and to ban pimps. Prostitution
cases in the thirteenth-century Orvietan judicial records are the sentences of
pimps and landlords rather than prostitutes themselves.52 The Seven sought
to ban prostitution from certain areas, particularly near churches. By 1313?
15, prostitution was to be excluded from the city entireiy, and the landlords
of properties used for prostitution were to be fined. The Seven forbade women
from holding their daughters or any other women in brothels; the penalty was a
beating and exile.53
These laws could be read as a response to a dramatic increase in courtly vice.
Orvieto from the mid-thirteenth century was a courtly capital, popular residence
of the papal curia and at times the Angevins and their attendant garrisons.54
Papal entourages were enormous, numbering as many as five or six hundred
people.55 The presence of all these courtiers, clerks, domestics, hangers-on and
troops must have fostered not only the luxury trades and rental housing market
but taverns, gambling and prostitution. However, these stringent Orvietan laws
on sex crimes date not from the town's heyday as a courtly center but from
after the curia's transfer to Avignon. The laws addressed not the impact of the
transient presence of the courts but threats understood to be internal.
The Seven were also concerned to separate spaces for men and women. In
1315, they made careful provision to divide the prison and create a separate area
for women. "No woman could or should be mixed into the prison where men are
detained." The new women's prison was to be locked with two keys, one held by

the podesta or another high official, the other by the Seven.56 The intent must
have been to avoid sexual impropriety and consequent trouble. Women were to
be carefully locked up.
The most striking of these laws is a provision of Sept. 13, 1310 in which the
Seven denied women access to the town hall and its broad exterior stairs, where
legal business was often transacted: "no woman may ascend to the Palazzo ofthe
Popolo or that of the Orvietan commune or their stairs for any cause or reason.
Women who must be questioned concerning accusations, inquests, testimony or
any other necessity shall be examined at the foot ofthe stairs, next to the piazza of
the Palazzo del Popolo," or in the church of San Andreas. Officials who ignored
the law were to be fined 25 libra; disobedient women were to be fined 10.57 In
effect, women were not allowed in the places where government and justice
took place. Judging from a revised version that allowed respectable women to be
questioned at home, the overt intent was perhaps to protect women, though how
questioning women in the busy piazza next to the butcher shops under the stairs
might accompiish this end is unclear.58 The law made no attempt to alter the
legal privileges and obligations of female citizens and female residents; women
could still lodge accusations, serve as witnesses, and so forth. The Seven simplv
defined the sites of public administration as an exclusively masculine place.
In the absence of women, government and justice could be carried out by calm,
rational male guildsmen.
IV. Concupiscence and just order
I would like to suggest that underlying these laws concerning the punishment
of sexual offenses and the restriction ofthe presence of women were ideas derived
from theological understandings of original sin. The lack of just order in society
could be understood as the result of concupiscence, sensual appetite resistant to
reason. Concupiscence was often coded as feminine. When the Seven discussed
excluding women from the town hall, they were talking about ways to exclude
irrational concupiscence from public life. This is not to deny the influence
on political thought of the revival of classical philosophy; clearly, ideas about
the restraint of passion also derived from the Stoic tradition, and efforts to
exclude female attributes from public life from the Greek equation of women
with irrationality.60 But the implications of Augustinian analysis of original
sin for understandings of human faculties and just order in thirteenth-century
political discussions were equally important and are less well understood.
Augustine had explained original sin in terms of the psychological difference
between men and women. Adam because of his rational nature would not have
listened to the serpent alone. It was Eve who was moved by concupiscence and
acted as intermediary.61 As Pierre Payer neatly explains, in Augustine's De Genesi
contra Manichaeos, "Eve represents the desire for pleasure, and Adam represents
rational consent."62 Augustine's reading ofthe temptation story in Genesis was
extremely influential, adopted among others by Peter Lombard. It appears in the
commonly-used medieval handbooks of theology, the Lombard's Sentences and
the Glossa Ordinaria.
Original sin came to be associated with the loss of just order in the body and in
society. Augustine had understood original sin in terms of concupiscence, best

represented by the excitation ofthe sexual organs, a random motion disobedient

to the will.63 The human defect that is the consequence ofthe fall is thus the loss
of rational control of the body, including but not exclusively the loss of perfect
control ofthe genitals. As John Rist explains, for Augustine this was "a revolt of
the senses and ofthe body generally."64 Thirteenth-century theologians brought
together August ine's emphasis on concupiscence with the views of Anselm of
Canterbury (d. 1109), who emphasized sin as the loss of original justice. Orig-
inal sin for Anselm meant Adam and Eve's betrayal of their rational natures and
their capacity to serve justice.66 From the time of Alexander of Hales, a number
of theologians turned to this idea and formulated understandings of original sin
that closely associated sexual impulses and the uncontrollable random move?
ments of the genitals with disobedience to authority and the absence of just
order.67 Thomas Aquinas understood original sin in terms of the loss of original
justice, the harmony of the human will with God's plan. Original sin is thus
an individual's disposition to disorder arising from the loss of that harmonious
justice.68 Concupiscence is the effect of original sin, or in Thomas' formulation
the material cause. Concupiscence, or disordered desire, is the body's pursuit of
natural appetites in disregard of reason. Sensuality is a rebellion against reason.
Orderly justice requires the imposition of rational control, the restraint of dis?
ordered desire. This analysis directly connected disorder in human nature with
disorder in society; it is the loss of interior justice and the rational control ofthe
body and its appetites with original sin that creates disorder.
Were these ideas available to the guildsmen lawmakers in thirteenth-century
Italian towns? Moral teachings about political order were transmitted in several
ways. Recent studies of lay education have stressed its moral function; Paul Gehl
argues for example that the purpose of the translation of Latin learning into
the vernacular was moral education.69 Urban elites often were literate, and the
texts they read?Latin as well as vernacular?emphasized ancient and Christian
morality. For example, James Powell in a recent study of Albertanus of Brescia,
a judge who authored popular moral and political treatises, demonstrates that
Albertanus was closely influenced by his reading of Seneca and Augustine's City
ofGod. In 1246 Albertanus wrote a dialogue on the need for self-restraint to avoid
destructive vendettas and establish peaceful civic order. Disorder is exemplified
by an attack by an man's enemies on his wife and daughter, an attack explained
in terms of their lust and cupidity.70 The occasional town judge like Albertanus
could himself be a moral philosopher.
Surely most Orvietan guildsmen did not read the works of Seneca, Augustine
or even Albertanus, but it was hard for them to escape the sermons of friars, who
often had sophisticated theological training.71 To my knowledge no sermons
preached to the laity in Orvieto in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth cen?
tury are extant, though because ofthe repeated presence ofthe papal curia great
theologians did teach there, including Albertus Magnus and Aquinas himself,
who served as lector in the Dominican convent in Orvieto during the sojourn
of Urban IV72 Thomas' teaching efforts in Orvieto were probably directed to
fellow clerics, but Franciscan as well as Dominican friars regularly passed on
theological ideas in sermons to the laity. Most extant medieval Italian sermons
still exist only in manuscript. One well-studied preacher is the Dominican Fra
Remigio de'Girolami, who preached to the laity in Florence at the end ofthe thir-

teenth century, and even addressed a number of sermons directly to the town's
executives. Fra Remigio was educated in theology at University of Paris and
has attracted scholarly interest because of a sermon that argued an Aristotelian
political analysis in terms of the common good and influenced Florentine state-
craft. Fra Remigio spoke far more extensively ofthe consequences of sin. In one
example of his sermons, he explained the effects of original sin in Augustinian
terms, concupiscence and the loss of perfect control ofthe genitals.73 This loss
of control is depicted in terms of political disobedience, the intellect as king
disobeyed by the members of the body. A thorough analysis of the precise ways
in which preachers explained sexual disorder to the laity requires extended re?
search in sermon collections in manuscript. But it is clear that friars did preach
on concupiscence and original sin and that they associated control of sexual
impulses with control of society.
Preaching friars also connected female dress and political disorder. One in-
fluential example is the Dominican Cardinal Latino Malabranca, a legate sent
by Nicholas III to Lombardy and Tuscany in the late 1270s to make peace. The
cardinal accomplished the dramatic public reconciliation of warring factions
and in 1280 in Florence established a new bipartisan regime. To my knowledge,
his sermons do not survive, but there is a description of his program written by
another friar, the chronicler Salimbene. Fra Salimbene tells us that Latino, in
this campaign to pacify factional violence, urged a tough ordinance on female
dress, banning long trains and requiring all women to veil their faces when they
went out. This was a serious effort; the ordinance forbade priests from giving ab-
solution to women who did not comply.74 Why urge limits on women's dresses
and veils covering women faces in public during a campaign to reconciie war?
ring factions and make peace? There is an implied connection between female
influence and male violence. If only women kept their faces covered, men could
show more restraint. Again, concupiscence, the irrational appetite that is the
source of violent injustice, was considered feminine; male nature was rational.
Did the laity take up these ideas? Early fourteenth-century laments over the
passing ofthe buon tempo antico, the good old days, suggest a similar connection.
Dante in a famed passage in the Paradiso depicted past order and present disor?
der in terms of loss of control of women. In the good old days of Cacciaguida,
Florence abode in peace, "sobria e pudica," sober and chaste, without bracelets,
tiara, embroidered gown or fancy girdle. Dowries were reasonable. Women wore
no paint and were found at the cradle and the distaff.75 The disastrous state
of Dante's Florence is a time when women are not always at home spinning
and wear jewels and embroidery. The text links concerns about dowry inflation
and luxury spending with civic disorder. Dante's source, Riccobaldo of Ferrara,
in his Historie of 1308-11 depicted the good old days as times of frugality and
plain female dress. He excoriated modern dissolute habits, including garments of
rich material decorated with marvellous gold, silver and pearls and exotic furs,
as well as the habit of drinking foreign wine at sumptuous feasts prepared by
highly paid cooks. These texts certainly express concerns about money, about
luxury spending and dowry inflation. But desire for money was not dissociated
from other forms of lust: immoderate appetite led to violence and political in?
justice. Riccobaldo made this explicit; from modern luxurious habits, he wrote,
"come usury, frauds, rapine, pillaging, plunder, contentions in the state, unjust

exactions, oppression of the innocent, destruction of citizens, banishment of

the rich."76
In some instances, the preaching friars' connection with legislative programs
was direct?preachers were invited to reform a town's statutes. In the revivai
movement of 1233 termed the Great Devotion, preachers demonstrably legis-
lated in Padua, Verona, Vicenza, Bologna, Parma and Milan. Most of their laws
are now lost. Gerard Boccabadati's laws for Parma survive; they concerned peace
and the administration of justice, heresy and moral reform, including laws on
fornication and adultery.77 However, direct evidence that these moral teachings
influenced individual Orvietan lawmakers is difficult to find. No memoirs or let?
ters remain. The extant records of council debates for this period are scanty, and
statements of the rationale for specific laws at best brief phrases. One law does
link women's dress with men's desire, desire that can lead to their destruction.
This is the first extant statute on female dress, passed by the Seven in 13ll.78
The law bans gold, silver and pearl detailing as well as fancy tiaras "lest for
the foolish things of women men kindled by excessive love be confounded and
destroyed."79 Control of female dress will enable men to restrain their excessive
desire. The exact scenario is vague. Perhaps men's passion for their wives leads
them to buy rich trinkets and suffer financial destruction; perhaps men fired by
love at the sight of women decorated with gold and pearls are then destroyed
by the consequences of lust. The vagueness itself recalls Riccobaldo's general
list of financial, social and political disasters that result from the loss of male
self-control.
The best evidence that Italian lawmakers associated a lack of just order with
concupiscence is political fresco. A number of towns commissioned painters to
set out political ideology on the walls of the town hall.80 The best-preserved is
the great allegory of good and bad government, painted for the Sienese town hall
by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. It has been extensively studied as evidence of contem?
porary political ideology by a number of scholars, notably Nicolai Rubinstein,
Chiara Frugoni, Quentin Skinner and Randolph Starn, but to my knowledge
despite rich possibilities has not been analyzed in terms of gender.81 A figure rep-
resenting Tyranny presides over the court of bad government, which includes a
trinity of avarice, pride and vainglory as well as cruelty, treachery, fraud, rage,
division and war. The figures of the court thus represent the psychological qual-
ities that are the source of bad government. Tyranny is depicted as the whore
of Babylon from the Book of Revelations, holding the gold winecup brimming
with her fornications in her hand and the goat of lust under her foot. In effect,
the image used to represent tyranny, the central aspect of bad government, is a
female image of concupiscence. A tyrant's desire for power is a whore's desire for
sex. The figure illustrates the consequences of original sin: the lack of just order
in the state understood in terms of unrestrained sensual appetite, portrayed as a
lustful woman.
V. Adultery in the Orvietan courts
I would like to turn now from normative legislation and discourse on con?
cupiscence to specific cases of adultery in Orvieto. Again, elite male concerns
about sex and disorder were influenced not only by political and theological ideas

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but by their actual experience of disorder. Lived experience is sadly inaccessible

for the thirteenth century, but court sentences for adultery do allow a somewhat
closer approach. Why after all did the civic officials take on the troublesome
business of pursuing adultery cases, through court-instigated inquests as well as in
response to accusations? One way to answer this question is to look at what was
going on: who was actually sentenced for adultery, and in what circumstances.
I will argue that the stories told in the sentences suggest that adultery was
especially threatening because it meant that both women and men had chosen
to challenge male authority in the household.
Adultery as an offense against Christian marriage had for the most part been a
matter for ecclesiastical authorities, but, in the thirteenth century, jurists in Orvi?
eto and other towns close to the centers of Roman and canon law began inquests
into adultery cases in the civic courts.82 As some decretists pointed out, this was
justifiable on the grounds that adultery has important civil consequences.83 The
pursuit of adultery cases was also a return to an imperial Roman precedent.84
The lexjulia de adulteriis of 18 BCE was a criminal law imposed by Caesar Au-
gustus to remove married women's adultery from private jurisdiction. A new law
court or quaestio perpetua for adultery cases joined existing tribunals for treason,
parricide, murder, acts of violence. Husbands were to divorce and then publicly
prosecute adulterous wives, or risk a legal charge of pandering; the woman's
penalty was exile and loss of half her property.85 This was part of the definition
ofthe new imperial authority, Augustus acting as paterfamilias patriae. Catherine
Edwards has argued that despite contemporary complaints of elite female adul?
tery, there is little evidence that the law addressed a genuine social problem.
Instead, Roman moralists associated female adultery with social and political
disarray. Sallust, for example, understood Catiline's conspiracy in terms of moral
corruption, exemplified by the shamelessly adulterous matron Sempronia. The
adultery law thus spoke to anxieties about social hierarchy and disorder.86 The
Augustan imposition of political order meant the control of marriage and illicit
passion. Under the Christian emperors, there were two gradual shifts. Penalties
for adultery became more severe, and the double standard faded; the affairs of
married men as well as married women were considered adulterous.87
In the later Middle Ages, then, ambitious governments turned to Roman
legal precedents in an effort to build authority through the control of adultery.
Some of the Italian towns did so in the late thirteenth century. Seventy-five
years later, the French monarchy followed suit, drawing on the same Roman
precedent to extend jurisdiction over adultery. French royal charters from the
mid-fourteenth century spelled out penalties in flagrant adultery cases. These
were usually monetary fines, a race (stripped naked) through the town and
perhaps abeating.88
There is no extant medieval Orvietan adultery statute. One does survive from
Bologna, treating adultery, then strupum and incest, committed against males
or females.89 The Orvietan penalty can only be reconstructed on the basis of
adultery sentences. And in practice, virtually every sexual offense incurred the
same punishment in the medieval Orvietan courts. People were fined 200 libra,
whether the crime was rape, fornication,90 adultery, or violent abduction and
rape.91 It might be difficult for the court to differentiate in practice between say
fornication and rape, because the difference depended on consent. A blanket

200 libra fine made elusive differences based on an act of will less important.
The fine was substantial, roughly a year's wages for a skilled mason working on
the new cathedral.
Thirteen adultery sentences appear in the medieval Orvietan judicial reg-
isters.92 The registers survive unsystematically from as early as 1269, and in-
clude a 684-page codex from the tenure of Bertoldo, the Orsini podesta. They
include no testimony but simply record how a case was resolved: sentences, bans,
absolutions, decisions on appeais. Of the thirteen adultery sentences, four were
court investigations, and nine accusations launched by individuals.93 These sen?
tences are complex texts; they can be taken neither as a representative sample
nor as fact. The brief stories told in them nevertheless are informative. First,
adultery was not defined in terms ofthe woman's marital status, as in the Roman
lex Julia: in two adultery sentences the married partner was the man. Second,
the sentences do not obviously express concerns about male honor or the legit-
imacy ofa man's heirs. Only two sentences reveal husbands accusing adulterous
wives.94 In 1287, a young man charged his wife Flora with adultery, and charged
her partner Hugonello separately with fornication.95 The fine was the same for
both. In the other case, a husband evenhandedly accused both his wife and her
lover of adultery; she received a lesser fine.96 In both cases the women were
contumacious; my guess is that they had left their husbands' households. The
husbands were probably in court in an effort not somehow to restore honor but
to claim the women's dowries for themselves and their heirs. Only one case even
hints at women as markers of male honor; a son accused a fellow who seems
to have been a nobleman's hanger-on of committing adultery with his mother
and then insulting him in the public road.97 The young man seems to have been
bristling at the dishonor. His enemy was convicted ofthe insult but not the adul?
tery. The woman's husband was never mentioned. Concerns about male honor
surely led to violent conflicts but apparently did not inspire adultery charges.
Two adultery sentences include editorial phrases explaining the purpose ofthe
sentence in terms ofthe severity ofthe crime. A man who "seduced a wife against
her will," carried her off and committed adultery with her was sentenced "because
these excesses set a bad example."98 Another male adulterer was sentenced "lest
such a great crime remain unpunished."99 Why was the crime so great, the
excesses of seduction and adultery such a bad example? Adulterers undermined
order and defied authority within the household.
The husband of an adulterous woman might suffer not only humiliation and
the loss of a wife but physical injury. Husbands' worst nightmares were realized
in a tragic case from Bologna in 1286. A Florentine man named Tegna and a
married Bolognese, Floriana, committed adultery "many times and many times."
He took her with him to Imola where they lived together for three weeks. When
her husband reclaimed her, Tegna followed, went to the house and threatened
to blind the husband with a lance if he did not give Floriana back. The horrified
Bolognese judges sentenced Tegna to death by decapitation, on the grounds that
"it is a foul thing and a bad example to commit adultery with other people's wives
and because of it to want to blind their men." The sentence, more typical in
cases of repeated homicides, was probably carried out.100
One possible interpretation is that adultery cases were essentially conflicts
between men over access to women. Women represented the objects of desire,

the sources of disorder because men competed for them. The wording of many of
the sentences supports this approach because it obscures female agency. Usually
the male adulterer was accused, usually charged with seducing or abducting
women. Overall, twelve sentences survive in which a man was accused of carrying
a woman off from another man's keeping?a wife, daughter, or concubine?then
retaining her.101 When the woman was married the charge was often adultery.
These stories can be cruel; one sentence describes a husband lured out with the
promise that he would be taken to find his abducted wife, and instead stabbed
and beaten to death on the road.102
Thus many sentences seem to depict men taking women from each other.
This picture of women without agency, traded around by men, accords well
with the scholarship on late medieval Italian women which describes them as
leading restricted lives, lives very much circumscribed by patrilineal concerns.103
However, this picture is focused on elites. Women in adultery cases were not the
carefully guarded daughters of the merchant nobility: the highest status woman
identifiable in the Orvietan records was the daughter of a master carpenter. And
the patrilineal model is less applicable to women at lower social levels, who led
less protected lives than their well-to-do neighbors.
Women in adultery cases did have a choice. In contemporary discussions they
represented not only the object of desire but desire itself. In the temptation story
as it was carved on the facade of the cathedral in Orvieto in these decades, Eve
represents the desire for sin as she offers Adam the apple. Adultery was like a
mirror image of contemporary matrimony in that it required that both partners
choose. In canon law, adultery was understood as a mental sin, an act of will.104
If a woman suffered violence, the legal commentator Gratian explained, but it
could not be proved that she had "set aside her shame" then she could in no way
be considered guilty of adultery. If the mind was pure, the flesh was uncorrupted
as well. Conversely, a man who "fouliy lusts after" (turpiter concupiscitur) a woman
commits adultery.105 It is the concupiscence itself that constitutes the sin.
One case underscores women's choice even in a seduction. Morbiduccia, an
unmarried woman with no living parents from a small village, accused Lauren-
zio of seduction and deception. Laurenzio "seduced her and deceived her and
removed her from her brother's house ... and led her to his village, saying to her
that he wanted her to be his wife and would marry her.106 He knew her carnally
but did not marry her, therefore he seduced and deceived her."107 Laurenzio did
confess to carnal knowledge. The court concluded that his crime was mitigated
because he did not use force, and fined him 50 libra. Morbiduccia was?as the
sentence repeatedly states?seduced and deceived. But this representation of
passive victimization is deceptive. She took a calculated risk when she ran off
with Laurenzio; perhaps she had no dowry and little prospect of marriage, and
saw in Laurenzio an opportunity to escape dependence on her brother. Clearly,
her calculation was wrong. She gambled again when she hauled Laurenzio to
court after he treated her shabbily.108
Adultery and seduction sentences thus often portray women who like Mor?
biduccia made the choice to walk away from a male guardian?husband, brother,
or father. Perhaps Lucia and Monakino were lovers who ran off together, sacri-
ficing her dowry and status. Surely in many cases desperate women left husbands
who were violently abusive.109 The fates of runaway wives are usually not evi-

dent, but they might end up as concubines. This was a common and accepted
role, judging from a number of references in the court records to a woman termed
an amasia, a concubina or, more vaguely, the mulier of so-and-so.110 Or, a runaway
wife might expect concubinage and in fact end up a prostitute, like Nesca, who
left her husband and ran off with a man who then dumped her in a public brothel
in another town.111 The point is not that women always made wise decisions but
that the sentences which depict adultery and seduction in terms of male theft
of women obscure the active choice of women in adultery cases. And again, al?
though I know of no way to prove the point, elite male concerns about adultery
were surely in part a reflection of the substantial, visible presence in the town
of women whose choices were more constrained by poverty than by patriarchal
controls.112
In one sentence, the choice is all feminine and it is the man who is desired.
Madonna Gillia, the injured wife of a public crier called Berzono, accused a
woman called Clara of adultery with Berzono between June and August. Clara is
identifed simply as a mulier, or woman, implying that she was unmarried and low
status. Further, according to the sentence Clara did malias etfatias with Berzono,
so that Gillia could not and cannot remain with him. Malias are evil things
and fatias are enchantments. Feminine evil and magic made Berzono abandon
his wife in favor of Clara.113 Clara's sentence was a 1000 libra fine, five times
the usual amount, reflecting presumably the court's disapproval of feminine love
potions and spells.114
VL Self ^definition and lenient enforcement
Clara's sentence brings us back to official concerns over the devastating ef?
fects of unrestrained concupiscence. I have suggested that contemporary laws
associated gendered attributes with disorder. Guildsmen-lawmakers drew on Ro?
man and canon law and on contemporary analysis of human nature and original
sin to understand threats to the vita civile in terms of unrestrained sensual ap-
petite. Laws restricting female dress, humiliating men convicted of sodomy, and
keeping women out of the town hall all were symbolic efforts to control con?
cupiscence. The extension of civic jurisdiction to adultery cases was a part of
this pattern. Adultery sentences depicted men and women who challenged just
order and authority?men who carried off married women, or broke up their
own households, women who chose to leave their husbands or guardians, or to
seduce the husbands of other women. Adultery was social disorder caused by
concupiscence.
To understand these laws and court cases as essentially efforts to define and
punish sexual deviance, then, is to miss their significance. In this extraordinar-
ily creative period, late medieval Italians sought in many ways to build a vita
civile. They constructed massive civic palaces, ornamented with images of good
and bad government; they opened up broad public piazze; they experimented
with new political and institutional forms. They also sought to shape peaceful,
rational male citizens by controlling the impulses that led to disorder and in-
justice. Concupiscence was understood as feminine but it was male passion that
threatened civic order. When the Seven limited women's pearls, marginalized

sodomy, restricted prostitution and tried to keep women out of the town hall,
they were seeking to control not only women but the sensual appetites of men,
notably themselves.
Finally, then, these laws and legal sentences are best understood not as serious
efforts to control disorderly sexual choices, but as attempts at self-definition.
Investigations of adultery cases cannot have been an effective means of social
control. Again, the court had little police power to enforce its rulings; most
convicted adulterers probably never paid their fines. Further, the lawmakers
themselves were deeply implicated in many of the disorderly activities they
sought to restrain. It is important to recognize that the members of the regime
in power at any given moment would be closely involved in factional clashes:
controlling internal violence meant controlling themselves. The Seven sought
to shape their own natures, controlling male lust for sex, for wealth, for political
power. With Albertanus of Brescia and the peacemaker Cardinal Latino, they
believed that it was through the restraint of concupiscence that peace and order
might be achieved.
Perhaps it is because this was an effort at self-restraint that medieval Orvi-
etans enforced their laws on sexual criminality with such leniency. Virtually
everyone sentenced was contumacious, and sentenced in absentia. It is not
even clear that most people who were contumacious were actually driven into
hiding or exile to avoid their sentences because it is not clear that the sen?
tences were enforced. As we have seen, the Seven worried that the podesta
would not enforce the sodomy law. They themselves were not really eager to
catch adulterers or sodomites either, judging from the extant cases. The coun?
cil votes indicate instead a sympathetic hesitancy. When the Seven actually
held convicted sodomites or an adulteress in prison, they preferred to be le-
nient. In 1303, when two low status men were convicted of sodomy and held
in jail because they were unable to pay, the Seven simply reduced the fine
and let them off.1 In 1307, the Orvietan state somehow captured a woman
called Flora who had been convicted of adultery, and the Seven had to decide
what to do with her. Flora was the daughter of a master carpenter, convicted of
relations with a greengrocer. The families were probably known to the guilds-
men in power. The town council deliberated and then?regardless of what-
ever threat of concupiscence Flora represented?simply absolved her and let
hergo.117
Department of History
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9410
ENDNOTES
I read a version of this article at the American Historical Association annual meeting
in 1994, where I benefitted from the comments of Barbara Cooper and John T. Noo-
nan. Ed English, Jim Farr, Susan Kent, Tom Kuehn and Louise Newman made useful
suggestions at various stages of the project. I owe a special debt to Marilena Caponeri
Rossi, director of the Archivio di Stato di Orvieto and to the archive staff. The re?
search was funded by the University of Florida and the National Endowment for the
Humanities.

1. One recent example is the History of Private Life series published in English transla-
tion by Belknap Press.
2. I failed to examine this connection in The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction
in a Medieval Commune (Princeton, 1991).
3. See Conan Gallagher, "Concupiscence," The Thomist 30, no. 3 (1966): 228-59.
4. See her December 1985 American Historical Review article, reprinted in Joan Scott,
Gender and the PoUticsof History (New York, 1988), ch. 2.
5. For bibliography on medieval adultery see note 83 below. A good single source for
bibliography on late medieval Italian gender and sexuality, though now dated, is Patricia
Simons, Gender and Sexuality in Renaissance and Baroque Italy: A Working Bibliography,
Power Institute of Fine Arts Occasional Paper, number 7 (Sydney, Australia, 1988).
6. See the survey in N icholas Davidson, "Theology, Nature and the Law: Sexual Sin and
Sexual Crime in Italy from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century," Crime, Society
and the Law in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (Cambridge, 1994),
pp. 74-98; Guido Ruggiero, The BoundariesofEros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance
Venice (Oxford, 1985h Michael Rocke, "II controllo dell'omosessualita a Firenze nei XV
secolo: gli 'Ufftciali di notte,'" Quademi storici 66 (1987), and his Forbidden Friendships
(Oxford, 1996).
7. See among many studies Leah Otis, Prostitutionin Medieval Society: The History ofan
Urban Institution in Languedoc (Chicago, 1985); Jacques Rossiaud, "Prostitution, jeunesse
et societe* dans les villes du sud-est au Xve siecle," Annaks: ESC 31 (1976): 289-325;
"Prostitution, sexualiti, soctete dans les villes francaise au XVe siecle," Communkations:
Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociaks, Centre d'etudes transdiscipUnaires35 (1982): 68-
83; Ruth Karras, "The Regulation of Brothels in Later Medieval England," Signs 14, no.
2 (1989): 399-433, printed in Sisters and Workersin the Middle Ages, ed. Judith Bennett
and Maryanne Kowaleski (1989), and her Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in
Medieval England (New York and Oxford, 1996). Maria Mazzi, Prostitute e lenoni neUa
Firenze del Quattrocento (Milan, 1991), is the best Italian study.
8. This point is convincing but difficult to document; Karrascites only James Brundage,
"Prostitution in the Medieval Canon Law,"Signs 1, no. 4 (summer 1976): 825-45, which
does not connect the views of the canonists with practice.
9. See Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago,
1990), p. 11.
10. Canonical definitions of sodomy were not specific to men. However, thirteenth-
century Italian statutes clearly target men: the Orvietan statute for example mentioned
display ofthe penis: see Archivio di Stato di Orvieto Statuti 27, 38 verso.
11. A recent conference at San Miniato, for example, examined the fourteenth-and
fifteenth-century Florentine territorial state in terms of elite networks of clientage.
12. There is a large bibliography on late medieval Italian statebuilding; see for a rep-
resentative recent collection Origini detto stato: processi di formazione statale in Italia fra
medioevo ed eta moderna, ed. G. Chittolini, A. Moiho, P. Schiera (Bologna, 1994). Many
ofthe essays appear in English translation in The Origins ofthe State in Italy, 1300-1600,
Journal of Modern History, vol. 67, Supplement (Dec. 1995).
13. Giorgio Chittolini, "The Trivate,' the 'Public,' the State," The Origins ofthe State in
Italy, p. S40.

14. Diane Hughes, "Sumptuary Legislation and Social Control in the Cities of Renais?
sance Italy," Disputes and Settlements: The Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. John
Bossy (Cambridge, 1983).
15. Judith Bennett argued for a return to study of patriarchy and the oppression and
subordination of women in "Feminism and History," Gender and History 1, no. 3 (1989).
In medieval Italian towns, patriarchy was interwoven with state authority and the two
are best studied together.
16. Incredibly, the whole fiscal apparatus of the Florentine state came to be housed
in the Dowry Fund. See Anthony Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Fhrence
(Cambridge, MA, 1994) and the review by Carol Lansing, American Historical Review,
100, no. 5 (1995): 1547-49.
17. On the continuing legacy of understandings of civic ideology shaped by ideas of the
Renaissance; see Edward Muir, "The Italian Renaissance in America," American Historical
Review 100, no. 4 (1995): 1095-1118.
18. Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Me?
dieval Women (Berkeley, 1987); for a controversial critique, Kathleen Biddick, "Genders,
Bodies, Borders: Technologies ofthe Visible," Speculum 68, no. 2 (April 1993): 389-418.
See also Judith Bennett's thoughtful general survey of scholarship on medieval women
in the same issue. Joan Cadden, Meanings ofSex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine,
Science and Culture (Cambridge, 1993). For surveys of the field, see Joan Cadden, "Me?
dieval Scientific and Medical Views of Sexuality: Questions of Propriety," Medievalia et
Humanistica, n. s. 14 (1986): 157-71; Monica Green, "Female Sexuality in the Medieval
West," Trends in History 4, no. 4 (1990): 127-85 and on the related problem of medical
texts concerning women, her "Women's Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval
Europe," Signs 14, no. 2 (1989): 457-73.
19. For a clear analysis of the methodological approaches underlying study of the history
of women and the history of gender, see Louise Newman, "Critical Theory and the History
of Women: What's at Stake in Deconstructing Women's History," Journal of Women's
History 2, no. 3 (winter, 1991): 58-68. For a discussion of the iimits of analysis of the
construction of gender in terms of Foucauldian discourse and the need "to bridge the gap
between discourse, social formation and the individual sexed subject," see Lyndall Roper,
Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London
and New York, 1994), esp. pp. 13-18.
20. Monica Green in 1990 asked whether current methods for studying female sexuality
were useful "only for constructing a history of how female sexuality was viewed by men,
not how it was experienced by women." This article is an effort to find connections
between them. See Monica Green, "Female Sexuality," p. 158.
21. Lynn Laufenberg's Cornell University dissertation on the enforcement of sumptuary

laws in fourteenth-century Florence will be a welcome addition. On judicial procedures,
see the many articles of Andrea Zorzi, including "The Judicial System in Florence in the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries," Crime, Society and the Law, pp. 40-58; "Giustizia
criminale e criminalita' nell'Italia del tardo medioevo: studi e prospettive di ricerca,"
Societd e storia 46 (1989): 942-7.
22. Nicholas Davidson, "Sexual Sin," is a useful recent survey.
23. Daniel Waiey, Medieval Orvieto (Cambridge, 1952), pp. 2-3. The curia spent a
total of 7 years and 91/2 months in Orvieto during the thirteenth century. See Agostino
Paravicini Bagliani, "Lamobilita della curia romana nel secolo XIII. Riflessi locali," Societa
e istituzioni deWltaliacomunale: Lesempio di Perugia (secoli XU-XIV) vol. I (Perugia, 1989):

155-278. Urban IV was in residence 1262-64; Clement IV in 1266; Gregory X in 1272

and 1273; Martin IV from 1281-84; Nicholas IV, 1290 and 1291; Boniface VIII, 1297.
24. A number of popes were elected to high civic office and served by proxy. Martin
IV was elected podesta in 1284, but refused the office; Nicholas IV held both offices in
1290-91. See Waley, p. 48, 59. Boniface VII was elected capitano del popolo in 1297
and 1302; see Archivio di Stato di Orvieto Riformagioni vol. 72, 18 verso-20 recto, 76
recto. All subsequent archival citations are to the Archivio di Stato di Orvieto unless
otherwise noted.
25. As Lucio Riccetti has pointed out, we need precise studies of the transmission of
legal and institutional ideas from one town to the next, often by travelling podesta and
their staffs.
26. This figure is derived from Elisabe th Carpentier's study of the 1292 tax records, which
list the heads of households wealthy enough to own land. She puts the urban population
somewhere between 14,000 and 17,000. In my view the high end of her estimate is more
credible. E. Carpentier, OrvietoalafinduXUlesiecle (Paris, 1986), ch. 2.
27. Two examples among many: two women condemned for an assault who are termed
Margarita and Benvenuta fornarie, Giudiziario Registro 1,380 verso, and market women
who were forever calling each other whores, like Maria pomarola, at 165 verso and 391
verso.
28. See the discussion of fourteenth-century Florence in Alessandro Stella, La revolte des
Ciompi (Paris, 1993), ch. 6, esp. pp. 179-83; Isabelle Chabod, "Widowhood and Poverty
in Late Medieval Florence," Continuity and Change 3 (1988): 291-311.
29. For women in Bologna who admitted that a few men they termed dominos (lords)
came to them for "services," Archivio di Stato di Bologna, Curia del Podesta, Libri
Inquisitionum et testium, Busta 10, filza 5 (inquisitiones), 4 verso. Thirteenth-century
Orvietan authorities pursued not prostitutes but pimps and landlords who rented to
prostitutes; women working without pimps do not appear in the judicial records. Two
Orvietan sentences for fornication and adultery depict informal prostitution controlled
by male pimps, in at least one case the woman's husband. It may be that the husband's
real interest was avoidance of a legal charge of pandering, as prescribed in the lex Julia
for cuckolds who failed to charge their wives with adultery. See Giudiziario Busta I, fasc.
6, 31 verso; fasc. 10.
30. See Sharon Farmer, "Matter Out of Place: Elite Perceptions of Single Women in
Thirteenth-Century Paris," in the forthcoming Single Women in the European Past, ed.
Judith Bennett.
31. See Carpentier, pp. 222-223. The percentage of female-headed households in the
countryside was similar.
32. This category was defined as those who had no land, house, profession or office
and who did not possess 100 florins. In 1352, 10.2% of Florentine households were
headed by women and owned only 5.5% of Florentine wealth; by 1404 the proportion of
female-headed households climbed tol7.4% and became even poorer, with only 6.2% of
Florentine wealth. See Stella, p. 188.
33. See Dennis Romano, "Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice,"
Journal of Social History 23 (1989): 339-53.
34. See on elite views of single women Farmer, "Matter Out of Place."
35. The significance of this change, especially outside the major commercial centers,

has been one of the key problems in medieval Italian urban history. For a very useful
survey of the scholarship on smaller towns to the south of the heavily studied Veneto
and Tuscany, see Jean-Ciaude Maire Vigueur, Comuni e signorie in Umbria, Marche e Lazio
(Torino, 1987).
36. Phillip Jones made this case in the classic "Communes and Despots: The City-State
in Late Medieval Italy," Transactions ofthe Royal Historical Society 5, no. 15 (1965): 71-
96; for a convincing example, Sarah Blanshei, "Criminal Law and Politics in Medieval
Bologna," Criminal Justice History 2 (1981): 1-30. On Orvietan judicial procedure, see
Francesca Cardarello, "Problemi di diritto penale ad Orvieto nel tardo medioevo," Tesi di
laurea, Universita degli studi di Roma "LaSapienza," Facolta di Giurisprudenza, 1990-91.
For a similar system in Perugia, see Ciara Cutini, "Giudici e giustizia a Perugia nel secolo
XIII," BoMtimfelkDepumziomdistoriapatriaperVUmbria, vol. 83 (1987): 67-110.
37. See Simon Roberts, Order and Dispute: An Introduction to Legal Anthropology (Har-
mondsworth, 1979), esp. pp. 115-53.
38. In 1295 guardians were explicitly appointed by the Capitano del Popolo and the
city's executives, by then guild consuis termed the Seven. See Giudiziario Busta II, fasc.
8.
39. For an important study of the relationship between public works and the idea of the
medieval city, located in Orvieto, see Lucio Riccetti, La citta costruita: Lavori pubblici e
immagine in Orvieto medievale (Florence, 1992).
40. For discussion of the problem of the degree of violence in a late medieval Italian
town, see Dean and Lowe, introduction.
41. The formation of popular associations was in part a response to this problem; guilds-
men created neighborhood militias to respond to noble violence. See the Orvietan Carta
del Popolo of 1325,121; Godice diphmatico della citta di Orvieto, ed. L. Fumi (1884) (here-
after CD), p. 810. On the problems of police power and social control, see Andrea Zorzi,
"Controle social, ordre public et repression judiciaire a Florence a Pepoque communale:
elements et problemes," Annales: ESC 45 (1990): 1169-1188, and the pathbreaking arti?
cle by William Bowsky, "The Medieval Commune and Internal Violence: Police Power
and Public Safety in Siena, 1287-1355," American Historical Review 73 (1967): 1-17.
42. The podesta did manage to confiscate some Filippeschi property but apparently
did not enforce the exiles; Riccetti in his research on the Filippeschi ror the Dizionario
biografico degli italiani found evidence of Guidarello di Aiessandro in Orvieto during the
period in which he was supposed to be exiied to Jerusalem. Guidiziario Busta I, fasc. 3, 2
recto-verso lists the men fined for nonattendance, first 20 Filippeschi kinsmen fined 31
libra and then 22 men from Fabro, fined 18 libra, though there is no evidence that they
paid. Fasc. 5, 1 recto is the public reconciliation. See CD nos. 503-12. There is a brief
account in Waley, ch.8.
43. See for one example among many of ministrales (neighborhood representatives)
stonewalling questioning about crime in their parishes, Archivio di Stato di Bologna
Curia del Podesta, Libri Inquisitionum et Testium, Busta 8, filza 16, dated from 1286.
44. Florence at the end of the thirteenth century had forty or fifty policemen, in a town
of roughly 100,000. See Zorzi, "The Judicial System," p. 49. The number for Orvieto is
unknown, though the 1325 Carta del Popolo required the Seven to have 20 retainers,
including a cook, a porter and police: Carta del Popolo, 5; CD, p. 742.
45. The deliberations of the Seven survive sporadically in the volumes of the Rifor-
magioni. Fragmentary statutes survive before the 1324 revised version of the Carta del

popolo, in CD, pp. 733-816. None contains provisions on adultery. For a discussion of
the unedited statutes and a text from 1313-15, see Laura Andreani, "Un frammento di
statuto del comune di Orvieto (1313-15). Note a margine," BoUettinoistituto storko artis*
tico orvktano 42 (1986-87): 123-72. Dott. Andreani very generously showed me some of
the unpublished copies of statutes.
46. The literature on the restriction of the magnates was surveyed in an important
article by George Dameron, "Revisiting the Italian Magnates: Church Property, Social
Conflict and Political Legitimization in the Thirteenth-Century Commune," Viator 23
(1992): 169-87. The Orvietan laws restraining the nobility were relatively late, dating
from 1306-9; see Waley, ch. 11.
47. Giudiziario, Busta II, fasc. 9, 7 verso. See the discussion in Riccetti, pp. 194-95n.
48. The sentence was read on 16 February 1295. The victim's father, a master barber,
was named as a guild consul on 24 August 1295. On 27 August, the council passed a
statute "super vitio soddomie et contra culpabiles in ipso vitio." See Riformagioni, 69, 28
recto and 30 verso; he is identified clearly as a barber on 91 verso..
49. Statuti 27, 38 verso.
50. Statuti 26a, 21 recto-verso. The law was actually relatively mild for the period; other
towns prescribed not only torture but death by burning. See for the Perugian statute John
P. Grundman, The Popolo at Perugia 1139-1309 (Perugia, 1992), appendix 4, p. 438;
Grundman cites Archivio di Stato di Perugia, Statuti Book IV, rubric 144a (323); ASP,
Statuti, no. 12, part 2, fol. 45.
51. Statuti di Bobgna deWanno 1288, ed. Gina Fasoli and Pietro Sella, Studi e Testi 73
(Vatican City, 1937), book IV rubric 30, nos. 30-31; vol. I, pp. 195-96. By the sixteenth
century the Orvietan statute also prescribed that sodomites be bumed alive: Statutorum
Civitatis Urbisveteris (Rome, 1951), book 3, rubric 27, pp. 174-75.
52. In 1291 seven men and one woman were banned from the town as pimps, and
an Orvietan who had rented to them was fined. If captured, they were to be beaten.
Giudiziario Busta II, fasc. 3, 16 recto; there is another copy at fasc. 4, 17 recto.
53. Statuti 27, 33 recto.
54. The most evocative account of the papal curia in the period is still that of Robert
Brentano, Two Churches: England and Italy in the ThirteenthCentury (Berkeley, Los Ange?
les, London, 1968; revised edition 1988). Charles of Anjou was resident in 1268, returned
during the residence of Gregory X in 1272-73 and again during the long stay of Martin
IV in 1281-84. See Waley, p. 48.
55. For a list of officials paid by the Camera Apostolica on a 1299 visit to Anagni, and
the rationale for this overall estimate of the size of the papal entourage, see Paravicini
Bagliani, 181-85.
56. Statuti 26c, 14 verso. This probably dates from 1315.
57. Riformagioni 77, 113 recto. See Riccetti, La citta costruita, p. 187.
58. For the butcher shops under the palace, see Giudiziario Registro 1, 557 recto, a
complaint by the custodem macetticomunis, dated 1288; see also Riccetti, La citta costruita,
p. 119n.
59. By the time the law was copied in the statutes, between 1313-15, the emphasis had

shifted: women oibonefame et conditioniswere not to be made to go to the palazzo because

of a judicial case, but could be questioned at home. Statuti 27, 33 recto.
60. See Roger Just, Women in Athenian Law and Life (London and New York, 1989), esp.
ch 9. There is extensive bibliography, notably Nicole Loraux, The Children of Athena:
Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division Between the Sexes, trans. Caroline Levine
(Princeton, 1993).
61. See the discussion in P. Agaesse and A. Solignac, notes to La Genese au sens Utteralen
douze livres, Oeuvres de SaintAugustin, Bibliotheque augustinienne, vol. 49 (Paris, 1972):
555-59.
62. See Pierre Payer, The Bridlingof Desire (Toronto, 1993) p. 43. He cites Lombard Sent.
2.24.12.5 (1.459-60); Ordinary Gloss on Gen. 2:25. See R. Howard Bloch, Medieval
Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago, 1991), ch.l. On the
history of Christian understandings of sexual desire see Eric Fuchs, Sexual Desire and Love
(Cambridge, 1983).
63. For a precise recent discussion, see J. Van Oort, "Augustine on Sexual Concupiscence
and Original Sin," Studia Patristica vol. 22 (Leuven, 1989): 382-86.
64. For a carefui recent analysis of understandings of concupiscence in the debate be?
tween Augustine and Julian, see John Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptised (Cam?
bridge, 1995), pp. 321-27. Thanks to Ed English who brought this study to my attention.
65. Odon Lottin, "Les theories sur le peche*originel de saint Anselme a Saint Thomas
D'Aquin," Psychologie et morale aux Xlle et Xllle siecles vol. 4 (Louvain, 1954). See Payer,
ch.2.
66. Anselm of Canterbury, "De Conceptu Virginali et de Originali Peccato," in vol.

2 of his Opera Omnia, ed. E S. Schmitt (Edinburgh, 1946), chs. 1-3, pp. 140-43. A
recent analysis of pre-scholastic understandings of concupiscence is John W. Baldwin,
The Language ofSex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 (Chicago, 1994), ch.
4.
67. See Alexander of Hales, Summa Theolopca (Quaracchi, 1930), book 2, part 2, ques?
tion 2, treatise 3, question 2 (220-26).
68. See Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Mah, Opera Omnia, vol. 22 (Rome,
1982), question 4, article 2; SummaTheobgiae, Ia.2ae. 82,3. On Thomas' analysis of con?
cupiscence as the material rather than formal cause of original sin, see Conan Gallagher,
"Concupiscence," pp. 228-59.
69. See Paul Gehl, "Preachers, Teachers and Translators: The Social Meaning of Lan?
guage Study in Trecento Tuscany," Viator 25 (1994): 289-323, and his A Moral Art:
Grammar, Society and Culture in Trecento Florence (Ithaca, NY: 1993).
70. See James M. Powell, Albertanus of Brescia: The Pursuit of Happiness in the Early
Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1992), ch. 4. Interestingly, Albertanus represented not
only the objects of desire but wise counsel as women.
71. On preaching see D. L. D'Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from
Paris before 1300 (Oxford, 1985). For a flawed but useful study of the social context
of Dominican and Franciscan preaching in Florence, see Daniel Lesnick, Preaching in
Medieval Florence (Athens, GA1989); see also Carlo Delcorno, Giordano da Pisa eVantica
predicazjtonevolgare (Florence, 1975). On the development of a lay intellectual elite,
see the summary article by Franco Cardini, "Intellectuals and Culture in Twelfth- and

Thirteenth-Century Italy," City and Countryside in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy,
ed. Trevor Dean and Chris Wickham (London, 1990), pp. 13-30.
72. On Aquinas in Orvieto, see James A. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d!Aquino: His Life,
Thought and Work (New York, 1974), pp. 147-63.
73. See Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, Conventi Soppressi D. 1.937, 341 verso-343
recto (Schneyer #937). Fra Remigio cited book 9 of the City ofGod.
74. The Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam, trans. Joseph L. Baird, Giuseppe Baglivi and
John Robert Kane, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 40 (Binghamton,
NY, 1986), pp. 160-61,443.
75. Dante, Paradiso, canto xv.
76. Riccobaido, Compendium of the Historie, quoted by Charles Davis, "II Buon Tempo
Antico," Florentine Studies ed. N. Rubinstein (London, 1968), pp. 65-61.
77. See Augustine Thompson, Revival Preachersand Politics in Thirteenth-Century Italy:

The Great Devotion of!233 (Oxford, 1992), esp. p. 183; Andre*Vauchez, "Une campagne
de pacification en Lombardie autour de 1233: L'action politique des ordres mendiants
d'apres la reforme des statuts communaux et les accords de paix," Ecole Frangaise de
Rome: Melanges d'archeologieetd'kstoire 78 (1966): 519-49.
78. There has been debate over whether sumptuary laws expressed concerns about social
issues or luxury spending, sparked in part by Diane Hughes, "Sumptuary Legislation and
Social Control. See Catherine Kovesi Killerby, "Practical Problems in the Enforcement
of Italian Sumptuary Law, 1200-1500," Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy,
pp. 99-120. Killerby emphasizes luxury consumption. It seems to me that the Orvietan
laws brought together anxieties about social disorder and about spending.
79. "Item stantiamus et ordinamus pro evidenti et manifeste utilitate comunis Urbisvet-
eris et singularum personarum dicte terre ne pro fatuitatibus mulierum ex nimio amore
accensi homines destruantur et confundantur, quod omnes et singule mulieres sint et
esse debeant contente pannis earum quibuscumque et quiscumque habebunt et habere
voluerint. Ita tamen quod nulla mulier habeat vel habere possit suos pannos cum fres-
ciaturis vel appettosaturis de auro vel argento sive pernis nec etiam coronas de auro vel
argento vel pernis portare posse ..." Riformagioni 77,173 verso.
80. See Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge, Am of Power: Three Halls of State in
Italy, 1300-1600 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford, 1992), pp. 9-80.1 differ with their
identification of the figure of Tyranny as the devil.
81. Chiara Frugoni identifies Tyranny as the whore of Babylon in Pietro and Ambrogio
Lorenzetti (Scala, 1988), pp. 63-64. See Nicolai Rubinstein, "Political Ideas in Sienese
Art: The Frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Taddeo di Bartolo in the Palazzo Pubblico,"
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21, nos. 3-4 (July-Dec. 1958): 179-207.
Rubinstein argued for the influence of the Aristotelian theory of justice as interpreted
by contemporary scholastics, with Augustinian overtones, influenced by Fra Remigio
de'Girolami's De bono comuni.
82. Canon and civil law were closely interwoven, as ideas and practices were exchanged
between them. Men were trained in both traditions; exchanges of personnel between civil
and ecclesiastical hierarchies were common. See the general discussion of the interplay
of canon and civil law in Brian Tlerney, Religion, Law and the Growth of Constitutional
Thought, 1150-1650 (1982), ch 2; Manlio Bellomo, Societae istituzioniin Itdiadalmedioevo
agli inizjidelVetamoderna (3rd. edition, Catania, 1982). Bellomo's general textbook on the

lus comune has been translated as The Common Legal Past of Europe, 1000-1800, trans.
Lydia Cochrane (Washington. D.C., 1995).
83. See James Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago,
1987), p. 319. He considers that "municipalities were beginning to assert their own rights
to deal with fornication and adultery cases during 1234-1348," p. 482. The published
studies I have seen from the continent largely describe adultery cases from fourteenth-
century ecclesiastical sources: Jean-Philippe Levy, "Uofficiaiite"de Paris et les questions
familiales a la fin du XlVe siecle," Etuaes d'histoire du droit canonique dediees a Gabriel
Le Bras II (Paris, 1965): 1265-94; Jean-Luc Dufresne, "Les comportements amoureux
d'apres le registre de l'officialite de Cerisy," Bulletin philologiqueet historique (jusqu'a 1610)
ducomitedes travauxhiswriquesetsckntifiques, ann?e 1973 (Paris, 1976): 131-56. See also
Jacques Chiffoleau, Les justices du pope: DeUnquanceet criminalitedans la region d'Avignon
auquatorzieme siecle (Paris, 1984), ch. 8. English leyrwite cases survive from the thirteenth
century: see for a recent discussion and bibliography E. D. Jones, "The Medieval Leyrwite;
A Historical Note on Female Fornication," EngUshHistorical Review 107 (Oct. 1992):
945-53.
84. Amy Richlin, "Sources on Adultery at Rome," Women's Studies 8 (1981): 225-50;
J. A. C. Thomas, "Lex Julia De Adulteriis Coercendis," Etudes offertes ajean Macqueron
(Aix-en-Provence, 1970), pp. 637-44; M. Andr6ev, "Divorce et Adultere dans le Droit
Romain Ciassique," Revue historiquede droitfrancais et etranger, series 4,35 (1957): 1-32.
85. Richlin points out that the quaestioperpetuaprobably faded rapidly, and was replaced
by a process of cognitio under the urban prefect.
86. Catherine Edwards, The Politics oflmmorality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 1993),
esp. ch. 1.
87. Digest 48.5 and Codex 9.9 include portions of the lex Julia along with excerpted
later commentary.
88. Annik Porteau-Bitker in "Criminalite et delinquance feminines dans le droit p?nal

des Xllle et XlVe siecles," Revue historiquede droitfrancais et etranger, series 4, 58 (1980):
13-57, examines late medieval French adultery laws, pp. 39-43. The French laws were
close in spirit to the lex Julia, punishing female adulterers and males only as their ac-
complices. Husbands were given the power to inflict physical punishment on adulterous
wives, including incarceration.
89. This misspelling of stuprum suggests perhaps that the word was unfamiliar to the
notary. Statuti di Bologna, book 4, rubric 30; vol. I, p. 195. In Bologna the monetary fine
for adultery differed by rank: knights and the powerful paid 500 Bolognese libra, foot
soldiers 300. A woman who committed adultery in Bologna was to lose 100 libra from her
dowry, or, faiiing that, an amount to be decided by the podesta based on her condition
and dowry; if she was banned she lost the dowry altogether. The statute carefully divided
the dowry between the commune and legitimate heirs, or the husband in the absence of
heirs. There is a large lacuna in the text; another extant version includes the provision
that a man convicted of forcible adultery was to suffer a corporal punishment greater than
a beating, to be decided by the podesta.
90. The verb used in the sentences is not to fornicate but rather to know carnally,
cognoscere carnaUter.I have assumed that when there is no further modifier (as for example
"with force" or "against her will") that carnal knowledge mean fornication. The term
raptum was also used; see Giudiziario Busta I, fasc. 6,40 verso. On terms for illicit sexuality,
see Ruth Karras, "Latin Vocabulary of Illicit Sex in English Ecclesiastical Courts," Journal
of Medieval Latin, 2 (1992): 1-17.
91. The court's working distinctions among adultery, rape and fornication were blurry.

There were men sentenced for carnal knowledge with force. Sometimes fornication and
adultery were interchangeable, as when a married woman was accused of adultery, and
her male partner of fornication. The line between rape and abduction versus adultery and
flight also was not always clear. Men were accused of committing adultery with women
against their will; prostitution was termed adultery. One example is Giudiziario Registro
I, 83 recto, 192 verso.
92. A simple count of the overall number of sentences in these registers would be
misleading; because sentences were pronounced several times before a final ban, the
same case often appears several times.
93. See Giudiziario Busta I, fasc, 6,32 verso, fasc, 10; Busta II, fasc. 9,60 verso; Registro
1, 29 verso. An inquisitio was often in response to an individual's petition.
94. In nine cases male adulterers were accused; in one case both adulterers were accused;
in one case a male pimp was accused; and in two cases female adulterers were accused.
95. The husband was named Venturello, and his father was living. Flora's sentence is
Giudiziario Registro 1,16 recto; Hugonello's is 153 verso.
96. Giudiziario Registro I, 53 verso. Both were contumacious. Busta I, fasc. 7, 7 recto
(dated 1279) regards a man accused by a husband of adultery with his wife in his house;
fragmentary marginalia suggest a dowry instrument was produced by the accused, though
whose marriage was being proven is unclear.
97. Giudiziario Busta II, fasc. 4, 17 verso. The accused was fined for the insult but
absolved of adultery.
98. Giudiziario Registro I, 192 verso.
99. Giudiziario Registro I, 29 verso.
100. "Unde cum talia facere et comitere sit res turpis et mali exempli comitere adulterium
cum alienis uxoribus, et propter hoc velle cecidere viros eorum? " The case is
Archivio
di Stato di Bologna Comune, Curia del Podesta, Accusationes 5b, register 15,12 recto-
verso. Tegna was imprisoned; Floriana, also accused by her husband, was contumacious;
her ban is register 19, 6 verso.
101. Giudiziario Busta I, fasc. 6,40 verso; Busta II, fasc. 1,3 verso; fasc. 4,4 recto, 6 recto,
11 verso; fasc. 9, 60 verso; Registro 1,6 recto, 189 verso, 192 verso, 519 recto, 521 recto,
639 verso.
102. Giudiziario Busta II, fasc. 9,60 verso (1295).
103. The most important and influential work is that of Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, in?
cluding studies of lower status women associated with elites, like wetnurses and domestics;
see the essays collected in La maison et le nom: Strategieset rituels dans Vltalie de la Renais?
sance (Paris, 1990); some appear in English translation in her Women, Family and Ritual
in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1985).
104. Gratian, Decretum, Corpus luris Canonici, ed. A. Friedberg, vol. 1 (Graz, 1955), part
2, causa 32, question 5.
105. Decretum, 2.32.5.13,14.
106. The term used is invadiare, which seems to have meant to exchange vows and enter
into marriage. A 1212 episcopal marriage case mentions invaddationes:Archivio Vescovile
di Orvieto, Codice B, 112 verso-113 recto.

107. Giudiziario 1,189 verso. "Quia Laurenzius filius Francisci Barthonis Crassi de Ville-
placta denuntiatus et accusatus extitit coram nobis a Morbiduccia fiiia quondam Petri
Bonomi de Castro Orbetano quia anno preterito et de mense octobris dictus Laurentius
subduxit eam et decepit et extraxit eam de domo fratris dicte Morbiduccie in qua ipsa
habitabat, posita in dicto castro et eam duxit apud castrum plebis dicendo eidem quod
volebat eam in uxorem et eam invadiaret et eam cognovit carnaliter nec eam invadiavit
immo eam subduxit et decepit."
108. This may have been at her brother's instigation, although the sentence does not
mention him playing any role in the proceeding.
109. For a study of the recourse of abused wives to civic courts in seventeenth-century
Venice, see Joanne Ferraro, "The Power to Decide: Battered Wives in Early Modern
Venice," Renaissance Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1995): 492-512.
110. The concubines of two local priests were termed amasiis in 1234; see Archivio
Vescoviie di Orvieto, codex B, 138 recto. Giudiziario Registro I contains a number of
examples, including Passqua concubina Flederikelli at 74 recto and Lippa concubina at
288 verso. A Jacopo was accused of striking a woman described as Bella eius concubina, 45
verso. Women were also termed the bagassa of so-and-so, like Feminella bagassa Gemmi
Giraldi, 165 recto.
111. Giudiziario Registro I, 521 recto.
112. This concern was also expressed in efforts to control the speech of poor women.
Insult and blasphemy cases very often involved women: see for example ASO Giudiziario
Exgravator II, 4 verso; Registro 1,15 recto, 231 recto, 254 recto, 275 recto for blasphemy
cases; for examples of verbal defamation, Registro I 15 verso, 28 recto, 28 verso, 53
recto, 82 verso, 83 recto, 118 recto, 131 verso, 167 recto, 198 verso, 200 verso, 275
verso. Karras mentions a connection between prostitutes and scolds in fifteenth-century
England: "Regulation of brothels," p. 423.
113. In the thirteenth century, love potions were not exclusively feminine: for a male
doctor accused of love magic by three angry husbands, see Archivio di Stato di Bologna,
Curia del Podesta, Accusationes 5a, 55 verso-56 verso. On Renaissance love magic see
Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power at the End of the
Renaissance (Oxford, 1993).
114. Giudiziario Busta II, fasc. 8,6 recto.
115. Lyndall Roper argues that the violent masculine culture of drinking and fighting was
integral to male identity in sixteenth-century towns because men fought in the militia.
See her "Blood and Codpieces: Masculinity in the Early Modern German Town," pp.
107-24.
116. The two men let off in 1303 were named Casella and Furafarina (perhaps "Flour-
stealer"); see Riformagioni 73, 29 verso-30 recto.
117. Riformagioni 75, 42 recto.


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Gender and Civic Authority: Sexual Control in a Medieval Italian Town

Author(s): Carol Lansing

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By Caroi Lansing University of Califomia, Santa Barbara

L Sexual criminality, gender and state formation

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in terms of Christian moral teaching. This influence has been under-studied,

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IL Social growth and civic authority

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This content downloaded from 128.250.144.144 on Wed, 18 Sep 2013 02:46:49 AM

III. Understandings of order: Orvietan statutes on sexual offenses

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IV. Concupiscence and just order

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represented by the excitation ofthe sexual organs, a random motion disobedient

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exactions, oppression of the innocent, destruction of citizens, banishment of

V. Adultery in the Orvietan courts

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but by their actual experience of disorder. Lived experience is sadly inaccessible

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VL Self ^definition and lenient enforcement

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21. Lynn Laufenberg's Cornell University dissertation on the enforcement of sumptuary

22. Nicholas Davidson, "Sexual Sin," is a useful recent survey.

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155-278. Urban IV was in residence 1262-64; Clement IV in 1266; Gregory X in 1272

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49. Statuti 27, 38 verso.

53. Statuti 27, 33 recto.

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shifted: women oibonefame et conditioniswere not to be made to go to the palazzo because

66. Anselm of Canterbury, "De Conceptu Virginali et de Originali Peccato," in vol.

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75. Dante, Paradiso, canto xv.

77. See Augustine Thompson, Revival Preachersand Politics in Thirteenth-Century Italy:

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88. Annik Porteau-Bitker in "Criminalite et delinquance feminines dans le droit p?nal

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98. Giudiziario Registro I, 192 verso.

99. Giudiziario Registro I, 29 verso.

102. Giudiziario Busta II, fasc. 9,60 verso (1295).

105. Decretum, 2.32.5.13,14.

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111. Giudiziario Registro I, 521 recto.

114. Giudiziario Busta II, fasc. 8,6 recto.

117. Riformagioni 75, 42 recto.

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