Social Science Research Council

"Crime and the City Solution: The Prisons of Southern Europe, c. 1250-c. 1400"

My dissertation seeks to identify and interpret the different, arduous and occasionally surprising processes by which southern European society embraced punitive imprisonment in the late Middle Ages. I trace the religious, social, economic and political structures which enabled penal incarceration to expand particularly in urban environments and relate the ways the prison became engrained in contemporary political thinking, embedded in concepts of justice, sovereignty, and citizenship, and integrated as a sine qua non of their urban space. To those who consider the prison as axiomatic to western penology, my study underscores both the contingency of institutional development and the potential variety of its social, political and even religious functions in different contexts. To this end I will be conducting archival research in three Italian city-states -- Florence, Siena and Bologna -- which were all on the cutting edge of political independence in the High Middle Ages, and were typical of future developments in social, religious, economic and political organization. I have already located promising materials in each archive, and was able to study some of them during the past year. Although I am spending my research year in northern Italy, the project as a whole will address contemporary developments across Western Europe, including southern Italy and Sicily, France, and England.