The first four months of the project have been spent in Italian archives to identify sources to be examined later. Most of this time was spent looking through the Death Notice’s records from Padua and Verona, sources compiled by local Health Officers that provide valuable insight into the lethal violence occurring within city walls. But these months were also used to gather the relevant sources for qualitative research. Based on such source material, four conference and one seminar papers have been produced, which discuss various topics related to the project's objectives.
In chronological order, these papers addressed: 1) the relationship between spaces of violence and the urban and rural environment in 17th century Padua; 2) the culture of violence in the maritime colonies of the Venetian Republic, to show how similar or different they were to continental Europe; 3) the impact of elite violence and violence against state authority on the overall rates of lethal violence; 4) a comparison between the new judiciaries created in the Republic of Venice and Papal States, and tasked with promoting civic peace and reducing noble and factional violence in those territories; 5) a focus on enmities between Venetian patrician houses in the first half of the 16th century as a moment of political and judicial transformation and the introduction of a more punitive justice approach. In addition to these papers, a conference project gathered scholars from Europe and America.
The two journal articles written, one of which currently in peer review and the other accepted and about to be published (plus a third that has been rejected but is going to be resubmitted) explored some of the conference papers’ topics: the first investigated violence in Cyprus during Venetian rule, a context hitherto unexplored due to the very scarce existing sources. This innovative analysis shows how Cypriot society shared the same idiom of honour and violence with the European social classes, and other points of contact concerned some legal nuances that shaped the narratives of conflicts by those involved in them. The second explores the case of the feud between the Michiel and Molin families at the beginning of the 16th century and, above all, its judicial and out-of-court management.
In addition to such outputs designed for specialists and the academia, the project also includes outputs designed to spread its findings to the general public. In particular, a blog post published on a specialised history of law, crime, and justice blog offers an overview of the civic peacemakers established in the Venetian mainland and in Papal States throughout the 16th century. The blog post outlines the main features of these new officers, highlighting common points and differences, and connects their emergence to the challenges faced by the two states, namely factionalism and noble banditry.
Finally, an innovative dissemination experiment was presented at the York Festival of Ideas. Using an open-source tool, an interactive gamebook has been designed to popularize the functioning of the early modern Venetian criminal justice system. The four storylines provide an in-depth look at the following aspects in a style tailored to the non-specialised level of the audience: 1) the relations between crimes and courts and the protagonists of Venetian justice; 2) how public justice worked; 3) forms of international justice justice before modern international law came into being; 4) what happened during and/or beyond the trial.
