(Source: Amsterdam University Press)
Amsterdam University Press has
published a new book on urban policing in Medieval Italy.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Medieval states are widely
assumed to have lacked police forces. Yet in the Italian city-republics,
soldiers patrolled the streets daily in search of lawbreakers. Police
Power in the Italian Communes, 1228—1326 is the first book to examine
the emergence of urban policing in medieval Italy and its impact on city life.
Focusing on Bologna in the
thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Gregory Roberts shows how police
forces gave teeth to the communes’ many statutes through a range of patrol
activities. Whether seeking outlaws in the countryside or nighttime serenaders
in the streets, urban police forces pursued lawbreakers energetically and
effectively. They charged hundreds of individuals each year with arms-bearing,
gambling, and curfew violations, convicting many of them in the process.
Roberts draws on a trove of unpublished evidence from judicial archives, rich
with witness testimony, to paint a vivid picture of policing in daily life and
the capacity of urban governments to coerce.
Breaking new ground in the study
of violence, justice, and state formation in the Middle Ages, Police
Power in the Italian Communes sheds fresh light on the question of how
ostensibly modern institutions emerge from premodern social orders.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gregory Roberts is a foreign
affairs officer at the U.S. State Department and previously served as a
historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History. He received his PhD from
Yale University in 2013 and was a 2010—2011 Fulbright scholar in Italy.
The table of contents can be
found here
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