Crime and Punishment in Renaissance Florence

This paper centers attention on available records that best reflect the sentiments and behavioral manifestations of those sentiments concerned with the treatment of criminal offenders in Florence, Italy, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.Florence is regarded as the birthplace of the Renaissance spirit, and the history of punishment there in this period has basic relevance to the development of methods dealing with persons who committed crimes.Many of the historical details which this study contains are reasonably well known, others are new or newly uncovered.The sociological implications of these details are less widely recognized.The view that crime and punishment of any period are not divorced from their social and cultural context is commonplace, but there are few empirical studies of this relationship.In general terms, this paper is an empirical examination of the genesis and development of some of the cultural values which underlie the social reaction to crime during the Early Renaissance in Florence.