Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan
Université de Paris-Sorbonne

After crisis, restoring order: punitive rituals in Renaissance Italy

At a time when, historians of Italian cities regularly reveal the diversity, in such communities, of ways of conflict resolution, it might appear odd to direct our attention to punitive justice. Studies of criminal justice in urban Italy filled a complete historiographical season at one time. 
Why return to this subject?
The initial goal here is therefore to expand the earlier analyses, limited to the merely repressive aspects of the judicial process, by showing the complexity and mobility of the spatial scenarios employed, with one ambition: to understand how the aim was not only with those punitive ceremonies to trigger horror or fear.
In a second series of observations, we will highlight how punishment could also be administered in everyday locations of life and crime, which will help us to understand how complex the range of emotions involved in those punitive scenarios was.
And we shall see how order has to be restored in the places which were precisely deeply disturbed by the crime, and how the soiled area has to be purified.