Shaming, Making Community and Purification: Legal Punishments of Destruction of Private Property in Early Modern Rome
(2021) Early Modern Rome 4 — Location: Rome (11.November.2021)
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- Abstract
- This contribution traces the application of legal punishments of destruction of private property from the revolution under Cola di Rienzo to the pontificate of pope Sixtus IV. While punishments of destruction were abandoned under Cola di Rienzo’s rule in view of the “honour of the city”, Pope Paul II reintroduced them as a means to end violent conflict among Rome’s leading families in 1466. Pope Sixtus IV, in turn, applied these punishments, resulting, for example, in the well-known destruction of the Santacroce and Della Valle houses in 1482 and 1484. This paper argues that such punishments of destruction should be read within papal attempts to (re)gain control over the social and physical fabric of the city, and related to contemporary notions of shame, citizenship, sin and disease. It shows how papal communication framed these interventions as the pope acting as a Christus Medicus, healing the civitas from sinful behaviour.
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De Raedt, N. (2021). Shaming, Making Community and Purification: Legal Punishments of Destruction of Private Property in Early Modern Rome. Early Modern Rome 4, Rome. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/240709