Penitential Themes in 14th-Century Sienese Petitions for Amnesty: How Can They Contribute to the Debate on the ‘Voices’ of Medieval Court Records?

Abstract

In the last twenty years historians have focused their attention on the relationship between the practice of confession, in both sacramental and judicial contexts, and discourses of identity and selfhood produced by the confessing subject and their listeners. A detailed analysis of the influence of sources in which penitent attitudes were promoted (sermons and hagiographies) on the production of judicial confessions could therefore enrich the debate on the ‘voices’ that can be identified when reading medieval court records. In this article, two collections of Sienese petitions created on the occasion of general amnesties promoted by the commune in 1321 and 1329 are used to investigate this issue. Making use of a social interactionist approach, the article analyses examples of petitions in which penitential themes feature prominently. It argues that the idea of confession, or of penance, as practices through which a subject creates an identity, that of sinner, that individuals however immediately set aside in favour of a new, sublimated, sense of selfhood is an effective strategy interiorised by some Sienese petitioners. This complicates the landscape of ‘voices’ and concepts of selfhood identified so far by scholars analysing medieval court records. It also challenges the dualism often proposed by historians of late medieval Italian judicial systems between models of justice based either on vendetta or on an ideology of public order, by suggesting that there were other prominent ideologies that contributed to the development of deviance disavowal strategies and to central concepts of jurisprudence such as those of justice and mercy.