Evidence, Crime, and Forensics in the Early Modern Mediterranean

'A beautifully nuanced yet incisive overview of the cultural and social dimensions of law and courts in the early modern Mediterranean. The highly original chapters maintain an impressive balance between theory and practice and offer many valuable insights on the very nature of early modern law in the real world' - Joel F. Harrington, Vanderbilt University.

'Where ordinary folk crossed paths with the tribunals, both the men and women of early modern Spain and Italy and the men of law themselves developed canny ways of gathering, reading, and deploying evidence to deal with crimes and to navigate delinquency's great web of social and institutional concerns. Legal matters had their subtle epistemologies and rhetorics, both official and lay. In this book, skilled scholars explore those modes of legal knowing and disputing, engaging, inter alia, the abuse of children, the authority of disabled witnesses, the credibility of midwives as expert witnesses where miscarriages were provoked by violence, the growing authority of medical expertise, plus awkward peace-making between unequals, seduction and abandonment, infanticide, spousal murder, the Inquisition's evolving take on witchcraft, the elaborate procedures of Bologna's highest court, and, in an Eastern European excursion, villagers' panicky responses to their ungrateful un-dead. This lively collection, rich and varied, is an open-minded, handy tour of current work and an entry point to the many lines of investigation of an archival record as rich and varied as it is piquant and beguiling' - Thomas V. Cohen, York University, Toronto (emeritus).