liturgies of violence 519
the importance of compensation and compromise in medieval and
early modern justice can be seen in all social conflicts. this includes those
that were informal and outside the legal institutions, though still marked
by a legal ritualism, as well as those more properly public, that is, those
in which the parties renounced (even if often only temporarily) infor-
mal community mechanisms in order to turn to an urban, seigneurial,
or ecclesiastical court. the importance of kinship and honor was clearly
perceptible in compromise, as was the desire to rebuild the friendships
that had been shattered by conflict.23
an examination of the judicial practices of the secular and ecclesias-
tical courts shows that trial rituals and judgments had very weak puni-
tive goals. even exemplary punishments sacrificed some of their symbolic
value in order to fulfill communal demands for guarantees of peace and
order. the use of monetary fines as punishment even for blood crimes
such as murder suggests how weak the border was between the civil and
criminal aspects of conflicts. Legal procedure was characterized by dispu-
tation between the parties and aimed fundamentally to re-establish the
equilibria disturbed by conflict, as well as re-establish peace between the
opposed lineages. trial rituals themselves were marked by a formalism
whose main objective was the restoration of the peace-based order. the
so-called pieggiaria (a type of surety) allowed the accused to defend him-
self while out on bail, while the difesa per patrem permitted the defen-
dant’s father or the most influential member of the lineage to assume the
responsibility for a killing to aid the settlement with the opposing group.
the ius comune jurists had further developed sophisticated distinctions
regarding the ways crimes were committed in order to prevent existing
feuds between kinship groups from prolonging violence. thus a defen-
dant could, by means of a safe conduct, appear in order to defend himself
from a charge of premeditated murder and, once he was acquitted, if he
so chose, appear again to defend himself from one of manslaughter. in
this way, the bloodiest manifestations of feud, in which the facts them-
selves (for example taking the life of a member of a lineage) were held to
be more important than the circumstances under which they happened,
were lessened in the courts through the mediation of the jurists.
admit no such code, to revert to it”; Julian Pitt-rivers, The Fate of Schechem or the Politics
of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean (cambridge, 1977), p. 8.
23 John bossy, Postscript, in John bossy, ed., Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human
Relations in the West (cambridge, 2003), pp. 287–88.