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G. Geltner is professor of medieval history at the University of Amsterdam.

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"This is a very valuable contribution to the history of crime and criminal justice. Geltner demonstrates, contrary to the claims of modern historians, that the prison as a punitive institution was born in the later Middle Ages, and shows, contrary to the claims of medieval historians, that prisons were not hellholes. There is no equivalent study of Italian medieval prisons."--Trevor Dean, author ofCrime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy

"A most welcome addition to what has been a neglected field of medieval legal and social history. Geltner argues very persuasively that imprisonment was an important phenomenon in medieval Italian cities.The Medieval Prison should appeal to a fairly broad audience outside the field of medieval history."--James B. Given, author ofInquisition and Medieval Society

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"This is a very valuable contribution to the history of crime and criminal justice. Geltner demonstrates, contrary to the claims of modern historians, that the prison as a punitive institution was born in the later Middle Ages, and shows, contrary to the claims of medieval historians, that prisons were not hellholes. There is no equivalent study of Italian medieval prisons."--Trevor Dean, author ofCrime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy

"A most welcome addition to what has been a neglected field of medieval legal and social history. Geltner argues very persuasively that imprisonment was an important phenomenon in medieval Italian cities.The Medieval Prison should appeal to a fairly broad audience outside the field of medieval history."--James B. Given, author ofInquisition and Medieval Society

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The Medieval Prison

A Social HistoryBy G. Geltner

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13533-5

Introduction

On 17 February 1327, a group of appellants at the Sienese General Council decried the state of local prisons. Reminding those assembled that "not two years have passed since over sixty men died there [in prison] on account of the terrible conditions and neglect" (propter pessimam condictionem et corruptionem), the petitioners reiterated the need for a facility "in which there would be distinct places for holding perpetrators of major offenses, for those of minor offenses, and for those held for debt." The plea was summarily adopted, and soon the commune purchased the properties occupying the site of the future compound. A master mason was at work on the project by December, and within three years Siena's new prison stood complete as the lateral extension of the Palazzo Pubblico on the side of via di Malcucinato. On 28 July 1330, the prisoners left their old cells at the Palazzo Cerretani (Alessi), and entered the new facility.

Constructing a new prison was a sound move. First, it ended the migration of local custodial spaces among several aristocratic torri rented by the commune since the 1240s. Next, the new compound was planned to enable the magistrates to distinguish among categories of prisoners, provide for the inmates' efficient processing, and improve their living conditions. All these purposes were deemed imperative since by that point prisoners were more numerous and the duration of their incarceration lasted longer than ever before. Last but not least, the act corresponded nicely with the reorganization of Sienese civic space under the Nine (1287-1355) in two interrelated ways. The new prison flanked-in fact, it completed-the communal palace, the most concrete expression of the city's transition from a polycentric oligarchy to a centralized communal regime, a process commonly dubbed "from tower to palazzo."

At the same time, erecting a prison at the city center reflected a broad shift in contemporary attitudes toward social marginals, namely from expulsion to containment. This strategy is evident across western Europe, especially in urbanized regions such as central and northern Italy, the Rhine Valley, the Lowlands, and directly north and south of the Pyrenees. Here local governments developed mechanisms for maintaining social order in a new key. Rather than physically annihilate or otherwise eliminate the presence of social and religious deviants, 2various regimes created or annexed "marginalizing" institutions such as leper-houses, brothels, hospitals, and Jewish quarters. The central, municipally run prison was a later but equally ubiquitous expression of such attitudes to social control.

For Siena's was not an isolated case. By the early fourteenth century, responding to similar needs and under analogous circumstances, prisons already dotted the landscape of western Europe. This moment in the history of the prison marked the end of a process that commenced sometime around 1250, when scores of city-states, capitals, and rural strongholds began founding such facilities and employing them as punitive institutions for sentenced culprits alongside their traditional role as places of custody (e.g., pretrial arrest) and coercion (e.g., torture chambers and debtors prisons). In its geographical scope and quantitative scale such recourse to incarceration in any of its modes was virtually unprecedented prior to the mid-thirteenth century. And although five centuries would go by before imprisonment became the cornerstone of European penology, both the measure and its physical counterpart-the prison-were widely integrated into judicial administrations by the close of the fourteenth century. This trajectory, from foundation to routinization, established the chronological boundaries of the present study.

Although ubiquitous, the process is nowhere clearer than among the Italian city-states, whose prisons are the best-documented institutions of their kind. Yet there are few detailed modern studies of these facilities' medieval phase. Over time, tangential works such as urban surveys and histories of charity have helped chart the creation of local prisons, and topical investigations have remarked the medieval origins of these institutions as preludes to their modern successors. What remains untold is the story of the many and varied local facilities-a necessary step toward a well-grounded regional portrait, which is the major object of this book.

The specific contribution of this study is threefold: first, in filling the Italian lacuna; second, in augmenting the traditional historiography of the prison with anthropological, urbanistic, and sociological perspectives; third, in grounding arguments about the history of the prison in documents of practice rather than by recourse to prescriptive texts, as has been the norm so far. I posit that the birth of the prison was more than a legal development, "a sign of advancing civilisation." Rather, it was a complex and contingent creation in which politics engaged architecture, religious imagination fused with penal practices, and an ancient legal tradition that abhorred punitive incarceration yielded to the reorganization of urban space according to new attitudes toward social marginals. In the process, prisons emerged as constituents of the urban landscape and proud symbols of a hard-won independence: their foundation dovetailed with the communes' desire to impose security in the city, efficiency in the courts, and expediency in business; and it responded to changing attitudes toward the "other," namely, a shift from ejecting to containing deviants. In fine, this study seeks to understand the advent of prisons in general and of punitive incarceration in particular by taking surrounding society and culture into account.

Two partially overlapping goals guide this book. The first is to delineate the variety of processes by which medieval society developed practices of punitive imprisonment, mostly against the grain of contemporary jurisprudence. To this end, I trace a range of alternative structures underwriting the proliferation of prisons particularly in urban environments, and relate the ways in which these facilities became engrained in contemporaries' political thinking, embedded in their concepts of justice, sovereignty, and citizenship, and integrated as a sine qua non of their social and physical environment. To those who consider the prison as axiomatic to Western penology, this study underscores both the contingency of institutional development and the diversity of its functions.

The second is to offer a living image of medieval imprisonment by focusing on the various persons comprising the human fabric of these institutions and the relations among them. These men, women, and children, however, are not limited to debtors, prostitutes, criminals, heretics, or vagabonds. This is due in part to the legal and administrative roles of communal prisons, in part to their physical centrality in late-medieval cities. For instance, a main factor in alleviating the inmates' conditions was the constant human traffic passing through the prison gates (and occasionally over its walls and through its windows). Prisoners, moreover, were visible: they roamed the city as licensed beggars, as debtors in search of settlement, and as criminals en route to court. And inmates' visibility increased during civic events such as routine festive releases, triumphal amnesties, and occasional riotous break-ins...