The Benefits of Peace: Private Peacemaking in Late Medieval Italy

In The Benefits of Peace: Private Peacemaking in Late Medieval Italy Glenn Kumhera offers the first comprehensive account of private peacemaking, weaving together its legal, religious, political and social meanings across several cities (13th-15th centuries). The ability of peacemaking to hinder criminal prosecution has often been considered the result of government powerlessness. Kumhera, however, examines the benefits of private peacemaking, detailing how its flexibility was crucial in creating a viable criminal justice system that emphasized violence prevention and recognition of jurisdiction while allowing space for friends, neighbors and clergy to intervene. Additionally, he explores the roles of women and clergy in peacemaking, how peace operated in a vendetta culture and how the medieval understanding of reconciliation affected the practice of peacemaking.

Glenn Kumhera, Ph.D. (2005), University of Chicago, is Assistant Professor of History at Penn State University, The Behrend College. He has published on peace and peacemaking legislation in Siena.

"Kumhera deftly sets out a series of contexts and categories in which medieval peacemaking occurred in the medieval Italian peninsula, demonstrating that each must be incorporated when thinking about a definition of peacemaking. He highlights important chronological shifts alongside regional peculiarities. This excellent book provides a detailed analysis alongside pertinent case studies, and a deeper insight into the complicated practices of private peacemaking in medieval Italy."
Alexandra Lee, in Reviews in History, review no. 2195. Date accessed: 20 November 2017. Click here.

"By attempting to consider his questions on an Italian rather than local scale, Kumhera has taken on a challenging task. His commitment to precision and acknowledgement of complexity prevents his book from becoming simply a general meditation on how strong communal governments were or weren't, or how violent communal societies may or may not have been. This is to the good. Instead, the book makes important, specific arguments about the nature of private peacemaking in general, and its benefits in both Siena and Rome. Comparison with material from other cities makes it clear that when it comes to peacemaking Italy was, as in so many things, a patchwork quilt of diverse localities, each of which has to be considered on its own. Yet for all that diversity, peacemaking took place within an Italy characterized by a great many common structures and dynamics. Growing communal power, status-seeking elites, and a complex, multifaceted ideology of peace were common everywhere. Kumhera's book is an excellent guide to thinking about peacemaking in light of such things and any scholar who seeks to understand the phenomenon as encountered in their own research would do well to look to it as a guide. The wealth of information provided, and its careful contextualization, make this book a welcome tool for anyone interested in peacemaking, then, but also for those working in late medieval Italian legal culture, the relationship between cities and countryside, and the development of late medieval states and their institutions."
James Palmer, in The Medieval Review, 17.11.13. Date accessed: 11 December 2017. Click here.

''provides a thoughtful addition to the studies on violence, legal culture, and peacemaking in premodern Italy and Europe. Kumhera’s command of the archival sources is impressive and his ability to weave nuanced arguments that give credit to opposing views is imitable.''
John M.Hunt, in Renaissance Quarterly 71 (2).