I am happy to report that my review of Colin Rose’s A Renaissance of Violence: Homicide in Early Modern Italy has just been published on H-Italy.

“One of the most brazen murders in Bologna’s history occurred on September 8, 1652, when Giacinto Pungelli, a sotto-auditore (assistant judge) in the Tribunale del Torrone (Tribunal of the Tower), was gunned down as he left the church of the Celestine Convent following mass. The judges and notaries of the Tribunale del Torrone conducted an extensive investigation of this assassination of one of their own, interrogating ninety-seven witnesses and uncovering a conspiracy and a long-simmering vendetta. The trial records reveal that ‘Pungelli’s death was a flagrant attack on court authority, but it occurred in the context of partisan rivalry and anti-papal feeling’ (p. 185).”

“A Renaissance of Violence constructs an institutional history of the Tribunale del Torrone, a criminal court established by the Papal States to prosecute homicides and other serious crimes in the city and province of Bologna. …”

My full book review of Colin Rose’s A Renaissance of Violence is available as a .pdf file from H-Italy:

https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54816. 

The full citation of the book is: Colin Rose, A Renaissance of Violence: Homicide in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

I want to thank Peter Sposato, Associate Professor of History at Indiana University Kokomo, for his kind invitation to review this book.