Rituals of youthful violence in late medieval Italian urban societies

The urban societies of Western Europe from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, as we know, were traversed by violence. These social systems worked out ways of interpersonal and group coexistence that were deeply imbued with the language of force and the exhibition of violence, from the most varied forms of social and political conflict to the most ritualized manifestations. Suffice it to mention, for example, the fights between factions or the feuds between consortia, but also, on another level, the games on horseback or the battles using fists and clubs. Until recently, however, studies have lacked a specific attention to certain practices of violence featuring the younger male component of the population, which seem to have been present in both Italian and French contexts; these are the instances of young boys mangling the cadavers of condemned to death or playing specific roles in lynchings. It is a case, as we shall see, of highly complex rituals with diverse meanings which can be read on various levels, connected with a sacred dimension of revelation of the divine, but also the expression of practices of thanatological mediation and expulsion of those perceived by the community as enemies. In this essay we shall focus on the experience of the Italian cities which practiced – or more precisely, where the memory remains – similar rituals of youthful violence. We shall thus see that in the cities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – and in particular Florence, due to the wealth of documentary evidence – these practices were progressively disciplined by social custom and Church pedagogy until they died out in the course of the sixteenth century.