The Art of Executing Well : : Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy / / ed. by Nicholas Terpstra.

• MitwirkendeR: Bailey, Meryl,; Das, Sheila,; Falvey, Kathleen,; Ferretti, Massimo,; Frazier, Alison Knowles,; Gravestock, Pamela,; Prosperi, Adriano,; Terpstra, Nicholas,; Troiano, Alfredo,
• HerausgeberIn: Terpstra, Nicholas,
• Place / Publishing House: University Park, PA : : Penn State University Press, , [2021]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Early Modern Studies ; 1
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (360 p.)

In Renaissance Italy a good execution was both public and peaceful-at least in the eyes of authorities. In a feature unique to Italy, the people who prepared a condemned man or woman spiritually and psychologically for execution were not priests or friars, but laymen. This volume includes some of the songs, stories, poems, and images that they used, together with first-person accounts and ballads describing particular executions. Leading scholars expand on these accounts explaining aspects of the theater, psychology, and politics of execution.The main text is a manual, translated in English for the first time, on how to comfort a man in his last hours before beheading or hanging. It became an influential text used across Renaissance Italy. A second lengthy piece gives an eyewitness account of the final hours of two patrician Florentines executed for conspiracy against the Medici in 1512. Shorter pieces include poems written by prisoners on the eve of their execution, songs sung by the condemned and their comforters, and popular broadsheets reporting on particular executions. It is richly illustrated with the small panel paintings that were thrust into prisoners' faces to distract them as they made the public journey to the gallows.Six interdisciplinary essays explain the contexts and meanings of these writings and of execution rituals generally. They explore the relation of execution rituals to late medieval street theater, the use of art to comfort the condemned, the literature that issued from prisons by the hands of condemned prisoners, the theological issues around public executions in the Renaissance, the psychological dimensions of the comforting process, and some of the social, political, and historical dimensions of executions and comforting in Renaissance Italy.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Graphs, Illustrations, and Tables -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Th e Other Side of the Scaffold -- Contexts -- Chapter 1 Scaffold and Stage: Comforting Rituals and Dramatic Traditions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy -- Chapter 2 Comforting with Song: Using Laude to Assist Condemned Prisoners -- Chapter 3 Mirror of a Condemned: Th e Religious Poems of Andrea Viarani -- Chapter 4 In Your Face: Paintings for the Condemned in Renaissance Italy -- Chapter 5 Consolation or Condemnation: Th e Debates on Withholding Sacraments from Prisoners -- Chapter 6 Theory into Practice: Executions, Comforting, and Comforters in Renaissance Italy -- Illustrations -- Contemporary Texts -- Chapter 7 Th e Bologna Comforters' Manual Comforting by the Books: Editorial Notes on the Bologna Comforters' Manual -- Chapter 8 Luca della Robbia's Narrative on the Execution of Pietro Paolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi -- Chapter 9 Public Execution in Popular Verse: Th e Poems of Giulio Cesare Croce -- Contributors -- Index -- Biblical Index