Dr Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh has recently written that the liberal scientific history writing championed by T. W. Moody and R. D. Edwards was structurally favourable to the imperialism that it claimed, and claims, merely to analyse (History Ireland, xxviii, no. 4 (2020), pp 14–17). Whatever about the truth of this argument, it is salutary to be reminded that every modern historian is a product both of a liberal tradition of historical writing that was born with the modern state and that tends to celebrate state power (denigrating resistance as regressive rebellion), and also of a romantic tradition that celebrates the nation.
Professor Angela De Benedictis's book, first published in Italian in 2013, advances an argument about early modern rebellions in Italy that might prompt historians of Ireland to think beyond those Anglophone liberal traditions that bind them to the state, as well as the Romantic traditions that bind them to the nation. This new edition contains an introduction which engages specifically with the Anglophone reader. The revolts of Naples in 1647 and of Catalonia in 1640 are relatively well known from the work of Peter Burke and Sir John Elliott; but De Benedictis wishes to re-calibrate our understanding of seventeenth-century revolutions in general through an examination of the revolts at Urbino (1572–3), Messina (1672–4), Mondovì (1690–99) and Castiglione delle Stiviere (1690–1700) and the treatment of these revolts in legal literature. In each case, the leaders of these tumults presented their actions as lawful defences against the unjust government of their princes. They insisted that they were neither disobedients (disobbedienti) nor rebels, and resorted to the law to support their case.
De Benedictis's study thus aims to complement Mario Sbriccoli's study of treason in the ius commune or continental civil law, Crimen laesae maiestatis (Milan, 1974), which argued that a wide variety of different legal categories (rebellio, seditio, tumultus, congregation armatorum, etc) were collapsed into one category, crimen laesae maiestatis or treason, from the middle of the sixteenth century. Sbriccoli identified this process as the early modern absolutist state's politicisation of all forms of resistance into treason. De Benedictis intends to reinforce this argument by pointing to the survival of a counter-culture of legal arguments for licit resistance to the end of the seventeenth century. This counter discourse existed not just in legal textbooks but also on the streets of the cities that De Benedictis examines.
Historians of Ireland might wish to read these arguments alongside Kenneth Nicholls's remarks on the obsessively centralised nature of English monarchy, and the studies of F. W. Maitland and Alan Orr on the history of treason in England, if revisiting resistance to English power in Ireland. Did rebels in England or English-Ireland have access to much weaker legal resources than rebels in contact with civil law traditions? Are there traces of the traditions with which De Benedictis is concerned in Scotland? De Benedictis leaves sacred power largely to one side, despite the traditional association between crimen laesae maiestatis and heresy, the well-known writings of Catholic and Protestant theologians on religious self-defence, and the arguments of Paolo Prodi on the tendency of the early modern state to make itself more and more sacred.
Chapter one deals with the tumult at Urbino in the 1570s, an event which later became exemplary in histories and treatises on taxation in France and the German-speaking lands. Chapter two turns to the legal theory of rebellion, beginning with Justinian's Codex and the phenomenon of the defensa, the appeal of a people to their prince against his or her wicked officers. De Benedictis tracks these concepts through the thickets of the learned law (Bartolus of Sassoferrato's commentary on the Codex, a book well known across Europe, is important here) and it would be interesting to compare these traditions to the common law, not least because historians of the Stuart monarchy tend to think of the civil law as a tool of absolutism. This chapter is probably the most important to historians of Ireland. Chapter three, an intermezzo, ranges more widely in early modern culture, touching on the theatre and emblem literature as well as law. Here, De Benedictis is interested in the concept of the unpunishable multitude (the idea that when many err, no one is punished) as well as seventeenth-century distinctions between revolution and rebellion. Chapter four analyses the revolts of Messina and Mondovì between the 1670s and 1680s. This begins with a treatment of the legal distinction between the punishment of individuals and whole communities. Chapter five tackles Castiglione delle Stivere in the last decade of the seventeenth century, and arguments by jurists that a tyrannous prince might become an enemy to his own people. This recalls John Locke but appears entirely grounded in the ius commune.
De Benedictis's learned and stimulating work thus suggests resources that legitimated resistance to state power in Italy and were propagated across the continent in a learned Latin literature, but which lay quite outside the conventional Anglophone liberal tradition (readily accessible in the work of Quentin Skinner) of common law, Calvinist revolutionaries, Catholic theologians and John Locke. While Irish historians will no doubt continue to choose to belong to an international, English-speaking, liberal community of scholarship, an ability to look beyond the bounds of that community and its traditions remains essential to the health of our profession.
