Katherine Ludwig Jansen is certainly well-known to most readers of this journal for her study of the image and cult of Mary Magdalene from the first century to the age of the Reformation, a prize-winning study drawing on theology, popular piety, art, and preaching: The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2000). Her long-awaited Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy is, if anything, even more cross-disciplinary and synthetic. In her preface (p. xx), Professor Jansen asks, “What did peacemaking in the Italian communes look like, and if indeed such a practice even existed? If so, what forms did it take? Was it practiced under the auspices of the Church or the commune? How did it function within the judicial systems of the emerging popular governments? Who participated in these events? What was at stake when people made peace? What kind of written or visual evidence documented the practice? And . . . what intellectual underpinning held together [this] architecture of ideas?” To answer these questions, Jansen not only focuses on the social and religious history of late-medieval Italian peacemaking but also draws on legal history, anthropology, ritual studies, and art history. The result is a stunning accomplishment, well worth the wait. I think it is safe to say that this is the first study that fully embeds the “event” of Italian peacemaking in its social, cultural, legal, political, and religious contexts.

The expansiveness of Professor Jansen's vision becomes evident in the changing focus of the book's five chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on the theological linkage between repentance for sin (and crime) and the creation of a mutual peace between feuding parties. She demonstrates that this combination—previously, as she acknowledges, identified by me in Revival Preachers and Politics in Thirteenth-Century Italy: The Great Devotion of 1233 (Clarendon Press, 1992) and by Daniel Bornstein in his The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late Medieval Italy (Cornell University Press, 1993)—was an integral part of virtually all peacemaking, not just that it was connected with preaching and devotional movements. The structure of peacemaking itself is shown to parallel that of sacramental confession and penance. Her second chapter focuses on how preachers and theologians conceived of peacemaking, drawing especially on the writings of Remigio dei Girolami. This is pioneering, as most work on this author has focused on him as a political theorist. Jansen's conclusion is that peace, for medieval Italians, involved not just cessation of conflict, but internal conversion of heart and a real reconciliation of enemies.

The third chapter is an extensive archival study of the peace instruments (instrumenta pacis) preserved in the Florentine archives. This survey shows how the more theoretical material of the first two chapters played out in actual practice. She demonstrates the rituals and legalities of penitential peacemaking functioned not only at the communal level but also as a way to resolve day-to-day conflicts, from tavern brawls to insults, assault, and theft. Her case studies show that “peace instruments were not just the purview of the grandees of Florence. Everyone used them.” Chapter 5 turns to more theatrical forms of conflict—murder, vendetta, and factional warfare. Here, Prof. Jansen shows that the same rituals and notarial forms used to end routine conflict were used to end factional violence and to permit the return of political exiles and those under the “ban” for capital crimes.

These two chapters effectively refute the old idea that “private” peace pacts were the result of the “backwardness and weakness” of communal policing and court systems. What to previous scholars seemed extralegal or private procedures, are shown to be an integral part of the functioning legal system. I found the contrast with the reconciliations of the “Great Devotion,” usually referred to as “The Alleluia,” that I studied striking. While that process was in the hands of a commissioned arbiter, who dictated the terms, Jansen's parties settle their differences among themselves and then have the peace contract formalized by a notary. This seems true even when the matter is murder or political violence.

The last chapter, for me among the most interesting, is first a study of the rituals of peacemaking, in particular the essential component of a public ritual kiss on the lips between the reconciled parties (something borrowed from the Catholic Mass). This ritual study is complemented by an art historical section, which survey's images of peacemaking in Italy from the thirteenth to fifteen centuries. These often take the form of ex voto wall paintings commissioned in churches by the parties, another example of the “sacral” understanding of peacemaking. Professor Jansen shows that, already in the late 1200s, the iconography was settled: the reconciled parties kneel, with arms crossed over their chests, and kiss on the lips, while an “Angel of Peace” spreads its wings over them and, putting its hands on their shoulders, guides them toward one another.

While principally focused on Florence, where the archival sources are especially rich, Professor Jansen's conclusions seem to this reviewer valid for the other cities of communal Italy, and, for them, up to the early-sixteenth century. All future work on the rituals and realities of peacemaking in medieval Italy will have to begin with this superb study.