“Henry Fielding e il laboratorio del romanzo. Dalle biografie criminali alla storiografia”

2019

The focus of this collection of essays is the two-way relation of Cesare Beccaria's "On Crimes and Punishments" with Britain. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to be entirely devoted to this subject.

2013

Criminology, 1991

Roma Tre Law Review, 2023

In: DAUCHY, Serge, MARTYN, Georges, MUSSON, Anthony, PIHLAJAMÄKI, Heikki & WIJFFELS, Alain, The Formation and Transmission of Western Legal Culture. 150 Books that Made the Law in the Age of Printing, Cham, Springer, 2016, 205-208, 2016

Short bio of the author and evaluation of the book

Textual Cultures

2019

2016

'1343.' Students of literature know it as the probable year of Chaucer's birth. Scholars of the Italian Renaissance and of Neapolitan history will recognize it as the year King Robert the Wise died, leaving his kingdom to his granddaughter Giovanna I. '1343' thus marks the date at which most studies of Angevin Naples either abruptly end or after which they perfunctorily carry on until the feeble demise of the dynasty: Naples slouching towards the Aragonese conquest and the Renaissance. But for Amedeo Feniello '1343' is neither turning nor beginning nor end, but another datum in a continuum from Naples' ducal period in the early Middle Ages to its late medieval, early modern and indeed modern life. '1343' represents not a cultural boundary post for the art, cultural or religious historian but a single data point for the social and economic treatment that Feniello offers in this remarkable new treatment of Neapolitan society in the later Middle Ages. Feniello's book has two beginnings-just as it has two themes-united across the centuries by socioeconomic and political structures. The first, just outside the contemporary Naples of the film <i>Gomorrah</i>-recounts a 2005 triple murder by the Camorra: a back-street assassination over turf initially met with official indifference and local silence. The second, recounted as impressionistically as the first, is also about a murder: this one in 1343 on the Bay of Naples, of a Genoese sea captain, and the theft of his cargo of meat and grain by another highly organized Neapolitan gang on a ship outfitted and directed by the barony of one of Naples chief <i>seggi (sedile)</i> or <i>rioni</i>. Feniello's comparison is more than a facile device. At this book's heart lie the connections between Naples' modern system of organized crime and its medieval social system on the one hand, and the historian's existential position as both contemporary citizen and impartial scholar on the other. He acknowledges the problematic nature of such comparisons and focuses immediately on the historian's conundrum: to what extent are comparisons drawn over six centuries valid methodologically and theoretically (9)? To what extent do they become metaphors, true in the way poetry and literature are often more "true" than history but lacking in specific detail, context and import? To what extent can the historian, motivated by contemporary problems, project questions into the past and seek answers there? Feniello resolves this conundrum in two ways. The first is methodological: by stressing what he terms "una struttura di lungo period" (9), something akin to the Annales' <i>longue durée</i> but more inflected by recent approaches that stress continuities passed on both by written texts, whether archival or narrative, and by cultural memories, "imprinting" (255) and "prejudices" (9). A master of archival research himself, here Feniello takes a different turn, stressing less the truth of established fact than a <i>verità processuale</i> (10): a truth derived from reconciling conflicting testimonies. Feniello's second method is rhetorical. Despite initial appearances of an impressionistic, comparative examination of Naples' historical and current conditions, Feniello himself admits to his strongly traditional philological approach, one still dominant among Italian scholars of Naples. Yet even more deeply, Feniello's startling contemporary opening pages set the stage not for a loosely structured set of parallel investigations but for a highly rigorous social and economic history of the city and its kingdom from the Norman period into the trecento. Already well known for his studies of Naples, Feniello takes us on a detailed tour of its socioeconomic and political structures as they were changed and augmented under the Normans and Hohenstaufen and then firmly set under the Angevins. [1] Feniello's rhetorical sleight of hand thus quickly and completely immerses the reader not in the world of the modern Camorra but in the deeply complex realities of Naples' medieval <i>seggi</i>, its royal governance and its social organization. Despite decades of historiography-particularly Anglophone-that draw a sharp divide between the communal states of northern and central Italy and the 'backward' monarchical structures of the Neapolitan Regno, Feniello's approach is fully comparative. Central to his investigation are the parallels and divergencies between Naples' civic organization and those of Florence, Genoa and more broadly of Rome and central Italy. Feniello's careful attention to the documentary evidence for the development of Naples' <i>seggi</i> clearly demolishes this historiographical dichotomy. He establishes beyond doubt Naples' vigorous communal life dating back to the late ducal period and its hard-won independence from the Regno's monarchs whether Norman, Hohenstaufen or Angevin. He also clearly and convincingly demonstrates how even under the intense scrutiny of an Angevin court only recently established in Naples-and jealous of both its prerogatives and revenues-Naples' communal government continued to function, largely independent of the crown, well into the quattrocento. Herein, however, is the core of Feniello's problem: in meticulously reviewing how this communal organization under Naples' <i>seggi</i> evolved and maintained its power and independence, Feniello has at times drawn too strong a contrast to parallel communal developments north of the Regno. Bearing in mind his initial comparisons of Naples' medieval and modern structural organization, Feniello is quick to emphasize the negative aspects of the city's division into strong centers of power under an increasingly consolidated number of baronial families. Here a clan <i>capo's</i> word was law for all aspects of life under his domination-secular and sacred-despite repeated attempts by the Angevins, especially Robert the Wise and Sancia of Majorca, to either contain or co-opt baronial power. The Angevins' destruction of the barons' towers and their planting of Naples' new Gothic