Narrazioni della vendetta e della giustizia: articolazioni di potere, cultura politica e acculturazione religiosa nell’Europa della prima età moderna

The essay aims at describing the different ways in which vindicatory violence and the recourse to official justice have been narrated, and thus interpreted, not by social actors but by the institutions responsible for the containment of violence. A primordial feature and instrument of justice in any human society, in the West revenge has undergone a gradual process of control which went hand in hand with a discursive production aimed at reduc-ing the vindicatory phenomenon to the realm of the passions, a psychological interiority that could be tamed and controlled. But the linear path of the civilization of manners, which was buttressed by the expansion of a punitive penal process (valorized as the opposite of vengeance), is more complex and tortuous than previously thought by historians.