Feud and Vendetta: customs and trial rites in Medieval and Modern Europe. A legal-anthropological approach

The paper deals with the relationships between judicial practices and the feud, which acquires interesting relevance both in customary systems and in systems governed by the legal process. First is described the crucial transition from customary practices mainly handled by the community (prevailing in the early medieval age) to practices managed by professionals (lawyers) and the procedures successively worked out by them. Feuding is examined along with the researches conducted on single European areas and for different historical periods, especially for the early Middle Ages, the Middle Ages, the Modern Age, considering the various disciplines used. In reality, while focusing on the relationship between the spread of violence and the need for peace, the discussion on the subject of feud in Europe paid little attention to the role played by the spread of Roman canonical procedures and the mediation carried out by lawyers, both in their tracts and their judiciary practice, in order to introduce a new social order. In the early modern period, the intense dynamics of social violence and the decisive interventions of state powers increased along with the use of new trial procedures. These transformations were relevant and even decisive, especially after the introduction of strict inquisitorial rites, which subtracted from the privileged classes the independent resolution of conflicts and the traditional management of procedural practices.

The challenge to the vendetta, understood as a genuine legal and cultural system that regulated the organization of conflict and thereby constituted an instrument of social control, was a very important phenomenon in almost all the countries of Europe. One of the instruments adopted by the new state realities was the introduction of inquisitorial procedures, whose aim was not only to impose a different legitimization of violence but also to put a end to the connections between customary rites and judicial practices that had for centuries characterized the legal system of the vendetta. The new punitive justice was marked by both the imposition of severe penalties and by the absence of an active role in the resolution of conflicts of the parties involved.