Factional Struggles: Divided Elites in European Cities and Courts (1400–1750). Mathieu Caesar, ed. Rulers and Elites 10. Leiden: Brill, 2017. xii + 258 pp. $138.
Kühner and Nicholas Funke study the mediation and arbitration activity carried out, respectively, in France in the aristocratic milieu during theWars of Religion and inGermany during the Thirty Years’ War. The third and final section contains essays addressing more traditional aspects of peacemaking—that is, from the point of view of courts and legal practices. Tom Hamilton studies the rituals of public executions in sixteenthand early seventeenthcentury Paris, focusing on the crowd’s responses, which could be of full approval or, on the contrary, of criticism and protest leading to requests of pardons and forgiveness. Gabriella Erdélyi, on her part, analyzes the appeals to the Roman curia—that is, the requests for pardons addressed to the pope—coming from the Hungarian countryside during the late Middle Ages, highlighting the various ways in which the social actors could use a transnational institution such as the Apostolic Penitentiary in order to negotiate local disputes and to bypass official lay justice. The witches on trial in early modern Germany are at the center of Laura Kounine’s contribution, while Stephen Cummins studies the pardons and the various types of peace agreements (compositions, remissions, etc.) stipulated in the kingdom of Naples during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Finally, Stuart Carroll in the afterword warns historians about the necessity of readjusting the Foucauldian perspective of a modern, absolutist state that had no hesitations in punishing blood crimes with the utmost rigor. Even in the late eighteenth century, pardons and peace agreements were not a rare event, and the “lexicon of hatred” can be found everywhere in the judicial records. We all should keep in mind Carroll’s final exhortation, inspired by John Bossy’s historiographic legacy: “If, as the advocates of ‘legalism’ desire, we are about to return to elucidating the rules and establishing the norms, let us hope that this does not come at the expense of the history of real people” (286).