53. Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseilles, 1264-1423
A fascinating look at how people used the courts
Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. 2013. (2003.)
The Consumption of Justice is a very interesting book. It takes as a focus for investigation the law courts of Marseille between the thirteenth and the early fifteenth centuries, and examines them from the point of view of the public performance of emotions like enmity, anger, and friendship. Smail's thesis is that, rather than being driven to use law courts by a growing royal monopoly on violence, Marseille's residents chose to use the law courts as one among a number of tools to enact their enmities.
Smail divides his work into five chapters, an introduction, a conclusion, and an appendix on the nature of legal records from this period in Marseille. In chapter one, "Using the Courts," he outlines, using specific cases, how the courts of Marseille operated, what kinds of cases they oversaw, and how in general people interacted with the local legal systems. Chapter two, "Structures of Hatred," discusses how enmity, hatred, friendship and kinship were socially constructed and performed as emotions, and how this came into play in a legal system where a witness who was too much a friend or too much an enemy to one of the parties at law could be forbidden from giving testimony. Chapter three, "The Pursuit of Debt," looks specifically at how cases for the recovery of debt enacted or exacerbated otherwise-existing enmities: debt represents by far the largest number of encounters with the legal system.
Chapter four, "Body and Bona," discusses the penalties assessed and assigned by the courts in Marseilles. "Bona," here is a term referring not only to someone's goods but also to their good name, their reputation, as I understand it in Smail's explanation. Marseillaise courts preferred to penalise the bona rather than the body, and people potentially subject to capital penalties usually fled into exile and negotiated their return from outside the Marseillaise courts' jurisdiction. In practice, it appears, corporeal punishments were reserved for people who had no bona to extract penalties from (which means no kin or friends willing to lend them means, either): foreigners or poor people of confirmed bad reputation. And chapter five, "The Public Archive," discusses the public, outdoors nature of law courts in Marseilles, and how community knowledge of individuals and their deeds and possessions was a vital part of what courts considered as evidence.
Smail's work here is readable and accessible to the interested layperson (not my period, but I found everything easy to follow) and filled with fascinating details and the traces of centuries-old grudges and affections. Like The Voices of Nîmes, it brings the past to life in the form of its people.