Endorsements

State of enmity establishes the central role of interpersonal enmity and peace-making in the society of southern Italy in the seventeenth century. It demonstrates the roles enmity, in its diverse manifestations, played in early modern politics, legal culture and social relations. Through this pursuit of the effects of hatred and reconciliation, the book charts a history of Spanish Naples that features its most evocative yet misrepresented characters: violent bandits and the unruly soldiers set against them; overbearing feudal lords and restive vassal; intrepid missionaries and penitent murderers; grand Spanish viceroys and poor Neapolitan rebels. Using the lens of enmity and peace-making, the dynamics of events such as the revolt of Naples in 1647-8 and phenomena such as banditry and criminal justice are given new interpretation. It is a rare example of a work on early modern southern Italy which uses records from criminal courts, thus providing the closest encounter in modern scholarship with the actual people involved in Naples' notorious 'disorder', constituted by homicide, banditry, feudal oppression and the Spanish regime's governing tactics. This monograph shows how states of public enmity and practices of peace-making structured both local politics and the central state's interaction with the provinces of the kingdom. The Kingdom of Naples was one of the most violent regions of Europe in the early modern period: this work explores why this was so.