Reviewed by: Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy by Katherine Ludwig Jansen Carrie E. Beneš Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy. By Katherine Ludwig Jansen. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2018. Pp. xxii, 253. $39.95/£30.00 hardcover; $27.99 ebook. ISBN 978-0-691-17774-8 hardcover; 978-1-4008-8905-1 ebook.) The ideal of peace may seem universal: while the United Nations deploys peace-keeping troops, the rest of us employ yoga, meditation, and other techniques to acquire inner peace. Yet as a concept peace is elusive, recognized most easily in its disturbance, breach, or absence. This was as true in medieval Italy as it is today: while preachers and magistrates extolled the benefits of peace, scholars generally characterize the era as one of vendetta, factionalism, and regional warfare. But conflict and conflict resolution are two sides of the same coin, and one of the chief contributions of Jansen's new book is its insistence that all of the well-studied hand-wringing about violence betrays a fundamental belief in peace as a key social virtue. Jansen's book therefore focuses on peace agreements: what we might call the aftermath of violence in medieval Italy. Jansen brings an impressive range of evidence to her study, using sermons, political treatises, chronicles, and works of art to enrich and contextualize her analysis of over five hundred peace agreements from Florentine notarial registers between 1257 and 1343. While scholars debate the extent to which events and practices in Florence can be considered representative of medieval Italy more broadly, Jansen persuasively employs the riches of the Florentine archives to illuminate peacemaking as a broad social phenomenon. Chapter 1 explores how the confessional requirements introduced at the Fourth Lateran Council and the preaching of the new mendicant orders encouraged a culture of penitence—for example in the "Great Devotion" of 1233 or the Battuti of 1310. Chapter 2 then analyzes how political theorists and communal councils (including figures such as Remigio de' Girolami and Albertanus of Brescia) linked the practice of personal penitence to the maintenance or restoration of civic order: in other words, arguing that citizens' acquisition of inner peace through penitence was an essential prerequisite to the outer peace of the community. Chapters 3 and 4 represent the core of Jansen's archival work, laying out the social conventions and legal requirements that surrounded these peace agreements and providing a typology of the crimes which they were drawn up to resolve—from burglary to rape, armed assault, and vendetta. Such agreements were employed by both men and women along a broad social spectrum. Chapter 5 then turns to pictorial representations of peace agreements, focusing first on depictions of the "angel of peace" uniting two parties in a conflict, and [End Page 711] second on representations of the traditional "kiss of peace": when informed by contemporary peacemaking rituals, for example, Judas' kiss of betrayal in Giotto's scene in the Arena Chapel inverts not just an expression of personal affection but a legal act of reconciliation and an affirmation of community. Jansen's book stands out first for its breadth and interdisciplinarity: subjects that had previously been treated chiefly in isolation (penitential culture, communal ideologies, ritual and artistic practices) are revealed as facets of the same social problem. In this it closely resembles Dennis Romano's important recent book on the marketplaces of medieval Italy. Secondly, Jansen's focus on practice, performance, and social meaning highlights the social roles played by notaries as well as women—who participate here not only as victims and allegorical inspiration but also as perpetrators and mediators. The book's final great virtue is the case it presents against positivist views of state-formation, which see progress from the informal or private justice of "pre-modern" societies to the formal or public justice of "modern" societies: Jansen's analysis reveals clearly the close co-operation between private and public forms of justice in medieval Florence. Here her work dovetails with related studies by Glenn Kumhera (2017) and James Palmer (forthcoming). In fact, this demolishing of an artificial public/private divide reinforces Jansen's fundamental point that medieval Italians saw the personal as inextricably...