Art of Executing Well

ISBN-13: 9781931112871 / Angielski / Twarda / 2008 / 354 str.

Nicholas Terpstra

Opis

n Renaissance Italy a good execution was both public and peaceful at least in the eyes of authorities. In a feature unique to Italy, the people who prepared a condemned man or woman spiritually and psychologically for execution were not priests or friars, but laymen. This volume includes some of the songs, stories, poems, and images that they used, together with first-person accounts and ballads describing particular executions. Leading scholars expand on these accounts with articles explaining particular aspects of the theater, psychology, and politics of execution. The main text is a manual, translated in English for the first time, on how to comfort a man in his last hours before beheading or hanging. It became an influential text used across Renaissance Italy. A second lengthy piece gives an eyewitness account of the final hours of two patrician Florentines executed for conspiracy against the Medici in 1512. Shorter pieces include poems written by prisoners on the eve of their exe