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It is rarely possible to write biographies of lay people who lived
in the Middle Ages. While accounts of clerical, royal, and military
life are many, the wider populace has remained in relative
obscurity. In Clean Hands and Rough Justice: An Investigating
Magistrate in Renaissance Italy, David S. Chambers and Trevor Dean
present an extraordinary and previously unknown character from
Renaissance Italy, Beltramino Cusadri (ca. 1425 1500). This judge
was known as the ""terrible commissioner,"" and he spent most of
his professional life acting as criminal investigator and legal
adviser to two princely dynasties the Gonzaga of Mantua and the
Este of Ferrara. The authors investigate and compare the judicial
institutions and social conditions in which he worked, the criminal
cases that he investigated, and his successes and failures. Their
combined presentation of the figure and mentality of Beltramino
amounts to something unprecedented in Italian Renaissance
historiography: the portrait of a professional man, employed to
combat rising crime but accused of corruption and tyranny by the
entrenched interests that he faced. The book follows the major
phases of Beltramino's career along with a broader exploration of
the legal history of Renaissance Italy. In his long life Beltramino
Cusadri wrote hundreds of letters to his employers, and it is upon
these letters that this book is based. These letters, with their
wry, colorfully worded expressions, are liberally quoted and
provide unique insight into the career, activity, and attitudes of
a major Renaissance bureaucrat. The letters of his employers in
return, and of many other judges and officials, along with the
evidence of legislation and prosecution, are also drawn upon to
examine a variety of themes, from the progress of lawmaking and the
pattern of criminality, to the problems of policing and the
changing forms of punishment.
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