The Building of Infamy

The medievalist historian Giacomo Todeschini suggests describing the social body according to the category of infamy, which involves access (or not) to speech, to an honorable name, to a legal personality. The entire civic body, in the Middle Ages, was under the threat of shame and discredit.

Read and commented on for a long time in France by researchers, the work of Giacomo Todeschini, an eminent medievalist historian from the University of Trieste, was made accessible to a wider readership thanks to the publication, in 2008, of Franciscan wealthwhich was a great success. The publisher, Verdier, continues this laudable effort by publishing In the land of the namelessthe French translation of another of his books, dating from 2007. In a certain way, this book continues the reflection started in Franciscan wealthwhich insisted on the link between (economic) market and credibility, the ideal market being defined as one in which only men worthy of faith participate.

But the primary object of the volume is quite different: In the land of the nameless focuses on how large numbers of men and women have been characterized as “ infamous » (in Latin infamous) and, as such, marginalized in medieval and modern Europe, that of the XIIeXVIe centuries above all, even if there is also talk, at the beginning of the volume, of the early Middle Ages. As for the question of infamy in the contemporary era, entirely renewed during the French Revolution, it is not directly considered here, even if connections are suggested.

At first glance, one might believe that we are dealing with some new book on the marginalized, in the style of what the social historiography of the 1970s and 1980s produced. That would be reading too quickly In the land of the nameless which, although of course having something in common with this founding historiography, is no less an original and new work.

To be believed

It is not a question of describing again the different categories of “ excluded ” (women, Jews, lepers, poor, witches, vagabonds, etc.), to study the advent of a “ persecutory society » or to comment, for example, on the definition of Western Christian identity by the definition of a marginality and an otherness which would serve as a foil. The book instead proposes to describe the social body according to a new and partly indigenous category, that of access or not to speech, to an honorable name, to a legal personality.

Another big difference with the classic historiography of marginality: it is not the worrying (and persecuted) margins of some peaceful center that the author studies, but rather a notion, the “ infamy ”, which was capable of qualifying almost all men at one time or another (there is talk, p. 175, of “ tiny number of those who were – perhaps – above all suspicion “). The entire civic body is under the threat of shame, discredit, anonymity and, as much as on theinfamy effectively, this book is about “ dread of being hit by it » (p. 26).

Of course, the terms capable of designating this category are very numerous, as the title of the work already suggests: infamous, but also excluded, marginal, “ nameless “, suspects, etc., without forgetting “ cruel » in the Italian title (crudeliin the sense of “ raw “, crude, unfinished, not perfectly human). L’infamy is an indigenous category, but not omnipresent in the sources, and it is the author who constitutes it as a transversal category.

Basically, he is not interested here in the marginal existence as such of the infamous, but in the very process which makes them such: the construction of infamy, that is the real object of the book. This construction takes place jointly in the legal, religious and economic fields. If, at the beginning of the infamy, there is the fact of no longer (or not) being believed and, consequently, the impossibility of testifying in court, the notion is also the subject of definitional work. theological, since the Church was first conceived as a restricted group from which many were excluded – the idea of ​​credibility is linked to being (a good) Christian.

The economic dimension, finally, is crucial: whoever is excluded from the market is excluded from society – a point where, once again, the reader can hear echoes with the contemporary situation. As we can see, this book is first and foremost a book of intellectual history, where it is sometimes difficult to identify the main actor. Let us say that, beyond the dizzying number of sources, authors and stories mobilized, this actor is the texts, the corpus, the “ western thought » which produces this category.

Categories of infamous

We cannot summarize here the content of the nine chapters, very dense and very rich, which form the volume. After three chapters which establish the framework of the investigation (“ The cruelty of the infidels », on Christianity and the origins of infamy ; “ The obvious infamy », on the legal training of the category ; And “ Pointed out “, on the importance of reputation, particularly that of clerics, who occupy a position of “ charismatic centrality “), the book considers different categories of infamous.

In the chapter IVit is a question of loan sharks. Very developed, the analyzes devoted to them clearly illustrate the way in which infamy is transmitted to almost the entire social body. Various texts, notably those of the Dominican moralist Guillaume Perault (around 1200-1271), criticize the princely tolerance with regard to usury and designate, “ through the usurer, abject by definition, the occasion for a degradation of the esteem from which the “princes”, that is to say the secular and ecclesiastical lords, usually benefit “. So, “ the very center of society also runs the risk of being struck with infamy ; and it is the usurers who are the vectors » (p. 117).

The author strongly qualifies certain commonplaces on the prohibition of the sale of the passage of time to show that what shocks, in usury, is rather the “ exteriority in relation to the play of urban or ecclesial interests » of this loan « without public or institutional significance », conceded by someone who is not useful to the community.

After studying the usurer, the author discusses the professions (chapter V, “ The Useful and Useless Forsaken “). Various professions are studied, which belong to the group of “ vile professions “. Roman law forbids testifying to those who practice a vile profession, but, in the Middle Ages, this provision was revisited: the definition of the non-credibility of a witness seemed elastic (p. 147) and, above all, theutilitas is compatible with theinfamy. There are in fact, alongside legal but immoral activities (prostitution, theater, gambling), others which are legal and moral, but impure (executioners, jailers, dyers, etc.). The executioner in particular is the subject of remarkable developments.

A metaphorization of marginality

The chapter VI focuses on the Jews and describes in a nuanced way the “ complex image of Judeo-Christian cohabitation » (p. 185). “ Cataloged as publicly present subjects and nevertheless procedurally delegitimized “, withered by their inability to receive priestly consecration, the Jews are nevertheless “ both inside and outside the Christian city », their presence in the economic and contractual field being legitimate (p. 189).

The next chapter considers “ The infamy of the poor “, raising in particular the question of voluntary poverty (starting with that, paradigmatic, of Francis of Assisi), valued, and that of the ever-greater disapproval hitting suffered poverty, which we associate with an idea of ​​dangerousness . The chapter VIII concerns the notion of honor, essential for understanding the status of individuals. THE XIIIeXVe centuries would be the moment when, on the objective categories of Roman law, this “ reputation » (fama) that we lose so easily, at the risk of being singled out.

The last chapter, “ A peripheral humanity “, gives its full place to the evolution which took place from the middle of the Middle Ages, leading to “ the magnitude reached during the XVIe century by the rhetoric of exclusion » (p. 272), after the progress of exclusion, the change in the way we view the poor, and, XVe And XVIe centuries, the “ meeting of the Inquisition and confession », according to the strong formula of Adriano Prosperi.

In short, we arrive at a metaphorization of marginality (the author mentions, p. 292, a “ generic incivility stereotype “): anyone who is far from the center can be assimilated to the inhabitants of the ghettos. And this hardly differs, apart from the intensity of the disgust, from what we say about a thousand and one categories, such as merchants and traders.

The intensity of disgust

Yes, but the intensity of disgust is not nothing: this intellectual history does not take into consideration the fact that a lot is at stake in the effective implementation of disgust: no doubt we find texts saying that usurers , women, merchants, etc., are impure, and therefore almost all of society is marginal. These are only theoretical constructions, fascinating, but which do not prevent the effective persecution from hitting some (heretics, for example) more than others (merchants, who have never been persecuted).

Let us admit that this criticism is not really one, because it misses the point of the book, which, let us repeat, is not a book about a social category. At the end of the volume, we understand that the process in question results from the combination of several lexicons and owes a lot to the diffusion of confession and penance, to the terrible idea, anchored in Christianity, of a uilitas fundamental of the majority.

To carry out this ambitious investigation into the concept of infamy, this book focuses on lexicon, language and theory. Its author is always attentive to words and sources, to the point that his very erudite investigation can seem austere, even difficult, taking the reader from document to document. But the journey is worth it: this incredibly scholarly and rich work convinces of the centrality and fertility of this theme, which, surprisingly, has been little studied as such until now.