33 pages • 1 hour read
Gene A. BruckerGiovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Quest for Justice”
Brucker describes the legal events of the investigation and trial of Giovanni. The investigation begins after Archbishop Antoninus receives a “papal breve” on June 4, 1455, informing him of Lusanna’s allegations and instructing him to investigate and determine their credibility (39). Antoninus places the case in the hands of Messer Raffaello, his vicar general, and orders the notary, Ser Filippo Mazzei, to record every step of the legal process. With these key tasks successfully delegated, Antoninus attends to questioning each witness.
In the trial, chosen “procurators” (40) represent both parties. Messer Stefano represents Lusanna, and Ser Piero Migliorelli and Ser Domenico represent Giovanni. Almost immediately, Giovanni’s procurators attempt to block the investigation, arguing that there is no legal basis for the trial. Messer Stefano continually responds to the procurator’s objections, describing them as “empty [and] vague” (43). The trial and investigation eventually begin with the court interviewing witnesses, though Giovanni’s procurators succeed in delaying the process.
Soon after the investigation begins, Antoninus learns that Florence’s “podestà,” the chief executive of Florence’s secular court, is investigating the allegations that Lusanna poisoned her first husband to death. Antoninus orders the podestà to cease his investigation, believing that it will interfere with the archiepiscopal court’s own investigation. The podestà refuses to follow Antoninus’s orders, causing Antoninus to excommunicate him. Six weeks later, the Signoria, Florence’s governing body, negotiates a compromise in which the podestà halts his investigation, and Antoninus reverses the excommunication.
At the end of July, Giovanni’s procurators deliver their main arguments against Lusanna’s case. They claim that a marriage would never occur between a young, rich man and an older, poorer woman who is no longer capable of bearing children. Lusanna’s procurators argue that such claims are without merit since “disparity in marriage partners was not uncommon in Florence” (50).
in August, the archiepiscopal court begins questioning Giovanni’s and Lusanna’s witnesses. First, the couple’s procurators submit questions for the court to ask the witnesses during their depositions. Giovanni’s procurators request that the court question Lusanna’s witnesses about the specifics of the wedding day, hoping to expose contradictions in their testimonies and prove that the wedding never occurred. Lusanna’s procurator instructs the court to find out what kind of relationships Giovanni has with his witnesses, hoping to determine if Giovanni bribed his witnesses to provide negative testimonies about Lusanna.
Over the next two months, the couple’s procurators call upon groups of witnesses to support their claims. Lusanna’s procurator asks her family to testify that she secretly married Giovanni, and he asks a group of peasants to testify that Lusanna and Giovanni acted like a married couple at a villa outside of Florence. Giovanni calls upon many of Lusanna’s neighbors, such as Giuliana Magaldi, who testify that Giovanni and Lusanna had an adulterous affair. However, Giuliana later recants most of her testimony. She claims that Giovanni promised to marry Lusanna “if her husband should die,” and Giuliana admits that she lied about seeing the couple having sex, as well as about Lusanna telling her that she poisoned her first husband.
In October, all three procurators read through the witness testimonies and provide their final arguments to the court. Giovanni’s procurators claim that Lusanna’s witnesses are untrustworthy due to their “low status and reputation” and their close relationships to Lusanna (57). Lusanna’s procurator also questions the credibility of Giovanni’s witnesses, describing them as “drunks, pimps, blasphemers against God and the saints” and claiming that they could only be trusted to provide true testimonies if they were tortured (58). Afterwards, Giovanni’s procurators try to delay the trial again, frustrating Messer Raffaello. However, the court finally delivers its verdict. It concludes that Lusanna and Giovanni have been lawfully married, nullifying Giovanni’s second marriage and compelling him to accept Lusanna as his lawful wife.
Chapter 3 Analysis
Though Brucker reconstructs the events of the trial leading up to the court’s final decision, he admits that it is difficult to understand the court’s motives. Brucker struggles to grasp the reasoning behind the court’s decisions because he only has second-hand knowledge of it. Everything he knows about the court comes from the records of the notary Ser Filippo Mazzei, who records in “painstaking detail” every event that occurs throughout the “slow and laborious” trial process (40). Though Mazzei’s notes are exhaustive, Brucker writes that they “provide few clues to the legal theory” that motivates the court’s decisions (40). Brucker is forced to use his knowledge of the historical era in which the court operated to offer hypotheses about its behavior.
Brucker exercises this skill throughout Chapter 3, especially when he recounts Archbishop Antoninus’s final decision in the case. Though Antoninus publicly announces that Giovanni and Lusanna’s marriage occurred, he never explains how he evaluated the evidence that lead him to that conclusion. As Brucker notes, there were many questions Antoninus had to answer before deciding the case, such as whether the alleged wedding actually occurred, whether Giovanni and Lusanna had had an adulterous relationship, and whether they bribed their witnesses. Instead, the question he answered was: Which party’s witnesses were more honest?
In many instances, witness testimonies directly contradicted each other. For example, Lusanna’s family testified that Giuliana and Niccolò Magaldi were present at the wedding, but the Magaldis both testified that the wedding never happened. Brucker surmises that Antoninus blamed this discrepancy, among others, on Giovanni’s witnesses, which is why he eventually “accepted Lusanna’s version of her relationship with Giovanni and, in particular, her denial that she had ever been unchaste” (72).
After examining Antoninus’s writings, Brucker argues that Antoninus’s conclusion in the case might have been influenced by “his sense of his pastoral mission as ‘father of poor and miserable persons’” (74). Though fifteenth-century Florence abounded with rich and powerful families, Antoninus believed that his primary objective was to protect the city’s poor, working class. He also had a reputation for being aggressive towards Florence’s “ruling elite,” which included the rich Giovanni (74). These insights indicate that Antoninus might have sympathized with Lusanna because she was from a middle-class family. Thus, Brucker concludes that Antoninus used “his knowledge of the law, his view of his pastoral role, and his social perceptions” to come to his decision about Lusanna and Giovanni’s trial (75).
