In a series of essays based on surviving documents of actual court practices<BR>from Perugia and Bologna, as well as laws, statutes, and theoretical<BR>works from the 12th and 13th centuries, Massimo Vallerani offers important<BR>historical insights into the establishment of a trial-based public<BR>justice system. Challenging the long-standing evolutionary paradigm of<BR>medieval legal procedures, Vallerani argues that public justice was not<BR>the triumph of strong inquisitorial procedure over weak accusatory procedure,<BR>but rather a process in which the two procedures developed in<BR>tandem. He demonstrates that inquisition and accusation shared many<BR>features in their intertwining goals of punishment and reconciliation.<BR>The grand narrative of the evolution of criminal justice is dismantled<BR>in this work, originally published in Italian and widely cited as a<BR>groundbreaking study of legal procedure. Vallerani contends that accusatio<BR>and inquisitio were formed simultaneously to address different<BR>needs: to seek and construct different "truths" -- the truth of the fact<BR>that occurred outside the courtroom as revealed by the probing of the<BR>judge, and the truth that emerges inside the triadic model of the courtroom<BR>as a result of negotiations between the disputing parties under<BR>the guidance of the judge.<BR>Vallerani's rich approach to his sources includes statistical analysis<BR>of the court records, revealing the functioning of the courts in terms of<BR>the incidence of torture, the proportions of trials initiated by accusatio<BR>and inquisitio, and the percentage of trials suspended at different<BR>stages of litigation. Furthermore, he sets legal procedures within the<BR>context of a society and political world immersed in violence and conflict<BR>and shows how the supplica, or petition for pardon, played a major<BR>role in the transformation from communal to signorial government in<BR>the early fourteenth century.