Patricia Turning, Ph.D.

Utilizing the lens of popular control to assess criminal sentences highlights the significance of effective public agency in the later Middle Ages, instead of political oppression, especially in the urban realm. The people who inhabited cities played a participatory role in setting the parameters involved in the spectacles of judicial chastisement by accepting or rejecting what unfolded before them. And this became a way in which neighbors surveilled and corrected both the residents who lived in their midst, and the agents of authority expected to orchestrate restitution through performative executions. This article unpacks jurisdictional disputes from the city of Toulouse, in order to analyze the notion of accountability among the inhabitants and of citizens over judicial officers, especially in crimes involving contested sexuality. In 1332, for example, a customary punishment known as a rege ribaldum (where authorities forced a criminal to run the streets of the town) spiraled out of control at the hands of one of the spectators, resulting in a gruesome disfigurement. Rather than dismiss this event as senseless mob violence, concepts of popular control shed light on the cooperative element of the officers and their people as it informed the distribution of punishment, rooted in principles that were sometimes congruent, and sometimes not.