Colin Rose

I am a historian of early modern Europe, specifically of north Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a social historian, I am concerned with the ways that communities of ordinary Italians managed their day-to-day conflicts and crises, and adapted to new forms of governance and power that emerged with the consolidation of ducal states in the region. In my current research I focus on homicide and everyday violence in the city and province of Bologna, where a resurgent papacy established a northern capital in the early sixteenth century. Bologna provides a fascinating case study in how local populations reacted to the imposition of “absolute” rule, as the city’s elite and ordinary people rejected, negotiated or embraced centralized justice and government by papal legates. Looking at homicide trials across the seventeenth century allows me to document a sharp rise in violence among local nobility as a reaction to the increased pressures of papal rule, a process explored in a forthcoming manuscript.