Faide e letteratura giuridica nello spazio trentino-tirolese del tardo Medioevo

Starting in the mid-1400s, aristocratic families and rural communities, as well as individual people, turned to the jurists of Padua’s Studium requesting a high number of legal opinions to be used in solving jurisdictional controversies. Confl icting opinions about law and local customs, about the extent to which communities were allowed to carry out armed resistance, and about the procedures in force in courts of law may be found in these consilia, often engendered by a feud. The contribution sets off from this kind of literature to show—in contrast with customary “oppositional” interpretations of the relationship between Roman-canon law procedures and customs—how aristocratic and rural communities quickly adapted to a new interpretation of feud confl icts in the course of the late Middle Ages.