Bologna in 1640 in Italy. Illustration by Johannes Blaeu
My forthcoming article in Social History 44, 2, ‘Police forces in medieval Italy: Bologna 1340-1480,’ came about from the happy conjunction of my interests in policing and migration with the unexpected discovery of a new set of documents in the state archive in Bologna. I’ve been working on crime and criminal justice in medieval Bologna for decades, this journal having published one of my earlier articles,[1] and you might think that I must have seen all the relevant documents by now. But one of the things I’ve learned rather late in the day is to explore the outer reaches of the archive catalogues: that means the pages at the back containing files titled ‘Miscellanies’ or ‘Undated fragments’.