HISTORY OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

The discipline belongs to the interdisciplinary educational activities of the Bachelor’s Degree Programme of History, Historical Curriculum – From European Hegemony to Globalization. These activities prepare students to reconstruct and understand, through the critical investigation, the sequence of different societies and their reciprocal connections through events and phenomena of the past. The instructional goal of the course is to give the basic knowledge of the History of Law and of the History of Political/Judicial Institutions and of their social impact. This knowledge answers the learning outcome to prepare students to elaborate an institutional analysis of the European historical context.

The attendance, the active participation at the course and the individual study allow the students: 1) to acquire the knowledge and the understanding of the most important European institutional frameworks; 2) to learn to compare the different institutional structures which followed each other during the past; 3) to be able to read critically studies of History of Institutions.

Knowledge of the basic events of Early Modern, Modern and Contemporary History, even if the student hasn’t passed yet the specific examinations.

The first part of the course will examine some important aspects of the History of Law and of the History of Political Institutions. In the second part of the course the lessons will deal with the History of Criminal Justice and its protagonists (judges, lawyers, defendants), with a focus on the Habsburg Veneto of the nineteenth century, but, more generally, with a long-term vision from the ancien régime to the age of codifications. A particular attention will be dedicated also to the relationships between the work of the judge and that of the historian.

For students who can’t attend the course the contents of the programme will be the same. The students will study them through the texts indicated in the section 'Referral texts' of this Syllabus.

The students who attend the course will prepare the exam through the notes of the lessons.

The students who can’t attend the course will study these two texts:

- Maurizio Fioravanti (ed.), Lo Stato moderno in Europa: istituzioni e diritto, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2002

- Claudio Povolo, La selva incantata: delitti, prove, indizi nel Veneto dell’Ottocento, Verona, Cierre, 2006 (from p. 1 to p. 145)
(https://www.academia.edu/2540305/Nella_selva_incantata_degli_indizi )

The examination will be oral and will last about 30 minutes. It will aim at verifying the assimilation of the contents of the course and the critical ability of the student.

Frontal lessons (lecture-style presentation).

Italian

Teaching language: Italian.

In a continuous interaction with the students, during the course, as often as necessary, it will be given a supplemental bibliography and it will be possible also to examine some texts online.

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