“The Art of Executing Well offers a disturbing picture of what went on behind the scenes at executions in Renaissance Italy. Companies of patrician laymen consoled the condemned during the dark night before an execution, whispered prayers into his ear as he marched through the streets on the way to the scaffold, and stood by him right up to the moment of death. Only in Italy did “companies of death” offer professionals, merchants, and political leaders an intimate experience with the horrors of judicial executions. This fascinating volume, which conveys all the psychological and spiritual intensity of these dramatic personal encounters between the condemned and the political figures who supported capital punishment, suggests why, long before other Europeans Italian elites became skeptical of the benefits of judicial executions, Tuscany was the first European state to abolish capital punishment.”

―Edward Muir

“This multiplicity of perspectives―condemned prisoners, comforters, public spectators, and scholars of various disciplines―makes this book deeply interesting and an important contribution to studies of ritual, piety, and society in Renaissance Italy.”

―Sixteenth Century Journal

“This excellent book quite belies the very series title under which it was published. Indeed, the included essays regarding the elaborate rituals by which criminals were put to death in Italy from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, and especially the contemporaneous manuals instructing volunteer laybrothers in how to comfort the condemned and convince them to accept and even appreciate their fate, indicate remarkably just how medieval still were the judicial systems of that so-called age of cultural enlightenment.”

―Catholic Historical Review

“[Terpstra] has identified and brought important primary texts to a wider audience. The volume will hopefully spur more scholars to study how public executions shaped Italian religious life and perhaps changed early modern attitudes toward crime and punishment.”

―Renaissance Quarterly

“There was an art to it, born of tradition and compassion. The act of execution in Renaissance Italy was not purely to punish the prisoner and entertain the public but also to affirm religious and social concepts that comforted some and warned others. Based upon an extended period of research, particularly of a rediscovered manuscript on the Beinecke collection of Yale U., this collection of essays reflects the political, religious and social complexity of execution. The contributors detail the comforting (and disturbing) rituals associated with executions and dramatic traditions, the uses of sacred song or other forms of worship to assist the condemned, the commercialization of executions through the sale of printed broadsheets and other products, and the works of artists and writers to preserve memories of the condemned and their acts.”

―Book News