This article aims to study the exemption systems foregrounded by the disharmonious elements regarding the medieval legal perspective, which Dante purposefully introduces into his system of reward and punishment. The Italian poet defines a normative space whose exceptions he explores: the pagans are saved, the convicts are bemoaned, the vows are trampled and the punishments are resized. perspective on divine justice, critical cases play a central role. These legal forms express the poet's perspective on law more obviously than merely citing legal texts. Without really having a cultural education in the field of civil and canonical law, Dante, as a civil servant and then as a convict, was interested in the legal culture of his time: the text of the Divine Comedy is crossed by rituals and legal elements that govern daily life. This was the origin of the two-faced nature of the religious vocabulary in the administration of justice: an ambiguity that revealed itself in the interpretation and use of the confession. Therefore one fundamental moment of the ritual of justice was the one in which the sentenced showed to have passed through the process of conversion and presented himself as a new man worthy of (eternal) salvation. These sources show that death sentences and other forms of judicial punishment had to be inspired to the religious model of divine mercy and were justified with the rhetoric of the religious solace that required the assent of the sentenced. At the centre of the narratives, both for ecclesiastical and secular justice, was the conversion. This was an activity voluntarily carried out by lay confraternities established since the Middle age in several parts of Italy and Europe. Among the available sources on the administration of justice the comments and remarks on religious assistance of convicts and sentenced to death are some of the most useful. For this reason one fundamental aspect of the history of justice has concerned conversion meant as interior transformation of the culprit. On these two subjects, civil and ecclesiastical justice have devised way of repression and punishment that were different in several respects, but built on the common ground of the Christian distinction between the salvation of the soul and the punishment of the body. The heretic and the criminal were the protagonists of two distinct forms of justice, one pertained to the spiritual power the other to the secular one.
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