March 28, 2011
"Not guilty by reason of insanity."
It's a phrase most people are familiar with thanks to round-the-clock news coverage of criminal trials. Brandon Parlopiano, however, is studying how jurists in the Middle Ages approached the problem of insanity.
Parlopiano, a doctoral candidate in medieval and Byzantine studies, recently received funding from two organizations to conduct research on his dissertation, "Madmen and Lawyers: The Development and Practice of the Jurisprudence of Insanity in the Middle Ages." The vast majority of the sources he will use were written in Latin.
He received a $1,750 Heckman Research Stipend from the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minn., to do research there from May 16 to June 13. Parlopiano will be working with a number of legal manuscripts on microfilm, most of which were filmed at Austrian libraries. Parlopiano says these manuscripts preserve early commentaries and glosses (brief notations of the meaning of wording in a text) to the Libri legales , the basic texts of Roman and canon law that functioned as textbooks in the medieval universities.
"By using them, I hope to show how jurists in the 12th century - when legal studies were beginning to revive in Western Europe - drew on ideas from Roman and canon law to understand the problems surrounding insanity, and how those early reflections colored the subsequent development of jurisprudence into the late Middle Ages," he explains.
Parlopiano has also received a $7,000 grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation in New York City to conduct research at the Venetian Archivio di Stato in Italy during the fall semester. There, he will study records from the courts and offices that oversaw medieval Venice.
"I want to examine select series of court documents to ascertain the level of interaction between the jurists' reflections on insanity and their practice in court," he notes. "Additionally, I am very interested, while examining these records, to see whether they seem to be cases in which the truly mentally ill had their day in court, or whether insanity functioned merely as a legal strategy. This is a question only court records can begin to answer."
Not only is Parlopiano excited for the research opportunities that await him in Venice, he's also looking forward to discovering a part of his own past.
"My family is for the most part Italian-American, and my grandparents were the last generation that spoke any Italian," he says. "While studying the history of this interesting and problematic feature of law, I hope to connect more with my own history."
In addition to the grants for research, Parlopiano recently won a $300 Graduate Student Paper Award from the Medieval Academy of America in Cambridge, Mass., for "Before McNaughton: The Jurisprudence of Proving Insanity in the Middle Ages." He will present the paper, a condensed version of a chapter of his dissertation, at the annual meeting of the academy in Scottsdale, Ariz., on April 16.
"In Italian Brandon's name means 'I speak slowly.' In the academic world, however, Brandon has been moving at warp speed," says Parlopiano's dissertation director, Kenneth Pennington, Kelly-Quinn Professor of Ecclesiastical and Legal History and professor of law. "His dissertation topic has enormous potential to shed light on the jurisprudence of the past but also to illuminate and put into a new context important issues of justice in modern American law."
Parlopiano says he is thankful to everyone associated with the CUA's Center for Medieval and Byzantine Studies, especially Pennington.
"My success truly belongs to the excellent teachers who have helped me reach this point," he notes.