ABSTRACT
Usurarius manifestus, namely someone who publicly and directly lends on interest, appears in the twelfth century as the clearest individual example of what canon law calls “infamy of fact.”1 From an economic and social point of view, the main legal characteristic of this person was shaped by the “fact” that his selling of money was openly visible and therefore proof of his shameless character, of his carelessness about his own reputation. In order to understand this correspondence between usury and infamy, namely to understand the metaphorical meaning at the origin of the notion and word usura, it is, however, crucial to keep in mind the close medieval textual relation which, before the twelfth century, links together infidelity as a basic typology of exclusion (defined by heresy, resistance to conversion, or misunderstanding of Christian notions) and avarice as a sign of the otherness, mainly connoting Jews and Jewish people, but also infidels and the so-called “pagans” or peasants (rustici).2 Actually, the link between infidelity and public crime that defined a specific legal exclusion was developed by canon law, especially after the middle of the twelfth century. This connection, however, had its origin not only in the Roman law that was reshaped by Justinian’s Code, but also in the redefinition of the notion of infamy (infamia) produced by canon law from the ninth to the twelfth century. The word infames designated in Roman law a well-defined range of dishonored social conditions derived on the whole from the sentence of a judge (the Roman “praetor”).3 Subsequently the textual stratification producing the canon law, beginning with the Decretum Gratiani, will reconsider the notion of “infamy” and shape a new definition of exclusion: the so-called “infamy of fact” (infamia facti). Canon law represented this new type of public dishonor as the openly visible shame4 testified by the common opinion, the vox publica, and daily embodied by a multifarious range of criminals, heretics, infidels, or subjects of ill repute, whose common evil and aggressive nature was, on the whole, recapitulated through the expression “they, who fight against the fathers.”5 The idea at the basis of this new definition of incapacity to participate in the public life of the Christian community was that infidelity or moral deviations (that is visible behaviors assumed as vicious as condemned crimes) were the
presumable starting point of an aggressive attitude against the ecclesiastical powers, or the beginning of a perverse will to desecrate and defame them: this hypothetical violent and “cruel,” namely “savage,” habit of infidels, criminals, and sinners was then perceived and described by ecclesiastical jurists as the reason for their untrustworthiness and unacceptability as witnesses. “Whoever is an infidel to God, cannot be trustworthy to people” (“Non potest erga homines esse fidelis, qui Deo extiterit infidus”).6
