Chierici e pubblici poteri nei Promessi Sposi di Alessandro Manzoni

Manzoni can be considered a legal historian like Dickens and so many other novelists. In fact, he has succeeded in humanizing stereotyped formulas of law in Renzo and Lucia’s novel. What he is concerned with is the machinery by which the law is enforced, the men who enforced it, the conditions in which these men lived and the actual effects of the rules of law, substantive and adjective, upon the men and the women of his day. Hence we get in “Promessi Sposi” that account of the human side of the rules of law and their working, which is essential to the legal historian and, in this case, to the ecclesiastical historian. Also the relations between Church and State in XVIth are painted with extraordinary powers observation