Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes / Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies

Anthropophagy was widely exploited in medieval political lexicon as a divide between barbarism and civilization. The following pages explore cannibalistic rituals that played a fundamental role in defining otherness and building the identity of a community. The focus of this examination will be the evidence related to Italian urban areas, given the high concentration of ritual cannibalism testimonies found in fourteenth to sixteenth-century chronicles of the cities of central and northern Italy.