Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice: Illicit Sex and Infanticide in the Republic of Venice, 1557-1789 (review)

This latest book of Joanne M. Ferraro is a nice companion to her earlier work on marriage litigation suits, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 2001). Based on fourteen case studies of criminal trials conducted by Venetian judicial authorities, Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice: Illicit Sex and Infanticide in the Republic of Venice, 1557-1789 investigates the often desperate situation of single mothers and their children. The book investigates three clusters of crimes: incest, infanticide, and illicit sexual relations with priests. Ferraro situates her book in the dual scholarly tradition of research on sex crimes (quoting the work of Ulinka Rublack and Guido Ruggiero, among others) and on child abandonment and infanticide (referring to research by Claudio Povolo, Adriano Prosperi, Philip Gavitt, David Kertzer, and others), ingeniously linking the two.

What results is a very moving analysis of young women's vulnerability to sexual exploitation in a society that defined female honor in terms of chastity but did little to prevent men from stealing it. Based on her careful reading of criminal investigation protocols, Ferraro details how pregnancies resulting from incestuous, adulterous, and otherwise prohibited intercourse almost inevitably led to child abandonment and infanticide. While Ferraro is careful to avoid facile generalizations, she does provide enough qualitative evidence to show how the lack of any kind of legal protection and societal support of illegitimate offspring and their mothers was a key component of the early modern patriarchal mode of reproduction supported by both state and church. She also questions the value of charitable assistance to single mothers consisting of the institutionalization of abandonment in the form of foundling homes and the enclosure of "repentant" women in convent-like institutions.

The first five case studies document the terrible situation of daughters who were sexually exploited by their fathers, usually with the tacit consent of their mothers and other family members. Often, it took outsiders to their communities to denounce this crime too shameful and terrible for its victims or their nearest relatives to confess and talk about, as in the cases of Marieta Negro and Mattia Stanghelin from the sixteenth century. In the summer of 1757, however, thirteen-year-old Anna Maria Bonon had the courage to denounce her father for the crime of incest in front of the Venetian governor of Vicenza; and in 1788, Caterina del Vei, encouraged by the Bishop of Belluno, denounced her husband, Osvaldo, for having repeatedly abused both of her daughters for a period of over five years. While the first three cases resulted in the fathers' sentencing (to death and galley service), the judges found the evidence for Caterina's husband's crimes to be insufficient. We can only imagine what life must have been like for Caterina and her daughters after Osvaldo's absolution. The last among the trials for incest that Ferraro discusses takes us into the home of a similarly "dysfunctional" Venetian aristocratic family. In this case, too, the judges were unable to establish undeniable proof of Bianca Capello's sexual abuse and attempted murder by her brothers, but Ferraro aptly uses the evidence to trace the young woman's many misfortunes: "tracked for the convent, but too ill to be a nun; sexually molested in her adolescence, if not before; afflicted with serious illnesses; and, ultimately, marooned in Ca' Capello amid family hatreds" (p. 115), Bianca appears as yet another victim of a domestic economy that left unmarried women vulnerable to sexual exploitation and their offspring destined to abandonment or infanticide.

The next four case studies center on women denounced for infanticide. Here, the judicial authorities as well as the defendants' communities wavered between sympathy for and condemnation of the single mothers under investigation. Maria Franceschini, for example, was sentenced to banishment for life in 1732 but secretly managed to stay in the city, protected by a network of neighbors and friends. It took until 1751 for...