Habitual Offenders: A True Tale of Nuns, Prostitutes and Murderers in 17th-Century Italy by Craig A. Monson (review)

Craig A. Monson's Habitual Offenders provides a third installment to his previous Nuns Behaving Badly (2010) and Divas in the Convent (1995; 2012), both examinations of transgressive nuns in seventeenth-century Italy. Habitual Offenders focuses on a single murder case in Bologna, in which two nuns, Suor Laura Vittoria Regi, and Suor Silveria Catterina Pasi, were murdered after a planned flight from their convent. In relating the local scandal, political intrigue, and criminal investigation of the case, Monson seeks to provide "a microhistory of crime and punishment in seventeenth-century Bologna, one that puts faces on people 'of the ordinary sort' from Italy's backstreets and back stairs, seldom encountered in historical narratives" (4).

Monson describes the events of Habitual Offenders as a "morality play" (53) and his presentation of this intensely complicated crime narrative is inherently theatrical; he even presents a "cast of characters" list in the beginning of the book, ranked by primary, secondary and tertiary importance (which is very helpful). The first portion of the book is dedicated to introducing these primary characters: the resilient and unruly former prostitutes Suor Laura Vittoria Regi and Suor Silveria Catterina Pasi, and the host of male paramours investigated for their murder, principally the mercenary Donato Guarnieri, the clergyman Carlo Possenti, and the novus homo Giovanni Braccesi. The second section details the various moving parts of the crime's discovery and introduces the ruthless prosecutor Giovanni Domenico Rossi, who begins a relentless and often morally questionable pursuit of those complicit in the murder. The final section moves between Rossi's months-long interrogations of Braccesi, Guarnieri and Possenti, punctuated by graphically rendered torture sessions and witness testimonies. Along the way, interlocking side-plots of feuding Bolognese families, dissolute Counts, and tension in the papal enclave add supplementary drama and color to the story, if occasionally making the arc of the central plot hard to follow.

Monson's unorthodox but engaging narrativization of the case is also addressed in his introduction, where he a explicitly lays out his methodology for "suggestively reconstructing" over two thousand pages of trial record into a three-hundred-page book. The near-cinematic dialogue that drives Rossi's investigations and interrogations stems from Monson's wealth of archival resources, from the intricately detailed court transcripts to the Roman avisi gossip sheets, ambassadorial dispatches, and contemporary chronicles, As Monson notes, "the detail in the original sources left little need for me to make things up" (8). The scattered "perhaps'" in each chapter allow the reader to track where those narrative embellishments or hypotheses occur.

While Habitual Offenders does indeed provide a microhistory of seventeenth-century Bologna, (especially in relation to the papal politics surrounding the recently appointed Innocent X) the marketing of Monson's book seems to place it within the realms of true crime, especially its eye-catching pulp-esque cover. Indeed, Monson's narrative style, uninterrupted by secondary critical engagement (which is instead present in his footnotes) clearly anticipates a broader public audience engaging with this narrative as a particularly fascinating historical cold case. Monson's goal to give voice back to the victims of Suor Vittoria and Suor Laura and "make a place for them in history" echoes the narrative missions of Sarah Koenig in Serial or the recent documentary The Keepers, which likewise investigates the unsolved murder of a nun as a gateway into institutional malfeasance and predation in the Catholic Church (290). Much like these other true crime works, Habitual Offenders ends wrestling with lack of narrative closure and epistemic certainty. The convergence of archival history and true crime is an underrepresented genre, and Monson excels in it. However, the pivots from winking sensationalism to earnest empathy are sometimes jarring. Suor Laura and Suor Silveria shift from fascinating primary characters to evidentiary cadavers, or "nonspeaking roles," as Monson terms it, with somewhat unceremonious narrative bonhomie (92). Even the wonderfully punny title...