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

Father-daughter incest, adultery, wayward priests, defloration by rape or seduction, physical and psychological abuse, molestation of adolescent girls, abortion, foundlings, new-born babies exposed in a field or dumped in a sewer, syphilis, women who sold their milk, and cooperative wet nurses, physicians, and priests—all these are the products of hidden sex, the substance of family secrets, the source of neighborhood gossip, and the subject of judicial investigations by Venetian authorities. The reality of poor, vulnerable, unmarried young women victimized by men in a position of social or economic superiority will be familiar to historians of early modern Europe, but seldom if ever has the human tragedy of gender inequalities been more graphically described. These stories about male misbehavior had horrific consequences for young women who often suffered from the scorn of their communities and the legal jeopardy of illegitimate pregnancies while their lovers usually squirmed out of serious trouble.

The sex crime problem only grew worse with time and expanded judicial surveillance. Although Ferraro cannot produce statistics from the Veneto, she notes that elsewhere the number of foundlings grew dramatically during the early modern period: from 6 percent of all baptized children in Florence in the fifteenth century to 38 percent in the nineteenth and between 30 and 40 percent in Milan by the end of the eighteenth century. These known orphans do not even begin to take account of all the "hidden" crimes that were the consequence of illicit sex. It is estimated that between only 1 and 7 percent of abortions and infanticides were ever reported in early modern Europe. These were the secrets of families and communities who made their own moral judgments and accommodations to human nature. As Ferraro notes, a macrohistorical study of such hidden sex crimes would be close to useless. The historical reality can best be detected through microhistories, and this book represents one of the most revealing examples of "serial microhistory" yet produced.

By the eighteenth century the diligence of Venetian authorities in investigating allegations of infanticide was impressive. They were systematic at interviewing family members, neighbors, and even those privy to secondhand gossip. In fact, magistrates had well-tuned ears for gossip networks, and much of what they discovered derived from presumed local knowledge, especially as it was rare for a third party to witness the sexual act that led to the crime or the crime itself. The most common evidence was the obviously swollen womb of a woman who did not admit to being pregnant. However, once the inquisitorial phase was over, defense lawyers intervened and more often than not destroyed the reliability of the hearsay evidence for involuntary defloration, defined as rape punishable by death. Without a confession for this crime, a woman's pregnancy tended to be defined as voluntary defloration, which then erased her legal defenses and released the man from the charge.

Ferraro, however, is too clever a historical detective to be content with rehashing the usual clichés mouthed by early modern defenders of the gender regime. She notes, "a few microhistories do not amount to a master narrative" (200), but she exploits the details of these stories to undermine some of the most common "myths" of the subject. Although when confronted with a dead infant, "authorities searched for the culturally constructed criminal, an unmarried woman" (200), the father—lay or cleric—was often an invisible agent in the death. Infanticide was as much a male as a female crime. She also notes that homes were hardly secure places for young women. Despite the customary restrictions that kept women at home to protect their virginity from predators, threats to young women often came from within the household, including from fathers, brothers, and other kin. Finally, she recognizes that the Catholic Reformation program to create asylums and convents for abused and vulnerable women involved more than a charitable impulse to protect the unmarried...