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

If the title alone leaves one in any doubt, Natalie Smith’s colourful dust jacket design with its racy quotes and saucy illustration makes it amply clear, Craig Monson’s latest foray into convent archives is going to be a page-turner. His long-honed expertise as an historian of Italian women’s religious houses is brought to bear on the official transcript of a murder case, all 2200 pages of it. This documentary treasure-trove, standing over twenty centimetres deep, provides the book’s core material, which Monson then enlivens with information gleaned from love letters, arrest and detention mandates, notarial annotations, papal directives and petitions, private communications in the Vatican Secret Archive, and avvisi, the gossip sheets of the period.

The action unfolds over a three-year period, 1644 to 1646. Two convertite nuns (former prostitutes) are abducted from a Carmelite convent in Bologna by a volatile priest and a dashing mercenary in the papal army. An archiepiscopal investigation ensues but leads nowhere. Two years later, the women’s bodies are found interred in a wine cellar, naked and garrotted. The ramifications of their murder turn out to be far-reaching, touching both the French and papal courts. Powering much of the intrigue is the almost lethal antipathy between the families Barberini (Urban VII and his nephews, Cardinals Antonio and Francesco) and Pamfili (Innocent X and his nephew, Cardinal Camillo Francesco).

What animates the pacing of this whodunit, a touch over-ripe with detail (all scrupulously documented), is Monson’s convincing construal of dialogue, in particular, his imaginative reinterpretation of the notaries’ mediation between interrogators and witnesses. Replete with distinctions between dialects and lowlife argot, it reads like a play script, with witness accounts injecting a realistic sense of the mores and social status of the protagonists. While Monson makes occasional tangential observations on broader issues (such as monastic enclosure of prostitutes and other marginalised women), relating the tale rarely retreats from the foreground. The description of the use of judicial torture inflicted on the culprit, Possenti, is not for the fainthearted.

One can admire the author’s panache as a storyteller as much as his perspicacity as an archival sleuth, but Monson’s Habitual Offenders, as a hybrid genre, remains less than the sum of its fascinating parts: a tawdry tale artfully told.