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

On 1 April 1644, stirred perhaps by longings for a more exciting life, two nuns escaped from a Bolognese convent for repentant former prostitutes (convertite). Several weeks later, the two were dead—strangled by men linked to their escape.

In 1989, these events came to the attention of Craig Monson, a scholar of music in Italian Renaissance convents, but he did not turn to them until two decades later when he discovered a voluminous transcript of the investigation into the nuns' disappearance and murder. This record is the basis for his latest exploration of the ways that convent women fulfilled, stretched, and transgressed the confines of their lives.

The two nuns in question, known in the convent by their street names, La Generona and La Rossa, undoubtedly joined their convent upon realizing that their lives as prostitutes would become increasingly precarious with age. The older one, La Generona, became a power in the convent's profitable laundry and needlework business, which supplemented both the convent's finances and her own. It was through this business that she and La Rossa encountered their male lovers and future accomplices. So beautiful, charming, and successful were these two nuns that many gentlemen callers were soon arriving at all times for suggestively amorous talk and musical entertainment while picking up or delivering their clothes.

Two of the regulars were Captain Donato Guarnieri and his friend, Carlo Possenti, two hotheads with violent pasts and prison records. The former was a handsome young mercenary in the papal army overseen by Cardinal Antonio Barberini, nephew of Pope Urban VIII, during the War of Castro. The latter was a tailor's son who, by dint of intellectual abilities and unbounded ambition, climbed the social ladder by pursuing useful social contacts that led to his appointment by Barberini as chaplain general of his army and vice-duke of Segni.

Both men brought valuable gifts to the two nuns with whom they developed liaisons. These added to the notable wealth that the nuns accumulated through their entrepreneurial skills. Among the most spectacular gifts were a silver-embroidered man's suit that Donato Guarnieri brought La Rossa and a similar one that Possenti brought for La Generona. These set off gender alarms when the recipients modeled them in front of others, but apparently did not raise the possibility that the suits might become disguises in the nuns' imminent escape.

So why would these nuns do such a thing? What were their motives when they abandoned their comfortable lives in an exceedingly lax convent to embark on a dangerous course that people thought was "craziness and a grievous sin" (138)? Unfortunately, the evidence is scant. As the author admits, "[I]t is ironic that the prostitutes turned nuns, whose death provoked this cause célèbre and who should be the main characters in the story, remain among the most elusive" (6). A contemporary who asked the nuns about their motives reported: "… the old one left because of Don Carlo Possenti, her beloved. The other one said she had done it because of Captain Donato Guarnieri" (138). Yet other scraps of evidence suggest a more complex picture. La Generona had great misgivings about "her beloved." She once confided to another nun that she wanted to end the courtship, that in one of Possenti's fits of temper "he had threatened to stomp on her belly" and "wished her no other death except by his own hand" (248). Possenti was, indeed, possessive. La Generona may have been a woman who didn't know how to escape an abusive relationship rather than one who was giddily in love.

Once out of the convent, the obstacles to a successful ending were more daunting than anticipated. The protagonists at the center of the story had not thought enough about what would happen next. Possenti masterminded the operation...