Infanticide, Secular Justice, and Religious Debate in Early Modern Europe by Adriano Prosperi (review)

Any book by Adriano Prosperi is a welcome event for early modernists, doubly so when an English translation appears for those unacquainted with this renowned scholar's Italian work. Now his Dare l'anima: storia di un infanticidio (2005) has appeared as Infanticide, Secular Justice, and Religious Debate in Early Modern Europe. The tragic tale of Lucia Cremonini, a Bolognese servant accused in December 1709 of murdering her newborn son and executed by hanging on 22 January 1710, provides the springboard for an unhurried, comprehensive investigation of the circumstances of childbirth, the crime of newborn child murder, and the religious and secular elements that conditioned life, birth, and death in early modern Catholic societies. Readers will emerge from this book with a thorough, and thoroughly humane, understanding not only of an obscure individual tragedy but of the way theology, law, doctrine, and premodern science governed the meaning of reproduction and the beginnings of life itself, and fell disproportionately on the shoulders of women. As Prosperi notes, "The Renaissance and the Modern Age: these uplifting labels applied to periods of European history correspond in the history experienced by women to an age of impending danger and agonizing death. The numbers speak for themselves" (65).

Prosperi begins with the story of Lucia Cremonini's crime as documented in the compact records of an accusation, investigation, trial, and execution that altogether lasted a mere six weeks. In brief, the servant Lucia described herself as an "honourable girl" (4). On an errand during Carnival season she encountered an unknown priest who led her "into a dark, narrow corridor; and there he robbed me of my honour and took my virginity" (5). They ate together in a tavern (she paid for her own food, possibly to spare the priest any suspicion of soliciting prostitution), the priest then brought her to her home, and he disappeared. From this single encounter came the pregnancy and birth of a baby boy. Lucia claimed he was dead from the moment of birth, but the midwives brought to inspect both mother and infant testified that it was born at the proper time, alive, and was well formed in all its parts. They noted also the knife wounds on the mouth and the severed arteries in the neck, most likely from a kitchen knife stained with blood, found at the scene by the notary. From this moment on, the outcome of the trial was inevitable, and much of the judges' work focused on eliciting from Lucia the confession of premeditated murder that condemned her "to be hanged and her soul separated from her body" (314). At the end of the book, Prosperi returns to the confession and the ritual of forgiveness that preceded Cremonini's execution and allowed her a Christian death.

This is the sad but familiar tale, then, recounted concisely by the author in the first twenty pages of the book. Prosperi, though, is concerned with much more than one typical case of newborn-child murder. In part 1, he moves steadily through the historical forces that transformed infanticide from sin to crime. Part 2 takes up the larger historical characterization of "The Mother" as a social construct defined by, serving, and especially constrained by larger institutions (the Catholic Church, family, the state), for which the individual woman was secondary, instrumental in the often-conflicting goals of discipline and reproduction ("providers of subjects" [79]). Ecclesiastical demands for celibacy and chastity were also less compelling than protecting the Church's honor and prestige from fornicating priests. Prosperi notes for example the case of a different cleric, accused and tried for teaching his mistress to murder their bastard child. The offending priest was suspended and sent away, "but he soon returned, without any further consequences" (101). And so it went (and goes): "But it is a fact that compared with the continuous chain of official documents condemning such acts, which covers all...