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

Ferraro's Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice examines cases of incest, infanticide, infant abandonment, rape, and abortions in Venice and the Veneto between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. By looking at sexual relationships that occurred outside marriage as reported in Venetian criminal courts, Ferraro explores how both secular and religious institutions monitored sexual behavior and disciplined sexual deviance.

Ferraro has unearthed some shocking stories. The trials tell of fathers who raped their daughters repeatedly over many years, often responsible for multiple pregnancies, miscarriages, births, and children subsequently killed or removed to foundling hospitals, and priests who seduced young girls and transported them far from home to give birth secretly or to take medicinal powders for aborting their pregnancies. The most dramatic case—that of Bianca Capello (1778)—involved a patrician family imprisoning a young noblewoman within their home where she was (possibly) poisoned, sexually abused, and raped by family members, resulting in several miscarriages and births over many years. These cases as a group illustrate how unmarried women and the men who slept with them managed both their socially forbidden sexual relationships and their unwanted pregnancies.

By examining these cases closely, Ferraro deftly demonstrates the uneven and unpredictable nature of justice in the early modern world. Popular networks of neighborhood and community often had the power to determine which sexual behaviors were forbidden and whether and how people were to be punished for them. Although formal, secular authority, or "the law," may have represented the primary force of justice in these cases, the documents from these court cases show that the influence of nonprofessional and lower-class individuals and their communities rivaled that which radiated from the halls of state and courtroom.

Much of Ferraro's analysis, however, represents well-tread ground. For instance, she and other scholars of early modern Italy have already explored both the shame that sexual deviance, rape, or illegitimate sexual relationships could bring to families and the extent to which patriarchal power and family honor could subsume justice for women. In addition, as gripping as these stories may be, in terms of historical methodology, they nevertheless raise the persistent, nagging question of the value of microhistory. Ferraro herself is the first to note that as a methodology, "close microhistorical study does not necessarily produce patterns" and that "a few stories do not constitute a master narrative" (10, 36, 200). Nonetheless, she claims that these trials are informative about "how early modern women and men and their neighborhood communities understood unwanted pregnancies" or about how families grappled with "rifts over inheritance and authority" (117, 114). Her conclusion suggests that the details of these trials demonstrate that abortion and infanticide were men's crimes as much as women's, that the private sphere and the home were by no means safe havens for women, and that the Catholic Reformation was as concerned about the sexual practices of unmarried people as it was about charity and pastoral care.

These interpretations are logical and intelligent, but like even the best microhistories (by the best microhistorians), Ferraro's study to some degree remains in search of a larger argument and bigger meanings. Scholars have raised the same issue with regard to such great works of microhistory as Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, 1980) and Natalie Zemon Davis' Trickster Travels:A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York, 2006). Ferraro is a top-notch scholar; her archival and analytical skills are beyond criticism. Yet no matter how compelling her work, it still leaves us questioning the significance of this handful of stories—plucked from two centuries, we must add—in the bigger picture. Either microhistory has seen its day, or Ferraro and other scholars of her ilk and talent need to continue to push at its boundaries to give it more a point and purpose.