Love and Death in Renaissance Italy
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- €25.99
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- €25.99
Publisher Description
Gratuitous sex. Graphic violence. Lies, revenge, and murder. Before there was digital cable or reality television, there was Renaissance Italy and the courts in which Italian magistrates meted out justice to the vicious and the villainous, the scabrous and the scandalous. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy retells six piquant episodes from the Italian court just after 1550, as the Renaissance gave way to an era of Catholic reformation.
Each of the chapters in this history chronicles a domestic drama around which the lives of ordinary Romans are suddenly and violently altered. You might read the gruesome murder that opens the book—when an Italian noble takes revenge on his wife and her bastard lover as he catches them in delicto flagrante—as straight from the pages of Boccaccio. But this tale, like the other stories Cohen recalls here, is true, and its recounting in this scintillating work is based on assiduous research in court proceedings kept in the state archives in Rome.
Love and Death in Renaissance Italy contains stories of a forbidden love for an orphan nun, of brothers who cruelly exact a will from their dying teenage sister, and of a malicious papal prosecutor who not only rapes a band of sisters, but turns their shambling father into a pimp! Cohen retells each cruel episode with a blend of sly wit and warm sympathy and then wraps his tales in ruminations on their lessons, both for the history of their own time and for historians writing today. What results is a book at once poignant and painfully human as well as deliciously entertaining.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Family relations were a rough game in Renaissance Italy: a man pressures his dying sister to exclude other siblings from her will; a mother participates in the seduction of her daughters; a suitor rapes a girl to increase his chances of marrying her. Cohen tells six such fascinating stories, pulled from court cases in the State Archive in Rome. The attitudes revealed about love, marriage, family and feelings are strikingly different both from modern concepts and from modern misconceptions of Renaissance love. Cohen, a historian at York University (Daily Life in Renaissance Italy), sorts through these often painful dramas, in particular exploring women's agency (it's substantial) and social relations across classes. He makes sense of some oddities by suggesting how people fit their lives into expected conventions: testifying under torture gives a woman's testimony authority; sex is judged rape by neighbors because they heard the girl cry out; a mother hopes to win a marriage portion for her daughter by allowing a social superior to take the daughter as a mistress. While Cohen's passion for the subject is apparent, he inserts his own voice and annotations a bit too often. But the stories speak out from the page: while historians may struggle with the pitfalls of microhistory, readers can happily immerse themselves in the unfolding dramas. 11 b&w photos, 1 map.
