Adriano Prosperi, Infanticide, Secular Justice, and Religious Debate in Early Modern Europe , Turnhout, Brepols, 2016 (original) (raw)

2016, Cromohs. Cyber Review of Modern Historiography

Released in Italy in 2005, the story of Lucia Cremonini and the infanticide committed by her in Bologna in the early 1700s, is now available for English speaking readers. As in the original version, which remains substantially unmodified, the reader is immediately immersed in the events (the first of the four sections of the book is aptly titled, "The Story"). There is no introduction and so no programmatic filter to lead in and orient the reader. The narrative takes up the statement of the porter, Domenico Prata, and the series of interrogations that resulted from it, immediately travelling to an impoverished attic on a cold winter's day. Here we encounter a young woman whose words, taken from an initial inquiry conducted on site by the legal notary (one of the many male mediators, after the reporting party, from whom we know the story), set out an affair that is extremely crude and stark, but equally charged with tensions and unresolved details. As recounted by Lucia from the bed in which she had given birth a few hours before, in a vulgar Italian that this new edition offers in its original form, everything started from a sexual abuse, an "honour" stolen in a dark entrance-hall one afternoon during the city Carnival. Over the following months the ever more swollen belly raised suspicion in a community that was ever attentive but little supporting. Lucia responded by drawing on common beliefs about the body founded in the theory of the humours, explaining that the swelling was just fluid retention (in that view of the world, humoural transfers, deformations, and metamorphoses were considered rationally credible). This same female community, curious and caring as their roles required of them, but substantially distant and judgemental, hurried to her side on the night of the birth, realizing soon afterwards, almost in choral surprise, that a tragedy had taken place. The body of a child lay in a bag with its throat cut, and so it remained when, following the denunciation, a legal notary of the criminal court of Torrone went to the scene of the crime. A story emerged of loneliness without respite, and at the same time of control equally without escape, that is almost archetypal. This archetype runs through the centuries from Ancien Régime Bologna to the contemporary age. The rape suffered by Lucia, as recounted by the notary, is reminiscent of the initial scene of History: a Novel, by Elsa Morante: both the virgin Lucia living in Bologna under Papal dominion, and the widow Ida living in mid 1900s Rome occupied by the Germans, are similarly raped in a dark entrance hall, we observe the same silent helplessness of a woman in the face of an brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk