Love and Death in Renaissance Italy

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.

. . . and so the book continues with stories that keep our attention pinned to the seamy underbelly of Roman society at the end of the Renaissance. Cohen's versatile and lively pen not only brings to life the complex characters that move the plot of these court-room narratives, but also invites us to ponder a variety of questions that rise from these stories.--Konrad Eisenbichler "Toronto Globe & Mail", It is very moving to read about such powerful passions centuries after all the characters are long gone and would have been consigned to the dustbin of history had it not been for Cohen's patient reconstruction. . . . This is a remarkable book. In these days of ever increasing specialization and jargon, it is hard to find books that combine scholarly excellence with such lively, colourful writing. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy will bring pleasure to both specialists and general readers."--Robin Ganev "Canadian Journal of History", Love and Death in Renaissance Italy offers sparkling tales of intimate life in sixteenth-century Rome. Cohen has given voice to the desire, anger, fears, and excuses of Romans as they testify before the governor's court, even while he reflects on and experiments with the historian's predicament in telling their story. This is a book of learning, humor, and insight. -- "Natalie Zemon Davis, author of The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France", For the past two decades, Thomas Cohen and his wife have systematically explored the Roman judicial records of the second half of the sixteenth century. From these court proceedings and from ancillary sources they have gained a comprehensive understanding of the social and cultural world of the Eternal City and its rural hinterland. Cohen here has selected six cases out of the thousands to illustrate the tensions and conflicts within Roman families in these decades. His introduction succinctly describes the Roman legal system and his methodology in interpreting the evidence from court proceedings. These richly documented episodes reinforce received wisdom with respect to this 'honor and shame' culture; the prevalence and range of social networks as sources of support; the weakness of political structures; and the pervasiveness of lawlessness. But Cohen also develops novel perspectives and insights, for example, the ability of women to develop effective domestic strategies in this patriarchal society. These tales often raise more questions than they answer, but they do provide instructive glimpses into a world so vastly different from our own. -- "Gene Brucker, author of Renaissance Florence", Rome's streets always seem to promise an infinite series of hidden histories. Here Thomas Cohen reveals six of these with gusto and compassion, reconstructed from Roman court records with a historian's eye for the telling detail, a novelist's flair, and an exuberance all his own. -- "Ingrid Rowland, author of The Scarith of Scornello"

Thomas V. Cohen is professor of history at York University. He is coauthor, with his wife Elizabeth Cohen, of Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome: Trials before the Papal Magistrate and Daily Life in Renaissance Italy.