Love and Death in Renaissance Italy

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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 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.

Love and Death in Renaissance Italy Review

While I agree with the reviewer quoted on Amazon that Mr. Cohen inserts his comments and voice often, I don't think this in any way detracts from this wonderful book. Rather, I found Mr. Cohen's passion for his subject and for the lives and stories he has unearthed from old lawsuit transcripts very refreshing. "Love and Death..." manages to be at the same time very learned and very gripping - a scholarly page-turner. By the end of the book, you will fully share Mr. Cohen's love of microhistory, as opposed to history focused on the famous and the powerful, or, on a larger scale, with global processes, whether political or economic. (And, if you do, please move on to Carlo Ginzburg's "The Cheese and the Worms" - but that would merit a separate review).

I think the word that best sums up this engrossing book is "moving". These long-dead people's struggles and longings are centuries removed from our own, and yet to me they felt utterly human and real - I wanted to stay Giovanni Savelli's hand as he savagely slashed at his wife - scream at the vultures hovering at poor Vittoria Giustini's deathbed - shake the Gramar sisters' parents as they passively witnessed their daughters' sexual abuse at the hands of a predatory neighbor!

If you are interested in Italy, the sexual mores of the Renaissance, women's history, or the law, by all means read this book. If you think history is boring, by all means read this book.

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