Penn State University Press has published Murder and Madness on Trial: A Tale of True Crime from Early Modern Bologna (2023), by Mònica Calabritto (Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center). A description from the Press:
On October 24, 1588, Paolo Barbieri murdered his wife, Isabella Caccianemici, stabbing her to death with his sword. Later, Paolo would claim to have acted in a fit of madness—but was he criminally insane or merely pretending to be? In this riveting book, Mònica Calabritto addresses this controversy by reconstructing Paolo’s life, prosecution, and medical diagnoses.
Skillfully combining archival documents unearthed throughout Italy, Calabritto brings to light the case of one person and his family as insanity ravaged their financial security, honor, and reputation. The very notion of insanity is as much on trial in Paolo’s case as the defendant himself. A case study in the diagnosis of insanity in the early modern era, Barbieri’s story reveals discrepancies between medical and legal definitions of a person’s mental state at the time of a crime. Murder and Madness on Trial bridges the micro-historical dimensions of Paolo’s murder case and the macro-historical perspectives on medical and legal evidence used to identify intermittent madness.A tragic and gripping tale, Murder and Madness on Trial allows readers to look “through a glass darkly” at early modern violence, madness, criminal justice, medical and legal expertise, and the construction and circulation of news. This erudite and engaging book will appeal to early modern historians and true crime fans alike.
Praise from reviewers:
“Murder and Madness on Trial, in dialogue with both historians of medicine and social and legal historians, paints a complex and rich picture of early modern madness. Thanks to the unusual abundance of the documentation of the case—legal, medical, literary—Calabritto describes in detail a nuanced case of murder, illness, and conflict of expertise, interpretation, and political cultures.”
“When a young Bolognese nobleman prone to delusion and rage slaughtered his well-born wife in 1588, the shocking crime set off a drama that drew in men of law and medicine, stirred up the city’s chronicles, and subverted the host family’s authority for decades to come. Murder and Madness on Trial ties everything together in a literary, medical, legal, and social history that traces discordant understandings of crime and mental illness and tracks the crime’s lasting repercussions within the wider family.”
More information is available here. An interview with Professor Calabritto is available here, at New Books Network.
-- Karen Tani
