Publications
(For articles and reviews, see Curriculum Vitae)

Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice Illicit Sex and Infanticide in the Republic of Venice, 1557–1789

Description

This captivating history exposes a clandestine world of family and community secrets—incest, abortion, and infanticide—in the early modern Venetian republic. With the keen eye of a detective, Joanne M. Ferraro follows the clues in individual cases from the criminal archives of Venice and reconstructs each one as the courts would have done according to the legal theory of the day. Lawmakers relied heavily on the depositions of family members, neighbors, and others in the community to establish the veracity of the victims’ claims. Ferraro recounts this often colorful testimony, giving voice to the field workers, spinners, grocers, servants, concubines, midwives, physicians, and apothecaries who gave their evidence to the courts, sometimes shaping the outcomes of the investigations. Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice also traces shifting attitudes toward illegitimacy and paternity from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Both the Catholic Church and the Republic of Venice tried to enforce moral discipline and regulate sex and reproduction. Unmarried pregnant women were increasingly stigmatized for engaging in sex. Their claims for damages because of seduction or rape were largely unproven, and the priests and laymen they were involved with were often acquitted of any wrongdoing. The lack of institutional support for single motherhood and the exculpation of fathers frequently led to abortion, infant abandonment, or infant death. In uncovering these hidden sex crimes, Ferraro exposes the further abuse of women by both the men who perpetrated these illegal acts and the courts that prosecuted them.

Reviews

Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice
Winner of the Helen and Howard R. Marraro
Prize 2002
Winner of the Society for the Study of Early
Modern Women Prize 2002

"In an extraordinarily important study for anyone interested in the history of marriage, Joanne Ferraro mines the richly revealing archives of Venice to analyze the 'unspoken secrets and contrived lies' of broken marriages. In a book so engaging it is hard to put down, Ferraro brings to life a colorful cast of willful and humiliated wives and of abusive and ineffectual husbands, who prove that troubles within the institution of marriage are hardly new."

-Edward Muir, Northwestern University, and author of Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta in Renaissance Italy, and Ritual in Early Modern Europe

This fascinating book explores stories of failed intimacies that circulated in the neighborhoods and courts of late Renaissance Venice, a city whose historical record of marital litigation is extremely rich. It captures sixteenth- and seventeenth-century individuals and authorities working either to keep the last few threads of troubled marriages from unraveling, or to untie the knots that held them together. Drawing on a wealth of previously unexamined documents-depositions, ecclesiastical inquiries, and the petitions wives and husbands presented to the Venetian Patriarchal Court to either annul their marriage vows or to live separately-Joanne Ferraro brings to life a lost world of ordinary Venetians, men and women struggling with marital conflicts against a background of religious, civil, and cultural strictures.

These strikingly detailed accounts, many animated by the first-person voices of spouses, in-laws, friends and neighbors, tell of philandering, sexual problems, domestic violence, financial pressures, and incompatibility. Ferraro allows the dramas of the court investigations to unfold as stories while developing a subtle understanding of the social contexts that influenced these strife-filled narratives. She reveals that despite the regulations of Church and state, ordinary Venetians, particularly women, had more flexibility to redirect their lives and satisfy their needs for intimacy than previously documented. This engaging book makes a significant contribution to the history of attitudes toward intimacy, domestic partnership, and marital breakup.

Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580-1650
The foundations of power in the Venetian State

This book focuses on the behavior of the ruling families of Brescia, a rich and strategically vital city under Venetian rule, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.

The first part of the book conceptualizes the civic leadership of Brescia, with a profile of its origins and a brief history of the process of aristocratization. Further, it examines the relationship between family structure and the local socio-political structures. Size, wealth, education, and marriage ties were all pivotal factors which helped determine the family's position in public life. Its strength rested ultimately on its continuity over time. Women and women's property are given careful attention. The second part places the Brescian elite within the Venetian state. Besides controlling urban political institutions, the Brescians held strong economic links with the surrounding countryside, the basis of their power, and they enjoyed ample authority in the rural communities subject to the city. This section of the book examines the different ways in which these families sought to preserve their control over local resources. It also analyzes the Brescian civic leadership's weight in public life, in relation to that of Venetian authorities, illuminating some of the important ways in which the Venetian state was knit together.