Habitual Offenders
Subtitle: A True Tale of Nuns, Prostitutes, and Murderers in Seventeenth-Century Italy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 344
ISBN-13: 9780226335339
Subjects: Murder, italy; Nuns; Criminal justice, administration of
Description: "In April 1644, two nuns fled Bologna’s convent for reformed prostitutes. A perfunctory archiepiscopal investigation went nowhere, and the nuns were quickly forgotten. By June of the next year, however, an overwhelming stench drew a woman to the wine cellar of her Bolognese townhouse, reopened after a two-year absence—where to her horror she discovered the eerily intact, garroted corpses of the two missing women. Drawing on over four thousand pages of primary sources, the intrepid Craig A. Monson reconstructs this fascinating history of crime and punishment in seventeenth-century Italy. Along the way, he explores Italy’s back streets and back stairs, giving us access to voices we rarely encounter in conventional histories: prostitutes and maidservants, mercenaries and bandits, along with other “dubious” figures negotiating the boundaries of polite society..."--Publisher description.