Description
Book SynopsisExplores the 1588 murder trial of Paolo Barbieri in Bologna, examining early modern violence, madness, criminal justice, medical and legal expertise, and the construction and circulation of news.
Trade Review“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.”
—Paolo Savoia,author of Gaspare Tagliacozzi and Early Modern Surgery: Faces, Men, and Pain
“By discussing jurists’ and physicians’ expertise, the social and cultural expectations of lay witnesses and contemporary accounts of the events, Murder and Madness on Trial creates an original and multiperspectival history that adds to current work on early modern perceptions of insanity.”
—Silvia De Renzi,author of Instruments in Print: Books from the Whipple Collection
“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.”
—Thomas V. Cohen,York University
“When a Bolognese nobleman kills his teenage wife with a sword and flees into the night, is he insane? What might that even mean? In Calabritto’s brisk retelling chaos descends as judges fight with doctors over how to define madness and guilt, local authorities resist papal overlords’ push to prosecute, and a family dissolves in animosity, grief, and vengeance. A brilliant and sobering reconstruction of the emotional cost of mental illness in the late Renaissance.”
—Nicholas Terpstra,University of Toronto
