Infanticide, Secular Justice, and Religious Debate in Early Modern Europe (Europa Sacra) (Europa Sacra, 10) 9782503531748, 2503531741

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Infanticide, Secular Justice, and Religious Debate in Early Modern Europe

EUROPA SACRA Editorial Board under the auspices of Monash University General Editor Peter Howard, Monash University Editorial Board Megan Cassidy-Welch, Monash University David Garrioch, Monash University Thomas Izbicki, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Carolyn James, Monash University Constant J. Mews, Monash University M. Michele Mulchahey, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto Adriano Prosperi, Scuola Normale di Pisa

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.

Volume 10

Infanticide, Secular Justice, and Religious Debate in Early Modern Europe

by

Adriano Prosperi

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS: SEGRETARIATO EUROPEO PER LE PUBBLICAZIONI SCIENTIFICHE

Via Val d’Aposa 7, 40123 Bologna, Italy. [email protected] | www.seps.it

© 2016, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/ 2016/0095/75 ISBN: 978-2-503-53174-8 e-ISBN: 978-2-503-55800-4 DOI: 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.106013 Printed on acid-free paper

Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Part One: The Story Chapter 1. From the Trial Records

3

Chapter 2. Infanticide as an Obsession

21

Chapter 3. Infanticide as a Social Practice: From a Sin to a Crime

47

Part Two: The Mother Chapter 4. Una figliola grande, giovane fatta (A Grown Girl, a Mature Young Woman)

87

Chapter 5. ‘A young priest’

93

Chapter 6. Il Carnevale prossimo passato (The Last Carnival Past)

105

Chapter 7. ‘He robbed me of my honour and took my virginity’

113

Chapter 8. ‘I was always on my own’

123

Chapter 9. ‘I Forced Myself with the Said Knife to Kill my Said Son whom I had Given Birth to Alive, by Putting the Point of the Said Knife into his Throat’

133

Contents

vi

Part Three: The Son. The Seed and the Soul Chapter 10. Un puttino maschio (A Baby Boy)

139

Chapter 11. Ben compito in tutte le sue parti (Well-Formed in All its Parts)

143

Chapter 12. A ‘Creature’ Without a Name, or When a Man is not a Man

151

Chapter 13. Baptism

161

Chapter 14. To Die without a Soul

187

Chapter 15. Ensoulment

231

Chapter 16. The Person

299

Chapter 17. The Sentence: That she Die and her Soul be Separated from her Body

313

Part Four: Justice Chapter 18. Accolta e Consolata (Received and Consoled)

321

Chapter 19. Repentance and Forgiveness

331

Afterword 369 Bibliography 373

Acknowledgements

O

ver the past twenty years many scholars and students, librarians and archivists, friends and readers, have provided me with answers, ideas, and bibliographical and archival help. I cannot mention them all here. Here I would like to thank by name Carlo Ginzburg at least, who read the initial plan, and was, as always, generous with his time and his intelligence, and Michele Olivari, who patiently read the final version. I have received help and advice from many quarters: among others let me mention Emmanuel Betta, Giampaolo Brizzi, Silvano Cavazza, Massimo Donattini, Vincenzo Lavenia, Chiara Franceschini, Pierroberto Scaramella, and Gabriella Zarri. It is not possible to do so, but I would have liked to list all the students who, between Bologna and Pisa, have contributed in various ways to this study or have listened to some parts of it. Towards the end, as the work was approaching the printing stage, I was lucky enough to be able to count yet again on the precious and patient work of Mariagrazia Negro, to whom I express my gratitude. To the extent to which I have been able to make them my own, this work has undoubtedly benefited from the many suggestions and contributions of others. To attempt to arrive at a historical understanding is to overcome the limits of the perspective of a single observer. If this can be said to have been achieved here, then the name of the author remains as a mere homage to copyright conventions, or as an indication of responsibility for the errors that have undoubtedly been made. Note on Translations All translations of Latin and of the Italian are by the author or translator unless otherwise stated.

Part One: The Story

Chapter 1

From the Trial Records

B

ologna, Thursday morning, 5 December, 1709. Domenico Prata, a porter by profession, an inhabitant of via del Borgo di San Pietro, presented himself before the notary of the criminal court known as the ‘Torrone’ (because of the great tower that once overshadowed it), and made the following statement: Lucia Cremonini ‘figliola grande, giovane fatta’ (a grown girl, a mature young woman), daughter of the widow Caterina Cremonini, his neighbour, ‘questa mattina ha fatto un ragazzo, per quanto ho inteso et è morto, la qual giovane si chiama Lucia’ (gave birth this morning to a boy, as far as I’ve heard, and he’s dead; this young woman is called Lucia). Domenico knew that the baby boy had died immediately on birth, but said nothing of the causes. That was not his job: the authorities would look into it; he just wanted to report the fact quickly: Né sapendo come detta creatura subbito partorita sia morta, per non haver qualche baccolo, e de’ guai, sono venuto a darne la presente notitia alla giustitia, acciò facci le sue parti e riconosca come sia morta detta creatura. (And as I do not know how the said creature died immediately after it was born, so as not to be blamed or get into any trouble, I have come to give the present information about it to the law, so that it may do its part and discover how the said creature died.)1 1 

Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. irv (Città, 1709, Infanticidii, Tombesius Notarius, ‘Pro curia Turroni Bononiae contra Luciam q. m. Nicolai Cremonini’). The word ‘baccolo’ perhaps derives from the Latin ‘baculum’, for ‘beating with a stick’.

Chapter 1

4

Justice did its part. While the notary went to the scene to make an initial inquiry, the criminal judge of the ‘Torrone’, who had immediately been informed, made the ‘necessary and opportune’ arrangements ‘for the good of Justice’, as the ritual formula had it. It was necessary in the meantime for the examining surgeons of the ‘Torrone’ to go and immediately inspect the corpse of the baby and subject Lucia to an examination. Forensic medicine enjoyed a solid tradition in Bologna, just as in Padua and in other university cities.2 It had spread throughout Europe thanks in part to the influence of the learned Quaestiones medico-legales by the papal archiater Paolo Zacchia (1584–1659).3 The first thing to be done after the accusation was an inspection of Lucia’s house by the notary Antonio Tombesi, who took Domenico Prata with him. In reality it was not a house, but a small rented room on the upper floor; here, in bed, lay Lucia. The notary made her swear to tell the truth and then subjected her to a rapid interrogation, recording his questions in Latin, which was the language of his office, and her replies in the vernacular in which they were spoken. Why was she in bed? Mi trovo così in letto da questa mattina in qua, perché ho partorito un ragazzo maschio. (I’ve been in bed like this since this morning, because I gave birth to a baby boy). Did she have a husband? Io non ho marito, né mai sono stata maritata (I do not have a husband, nor have I ever been married). And so where did that baby come from?

Lucia told her story. She began by stating that she was a ‘putta honorata’, an ‘honourable girl’, a defensive premise and a fundamental key for understanding her experience. But Lucia’s honour had been lost. At the beginning of his 2  On its medieval origins, see Ortalli, ‘La perizia medica a Bologna nei secoli xiii e xiv’. In the modern period the functions of the forensic scientist increased; in cases of abortion and infanticide, the ‘Constitutio penalis Carolina’ stipulated recourse to the opinion of a midwife in addition to that of the forensic expert: see Pastore, Il medico in tribunale, p. 51. 3  The edict issued by Louis XIV in 1692 which ordered the establishment of a sworn surgeon in every city of the kingdom was due to the ‘impulsion du livre de Zacchia’: see Corre and Aubry, Documents de criminologie rétrospective, p. 61. Quaestiones medico-legales was first published in 1621, and subsequently expanded several times, with the full edition published in 1660.

From the Trial Records

5

report, the notary mistakenly called her ‘Lucretia’, 4 and perhaps his thoughts went out to the story of violence and death of the Roman heroine: Essendo io putta honorata e da bene e stando con Cattarina mia madre vedova, il Carnevale prossimo passato venni in piazza un giorno per non so che mio servitio, et essendo sotto li portici de’ limonari, un prete giovane da me non conosciuto […] mi guidò dentro una porticella nera e piccola che è tra un orefice et un merciaro e di lì giù da una scaletta in un corridoretto stretto e scuro; et ivi mi levò il mio honore e mi sverginò. (As I am an honourable girl and respectable, living with my mother Caterina, a widow, the last Carnival past I came to the piazza one day on some errand, and while I was under the portico of the lemon sellers, a young priest I did not know […] took me through a small, dark doorway between a goldsmith’s and a haberdasher’s, and from there down a little stairway into a dark, narrow corridor; and there he robbed me of my honour and took my virginity.)

This Carnival adventure had ended ‘all’ostaria de’ Morelli da S. Bernardino, dove mangiassimo della mortadella, de’ tagliolini, del pane’ (at the inn of the Morelli at San Bernardino, where we ate some mortadella, tagliolini, and bread). Everyone paid for themselves — Lucia makes a point of stressing this: Né mi diede altro né mi pagò il detto mangiare. (He did not give me anything else nor did he pay for the said food.)

Then the priest had taken her home. It was night and the door was locked, and so he had taken her ‘da una donna in Fiacca il collo’ (to a woman in Fiacca il collo), where Caterina had slept. ‘Et il prete andò via’ (And the priest went away). She had never seen him again. Nor had she realized that she was pregnant. Had she had sexual intercourse (rem carnalem) with any other men besides the priest? Io non ho avuto che fare carnalmente con alcun altro che con detto prete, né alcun altro m’ha toccata (I have not had carnal relations with anyone else other than with the said priest, nor has any other man touched me.)

Lucia’s account thus arrives at the moment of birth: Questa mattina ho fatto detta creatura qui in questa stanza dove mi trovavo sola, ché mia madre era in campagna andando a lavorare da de’ contadini, che è tornata hoggi. Et essendo in letto quando mi son sentita che stavo per partorire son calata 4 

Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. 2r.

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6

giù dal letto et ho fatto detta creatura, che è cascata in terra, et ho sentito che era viva che ha tirato un zago. E doppo, essendo detta creatura morta l’ho presa et ho veduto che era un puttino maschio e l’ho messa in una sporta che è dietro al letto e poi me ne sono tornata in questo letto dove hora mi trovo. E questo è tutto il fatto della mia gravidanza e del parto sudetto. (This morning I gave birth to the said creature here in this room where I was alone, since my mother was in the countryside working with some farmers, from where she returned today. And as I was in bed when I felt that I was about to give birth, I got down off the bed and gave birth to the said baby/creature, which fell on the ground, and I heard that it was alive and it gave a cry [a sign in the margin calls attention to this decisive point] And then, as the said creature was dead, I took it and saw that it was a little boy and I put it in a bag which is behind the bed and then I went back to this bed where I am now. And this is everything regarding my pregnancy and the above-mentioned birth.)5

But this was not quite everything. The notifying officer of the court (cursore) looked behind the bed and found the bag there, with the baby in it. The little body was placed on a walnut chest, the only other piece of furniture in the room. The notary carried out a detailed inspection of the body, and reported his findings. It transpired that the baby had not died because of a fall: once it had been examined on all sides, the body revealed traces of a deep knife wound from the mouth to the throat, ‘con incisioni di vene, arterie e nervi con sangue congelato’ (with the veins, arteries, and nerves cut through, with congealed blood). In the report a second sign in the margin refers to the previous one.6 The signs bring together the two fundamental points of the case for the judge: the baby was born alive, ‘bene et optime organizatum in omnibus suis partibus’ (well-formed and complete in all its parts) and then it had died as a result of its wounds. From this moment onwards, the notary proceeded to gather statements which left no room for doubt. It was an ‘unspeakable’ (nefando) crime, and hence fell into the category of the most serious offences which had to be documented in all their particulars (‘ut magis magisque constet de nefando scelere supradicti infanticidii’).7 It was necessary to translate what the eyes could see into written testimony. The eyes of the experts and the men of the law concentrated on the tiny corpse. The first to look at it were Giuseppe Raimondi and Ignazio Salteri, surgeons of the court, who ‘voltato e rivoltato, ben guardato e considerato per vedere e riconoscere di che morte sia morto detta creatura’ 5 

Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fols 2r–4r. Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. 6r. 7  Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. 11v. 6 

From the Trial Records

7

(having turned over, examined, and considered the body to see and understand what death the said creature died of ), acknowledged the cause of death to be the knife wound.8 Their report was confirmed by two witnesses of the court, Antonio Monteventi and Andrea Santini, who inspected and described in detail the corpse and the wounds. These were ‘quanto mezzo ovo incirca’ (approximately the size of half an egg), an image suggested by the coagulated (gelato) blood inside the wound. Lucia was also asked to look at it and describe what she saw. Was she able to recognise the baby she had given birth to? Yes, she could, replied Lucia, ‘havendo veduto et osservato doppo fatto, e quando l’ho messo nella detta sporta’ (as I saw and observed it after it was born, and when I put it in the said bag.)

Now the body was laid out on a walnut chest. Vedo questo puttino maschio che Vostra Signoria mi fa vedere sopra a questa cassa de noce, ben compito in tutte le sue parti, e dico essere il puttino da me fatto e partorito questa mattina, e per tale e come tale lo riconosco benissimo. (I see this little boy, whom your Lordship is showing me on this walnut chest, wellformed in all his parts, and I confirm that it is the little boy I made and gave birth to this morning, and as such I recognise him very clearly.) Could she also see the wounds? Io vedo benissimo questo taglio che ha detta creatura nella bocca dalla parte destra, come pure questa ferita che ha nel collo da detta parte, ma io per me non glela ho fatta, né so che glel’habbia fatta (I can clearly see this cut that the said creature has on his mouth on the right side, as I see this wound which he has on his neck on the said side, but I myself did not do it to him, nor do I know who did.) She was warned: she had declared that she had always been alone. Was that true? È vero che quando ho partorito detto puttino, et anche doppo son sempre stata da me sola, e non vi è stato alcun altro in questa stanza; ma per me dico, che non gli ho fatte tal ferrite, e se si pretende che gle l’habbi fatte, dico che non è vero, né so dirgli altro. 8 

Salteri was standing in for the physician Domenico Martelli, who was ill, and who together with Giuseppe Raimondi had already carried out analogous examinations for the Torrone court: in the case of infanticide, for example, in Venezzano in the plain surrounding Bologna in 1696: see Pastore, Il medico in tribunale, p. 141.

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8

(It is true that when I gave birth to the said little boy, and afterwards too, I was always alone, and there has not been anyone else in this room; but as for myself I say that I did not give him those wounds, and if you allege that I gave them to him, I say that it is not true, and I cannot say anything else.)9 And she repeated: Per me dico, che non gl’ho fatto dette ferite, e se pretende che gle l’habbi fatte, dico che non è vero, né so dire altro. (As for myself, I say that I did not give him those wounds, and if you allege that I did, then I say that it is not true, and I cannot say anything else.)

At this point, in a corner, the notary saw — and it cannot have been difficult in the bare little room — a kitchen knife (cultrum mensalem), stained with blood. This brought the first day to a close. The ‘unspeakable crime’ had been established. On the evening of that Thursday, mother and daughter were taken to prison. Given her condition, Lucia was taken by carriage to the Ospedale della Morte where she remained until 29 December, when she was transferred to the prison of the ‘Torrone’ to be questioned again.10 The wheels of justice methodically went through the witnesses’ testimony and the experts’ reports in a relatively short space of time, without any obvious bias or violence. On Saturday 7 December, two midwives of the court, Barbara Lucignani and Anna Maria Natali, were charged with inspecting the child. Placed before the tiny corpse (which in the meantime had been taken to the ‘Torrone’, to the archive room), they reported that ‘mostrata sopra a questo tavolino questa creatura maschia di nascione, acciò la vediamo et osserviamo se sia nata viva del suo tempo e perché sia morta’ (this baby, born a boy, was shown on this little table, so that we can see and observe whether it was born alive at term and why it died). Thus ‘ben veduta, considerate et osservata in tutte le sue parti’ (having clearly seen and considered and observed it in all its parts) they testified that it had been nata del suo debito tempo di nove mesi, e viva, essendo ben compita in tutte le sue parti e membri, havendo li suoi capelli in testa et unghie nelle dita delle mani e piedo, et esser morta per due ferite che ha, una nella bocca dalla parte destra e l’altra nel collo da detta parte, con incisione di vene, arterie e nervi

9 

Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. 11r. Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. 24r (as stated by Antonio Pasqualino custodian of the ‘secret’ prison of the Torrone, on 30 December, 1709). 10 

From the Trial Records

9

(born at the due term of nine months, alive, and was well-formed in all its parts and limbs, with hair on its head and nails on the fingers and toes of its hands and feet, and that it died because of two wounds it has, one on its mouth on the right side and the other on its neck on the said side, with the veins, arteries, and nerve cut through.)11

On Tuesday 10 December, two women neighbours were questioned, indeed, two fellow tenants, as Marta, the wife of Lorenzo Billi, and Francesca, the wife of Giuseppe Pilati, defined themselves. They had not known Lucia and her mother for long, since the latter had moved to the room in via del Borgo di San Pietro only in May of that year. When asked whether they had noticed any signs of pregnancy, they replied by carefully distancing themselves from the guilty party. Marta: Haveva della panza et il corpo grosso, ma essa diceva che ciò procedeva perché non haveva le sue purghe e perché aveva dell’acqua, ma in fatto si è poi scoperto che era gravida perché partorì un putto maschio e poi la disgraziata lo sgargatò et amazzò. (She had a big belly and a big body, but she said that this came from the fact that she did not have her purges and because she retained water, but in fact it was later discovered that she was pregnant because she gave birth to a baby boy and then the wretched girl cut its throat and killed it.)12 Francesca reported the same and commented: Ciò diceva per coprire la sua gravidanza, et in fatto si credeva che dicesse la verità, ma poi si è scoperto tutto il contrario. (She said this to hide her pregnancy, and in fact she was believed to be telling the truth, but then quite the opposite was discovered.)13

On the evening before she gave birth, Lucia had called on them for help: she was alone, her mother was outside Bologna, and she did not feel well. ‘Haveva un gran freddo’ (She was very cold). Marta Billi and Francesca Pilati, together with another neighbour, Domenica Fratti, prepared a hot water bottle and placed it on her stomach, then they left and went back to bed. At dawn, however, Marta wanted to go and see how Lucia was: perhaps she had some suspicion. Solidarity perhaps, curiosity certainly, as a ‘compigionante’ (‘fellow ten11 

Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fols 11v-13v. 12  Statement by Marta, 7 December, Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fols 16r-18r; see fol. 17v. 13  Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. 20r.

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10

ant’, as she too defined herself ) induced her to go and see how the girl was and what was happening in the bare room under the roof. In her account the emotion of the scene which offered itself up to her can be read in the brusque way in which her words jump from one thing to another, following the movement of her eyes, from the woman in the bed to the tiny body in the bag, immediately detaching itself in horror: ‘Andai a vedere che faceva, et era in una sporta morta, ma non l’osservai né altro’ (I went to see what she was doing, and it was in a bag dead, but I did not look at it or at anything else). Distraught, she asked Lucia ‘cosa haveva mai fatto’ (whatever had she done); but ‘lei si ammutì né rispose cosa alcuna’ (she remained silent and did not make any reply).14 The news had spread among the neighbours, and her mother Caterina had thus found her, silent and alone, when she returned from her day’s work in the countryside. Arrested for the obvious presumption of shared responsibility, Caterina was only interrogated on 23 December after having spent a number of days in prison, and she did her best to avert any form of suspicion from her own person. Various sentiments transpire from her words as they are reported: anger, amazement, and fear. She had nothing to do with ‘quella furfante di Lucia Maria mia figlia’ (that scoundrel Lucia Maria, my daughter), who had done ‘la matteria più grande di quelle che si possano fare’ (the most insane thing that anyone can do).15 This was the anger of a mother faced with the madness of a daughter who had ruined herself with her own hands while she was away. Caterina was at work with a family of peasant farmers in Ravone, just outside Bologna. But she had come back home in time to live through the entire tragedy, in the middle of the crowd that had gathered at the entrance to the house. One voice — ‘O poveretta va’ pur su’ (Oh, poor little thing, go on up) — had told her that those people were there for her. She had gone up the stairs and entered the room: there were other women around her daughter’s bed, as there are when someone dies. But her daughter was alive, and had called out to her ‘Oh mia madre’ (Oh, my mother), and she immediately ‘si mise a piangere’ (began to cry). And Caterina remembered the pain that had cut short her every word, the desperation faced with the terrible force that had devastated her life: ‘Mi accorai, né potei far altro discorso e quasi subbito arrivò la giustitia, e fu trovato il ragazzo’ (I felt my heart in my throat, and I could not say anything else, and the law arrived almost immediately, and the boy was found). 14 

Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. 18r. 15  Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. 21r.

From the Trial Records

11

As the mother, Caterina now had to explain what she knew not only of the birth and infanticide, but also what had preceded it: her daughter’s pregnancy must have been clear to her. But Caterina denied it: Io non mi sono mai accorta che detta mia figlia fosse gravida (I never realised that my said daughter was pregnant.)16

She had accepted Lucia’s explanations, ‘che ciò procedeva perché beveva dell’ac­ qua per la fibre che quasi sempre haveva’ (that it came from that fact that she drank water for the fever that she almost always had). For this reason she had taken her ‘a far segnare dal prete di Granarolo, all’ospedale a far cavar sangue’ (to be blessed by the priest of Granarolo, and to the hospital to be bled). But exorcism and blood-letting had served no purpose, and now there was nothing more that could be done. At the end of the interrogation she was shown the blood-stained knife: she recognized it as her own. Then she left the room and disappears from the trial; temporarily incarcerated, she then must have been set free; in fact, she was no longer heard from and nothing else is known of her. The court followed the usual procedure rapidly and scrupulously. Lucia, trans­­ ferred from the Ospedale della Morte to the ‘Torrone’ prison, was examined by the court midwives. After having ‘visitata, guardata e toccata’ (examined, looked at, and touched) her body, described at length and in detail in their report, Barbara Lucignani and Anna Maria Natali testified according to their ‘peritia e conscienza’ (expertise and conscience) that she had recently given birth. The baby had been born alive at term after a normal pregnancy and had been killed by a knife. They had the incontrovertible proof of the crime of infanticide. The accused appeared again before the judge on 31 December, 1709. She declared that she was ‘disposta a dire la verità’ (willing to tell the truth). The cross-examination concentrated on the knife used in the crime. Lucia described it: it was a table knife, the one used for the daily bread, ‘di ferro lungho senza manico’ (made of iron, long, without a handle), stained with rust and dried blood. They showed it to her and they made her hold it. Lucia noted the blood and recognized the knife. She confessed. She described in detail how the crime had been committed, in particular the movement by which the child had been killed: among other things she remembered having had to press down with all her might to penetrate the child’s throat.

16 

Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. 22v.

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Dirò a V.S. per che causa il cortello da me sopra descritto e riconosciuto si trova segnato da sangue; et è perché la mattina istessa che io partorii il figlio maschio, come ho detto negl’antecedenti miei essami, trovandomi sola in casa mentre mia madre si trovava in campagna, a fine non si scoprisse chi io avevo partorito m’indussi col detto cortello a dare la morte a detto mio figlio partorito vivo mettendoli la punta di detto cortello nella gola, che feci penetrare calcandolo bene sin dalla parte di dietro nel collo, per la quale ferita da me datali detto mio figlio ricevé la morte. E doppo poi lo posi dentro una sporta sotto il mio letto affine poi di portarlo nascostamente a sepelire senza che nessuno se ne potesse accorgere et ad effetto che nessuno potesse sapere che io avessi partorito. Et eccoli raccontato il fatto come seguì. (I will tell Your Lordship for what reason the knife described and recognised by me above is stained with blood; and it is because on the same morning on which I gave birth to the baby boy, as I have said in my previous interrogations, as I was alone in the house while my mother was in the countryside, so that it should not be discovered that I had given birth, I forced myself with the said knife to kill my said son whom I had given birth to alive, by putting the point of the said knife into his throat, which I made go in by pushing it down hard right down to the back of the neck, and because of this wound inflicted on him by me my said son died. And afterwards I placed him in a basket under my bed so that later I could take him away secretly and bury him without anyone realising, and so that nobody would know that I had given birth. And here I have said how the thing happened.)17

Everything was there: the intention to kill, the murder weapon, a description of how the killing had taken place, and the acknowledgement that it was precisely ‘because of […] the wound inflicted on him by me that my said son died’. As for the other wound on his face, the following explanation was given: immediately after killing him, Lucia explained, ‘lo gettai con la bocca sul focolare che è di pietra per la qual botta restò ferito detto mio figlio nella bocca dalla parte destra’ (I threw him with his mouth onto the fireplace which is stone, and because of this blow my said son was wounded on the right side of his mouth).18 When questioned, Lucia confirmed that she had not spoken to anyone of her pregnancy: Io non ho mai discorso con alcuno d’esser gravida, o di voler partorire e né tampoco di volere dare la morte a detto mio figlio. (I have never spoken to anyone of being pregnant, or of wanting to give birth or even less of wanting to kill my said child.)19 17 

Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. 29rv. Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. 30r. 19  Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fols 30v-31r. 18 

From the Trial Records

13

And she had premeditated hiding the body: La mia intentione era di sepelire detto mio figlio da me nel modo come sopra occiso o in casa mia, o pure in qualche luogo in campagna, dove havessi potuto, acciò nessuno penetrasse che io avessi partorito. (My intention was to bury my said son, killed by me in the way described above, either in my house or in some place in the countryside, where I could, so that no one should discover that I had given birth.)20

It was a full and complete admission and, at the same time, a total abandonment of all resistance. The confession was the queen of all proof, and yet the trial did not finish immediately. Although it may seem strange, it was the scrupulous Bolognese judges who tried to get to the bottom of various hypotheses that might have alleviated Lucia’s position: was it really certain, for example, that death was the result of that knife wound, and not some other cause? Was the baby still alive when Lucia stabbed it? In order to test these hypotheses, in favour of the accused, an investigation was carried out in the room where the baby had been born, with a conclusive report on the position of the stones of the fireplace where the baby may have hit his head as it was born, and the blood stains which were found in the room. While all these men were busy in her defence, Lucia appeared to be devoid of any further will to resist. Questioned again on 1 January 1710, on details of this kind, she gave an answer which leaves no doubt as to her state of mind: Io non ho altro da dire di quello dissi e confessai hieri nell’altro mio essame circa la morte da me data al suddetto mio figlio. (I have nothing else to say than what I said and confessed yesterday in my other interrogation regarding the death inflicted by me on my said son.)21

Now the defence phase began. Lucia was defended by the ‘lawyer of the poor’, a figure which existed in the system of charity typically found in Italian cities of the ancien régime.22 The lawyer Giacomo Arrighi carried out his duty carefully and conscientiously. The trial records still contain the text of one of his reports, written in Latin. Arrighi defended the theory of a crime of honour: 20 

Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. 30v. Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. 31v. 22  Operating in Bologna was the ‘Compagnia della carità de’ poveri carcerati’, which, as stated in its printed statutes (Statuti, Bologna 1635, p. 16), would intervene to protect poor prisoners who ‘li domanderanno aiuto’ (ask them for help). On the origins of these aid initiatives see D’Amelia, ‘Il buon diritto’. 21 

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Lucia had not reached the point of doing what she did because of any innate evil or because she despised the bonds of nature which unite a mother and a child (impietas). She had been driven by the need to safeguard her own honour, an asset to be protected above all else (‘proprius honor, omnibus anteferendus’). Lucia was generally reputed to be a ‘virgo honesta’. And honour, above all for those classes which could not display it as a hereditary possession linked to their name, had only one point of reference: the opinion that the community held of its own members. ‘Honour’, wrote a sixteenth-century man of letters, ‘non è riposto in altro se non ne la stimazione appresso gli huomini’ (is not placed in anything other than in the esteem that one enjoys among men).23 For women, honour was linked to their sex, and men were responsible for it: their fathers or their husbands. Lucia had neither one nor the other. For Italian society of the time there remained one final point of reference: the custodian of conscience and the authority able to attest to one’s obedience to the rules and possession of honour was the parish priest. For this reason the lawyer presented exhaustive documentation: two statements provided by priests, one by the parish priest of Santa Maria della Mascarella and the other by the rector of San Matteo delle Pescarie, with additional statements by the families with whom Lucia had worked as a domestic servant. On the basis of this reputation for respectability she had been allocated one of the dowries available for poor girls, allowing them to marry. This ‘elemosina dotalis’ was a reward and a signal to male society in search of an honourable wife. Arrighi had the documentation of that public reputation added to the records, a public reputation that constituted the very essence of female honour. His fundamental argument was that Lucia had acted out of necessity, to avoid losing her honour, and also because of her lack of understanding (simplicitas). During this phase there was further cross-questioning of the surgeons, who, as experts of the court, had already handed in their written report on the examination of the body. On 15 January, Giuseppe Raimondi and Ignazio Salteri confirmed the statements they had made in the course of the previous inquisitorial phase, describing the new-born baby once again as a ‘creatura […] bene organizzata in tutte le sue parti del corpo ed in tutte le membra, con I capelli nel capo e coll’unghie nelle dita delle mani e piedi’ (baby […] well-formed in all the parts of its body and in all its limbs, with hair on its head and nails on the fingers and toes of its hands and feet). The surgeons were able to state that ‘the said baby’ was not only ‘un parto perfetto di nove mesi’ (a perfect nine-month 23 

The passage, taken from the dialogue in Piccolomini, La Raffaella, is quoted in ch. viii of the important work Niccoli, Storie di ogni giorno, p. 171.

From the Trial Records

15

delivery), but also that it had been born alive and that it had been killed immediately after birth: this was demonstrated by the contraction of the limbs and by the wounds and the blood, which the report meticulously described.24 At this point the work of the auditor of the Torrone was over. On 16 January, the criminal court met, which — besides the auditor, the Roman Marco Antonio Venturini — included the cardinal legate and the vice-legate. The case was examined and referred to the auditor of the Court of the Torrone, whose job it was to pass sentence. This is all there is of Lucia’s story as told by the court documents. Many questions present themselves as we read it. Up until now we have simply looked at the trial documents, following the work of the notary of the Torrone, reading the statements, declarations, and confessions which he heard and set down in writing. The reality that those documents have brought back to life before us was fixed once and for all at a certain point in time, and bears a truth which is the truth of the facts of the past: unchangeable because nothing can make it different from what is was, yet subject to change in the knowledge we can have of it. Nothing will stop the hand that held that knife on the morning of December 5, 1709, and nothing can change Lucia’s fate, which the judges were preparing to decide. But some neglected document could reveal to us some of the many things we do not know, or change our interpretation of those we have already read. What we have before us are words set down in the trial documents. Through these words we come into contact with facts, opinions, and surroundings; we reconstruct them within ourselves until we have formed an idea of them, as if we had people standing before us instead of these words. Through these documents, people who have been dead for centuries move, speak, and act as if they were alive. It is inevitable that it should seem like this; but it is right to remember that it is not. On one point there can be no doubt: we would like to understand whether the events actually happened as they are described on paper, and why they happened in that way. Many details are unclear or decidedly incomprehensible. Why was Caterina, the mother, so harsh with her daughter as to call her — she, the mother — a ‘scoundrel’? Not even the judge used such an aggressive and hostile term. And then there are all the characters who move within the story: the priest, the unaware, elusive father, the neighbouring women, all the experts who move in and out of the scene to inspect bodies and give opinions. The machinery of justice covers everything and answers for everything. But this justice, so precise and efficient, is at the same time close to and remote from our 24 

Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fols 33r-35r.

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Chapter 1

present; we must try to form a better understanding of the mental system that regulated it. Yet these are all questions that skirt around the main problem: the story that the documents tell is such as to challenge our sense of safety and tranquillity as human beings. The act of a mother who kills her child makes the events disturbing and threatening. It happened, it can happen again; indeed it continues to happen, and every time it happens, that act stirs up deep-seated reactions, because it undermines our sense of the continuity of life, it attacks the root of hope as a projection of our species into the future. Like other tragic facts that are part of the history of human societies, we can relegate them to the background noise of history, as far as the past is concerned; as for the present, we can consign them to other forms of knowledge: criminology, social psychology, or sociology. But the distinction between the past and the present is difficult to draw: it would be like studying the unstable crest of a wave, ignoring the fact that those drops come from the sea and return to the sea. We can ask ourselves how and why things happened in the way they did on this occasion; but it would be like emptying the sea with a teaspoon. And perhaps all those who conceive of history as a relatively ancient and self-confident form of knowledge will react with annoyance, believing it is possible to ignore such elementary questions as this. Still we must ask ourselves what it means to study history: not in general, but this history, this story. It means in the first place understanding what really took place, and it means that we cannot limit ourselves to narrating the pure and simple contents of the legal file. That file was created to respond to another type of question: to document the correctness of the judicial process on the basis of the rules that were then in force, in a certain place, for precise social categories; to place an action in a pre-established legal framework, to measure it, and to punish it. Here it is not the typology of the crime that interests us, but the history of what was done, thought, and felt by a certain person at a certain point in their life. The distance in time makes the event unpardonable: it renders any attempt to touch it or change it vain, just as the ancients considered as vain the desire to embrace the shades of Hades. This does not mean that we do not desire to embrace the shades all the same, and understanding is the equivalent of that embrace. The attempt to understand is at the origin of historiography as a form of knowledge. As we know, the answers that are actually given to any question are always partial, marked by limited success, and sometimes by a painful lack of success. But all we can do is to make that attempt again. Anyone who attempts knows that, in the limited and imperfect condition in which we are placed by an unbridgeable distance,

From the Trial Records

17

we can at least count on some help from that very time which distances us from the events. In the study of documents, fleeting time in some way stands still. That which in real life appears briefly and suddenly disappears, places itself here before our eyes without any other limits than those of our own will to understand and the ability of the documents to reply. A limited ability, for the document is only a trace, a clue, a sign. Interpreting signs is what historians have in common with doctors. Let us borrow the definition of ‘sign’ from the words of a physician who in some mysterious way had some connection to Lucia Cremonini’s fate: a sign is any thing that can lead us with its visible manifestation to the knowledge of something that remains hidden. The nature of a sign is to be manifest; that of the signified to be hidden.25 In this case, the most obvious signs are those left by the judges. The judges also set themselves the problem of understanding. But what they wrote in the documents is only part of what they knew and what they thought: the part that sufficed to follow procedure and to reach a decision. It will be necessary to try and understand what remains hidden between the lines of the documents too, what was known then and is no longer known today. The judges had before them a person whose appearance became familiar to them during the trial and which probably remained in the minds of many. Someone’s face, their way of speaking and reacting to the environment, is an integral and irreplaceable part of the relationship which each of us creates with others and of the idea which we form of them. In this case we will have to do without this. But who was Lucia? And why did she do what she did? The Bolognese judges of the time tried to find out what she had done: their attention focused on the type of offence. As for the circumstances and the motives behind her behaviour, the information they collected and set down in their report was selected to respond to the main question: who and what had determined the death of the baby boy. Their idea of the truth was not far from that which more than a century later the Prussian historian Leopold von Ranke put forward in his model of historical narrative: to tell ‘precisely how things had happened’. In practice, even historians of events such as those that concerned Lucia have generally restricted themselves to recreating the general features and circumstances surrounding the events, ‘bent over the shoulders of the judges’.26 25  ‘Signum est, quicquid manifestius existens potest nos ducere in cognitionem illius, quod est occultius: de ratione signi est quod sit manifestum; de ratione signati seu illius quod significatur est quod sit occultum’: Fyens, Simiotice sive de signis medicis, p. 1. 26  The image is used by Ginzburg, ‘L’inquisitore come antropologo’, p. 25.

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But this knowledge is far from satisfactory. Faced with an individual case, the case of a woman — this woman and not another one — it is inevitable that we should ask whether it is not possible to go beyond this chronicle of trite facts. What can we really know about Lucia, her life, her feelings, the forces that acted within her and upon her? It is a question which increasingly accompanies the curiosity of historians, and with increasing urgency. It is no longer enough to recreate a chronicle of the facts, whether they be famous people and great events or the overwhelming majority of facts and people which remain in the shadows. The records of a criminal trial stumbled onto by chance in an archive brings us into contact with a woman, Lucia, the daughter of the widow Caterina Cremonini, who experienced her own story at a particular time. But right from the start the story of the events which concern her appears to be interwoven with those two distinct threads which intertwine in different ways and proportions in the weave of every life: the grey thread of that which repeats itself from generation to generation and of which it has been said that ‘there is no new thing under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1. 10), and that other thread which once and once only adds the unmistakable note of colour, and which is destined never to re-appear again. Analogies, repetitions, recurrences: we are talking about historical and cultural facts, always remembering however that the weave of hereditary facts and individual characteristics is the unitary reality which links historical knowledge to the sciences of life. Faced with the history of a crime, the first observation to make is this: from the moment in which a form of behaviour is defined as a crime and as such is prohibited and punished, it becomes possible to study the repetition of that crime, the variations in the laws which concern it, and the modifications in the social and judicial perception of it. Killing other human beings falls into this norm: there is nothing more repetitive in the history of our species than causing the death of our fellow creatures. That which for other animal species is the result of an instinct arising for certain needs (defensive or nutritional), is in the human species a cultural fact, highly elaborated, regulated, and limited by precise norms: considered necessary and obligatory in certain circumstances, and at times highly praiseworthy (in war, for example), it has in any case a central place in the production of rites and norms of a religious, political, and legal nature, which derive precisely from its irremovable historical presence. Infanticide is no exception to the rule. The abhorrence with which people have attempted to push its perpetrators beyond the natural confines of the species, classifying them as savage, is proof enough, in its unemotional repetition, that it is a relatively ordinary event. But in defining it, classifying it, measuring it, and in determining the sanctions and the form of social intervention, what

From the Trial Records

19

becomes clear behind the apparently eternal return of things is the force of historical change. The words to indicate the crimes change, and with them the crimes themselves change in some way too. At the time when Lucia Cremonini lived, infanticide could still be generally defined as the murder of a child by its parents. In a country imbued with ancient myths, the saga of the House of Atreus or the story of Saturn who devours his own children, still had a place besides that of Medea, expressing the profound ambiguity of the gift of life which brings with it that of death; but in the language of criminal lawyers the term infanticide was by this time applied almost exclusively to the killing of a newborn by its mother.27 The ‘cruel mother’ as a type has a long history in criminal law: while the father who abandons or exposes his child, indirectly causing its death, enjoyed all forms of indulgence, abhorrence of the infanticide mother grew progressively through the centuries of the modern and contemporary age: the cruelty of human mothers defied culture and nature, and they were always compared unfavourably with the protective motherly instinct of the beasts. As a crime described as ‘atrocior’,28 unpardonable and incomprehensible, in practice infanticide came increasingly to mean an exclusively maternal crime. This use of the term ended up by becoming the only legitimate one: indeed in the Vienna of the late nineteenth century Dr Sigmund Freud was amazed to hear the story of a friend who had dreamed he had committed infanticide. ‘Infanticide? But you know that only a mother can commit this crime upon her new-born child?’ ‘That is true’, replied the friend: as he was ‘an intelligent jurist’ he could not have been unaware that article 139 of the Austrian penal code left no doubts on the question: ‘The subject of this sort of privileged crime can only be the mother’.29 But it had not always been so.

27 

‘Homicidium […] quatenus id in descendentes committitur, infanticidium in sensu generali dicitur. Infanticidium, in sensu stricto et proprio, est homicidium, quod a matre in infantes recens natos committitur’: G. J. F. Meister, Principia iuris criminalis Germaniae communis, quoted by Wächtershäuser, Das Verbrechen des Kindesmordes, p. 7. In current usage the distinction has faded, hence Jackson, New-Born Child Murder, prefers to use a specific term to distinguish the murder of a newborn from the broader case of the murder of a child. 28  It is listed ‘inter atrociora homicidia’ by the penologist Carmignani, Juris criminalis elementa, ii, 112–13. 29  Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 107. On this case see the excellent study by Walter, ‘Un infanticidio immaginario’; see p. 887 for the Austrian penal code.

Chapter 2

Infanticide as an Obsession

I

nfanticide, understood as the suppression of unwanted new-born babies, is a fact that has accompanied the history of our species like dull background noise. Those who have tried to create an overall picture of the phenomenon have placed the history of those cultures which have persecuted it as a crime in the framework of other traditions whose selective birth strategies have justified or at least tolerated the practice.1 But alongside the fact of its existence is the history of an image cultivated as an obsession: that of human groups whose point of cohesion is based on a rite centred around the murder of a child. It is a long and complicated history, where the accused become accusers, and vice versa. But in this back and forth of accusation and defence one fact clearly emerges: that image of the secret gatherings of a sect (the first Christians) around the unknowing victim, who still gurgles and smiles at its assassin,2 has long aroused a mixture of horror and attraction, and it has marked out the lim-

1  See Wrightson, ‘Infanticide in European History’, who mentions among other things the Chinese practice of suppressing new-born babies, exposing superfluous children in Ancient Greece, and the infanticide practised in Japan to model the family according to the sex and number of children desired. 2  ‘You must bring an infant, as a guarantee for our rites, to be sacrificed, as well as some bread to be broken and dipped in his blood’ (Tertullian, Ad nationes, i. 7. 23); and ‘a child tender and good, too young for any sense or notice of death; such a child as will smile into my face under the fatal knife’ (Tertullian, Apology, viii. 7); on these texts and themes, see the fundamental study Dölger, ‘“Sacramentum Infanticidii”’, p. 18.

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its of the inconceivable, while lingering at the same time, under an outward show of abhorrence, over its most minute details. Once the accusation had been made of a rite based on the murder of a child, it rebounded back and forth between the various religious practices of individuals and entire social groups. Famous victim were, as we have said, the early Christians. The first hostile representations of the new religion took the rite of the Eucharist as practised in secret by the followers of Jesus of Nazareth in pagan Rome to show that they met to eat a child.3 This libellous rumour distorted the real fact that in the bread and wine of the rite the Christians maintained they were eating the flesh and drinking the blood of their God. And it was around the Eucharist that the myth of ritual infanticide continued to propagate even after the triumph of Christianity, changing its protagonists and its victims in time. Victims of this libel were in turn Jews, heretics, and witches. The first were the Jews: stories of Christian children bled to death by Jews appear throughout a good thousand years of the history of Christian Europe and mark sadly memorable dates. Little William of Norwich, held to be a victim of the Jews during the Holy Week of 1144, initiated a series which, with varying ingredients, was to constitute the ‘mythological machine’ of the accusation of blood.4 The stereotype of the Jew thirsting for the blood of Christian children responded to the need for hatred and scorn that the Church very soon felt towards the Synagogue. But among the many negative characteristics of the ‘Deicidal people’, that of infanticide developed rapidly and violently in circumstances and ways which closely follow the history of the Eucharist. The doctrine of the divinity of the Jew Jesus had turned the original Jewish sect into the root of the new religion, and continued to be the irremediable point of conflict between Jews and Christians. The presence of Jesus — flesh and blood, humanity and divinity — under the outward form of bread and wine was obviously denied by the followers of Judaism, besides constituting a source of doubt and uncertainty among Christians themselves. Two powerful arguments came to their aid in responding to those doubts: the miracles of the host and the monstrous crimes attributed to an imaginary 3 

Besides Dölger, ‘“Sacramentum Infanticidii”’, see the old study by Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, which is discussed, with a large number of cases, by Ginzburg, Ecstasies, trans. by Rosenthal, pp. 7–8, and 74–78. 4  The definition is by Jesi, L’accusa del sangue. Levi Della Torre, Mosaico, pp. 105–34, speaks of a ‘Eucharistic crime’. An overall view can be found in Taradel, L’accusa del sangue. On the case of William of Norwich and the historical changes to the stereotype up to the present day, see the cogent analysis by Caliò, ‘Il “puer a Judaeis necatus”’.

Infanticide as an Obsession

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sect of enemies, thus uniting the power of the marvellous with that of hatred. Among the many miracles of the consecrated host which repeatedly occurred to dissipate the doubts of the clergy and the Christian people, particularly notable are those which were used to mark the moving boundary of the Catholic Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims. 5 Muslims and Jews represented the frontier of rejection and infidelity, with the difference that the Jews lived among the Christians. Hence the special Christian propensity for hatred and suspicion of sacrilege, which was always there ready to appear or to be evoked against them; and the extent to which the ground had been prepared on this question is shown by the extraordinary spread of the rumour of a special miracle, which had a Jew as its protagonist. The heart of the tale takes us to Paris around 1290, where a Jewish moneylender bribes a Christian woman, forcing her to give him a consecrated host (which the woman has hidden in Church by pretending to swallow it). The sacrilege begins as the Jew places the host on the fire to cook; but here comes the miracle: fresh blood pours from the host and spreads out of the room, attracting the attention of others, and the Jew is captured and punished. The story was transmitted through the channels of preaching, took its place in the city chronicles, and thus came to be enriched and transformed as it spread by word of mouth. But its most famous representation was created by the hand of a great Italian painter, Paolo Uccello, who chronicled it in images, in Urbino, in the same fifteenth century that saw the contemporary spread of the ‘Compagnie del Santissimo Sacramento’ and the ‘Monti di Pietà’. 6 At the same time an aggressively anti-Jewish form of piety was spread by preachers (above all Franciscans), who incited the crowds to establish the Monti di Pietà in order to eliminate the presence of the Jewish banks and the Jews in general. Another more radical means was found in the same century for eliminating the Jews completely from Christian society. The Jews had already been accused (by Phillip the Fair in 1321) of poisoning the wells and plotting with the lepers and the external enemies of Christianity (the Muslims); but the accusation of hatching secret plots was elaborated to the point of imagining secret gatherings and demonic rites in which it was said that the Jews gave themselves over to 5 

Six bloodstained hosts are displayed in the cathedral of Daroca in Spain, which were allegedly consecrated for the Christians fighting against the Moors on 23 February, 1239. 6  The circulation of the story of the miracle and the connection between the birth of the ‘Compagnia del Santissimo Sacramento’ in Urbino, the paintings by Paolo Uccello, and the foundation of the ‘Monte di Pietà’ have been reconstructed by Aronberg Lavin, ‘The Altar of Corpus Domini in Urbino’.

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sacrilege and the derisory overturning of Christian rites, in particular that of the host. It was said that they kidnapped Christian children and bled them to death in order to use their blood to make bread for Easter. The image of blood dominates the centre of the story told by Paolo Uccello: not that of the Jew condemned to death, but that which spurts out of the host. It was the tangible sign that a living being was there, truly present, as Pope Innocent III had definitively established at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Between the proclamation of the doctrine of the real presence (and the consequent propagation of the cult of the ‘Santissimo Sacramento’), and the legend of the deicidal Jew, enemy of the blood of Christ and thirsting for Christian blood, there is a clear link, which can also be seen in chronological terms. The massacre of the Jews in Fulda in 1236, the cases of Valréas in France in 1247, Saragossa in 1250, Lincoln in 1255, Pforzheim in 1261, Weissemburg in 1270, Oberwesel in 1287, and Krems in 1293 form an striking crescendo on the same theme: the kidnapping and killing of a Christian child by the Jews with the Jewish Easter in the background. In the case of Saragossa — according to the anonymous Passio of the period, later edited in the Acta Sanctorum — the little Dominguito del Val was kidnapped by a certain Mosé Albayuceto, who handed him over to the ‘Alijama’ of the Jews; and they, ‘renewing Christ’s martyrdom, nailed the child with extreme cruelty to the wall with nails and deeply pierced his side with an iron spike’.7 The ardent devotion of baroque Spain translated that text exactly into the image of a crucified child placed in the cathedral, which aimed at fostering faith in the Eucharist and hatred of the Jews. And it was the definition of the doctrine of the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist which laid the bases for this. In their abhorrence of the Jews, accused of ritual crimes and sacrilegious practices, the doubts and uncertainties of the Christians before the demanding task of believing in something they could not see, found an ideal place in which they could be exorcized. These accusations originating around the Fourth Lateran Council long remained as glowing embers, always ready to flare up. Elaborated and spread by those who had an interest in creating waves of popular hatred against the Jews, they brought forth poisoned fruit: it was in this ways that the countries of the Iberian peninsula reached the point of creating a tool to annihilate the Jewish denial — the Inquisition. In the Spain of the Catholic Kings, at the end of the fifteenth century, the case of the ‘niño de la Guardia’ established the premises for the collective violence on which this new tribunal could be created and 7 

‘Renovantes Christi sanguinem’: according to the author, this is what the ‘hostilis et impia gens Iudaeorum’ wanted to do: ‘Passio autore anonimo’, p. 782.

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developed. In this period stories of Christian children kidnapped and killed by Jews multiplied throughout Europe. In the lands of Italy, there was the case of Simonino in the Episcopal principality of Trent, which developed according to tried and tested models and created a new holy child in the tradition of the Spanish Dominguito. It followed a dynamic which was by now routine, in which a child disappears from its home and is found dead. The bishop of the city, the ambitious and enterprising Hinderbach, identified the Jews as the guilty party; and the violence of a torture that the lawyers of the papal Curia recognized as illegal because applied in the absence of proof, led to confessions and hence to the execution of the ‘guilty’ as well as to the expulsion of the Jewish community from the city, while the cult of the new saint organized through clever publicity brought the bishop fame and his city to join the international circuit of pilgrimage and indulgences.8 From this point onwards the accusation of ritual infanticide became a stable part of Christian anti-Judaism. Centuries after the Paris miracle, the Christian propaganda press told of the ‘stupendo e maraviglioso caso’ (dreadful and marvellous case) of the profanation of the host carried out by a group of Jews. The tale had the same ingredients as the Parisian one, but this time the blood that flowed out of the profaned host unleashed natural forces, and the heavens hurled down lightning on the houses of the Jews. The violent hand of justice fell on the three who escaped the flames: the Jews were ‘scarnificati con rigorosi tormentI, e poi il terzo giorno conficati i pali accutissimi nelli suoi corpi’ (scarified with merciless torments, and then on the third day sharp staves were driven into their bodies).9 There was an unavoidable link, therefore, between the Eucharistic doctrine of the real presence and the image of the deicidal and sacrilegious Jew, a link constituted by the obsession of ritual Jewish infanticide. The divine blood which was imagined to flow from the host profaned by the Jew came from that Christian sacrament which was often represented as the place where a child was shown to the eyes of the believers. Miraculous, sometimes terrifying, visions, took place, such as that in which the celebrant was seen to devour a child in the place of the host;10 but more often there was intense devotion, above all 8 

See Esposito and Quaglioni, Processi contro gli ebrei di Trento. For a reconstruction of the case of Simonino see Hsia, Trent 1475. 9  Capponi, Stupendo e maraviglioso caso eseguito in Presburgo. 10  ‘… Viderat eum devorasse infantem in capella super altare, et timuit ne faceret sibi similiter’: the vision, recounted in the mid fourteenth century by Thomas of Ecclestone, is quoted in Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 118–19.

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female, for ‘the eucharist as nurturing blood’.11 We find the flesh and blood of the divine child, contemplated with devotion by Christians, again in the obsession of the ritual crime of the anti-Jewish legend. It is not by chance that in the Canterbury Tales Chaucer attributes the character of the Prioress with a certain fascination for the story of little Hugh of Lincoln, martyred by the Jews.12 The traditional Christian devotion to the divine motherhood of the Madonna came to be united with an image of Jewish mothers attributed with extraordinarily ferocious characteristics: in a popular tale used in the Catholic schools of the nineteenth century we find the description of a depraved Jewish mother who, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, ‘fissando gli occhi sopra un innocente fanciullo […] lo scanna, lo arrosticsce, ne mangia la metà e il resto nasconde’ (fixing her eye on an innocent boy […] slaughters him, roasts him, eats half of him, and hides the rest).13 In the contemporary reality it was the Jewish mothers who cried, not the Christian ones: Rachel’s tears ( Jeremiah 31. 15) were for the children of the Jews torn away from their families to be Christianized, in a drive towards assimilation which has marked the Catholic Church’s attitude towards the Jewish community throughout the centuries, in clamorous episodes, but also with a substantial continuity in its fundamental attitude — emerging even in the face of the Holocaust.14 Among the cases discussed in relation to the sacrament of baptism is the imaginary case of the pregnant Jewish woman who has converted to Christianity and who is killed by her fellow Jews in revenge: the unborn and unbaptized child of this hypo11 

Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 142. See Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 344. 13  Bosco, Storia sacra per uso delle scuole, pp. 205, 207. This is worth quoting for its additional emphasis with respect to the story by Giuseppe Flavio. 14  The biblical image of Rachel was evoked at the time by theologians and jurists. Fletus Rachel plorantis filios and Rachel plorans filios suos consoletur are the titles of printed memoirs published for the case of Ester, the widow of Salomone Belforte of Livorno, whose daughter, still being breastfed, and two sons of three and five were taken away from her after the death of her husband (1696) because they were ‘offerti alla religione’ by a paternal uncle who had converted to Catholicism. The booklet, printed in Rome by the press of the Rev. Camera Apostolica, is preserved among the papers of the Florentine Inquisition in Brussels (III.24, Decreta contra hebraeos, fols 43r ff.) A copy in the Biblioteca Labronica in Livorno is quoted by Toaff, La nazione ebrea a Livorno e a Pisa, p. 192, n. 1. See Prosperi, ‘Ebrei a Pisa’. On the famous case of little Mortara see Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. As for the Holocaust, see the directive of the Inquisition dated September, 1946, regarding the returning of Jewish children staying in Catholic institutions to their families, published in Melloni, ‘Pio XII a Roncalli’. 12 

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thetical martyr was guaranteed the certainty of entering Paradise.15 In a climate of religious assimilation marked by these campaigns for conversion, a pope — Prospero Lambertini, the ‘enlightened’ Pope Benedetto XIV — established the historical basis for the accusation of ritual infanticide with his bull Beatus Andreas (22 February, 1755); and the document was to come back to light again in the institutional memory of the papacy during the aggressive twentieth-century renewal of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.16 Besides the Jew, other figures aroused accusations and fantasies of infanticide: heretics, for example. In the polemical literature we often find the image of the heretic as the follower of a diabolical and mysterious religion, capable of breaking all the most sacred principles, and of dedicating himself to excesses of every kind in hidden places. These accusations go from the Gnostics and the Valentinians up to the Huguenots, and an extreme echo of the accusation emerged again in the Catholic pamphlets during the wars of religion in France.17 But it was above all the figure of the witch who inherited the charge of blood libel. It is difficult to say something new about a character like the witch, who was present in different forms in the ancient world and primitive societies just as she was in that of medieval and modern Europe. And the relationship between witches and children, especially new-born babies, has also been pointed out and described many times. But the tangle of truth and imagination which characterizes this latter aspect has perhaps not yet received adequate attention for its indisputable centrality to the history of witchcraft. There are many examples of this in what was said of the women accused of witchcraft, as there are in what these women themselves told the judges. Let us look as some of those found in the context of early-modern Italy. They entered the houses, took ‘li mammoli’ (the children) and sucked their blood ‘dalu nasu, dale rechie, dal bellico, dal nervo’ (from their nose, from their ears, from their belly button, from their penis) until they had bled them dry. Thus recounted Bellezze Ursini in the confession written in her own hand and given to the Roman court of the Governor around 1527.18 She had been wid15 

As stated in the handbook for administering the sacraments used in Padua in the eighteenth century: Chiericato, De sacramentis in genere ac de sacramentalibus, pp. 151–53. 16  It was this document which the Inquisition referred to in July, 1900, to reject the invitation to issue a definitive denial of the ‘pretesa pratica dell’omicidi rituale’ (alleged practice of ritual murder): Caffiero, Battesimi forzati, p. 19. The document of the Inquisition is quoted by Miccoli, ‘Santa Sede’, p. 1541. 17  See Racaut, ‘Accusation of Infanticide’. 18  See Trifone, ‘La confessione di Bellezze Ursini’, pp. 150–224. The trial against Bellezze

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owed when she was very young (quasi putta) and to earn a living she practised a science of hers which had much in common with the medicine of the ‘segreti’. She had collected many of these in ‘un livrone’ (a big book), and had been set on this path by another woman, a ‘mastra’ (mistress) of the art. She used her remedies to help women who wanted to ‘infantare’, that is to have children, and she looked after children when they were born and when they fell ill; she cured many of them, but many more of them died. The devil, she recounted, forced her to let them die, but she had saved many of them. They were always small children who could not yet speak, and in many cases she could not name them because they had died before they had even been given a name. She spoke of magical preparations made with the blood and the bodies of children, which had disinterred, and she made ointments with their flesh. She described the ritual for becoming a witch as follows: there was a woman initiator, the ‘mastra’ witch who practised a rite similar to baptism (‘te sputa in bocca e te onge’: she spits in your mouth and anoints you), and ordered you to go to your own baptismal font to perform a ritual abjuration there from the ‘legie e attoretà date da Dio e dala chiesia’ (laws and authorities given by God and the Church) and to give yourself over to the devil as your ‘patrone e signore’ (lord and master). Immediately afterwards, the ‘mastra’ celebrated the sacrament of the devil on the neophyte in which she anointed her temples and the palms of her hands with an ointment made of the flesh of children who had died without being baptized. In this confession the witch is a figure who has practised medicine and deals especially with pregnant women and new-born babies: she kills but she also cures. Did she really kill these children? The question could also be put the other way round: did she really cure them? It is not only popular rumour or the voice of the accusers which replies in the affirmative: it is the accused themselves who confess it, sometimes with a hint of vanity, probably deriving from the way in which they fanned popular rumour and increased their own work in an area of medicine which was by definition of a lower social status as it was more specialized, and for this reason open to women too.19 Whatever the nucleus of truth in these stories, it is a fact that Bellezze Ursini is anything but an isolated case. In Rome again, a century earlier, a woman called Funicella was burnt at the stake because she ‘diabolicamente uccise de molte criature’ (diabolically killed many babies), as the chronicler Stefano Infessura wrote. Ursini (without the text of the confession) is quoted by Bertolotti, Streghe, sortiere e maliardi. 19  On specialization as a sign of low social status, see Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, p. 38.

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Bernardino of Siena was probably alluding to her case when, preaching in Siena in August, 1427, he spoke of a witch who ‘disse e confessò senza niuno martorio che aveva uccisi da xxx fanciulli col succhiare il sangue lore: e anco disse che n’aveva liberati lx’ (said and confessed without torture that she had killed about 30 children by sucking their blood; and she also said that she had freed 60 of them).20 Funicella’s trial originated in the furore caused by the Roman sermons given by the same San Bernardino against the new sect known as the ‘barilotto’ (the barrel) which had been discovered ‘in Piemonte’. Thus news appeared in Rome and Siena of a new sect, which was targeted by the Franciscan Ponce Fougeyron, Inquisitor over a vast territory which included Aosta and Geneva. It was, we read in the papal bull sent to him in 1409, a sect of Christians and ‘perfidious Jews’, which practiced sorcery invoking demons, and many other rites and practices which were forbidden and contrary to the faith.21 The link between the witch hunt and the Christian demonization of the Jew is clear: its origin has been identified precisely in that span of time between the Black Death of 1348 and the first traces of a sect of witches and magicians which appeared around 1375.22 We will not return to this point, however, unless it is to follow a thread that is of interest to us. Now, there is no doubt that in the construction of the witch’s Sabbath, infanti­­cide, together with cannibalism (of children), soon became a constitutive element.23 In the account that the chronicler Hans Fründ has left us of the 1428 witch trials in the Valais — one of the oldest sources for the imagery of the Sabbath — infanticide appears at the extreme end of a series of acts of sorcery and witchcraft concerning conception and birth: sterility, abortion, and pre­­mature birth. Some members of the sect killed their children, roasted them and ate them, and then took dolls to church in place of their babies (for their baptism and funeral).24 The Christian rite of birth was countered by a reverse 20 

See Ginzburg, Ecstasies, p. 298. See Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen, pp. 16–17. See Ginzburg, Ecstasies, pp. 68–69 and n. 26. 22  Ginzburg, Ecstasies, pp. 63–72 23  ‘L’infanticide et le cannibalisme d’enfants sont entrés dans les mentalités comme un élément constitutif du sabbat’: Ostorero, ‘Commentaire’, p. 320. 24  See Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen, but now see the critical edition: Hans Fründ, ‘Rapport sur la chasse aux sorciers et aux sorcières menée dès 1428 dans le diocèse de Sion’, translated [into French] by Catherine Chène and edited by Kathrin Utz Tremp, in L’Imaginaire du sabbat, pp. 30–62: see pp. 36–39. Ibid., p. 57. In her commentary on Fründ’s text, K. Utz Tremp hypothesizes that the ceremony in church was either for the baptism or the funeral, but the two were necessarily linked and followed on from one another. 21 

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rite dominated by death and the devil. Witches, according to Johannes Nider, exercised their homicidal power preferably on infants who had not been baptized or who were not protected by special prayers; they suffocated them by night (so that the blame fell on their parents), then they disinterred them and made ointments from them for their magical arts.25 The ‘errores Gazariorum’, an anonymous document drawn up in Lausanne around 1437, tells of the practices of the sect of the ‘Gazari’ or riders of broomsticks: the members of the sect, it is said, killed their own children and ate them in their ‘synagogue’, and they did this in mockery of the Eucharist (in contumeliam eukaristie).26 The sacrament targeted by the devil, therefore, was above all the Eucharist. And here the stereotypes of the witch and the Jew come together and partially overlap: the bleeding described by Bellezze Ursini recalls the deadly spectre of ritual Jewish infanticide which was still abroad, thanks in part to the new techniques for creating images and propaganda by means of the printing press. When the bishop of Trent unleashed his persecution of the city’s Jews in 1475 with the accusation of having killed little Simonino, the xylograph representations of the child surrounded by Jews who collected his blood enjoyed an extraordinary fortune and spread rapidly.27 And playing a fundamental role in these events was the Dominican Heinrich Kramer, the same person who, a little later, was to publish the fundamental text for the modern witch hunt, the Malleus Maleficarum, together with Jacob Sprenger. In 1475 Kramer was given the task of collecting notary records of the sentences passed in cases of ritual infanticide in Germany, between Breisgau and Lake Constance, to support the legitimacy of the work of bishop Hinderback in the face of accusations by the apostolic commissioner Battista de’ Giudici.28 Witness to the death penalty inflicted on the Jews of Trent, Kramer was soon to make a decisive contribution to the obsession with the anti-Christian threat of the witches’ sect. Thus, while the accusation of ritual infanticide unleashed pogroms and was used to legitimize the birth of the Spanish Inquisition, analogous accusations were giving weight to the witch hunt. The Malleus Maleficarum devotes 25 

Nider, Formicarius, p. 155. And see Errores gazariorum, trans. and ed. by Tremp and Ostorero, p. 287. 26  See Errores gazariorum, trans. and ed. by Tremp and Ostorero, pp. 280–81, 287. 27  See Rigaux, ‘L’immagine di Simone di Trento’, and see the illustrations included. On the circulation of printed material regarding the case of Simonino see Kristeller, ‘The Alleged Ritual Murder of Simon of Trent’. 28  See Hsia, ‘Witchcraft, Magic, and the Jews’, pp. 420–22.

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ample space to the theory that behind every midwife lies a potential witch. 29 But besides the handbook we must also consider the many trials, which demonstrate the tendency to juxtapose witches and ‘mammane’ or midwives, and of which the cases of Funicella and Bellezze Ursini are but a sample. This is a history which is in many respects well-known, yet one which has not been adequately considered. Anyone who has read the documents of the witch trials knows how often the suspicion and the accusation originate in episodes which concern children: children who, after some contact with the alleged witch, fall ill or die; children taken to female (or male) healers to have the evil eye removed from them. In the relationship between midwives and their clients, the suspicious eye of the Inquisitors saw the original field of action of the forces of evil. In this they were picking up on more ancient threads. The tradition which had outlined the characteristics of the midwife up until Plato’s Theaetetus had moved in this direction: it described an old woman, no longer able to conceive and give birth, mistress of a mysterious art, who with charms and potions alleviated the pains of labour, eased the moment of birth, and if necessary carried out abortions.30 Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, the great encyclopaedia which was used as a source by subsequent ages, added a description of the sorcery which the midwives practised with the limbs of aborted babies and with menstrual blood, a potent and mysterious liquid long investigated by popular medicine, at the centre of fantasies and fears over the wonders and monstrosities of human generation.31 Magic and portents imagined by the Ancients became for the Christians the product of diabolical forces, and the midwife came to be placed alongside the witch. If there was one place that was suited to the practices of witchcraft this was the scene of childbirth, where life and death habitually met; and the attributes of the witch adapted themselves well to those of the midwife. The conviction spread that childbirth was the scene where a thousand devilries 29 

This is pointed out by Pancino, Il bambino e l’acqua sporca, p. 28. But see above all Forbes, The Midwife and the Witch; and Forbes, ‘Midwifery and Witchcraft’. 30  The history of this tradition has been reconstructed in Bettini, Nascere. See in particular pp. 289–301. 31  See Niccoli, ‘“Menstruum quasi monstruum”’. On the more general theme of the history of childbirth the historical literature has grown considerably in the last few decades, see Laget, Naissances; and Gélis, History of Childbirth. For Italy see in particular Accati, Maher, and Pomata, Parto e maternità; and Fiume, Madri. There is also a vast literature by now on the knowledge of the midwife, among which see Gélis, La sage-femme ou le médecin; and for AngloSaxon culture Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men.

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were perpetrated, an opinion that historians have not perhaps taken seriously enough.32 In practice, it is clear from those criminal trials in which midwives were accused of commerce with the bodies of new-born babies that the ancient tradition was alive and well and that around midwives those practices continued to exist which aimed to obtain preparations for curing special illnesses like leprosy, from the death of new-born babies.33 The ambiguous status of the process of birth as the original moment of separation between life and death invested everything that was part of that process. Through the mists of folklore belief it is possible to catch a glimpse of how important realities were perceived, such as those relating to the powers of the placenta, the potent and mysterious wall which divides the kingdom of life from that of death.34 As Kramer and Sprenger observed, it is enough to read the trials to discover that the recurrent scene of witch’s sorcery was one which had the midwife as its protagonist. Birth and all that surrounded it was the original social context in which the accusation of witchcraft multiplied like bacteria on a Petri dish. The reasons for this were many: midwives were generally women of the humblest condition with many children, who practised their art on the basis of personal experience, which they enriched with exorcisms and formulae of a magical flavour taken from oral culture. The extreme poverty of their living conditions was reason enough to lead them to desperation and to search for a pact with the devil in the terms described by the preachers’ tales or the lives of the saints. It was inevitable that the ecclesiastical authorities would look on such women with suspicion, conscious of their absolute marginality. Hence the multiplication of injunctions and prohibitions from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, which coincided with the foment of the witch hunt. Nor was the creation of the hagiographical model of the midwife in Margaret of Cortona enough to pro32  With the exception of M. Murray, whose ideas on the reality of witchcraft, as set out in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, were anticipated in a note on infanticide by witches: Murray, ‘Child-Sacrifice among European Witches’, pp. 60–62, n. 18. Her theory is quoted in the rich study by Forbes, ‘Midwifery and Witchcraft’, revised and enlarged with new sources in the volume Forbes, The Midwife and the Witch, pp. 116–18, 129. 33  In 1408 the Parisian midwife Pierrette was tried for having participated in the trafficking of bodies of new-born babies to cure a nobleman afflicted with leprosy: see Forbes, The Midwife and the Witch, pp. 133–38. 34  The mother whose gaze falls on the newly-expelled placenta will die, according to one widespread belief: see Bächtold-Stäubli, Hoffmann-Krayer, and Ludtke, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, vi, 761; this observation is given, together with many others, in the rich but unsatisfying study by D’Yvoire, ‘La placenta’.

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tect them.35 What was to reveal itself as more effective was the work of acculturation, in which the character of the midwife became a precious ally of the priest and the physician, or rather an indispensable tool in their advance onto the scene of childbirth. But in the meantime one of the first works devoted to midwifery, that published in 1513 by Eucharius Rösslin, was full of accusations against the entire category.36 What made these midwives highly suspect was the subject they dealt with and the circumstances in which they did so. In their hands were human beings devoid of divine protection. The woman in childbirth was by the very fact of her condition an impure being who could not cross the threshold of a church without first subjecting herself to a rite of purification; and the as yet unbaptized newborn was a creature of the devil whom only the exorcisms of the ecclesiastical rite could free from unclean spirits. The persistence of practices such as the blessing of women after they had given birth in the Churches which had separated from Rome, and the resistance against abolishing exorcisms in the world of the Reformation, demonstrate the strength of convictions which could not be ignored.37 That new-born child was already prey to evil spirits: if the midwife so desired, she could dedicate him to the devil instead of baptizing him, and take advantage of the opportunity to procure natural ingredients which were attributed with great magical powers: the mother’s placenta for example, or the fat from the unbaptized child. An ointment of this type figures among the witch’s preparations as described among others by Martino Delrio, Girolamo Cardano, and Giovanni Battista della Porta.38 To what extent these accusations and suspicions corresponded to effective practices naturally remains to be seen. But it is an indisputable fact that among those tried for witchcraft there figure above all midwives. Let us look at a few examples. 35 

Benvenuti ‘Il culto degli Innocenti nell’immaginario medievale’, pp.  123–24, which quotes the case of Margaret of Cortona together with the ‘sviluppo di una tipologia evangelica di levatrice’ in the apocryphal gospels as ways in which medieval Christianity tried to exorcize the negative and disturbing aura of the midwife. 36  Rösslin, Der swangern Frawen. Among the many studies on the profession of midwifery I have not been able to see Murphy-Lawless, Reading Birth and Death. 37  After the fundamental reconstruction by Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, research has been carried out into baptismal rituals from the point of view of reformed theologies: see Nischan, ‘The Exorcism Controversy and Baptism’; and for the blessing of women in childbirth as a theme of social history, see Cressy, ‘Purification, Thanksgiving and the Churching of Women’. 38  See Forbes, ‘Midwifery and Witchcraft’, pp. 268–69.

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In the reports of the Roman Inquisition, in the summer of 1552 we find the name of a certain Faustina Orsi, described either as a ‘striga’ (witch) or an ‘obstetrix’ (midwife), depending on whether it was her crime or her profession that prevailed.39 Besides these notes we know nothing about her. We do know, however, that after subjecting her to a trial, and probably after torturing her, the Roman Inquisition let her go, on bail, with one important condition: that she no longer exercise the office of midwife and that she no longer have anything to do with medicating children.40 At that time the Roman Inquisition was deeply involved in the hunt for those suspected of the Lutheran heresy, and it did not pay much attention to cases of witchcraft. In its prison Faustina had fellow detainees called Cesare Flaminio and Camillo Regnoli, and the Inquisition certainly paid greater attention to them than it did to her. But the value of that testimony remains, showing how, in a case of witchcraft, the prelates of the Inquisition demonstrated that cautious and relatively moderate attitude which was to distinguish their methods in this field later too. For them the accusation of witchcraft was linked to a social function: being a midwife and curing sick children. Hence the remedy: the witch was neither condemned nor absolved, but simply forbidden from dealing with children, either helping at their birth or curing them. What the witches of the city and the witches of the countryside had in common was their social function as midwives. The unpublished documents of the Inquisition of Siena, recently made public, contains many stories of women accused of witchcraft for what they did as midwives and as experts in childhood illnesses. Let us look at some of them. On 19 September, 1590, the Inquisitor of Siena was presented with an accusation of witchcraft against Camilla di Bino, ‘ricoglitrice’ (midwife) of Montal­ cino.41 She was an elderly woman: no one, not even she, knew her real age, but 39  On 24 June, 1552, ‘Faustinam strigam obstetricem’ is ordered to appear before the Congre­ gation: Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, Decreta 1548–58, fol. 68r. On 30 June, she is given five days to prepare her defence (fol. 72v). On 12 July the ‘repetitio testium’ is ordered (fol. 74v), and on 16 August orders are made regarding the goods which had been seized from her (fol. 77r). On 3 November it is decreed that they proceed to torture her if necessary (fol. 83v). I would like to thank the Archivist of the Congregation, monsignor Alejandro Cifres, for the help he gave me in the course of my research. 40  ‘Faustina de Ursis relaxetur data cautione […] Interdicta sibi quod de caetero non faciat officium obstetricis neque curet pueros’ (Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, Decreta 1548–58, fol. 86v). 41  Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Fondo senese, ii, fols 225r ff.

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it was estimated that she must be around fifty or sixty years old. She had been practising the profession of ‘ricoglitrice’ in Montalcino for a good while: a female profession by definition, which was based exclusively on experience, it was practised by women of a certain age, who had had many children and who had learnt to cope with the labours of gestation and childbirth as well as the difficulties of bringing up children. Camilla had had six children in the first years of her marriage; then she had become a widow, having lost her husband during the war of Siena and the long resistance put up by Montalcino against conquest by the imperial army under Cosimo I. Times of war and famine were hardest for a widow with six children. Camilla re-evoked these times before the judges: they had been extremely difficult, non havendo io pane et ritrovandomi vedova nel tempo che se perse Foiano nel tempo della Guerra di Siena e trovandomi sei figliuolini et trovandomi senza pane et così povera che non havevo da poter sotterrar il mio marito che mi fu sotterrato per l’amore di Dio, et trovandomi disperata […].42 (As I had no bread, and finding myself a widow at the time when Foiano was lost, during the War of Siena, and finding myself with six children and no bread, and so poor, and not having enough to bury my husband, who was buried by charity, and finding myself destitute […].)

Desperation forced her to extreme steps. The theologians had good reason to define desperation as a sin against the Spirit, the only unpardonable sin in the religion of forgiveness. Trovandomi disperata mi detti al diavolo. Mi posi a sedere nella mia sala, chiamai il diavolo dicendo: ‘Diavolo, vieni per me che me ti do et dono in carne et in ossa, in spirito et ogni cosa’. (As I was desperate I gave myself over to the devil. I sat in my room, and I called on the devil, saying, ‘Devil, come for me: I give and donate myself to you in flesh and bone, in spirit and in every thing’.)

With the devil, who apparently appeared ‘in forma di huomo vestito di nero’ (in the form of a man dressed in black), Camilla said she had made a pact. This was the part of the story that most interested those who were listening, and they questioned her not on her hardship and desperation but on diabolical entities, apparitions, and magical powers. Camilla had been arrested, accused of having brought about illnesses and death. Her accusers spoke of new-born 42 

Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Fondo senese, ii, fol. 299r.

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babies who had been touched by her and had then fallen ill and died. These were everyday happenings: Camilla walked through the streets of the town, and entered the houses; there were children in swaddling who cried; Camilla looked after them, she unwound the swaddling, she touched them. They were also frequent episodes: she was the ‘ricoglitrice’ and it was her job to deal with that difficult period of a life which was just beginning, and which often ended there. Frightening stories circulated about her: there was the person who had been touched on the shoulder by her and had then suffered from a sudden and violent attack of pain. Perhaps that touch, which welcomed the newborn, giving them life, was also able to give death. The accusations reached the Inquisitor of Siena: the court did not have much work after its long hunt for heretics throughout the 1570s, and it could go back to dealing with witches, an old subject only momentarily set to one side. In the period of the clash with the Reformation and doctrinal heresy, the supreme Inquisitor fra Michele Ghislieri had said there would be time for them later, and now that time had come. Camilla was arrested, interrogated, and tortured. The torture was long and harsh: the rope hoist (strappi di corda), lasting up to half an hour; the terrible ‘stanghetta’. The doubts that the jurisconsults had meticulously gathered over time as to the use of torture and the proof required to move on to that phase of the trial, did not hold much weight in practice: witchcraft, like heresy before it, was a crime of apostasy from the true faith, a crime of divine and human treason, and the normal rules did not apply here — it was a ‘crimen exceptum’. Nor was any weight given in Siena to the doubts over witchcraft which were making headway in Rome among members of the Inquisition. Many historians have held, with good reasons, that the Inquisition was lenient in Italy and Spain on the question of witchcraft. Camilla knew none of this leniency. She was tortured on more than one occasion; they wanted a confession from her, and Camilla confessed: she told of how she had given herself to the devil, how she had received from him the powers of death, and how she had used them. But her truth did not seem to be the whole truth to the Inquisitor. He expected something else: he knew from theological and police science what went on in the relationship between witches and devils, and he was expecting an entire confession from Camilla, one full of details, beginning with what the textbooks had taught him: the act of homage to the devil, the violation of the cross, the magical ointments, the night flight to the Sabbath, the scene of the Sabbath, and the meeting with other witches. He was expecting the names of the other witches so that he could arrest them and thus destroy the entire sect. Camilla seemed reticent to him: she spoke, it is true, but with difficulty, almost drop by drop, giving short and uncertain answers to his questions. He

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asked her ‘se lei lassò Christo et il modo tenne a lassarlo’ (if she rejected Christ and how she rejected him); and he was happy when Camilla described the scene of the trampled crucifix; he asked her finally the most important thing: ‘se lei cognosce in Montealcino o altrove altre streghe e dica chi’ (if she knew other witches in Montealcino or elsewhere, and say who). And here the reply was unsatisfactory. Camilla had spoken of a friend of hers, a certain Agnesa, with whom she had admitted coming together in order to practise witchcraft. But she did not know any others, ‘et non ne conoscendo non mi son ritrovato né a giuochi nè ad altro’ (and as I did not know any others I did not take part in games or anything else).43 Faced with a reply of this kind, which radically denied the paradigm of the witch’s Sabbath, Nicola Angelini from Civita di Penne, Inquisitor of the State of Siena, declared himself highly unsatisfied: for him, Camilla ‘ha celato, et cela et occulta la verità’ (has hidden and hides and conceals the truth), namely the opinion of the Inquisitor on what the Sabbath was supposed to be.44 She had to be kept in prison for longer therefore; and it was in prison that Camilla died on 15 August of that year, perhaps ‘di sua morte naturale’ (of a natural death), though there was little that was natural in the treatment inflicted upon her. It was enough, however, to declare ‘terminata, et finita la sua causa’ (her case to be over, and finished). Many other trials of the period have the same characteristics. Among those that were held in the Tuscan countryside we meet other women like Camilla: old women or at least women no longer of child-bearing age, poor, and forced to live by expedients, offering themselves to the families of the town as experts in natural ‘secrets’ — herbal medicines and decoctions mixed with a mysterious knowledge consisting of words and effective gestures. In the web of accusations by disappointed clients and the opinions of neighbours, what takes shape before our eyes is a craft that can be defined as magic by its very nature, placed as it is on the border of life and death: that of the midwife, expert in things to do with birth. Hence the immense faith that people had in the power of these women; hence too the rapidity with which this faith could change into acrimony and a desire for revenge. If the baby has a difficult birth, if it is born sick, if it falls ill, and finally if it dies, it is her fault, the fault of the woman who has power and uses it to harm. 43  Statement of 26 January, 1591; Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Fondo senese, ii, fol. 308v. 44  Document dated 22 February, 1591; Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Fondo senese, ii, fol. 314v.

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Another woman from Montalcino, a little younger than Camilla, followed a similar path a few years later. Her name was Vittoria, the widow of Simone Ciani (or Ciacci), who was sixty years old when, in July, 1619, an angry citizen of Montalcino presented himself before the Inquisitor of Siena to make a formal accusation against her.45 She was also born during the war of Siena, and precisely ‘l’anno che venne il campo a Monte Alcino’ (in the year in which the camp came to Montalcino). She became a widow, and poor, early, and supported herself by working: spinning, ‘lavare una bucata e far qualche servitio’ (doing the laundry and some other jobs). She had been a servant in the house of one of the town notables, ser Bernardino Costanti, who had dismissed her, however, when he married. To make a living she went to ‘far la ricoglitrice e ricor le rede’:46 in other words, they called on her when it was time to give birth. But she had not done a good job when her former master’s wife gave birth, as the child had been close to dying. Ser Bernardino was convinced that Vittoria wanted revenge for her dismissal: he spread a rumour around town that she was a witch and caused children to die, and as a consequence Vittoria lost her already meagre means of subsistence. The faith that people had in her capabilities turned to fear. One day, Ser Bernardino fell ill with a cataract, and his first thought was of the evil eye. He sent someone to get hold of Vittoria and effectively kidnapped her, tying her up in his house to force her to undo the witchcraft. Then he went to place a formal accusation against her, bringing as proof ‘mezzo staio’ (half a bushel) of suspicious items found in her bed: bones, seeds, pins, human fat, and even ‘due ochi di morto’ (two eyes from a dead person). He was aided and abetted in this by a Franciscan, an exorcist from the nearby convent. The trial lasted almost a whole year, and during this time Vittoria lost a daughter, who died ‘di povertà e di stenti’ (of poverty and hardship). Vittoria noted in vain that if she had had the powers of a witch she would have used them to protect her daughter. More effective were her protests that she had lived ‘da bouna christiana’ (as a good Christian). In the end, she was released from the Inquisition’s prison in Siena; but she was ordered to remain at the disposal of the court and above all not to work as a midwife and a medicine woman any more. In her case too, therefore, the Inquisition identified the root of the accusation of witchcraft in the practice of assisting at birth. 45 

Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Fondo senese, xxvii, Processi 1617–19, fols 609r-723v. The spelling of the name varies from ‘Ciani’ in the first records of the trial to ‘Ciacci’ at the end. 46  Statement of 22 August, 1619; Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Fondo senese, xxvii, Processi 1617–19, fol. 676v.

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We find similar cases in different times and places: in southern Germany, for example, at the end of the seventeenth century. In 1671, a fifty-six yearold woman, Appolonia Glaitter, from the village of Windish-Bockenfeld outside Rothenburg, was accused of witchcraft. The city court dealt with many cases of this kind between 1500 and 1750, but only three of them resulted in capital punishment. There are many analogies here with the Siena court and the witches of Montalcino. Appolonia also made herself useful by assisting her neighbours at childbirth and in the bringing up of their children; but it was enough for the eleven-year-old daughter of one of her neighbours (already assisted by her at birth) to fall ill from an infection after having touched plants from her garden for the accusation of witchcraft to be unleashed.47 It is impossible to consider all the numerous well-known or at least documented cases of women accused of being witches and of causing babies to die while assisting at their birth or wet-nursing. It is clear that the profession of the ‘recoglitrice’ particularly lent itself to this kind of outcome. Crossing the threshold of birth was a passage that was itself dangerous and the cause of extreme concern. Midwives easily fell under suspicion or were accused of abusing their powers and knowledge in favour of the devil and not God. In practice, however, while the emergence of learned medicine pushed most of these practices into the background, the condition of the midwife was not only invested with suspicion and the accusation of witchcraft, but it also underwent a deeper transformation. This is revealed in a detail which can be found in the trial against Vittoria Ciacci of Montalcino: once the accusation of causing babies to die had been overthrown for lack of proof, suspicion was raised concerning the way in which the midwife had baptized the newborns in peril. It was the life of the soul and not that of the body which made the parents and the clergy anxious: by no means a small change, and one which we should take into due account. The midwife was becoming detached from the sphere of the practical knowledge of a suspect female world, and was being placed alongside the ecclesiastical world, which assigned her with new tasks and responsibilities. Here, the post-Tridentine clergy intervened with its greatest force, with a double-edged strategy of control: inquisitorial aggression against witches on one hand, and acculturation and integration on the other. The education of midwives was a task made necessary by many circumstances: bearers of an oral culture which was by now distrusted in principle, these women with their secret arts exercised their knowledge in that most delicate area — sex, gesta47 

Rowlands, ‘Witchcraft and Old Women’, p. 55.

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tion, and birth — and they assisted mothers in the early infancy of their children. It was known that they recited secret prayers and aided childbirth with spells, things that were done ‘all’oscuro’ (in the dark), wrote Tommaso Garzoni, far from male control.48 It did not take much to suspect them of carrying out abortions or even true infanticide. On the other hand, their collaboration continued to be precious not only for the physicians, but also for the clergy, who were increasingly concerned to guarantee that baptism be administered in all those cases in which the survival of the baby was at risk. It was precisely the urgency of the timely intervention of the sacrament on the very threshold of birth which meant that great attention was paid to the midwife’s knowledge on this specific point. In the measures taken by the post-Tridentine bishops, control over midwives’ abilities and their orthodoxy became a compulsory theme, and a special series of instructions was drawn up for their benefit. We have a testimony to this in the work of Scipione Mercurio: a pupil of the Bolognese anatomist Cesare Aranzio, Mercurio was a Dominican friar and physician, and with his literary work he showed that he had put into practice both his medical science and his Dominican desire to extirpate error from the minds of the people. His textbook for midwives — La commare o levatrice — published in its first edition in Venice in 1596, was to be re-published a good seventeen times: a truly practical handbook, updated progressively by the publishers and enriched with illustrations as well as with new contributions of a medical and theological nature.49 If the question of how to impose a Christian discipline on married life became central in Reformation Europe, partly as a consequence of the abolition of clerical celibacy, it was the Italian Catholic world which took a decisive step along the road to the cultural control over midwives. Interest in the problems of the birth and the raising of children was a general problem of 48 

Garzoni, La piazza universale, p. 1340 (See also Pancino, Il bambino e l’acqua sporca, pp. 30–31). 49  Claudia Pancino has devoted various studies to this work and its author in the course of her exploration of the history of childbirth. In Pancino, Il bambino e l’acqua sporca, pp. 59 ff, she provides a review showing the proliferation of works on the instruction of midwives, from Mercurio, La commare o ricoglitrice to Antonio Bigeschi (1819). The edition by Gio. Francesco Valvasense (Venice, 1686), is, for example, ‘accresciuta di due trattati’, one by the physician Pietro di Castro, and ‘l’altro di un gravissimo autore nel quale si risolvono alcuni dubii importanti circa il Battesimo dei bambini, e si danno alcuni avvisi spirituali molto a proposito per le partorienti’. A series of etchings illustrates the structure of the female reproductive system and the various ways in which the baby can present itself at birth.

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the time: official culture took over questions such as breast-feeding and wetnursing, which up until then had remained entirely outside the perspective of medieval Christianity.50 But it was in Mercurio’s work that the most diverse aspects of pregnancy and childbirth were set out in the vernacular for the first time, in such a way as to place scientific knowledge and theological doctrine within the reach of the midwife. The succession of editions and updated additions are a reflection of the anxiety with which ecclesiastical culture viewed the problem of reviewing and dominating the knowledge and behaviour surrounding birth: subjects once unrelated or dealt with only under the category of the sins of sex. The distance that separates Mercurio’s work from that of his fellow Dominican, fra Vincenzo of Bologna, on behaviour forbidden in marriage is far greater than the seventy years that separates them.51 Mercurio’s viewpoint is not that of the moralist forced to intervene to set some limits in an unpleasant and dangerous subject like marriage; there is in his work, instead, an unlimited curiosity that touches on everything that happens in a woman’s body, from conception and the times and circumstances of gestation, to the care that a woman must have for her child before, during, and after birth. The work is divided into three books, dealing with the preparation for birth, birth, and the period after birth. The moralistic intention is almost hidden in the sea of medical notions and warnings on how to interpret and cure the most diverse manifestations of the mother’s and the daughter’s bodies: pains, swellings, menstruation, fevers, the presence or not of milk, the maternal duty to breastfeed, the sex of the baby to be and the ways of determining it, difficult births, the imperfections of the newborn, the birth of monsters, and illnesses of the newborn and the ways of curing them. As can easily be imagined, a work of this kind was destined above all for those who had the responsibility for and the opportunity of dealing with mothers: midwives in the first place, but also physicians and confessors. After the Council of Trent, in the course of their pastoral visits, the bishops had begun to submit midwives to specific examinations in order to verify their capacity to administer baptism. A result of this orientation can be found in the Roman Ritual published by Pope Paul V in 1615, where parish priests are obliged to verify midwives’ knowledge of the formulas of baptism.52 And this order was put 50 

See Wood, The Church and Childhood. On these discussions in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, the fundamental work is still Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage. 51  Da Bologna, Preclara operetta dello ornato delle donne. 52  ‘… Curare debet parochus, ut fideles, praesertim obstetrices, rectum baptizandi ritum probe teneant et servent’, Rituale Romanum Pauli V Pont, p. 10.

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into practice: in eighteenth-century Bologna, cardinal Lambertini still insisted that midwives be ‘ben istrutte nell’amministrare il battesimo ne’ casi di necessità’ (well-instructed in administering baptism in cases of necessity).53 But the task of spreading the knowledge concerning birth in a form filtered by ecclesiastical culture meant that a series of adjustments and compromises was necessary: not by chance was Scipione Mercurio also responsible for the first printed work in the Italian language devoted to correcting ‘errori popolari’. Entering the world of popular culture with these premises meant collecting and sifting through the sieve of orthodoxy themes and attitudes with which official science had up until then co-habited in various ways. Thus Mercurio dwelt on the convictions relating to childbirth in a culture which believed, for example, in the magical powers of the gaze as a bearer of curses and death, but also as a potential vehicle for images capable of impressing through the eye of the pregnant women the aspect of the baby she was carrying.54 The suspicious eye of the Dominican lingered above all on those practices which took place around childbirth and which to his friar’s instinct smelt of witchcraft: he suggested, for example, taking great care over the choice of ‘commare’ (midwife) and unhesitatingly rejecting those women who had strange commerce with the babies’ amniotic sac (the ‘camiscia’, or shirt).55 Scipione Mercurio’s work was not the only one of its kind: it took its place among the dense and careful regulation of midwives as a body, of which there remains a vast and widespread documentation in the records of Episcopal visits and diocesan synods. In his handbook for the ‘mammane’, diffidence, indeed strong suspicion of witchcraft, alternates with the offer of an alliance with the Church on the basis of a dignified compromise: the midwives were to leave off their strange and mysterious formulas, pronounced in whispers, and substitute them with the clear, simple, and unchangeable formula of baptism in cases where birth proved difficult. From their position as the priest’s rivals, the midwives had to become allies and tools of the Church in the conquest of souls. Thus an armistice was reached in the long war between folklore practices and 53 

Notification dated 30 September, 1732, quoted by Pancino, ‘La levatrice fra delazione e segretezza’, p. 119. 54  Mercurio, De gli errori popolari d’Italia libri sette. A study has been devoted to the spread of these ideas (especially in the medical culture of the Low Countries): see Roodenburg, ‘The Maternal Imagination’. 55  Thus, for example, it was suspicious to ‘pigliare le seconde, o camiscie de bambini, et farle benedire et dirgli messe sopra, vendendole poi, dando ad intendere agli huomini ignoranti che mentre havranno tali camiscie adosso, non potrano mai esser uccisi, né feriti’: Mercurio, De gli errori popolari d’Italia libri sette, fol. 260rv.

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official religion: the suspicion remained, but it had shifted to the ability of the midwives to carry out their role adequately. In the meantime the accusation of witchcraft which had brought so many women to judiciary torture and the stake was silently downgraded in the Inquisition’s directives. Naturally it was another thing to remove the prejudice against witchcraft, which was destined to enjoy a longer life. The idea that behind the ‘true’ religion, with its rites and practices exposed to the light of day, there was a false religion, hidden in the shade and devoted to horrendous rites, remained alive for a long time. Popular preachers and learned theologians still argued their convictions at length, spreading them and inciting the people to hatred and fear against the ‘donne malefiche’ (evil women) who consecrated new-born babies to the devil and then killed them by sticking a needle through their skulls.56 It was, it was said, a plague which had spread throughout Europe; to doubt it was proof of weak faith and stupidity. But the reason for the hatred of witches, and the accusation of infanticide were now linked to the contrast between Catholic baptism and a magical baptism in the name of the devil.57 We will not attempt to formulate the umpteenth ‘explanation’ for the antiwitch obsession which dominated the minds of the Early Modern Age. The construction of the figure of the witch responded to needs and obsessions of various kinds, and her attributes varied in time and place. But even before the picture of the witch and devil’s Sabbath took form and unleashed the most violent and bloody witch hunt in history, the figure of the witch had undoubtedly formed a close relationship with the life and death of the new-born baby. Right from its pre-Christian origins, the character of the witch often overlapped with that of the midwife. We find this original characteristic in the witchcraft of Christian Europe. As it has been pointed out, witchcraft and infanticide are female crimes par excellence: once the criminalization of witchcraft had declined, infanticide remained the dominant charge against women.58 56 

The Parisian theologian Jean Filesac spoke of witches as ‘sagae illae et maleficae mulieres, quae infantes ex uteris puerperarum exceptos diabolo sacrificare et offerre, atque eidem execrabili quadam verborum forma baptizare, ac nonnunquam acu, vel re simili, capiti infixa, necare solent’, Filesac, De idololatria magica dissertatio, fol. 65r. Filesac believed that this was a ‘pestis’ (plague) which had spread the length and breadth of France, Europe even, and that harbouring any doubts as to the reality of phenomena such as the night flight, is a sign that a person is not only not a good Christian, but ‘verum etiam iudicii rationisque parum compos’ (fol. Iv). 57  Filesac states ‘de Baptismo, ut ita loquar, magico’ (Filesac, De idololatria magica dissertatio, fol. 65r) and quotes, besides the canons of the ancient councils, the testimony of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera on the ‘Cempoalanos barbaros’ (fol. 66). 58  The learned and detailed study by van Dülmen, Frauen vor Gericht, provides a statistical

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This is no random coincidence: as we have seen, the two crimes touch each other and often overlap in the social figure of the midwife, the heir to a multifaceted heritage. Aby Warburg once observed that in renaissance painting the midwife is the heir to the ancient maenad.59 The re-surfacing of ancient culture through the many paths of mythology and the natural and medical sciences had a significant impact on the image of this figure. Contributing to this, naturally, was also the function she held. The lives of the mother and the baby to be were entrusted to her expertise, in a transition which was full of danger. Death in childbirth was a very real possibility, and the best way to prepare yourself for it was to make a will, ‘knowing’, as the Venetian noblewoman Laura Michiel Venier wrote in October, 1692, ‘in quanto pericolo della vita si sia il mandar alla luce una creatura’ (in what danger one places one’s life when bringing a baby into the world).60 Even in those cases which ended happily, the condition of the mother and the baby remained precarious. The newborn was described in some wonderful hexameters by Lucretius as the survivor of a shipwreck, thrown onto the shore by cruel waves, naked and in need of everything; and this was a familiar image in the humanistic and medical culture of the Early Modern Age.61 As for the condition of the woman giving birth and her possible reactions, the case of Lucia Cremonini itself shows what emotional storms could be unleashed in such circumstances. The midwife had to deal with all of this. She was generally an old woman — and in this her stereotype coincided with that of the witch;62 she was often a analysis (p. 59). In general, see the statistics elaborated by Evans, Rituals of Retribution. 59  ‘The maenad is discharged and has been given a job in civilian life as a nurse’: A. Warburg, unedited notes quoted by Gombrich, Aby Warburg, p. 299. 60  See Hünecke, Der venezianische Adel, p. 97. 61  On Lucretius’s image of the newborn baby and its fortune, the rather superficial study by Rochette, ‘“Nudus…infans…”’, points to Lactantius and Leopardi in particular. On the problems of childbirth in the ancient world, see Grmek, Diseases in the Ancient Greek World. An image of a woman dying in childbirth is analysed by Stewart and Gray, ‘Confronting the Other’. 62  Many opinions have been expressed on the reasons for the pre-eminence of elderly women in cases of witchcraft, in the more general context of the relationship between witchcraft and the condition of women. The hypothesis of a connection between witchcraft and the menopause, accepted by Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, is one of the results of this discussion. On the basis of new documentary evidence relating to southern Germany in the seventeenth century, Rowlands, ‘Witchcraft and Old Women’, has re-opened the discussion by suggesting that the rigidity of the general theme be softened with a micro-historical analysis of the specific contents (and refers to a book which I have not been able to see: Rowlands, Narratives of Witchcraft).

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widow who lived alone, in poverty, and who saw to her needs by putting at the disposal of pregnant women and mothers the experience she had of birth and curing childhood illnesses, experience which she had learnt from other women or accumulated over the years. In the extremely rare cases in which we have direct testimony of the real life of a midwife — we can think of that ‘small miracle’ which is the redaction and preservation of the diary notes of the midwife Martha Ballard, in the service of God and her neighbours in New England between 1785 and 1812 — a picture emerges of a daily life interwoven with birth and death, a life that lies in the shadow of the ‘great history’ of men. 63 Women turned to the midwife with confidence and some reverential fear of her powers when birth was difficult, and when the cries and the illnesses of the newborn could not be easily resolved. Her task was that most mysterious of operations, charged with emotion: that of bringing babies into the world. And it was she who showed mothers how to apply the swaddling, how to prepare the medicinal decoctions, how to calm the crying and the suffering of the children and the anxieties of their mothers. The prayers she recited and the protective amulets she placed around the neck of pregnant women and newborn babies accredited her with a magical alliance with the mysterious forces of nature (demonized by Christianity). When her remedies did not work, therefore, or the birth ended badly, when the child fell ill and died, belief in her powers turned into suspicion and accusation — all the more readily if, in the changeable relationships between neighbours, there were other reasons for hostility or arguments between families, and then, all those characteristics which socially distinguished the midwife — her age, her poverty, her solitude, her experience with plants and potions — became as many clues to her adherence to a witch’s sect which celebrated death and practised infanticide in its secret nocturnal rites. In the mental constructions of the Jewish blood crime and the witch’s Sabbath we have seen the emergence in various forms of the obsession of infanticide. It is an obsession which reveals a sort of collective sense of guilt with regard to a crime which the criminal laws were at the same time persecuting with even greater harshness.

63 

The diary of Martha Ballard has been partially published and analyzed in detail by Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale. The ‘small miracle’ (p. 383) which is the preservation of this source has allowed Thatcher Ulrich to re-read American history of the period in a different way.

Chapter 3

Infanticide as a Social Practice: From a Sin to a Crime

T

he definition of infanticide as a crime and the consequent work of the judges and courts concerns a reality which appears in some respects like an underground current of forms of behaviour, each with its own necessity. The roots of these forms of behaviour remain hidden underground, where forces are at work which are greater than the laws of society and the desires of individuals. The distinction between what appears in the courts and the laws and what remains secret is useful for observing the scene that the historical sources sometimes allow us to glimpse. And this is the scene of the suppression of unwanted babies as a habitual or at least a recurrent fact. When we discover from a document of accounts from the Carolingian period that births in peasant families living on the ‘mansi’ saw a ratio of between 115 up to 252 male births to every 100 female births, the reality that emerges is the tendency to eliminate new-born baby girls.1 The structural basis of the phenomenon was then, and long remained, the relationship between the unit of land to be farmed and the availability of a (male) work force: in such conditions, recourse to infanticide must have presented itself as a necessary system for selectively regulating births, when the ordinarily high rate of child mortality — a reality defined with good reason by one scholar as a ‘relief for poor families’2 — was not enough. The regulation of births according to the availability 1 

Coleman, ‘L’infanticide dans le Haut Moyen Âge’, p. 318. Toaldo, Tavole di vitalità, p. 20; I take the point from Povolo, ‘Evoluzione demografica’, p. 167. 2 

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of resources is a sort of elementary rule in agrarian societies, confirmed experimentally by a reading of the demographical statistics and documented macroscopically by the present-day experience of countries like India and China. As for the European past, as the registration of births and population counts gradually became more regular and effective, the recourse to infanticide becomes clearer. One valuable source are the baptism books which spread from the late Middle Ages thanks to a joint effort of religious concern and civic need. By obliging curates to record baptisms, the Church created the concrete consequences of the Christian concept of the immortal soul; and the urban societies that needed accurate information for the administration of justice contributed to the creation and preservation of a huge mine of personal data.3 The disciplinary system to which the clergy were subject in the sixteenth century established and generalized the registration of birth as a means of control which had become urgent thanks to the Protestant Reformation. It was in this period that the ‘liber animarum’ was introduced, which contained periodical population counts and listed all those who were of an age subject to confession and communion. The advantages of these registers from a civic and political point of view was clear right from the start, and it led medieval cities and modern territorial sates to encourage and generalize the practice. In those places where these documents have been preserved it becomes possible to photograph the demographic trends. These documents cannot of course provide us with the numbers of effective births: those babies who were eliminated at birth and who were not baptized did not generally enter the parish registers. But we can verify the rate of selective infanticide which concerned girls. A significant example emerges in the small town of Montefollonico, near Siena. Here, in the mid seventeenth century, not only were there generally more males than females, in terms which go from 5 to 34 per cent according to the parish, but by reconstructing the age pyramids we can see that for children under the age of ten there were eleven girls for every twenty boys, and for children under five the percentage dropped even further: six girls for every twelve boys.4 If we read these statistics together with what we know about the period, the conclusion is obvious: in a society linked to farming, the years of famine around 1648 made baby girls particularly undesirable. Families could get rid of them by leaving them at the nearest foundling hospital (in this case, in Montepulciano) or 3  Jedin, ‘Le origini dei registri parrocchiali’, pp. 331–32, has already pointed out the ‘ragioni sociali e civili’ for the creation of registers. There is a review of the sources by Corsini, ‘Nascite e matrimoni’. 4  See Hanlon, Human Nature in Rural Tuscany, ch. 4: ‘Reproduction’, pp. 103–38.

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by sending them into service somewhere else; but, as it has been observed, it is certainly not unreasonable to suspect that parents suppressed ‘almeno alcuni dei propri figli, principalmente femmine, durante la carestia’ (at least some of their children, mainly girls, during times of famine).5 Yet in the records of the competent criminal court we find only one case of infanticide in the course of the century. In many respects the case is similar to that of Lucia Cremonini: an eighteen-year-old girl, who had lost her father, was poor, and had a hope of making an honourable marriage, was formally accused by one of her female neighbours.6 This episode from a little town documents particularly clearly the gap which existed between a family practice of birth control which went on in secret within the domestic walls, and the defensive and dramatic reaction of the single woman who found herself alone at the crossroads between dishonour and marriage. It is with respect to this woman that the system of control and repression appears to be particularly efficient, leading us to suspect that the judicial and police machinery was set up precisely for this purpose. But let us see what we know here. It is only possible to summarize the history of infanticide as a social practice or a crime by considering a series of partial views and individual problems. Despite the many studies that have been devoted to the question, not much is known about it: the term itself is used late and in an uncertain fashion, like other signs of that which has been described as the modern discovery of childhood.7 And yet no other crime has been studied, analysed, and described more, not only in the recent specialization of historical studies known as the history of crime, but in the culture of the last few centuries in general. Here more than anywhere else the historical data has been selected and at times distorted by the assumptions of those studying it, according to their chosen viewpoint. From the eighteenth century onwards such research has been influenced by the great problems of the time: in chronological order, the reform of the system of crime and punishment, the social condition of women, the religious conception of life and the Church’s defence of the right to life of the unborn child, state intervention to guarantee population growth, and the new frontiers of biology and 5 

Hanlon, Human Nature in Rural Tuscany. The case is quoted in Hanlon, Human Nature in Rural Tuscany, pp. 458–59. 7  In funereal iconography, ‘the child appeared only at a very late date, in the sixteenth century’: Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, p. 38. On the broad limits of the age known as ‘childhood’ see Niccoli, Il seme della violenza, pp. xi-xiii. That the term ‘infanticide’ does not appear before the late sixteenth century is an observation made by Trexler, ‘Infanticide in Florence’, pp. 103–05. 6 

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medical diagnosis. It is even difficult to date the moment at which infanticide began to be considered a crime in the Christian society of the West. The accusation of infanticide made by the first Christian apologists against the Romans has often been quoted to demonstrate that it was Christianity which inaugurated legislation in defence of babies and children,8 and Tertullian’s proud defence of the difference of the Christians’ attitude is rightly famous: ‘For us murder is once for all forbidden; so even the child in the womb, while yet the mother’s blood is still being drawn on to form the human being, it is not lawful for us to destroy […] He is a man, who is to be a man; the fruit is always present in the seed’.9 The ancient discussion of the question of the right of the Roman paterfamilias to decide on life or death was indirectly animated by an apologetic intent Its longevity in the study of Antiquity began at the end of the sixteenth century, when Justus Lipsius maintained that a father’s right to kill or expose his newborn baby had been practised up until the times of the emperor Gratian. By analysing the sources Lipsius used, an eighteenth-century Dutch lawyer observed that the accusations made by the early Christians contained preconceived ideas which led them to exaggerate their accusations.10 But in modern Europe it is possible to glimpse behind these discussions on the right of the Roman family, the pressing advance of state powers towards a control over gestation and birth. It was precisely in this period, as we will see, that increasingly drastic criminal laws were passed against infanticide. As for the difference which the Christians claimed to exist between their own culture and that of the pagan world, scholarly opinion has expressed very different opinions. It has been observed that it is vain to search through the ancient sources for an appreciation of the value of the life of the newborn equally as intense as that expressed by the Christians.11 When Ovid criticizes the practice of women terminating their pregnancy to preserve their beauty he opened a window onto the widespread existence in the 8 

See recently Lutterbach, ‘Der zivilisationsgeschichtliche Beitrag’. ‘Nobis vero homicidio semel interdicto etiam conceptum in utero, dum adhuc sanguis in hominem delibatur, dissolvere non licet […] Homo est et qui est futurus; etiam fructus omnis iam in semine est’: Tertullian, Apology, ix. 8. On Tertullian and Minucius Felix in the context of a careful and detailed reconstruction of the Christian attitude to abortion see Sardi, L’aborto ieri e oggi, pp. 68–70. An overall historical view of the question has now been provided by Galeotti, Storia dell’aborto. 10  ‘Sed ego […] dixero, veteres christianos, de bona fide saepe parum solicitos, Gentilibus, adversariis suis, plurima exprobrasse’: van Bynkershoek, De jure occidendi, pp. 141–232; see pp. 224–25. 11  See Assmann, ‘Werden was wir waren’. 9 

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ancient world of a ‘vastissima farmacopea nel campo sia degli abortivi che degli anticoncezionali’ (a vast pharmacopoeia in the field of both abortion-inducing and contraceptive drugs).12 But an analysis of the ancient sources has led to much more nuanced conclusions: a religion which modelled divine behaviour on human behaviour, and a state which did not consider itself damaged by the practice of abortion, left a vast margin for different opinions and choices.13 It is beyond doubt that many features of ancient culture were long echoed in the medieval vision of the formation of life: the idea that life is a gift from God appears in Greek works dating half a millennium before the Christian age, and the scientific and philosophical basis for knowledge of conception and pregnancy was laid down by the Ancients. Aristotle and Galen are the authorities which were quoted for centuries and centuries on the question of the conception, ensoulment, and development of the foetus and the physical and mental development of the human being. And then there are the great works of ancient literature which nourished the new Christian sensibility. Analogies and differences can be symbolized in the way the infants’ wails at the entrance to Hades as described by Virgil (Aeneid, vi. 426–29) return in the sighs of Dante’s limbo (Inferno, iv. 26–30). And naturally it must be remembered that behind the Christian sources lies the Hebrew Bible, with the great value it attributes to female fertility and the birth of children, seen as a sign of God’s blessing. But the climate in which the pagan and Hebrew sources were read in the first Christian centuries can be exemplified by the use which was made of the only passage from the Hebrew Bible that speaks of abortion: in Exodus (21. 22–25), a punishment was established for the harm caused by anyone who accidentally struck a pregnant woman. In the Greek Septuagint the punishment varied according to the development of the foetus: anyone who caused the abortion of a foetus which was still unformed paid a monetary fine; in the case of a formed foetus, however, the law of an eye for an eye came into force (‘anima pro anima’, in other words, capital punishment). In the Vulgate, the translation of the passage reflected the Hebrew original more faithfully and only established the law of an eye for an eye for someone who had caused the woman to die. In short, for the Bible abortion was not equivalent to murder. But in the Christian tradition 12 

Bettini, Nascere, p.  297. On the question of abortion in the ancient world, after E. Nardi’s excellent studies on legal history (see in particular Nardi, Procurato aborto nel mondo greco-romano), the reference work is the recent volume Kapparis, Abortion in the Ancient World. 13  Kapparis, Abortion in the Ancient World, pp. 195–99. See p. 169 for the reference to Antiphon for the concept of life as a gift from God.

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the passage was either simply ignored or it was taken in the Septuagint translation with its gradualistic conception of the formation of the foetus.14 Even Tertullian, though he includes abortion under the prohibition of murder, had distinguished between the seed and the fruit, between the embryo as soon as it was conceived and the complete individual. But it was with Saint Augustine that the idea imposed itself of ensoulment as subsequent to conception. And it was in the context of the uncertainties of this tradition that those who practised abortion were defined as ‘almost murderers’ in medieval preaching.15 While accepting these precedents, it is an undeniable fact however that Chris­­tian culture particularly dramatized maternal infanticide, though it still con­­sidered it to be less serious than normal murder. Proof of this is found not only in erudite sources but above all in folklore traditions, which show the extraordinary degree of elaboration and diffusion of myths and rites concerning the theme of infanticide, and the oppressive image of the child who dies on the very threshold of existence.16 In practice, for a long time, the death of an infant, caused accidentally or deliberately, was punished by the laws of the Church as a sin; only very slowly did a different consideration emerge, one in which it was subject to punishment by law as a crime. European Christianity classified abortion among the sins very early on: a sin of the parents, and the woman in particular, who thus made her entrance as a penitent into a field which was hers but in which she was to find herself increasingly alone. We find the first signs of punishment to this regard in canon 21 of the Synod of Ancyra (314 ad), which reduced to ten years an excommunication which had previously been for life for women who had an abortion. In early-medieval penitentials, from the seventh century onwards, we find differentiated punishments for a woman who deliberately aborted: if she had not yet reached the fortieth day of her pregnancy she was given a lighter punishment; if on the other hand she had passed the fortieth day then she was held to be guilty of murder.17 Fundamental and long destined 14  For a historical and philological commentary on the passage, see Houtman, Exodus, iii, 160–71 (I would like to thank Pier Cesare Bori for the reference). 15  Women who practised abortion were defined as ‘quasi homicidae’ by the archbishop of Pisa around the mid thirteenth century: Visconti, Les sermons et la visite pastorale, ed. by Beriou and le Masne de Chermont, p. 477; the source indicated by the editor is Raymundus de Pennaforti, Summa de paenitentia, ed. by Ochoa and Diez, ii. i: De homicidio, 6 (p. 448). 16  See O’Connor, Child Murderess and Dead Child Traditions. My thanks to Silvano Cavazza for this reference. 17  A summary review of the sources is provided by Lutterbach, ‘Der zivilisationsgeschichtliche Beitrag’, pp. 13–15.

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to be heard was the distinction between the child who died without baptism and the baptized child: ‘it is a grave sin to lose a soul’, we read in an ancient Irish penitential, where the parents responsible are punished with a year of penitence on bread and water and abstinence from sex.18 To let an infant die before baptism is one of the sins indicated in the Roman-Germanic Pontifical of the tenth century.19 Rarefied sources like these, however, which are difficult to interpret, do not allow us to reconstruct the characteristics of the question in that period; as often happens, the dramatic way in which the problem of infanticide was experienced in subsequent centuries came to reverberate on the sources. Sources conveniently selected and at times re-written have been made to act as proof of the continuity of the Church’s approach on the subject. This is the case of the bequest for the foundation of a foundling hospital in Milan, which was allegedly written as early as 787 by an archpriest from Milan called Dateo. A late copy fell into the hands of Ludovico Antonio Muratori, who published it in his Antiquitates Italicae; but the language of the document, its violent accusations against murderous mothers, its description of the way in which the fruits of sinful love come to be thrown into the sewers, and the dramatic way in which it stresses the risk of failing to baptize seem to belong to a much later age.20 In the mid thirteenth century, it was still possible for the Dominican bishop of Lyons, Stephen of Bourbon, to identify the practice of infanticide in his work combating the superstition and witchcraft linked to the cult of the holy greyhound saint Guinefort, without however punishing it severely.21 18  ‘Magnum est crimen animam perdere’, Penitentialis Vinniani, ed. by Bieler, pp. 74–92, ch. 47, p. 92). On these sources see Mores, ‘“Susceptus de fonte est”’. 19  ‘Si infans per negligentiam moritur ante Baptismum’, Le pontifical romano-germanique, ed. by Vogel and Elze, ii, 239. 20  ‘Quia frequenter […] concipientes ex adulterio, ne prodantur in publico, fetos teneros necant, et absque baptismatis lavacro parvulos ad tartara mittunt, quia nullum reperient locum, in quo servare vivos valeant, et celare possint adulterii stuprum; sed per cloacas et sterquilinia, fluminaque proiciunt …’: Muratori, ‘Dissertatio trigesima septima’. The document is quoted, without comment, by Albini, ‘L’infanzia a Milano nel Quattrocento’, p. 155 n. 45, and by Hünecke, I trovatelli di Milano, pp. 70–71. In the eleventh century, according to the Historia Mediolanensis of Landulf Junior (cited by Hünecke, I trovatelli di Milano, p. 71), there was a hospital in Milan in the eleventh century for the ‘infantulos qui ante ecclesiae ianuas a parentibus qui eos nutrire ac fovere minime valebant nimia paupertate attenuati, mittebantur’. The tone here is completely different, stressing the poverty of the parents. My thanks to Francesco Mores for his observations and comments. 21  See Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound, p. 35.

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The intervention of criminal law besides the law of the Church came later. One of Charlemagne’s capitularies made the killing of a child equivalent to murder: it was evidently difficult for people even to consider as serious the killing of someone who was not yet a grown man.22 It is a fact that in Iceland and Norway, in the Anglo-Saxon world, and on the margins of the Christian world in general, the practice of eliminating unwanted infants was still largely permitted; the secular courts only dealt with the most clamorous cases of infanticide, leaving the ecclesiastical courts to deal with all the others, which were considered in any case more as sins than as crimes.23 In the customary law of Anjou and Maine, the punishment was death at the stake, but only for a woman who repeated the crime; and this law, which was adopted by St Louis, remained in force up until the late fourteenth century.24 The sense of a change in climate can also be perceived in the dramatic increase in the seriousness of the crime. Preachers’ voices widely complained of the violence of customs, but also of the ease and freedom of sexual relations which led to unwanted pregnancies and the practice of abortion: in his Lenten preaching in Nantes around 1460–70, Olivier Maillard spoke of the cries of infants drowning in latrines, ponds, and rivers, as people got rid of these unwanted fruits.25 It was an image which by this time was on its way to becoming a commonplace in ecclesiastical culture. The accusation aimed at adulterous women of suppressing new-born babies to hide their sins from their husbands goes back to the synods of the fourth century, and was subsequently re-launched by the monk Dionysius Exiguus.26 It was taken up again 22 

‘Si quis infantem necaverit ut homicida teneatur’, Sacrorum Conciliorum, ed. by Mansi, xvii.2, p. 1060; see Brissaud, ‘L’infanticide à la fin du Moyen-Âge’, p. 246. 23  Noted by Heywood, A History of Childhood, pp. 74–75. According to Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, ‘In medieval England, infanticide was not treated as homicide and dealt with in the secular courts, but was a lesser crime left to the Church courts’, p. 474; yet this was probably not due to a greater or lesser perception of the seriousness of the act, but rather to the dividing line which then existed then between a sin and a crime. 24  Brissaud, ‘L’infanticide à la fin du Moyen-Âge’, pp. 246–47. 25  Brissaud, ‘L’infanticide à la fin du Moyen-Âge’, pp. 246–47, which refers to Samouillan, Étude sur la chaire, p. 316. 26  The contents of the canon of the Synod of Ancyra, in Asia Minor, and Elvira, in Spain, at the beginning of the fourth century, was summarized in the sixth century by the monk Dionysius Exiguus, who speaks of women ‘quae fornicantur et partos suos necant’; the Synod of Ancyra referred to the case of a woman who ‘per adulterium absente marito suo conceperit, idque post facinus occiderit’. See the detailed reconstruction by Walter, ‘Die Sage der Gründung von Santo Spirito’, pp. 844–45.

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in a striking painting from the late fifteenth century, of a darkly accusatory nature, which stands out from the pictorial representations of ordinary maternity which were then widespread in Italian hospitals.27 Painted on the walls of the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Rome at the end of the fifteenth century was a remarkable scene of birth as the preface to a crime: the mother, who we see in the background lying in bed assisted by a servant girl who holds the baby in her arms, appears in a chronologically later scene, in the foreground, as she throws the baby into the river while the servant holds up her hands in horror. There is a written commentary which points to the abhorrent nature of the mother’s behaviour: she is one of those cruel women (‘nefariae mulieres’, ‘crudeles matres’) guilty of having secret and forbidden sexual intercourse (clandestinum stuprum), who, in order to free herself from shame, throws her child into the river by night. The third part of the story shows the fisherman’s nets hauling the tiny corpses to the surface. The fresco was commissioned by Pope Sixtus IV, but the hospital had been founded by Innocent III, who had also opened it up to abandoned infants. In his ascetic writings on the misery of the human condition, the then cardinal Lothario di Segni had expressed his deep compassion for the condition of newborns who inherited the sins of their parents, and were condemned if they were unbaptized; as pope he had seen to it that there was a place to receive them.28 In reality, as it has been demonstrated,29 this pictorial manifesto took its ingredients from a tradition that had previously matured in the shadow of Innocent III’s work to impose celibacy on the clergy and to provide a rigid definition of the external boundaries of the Church and the system of sacraments. On one hand, that programme had made baptism obligatory for newborn babies as the moment of their entry into the Church, thus increasing the responsibility of those who failed to administer the sacrament; on the other, it had made it necessary for churchmen to conceal the proof of their relations with the opposite sex, increasing the need to turn to abortion and infanticide. By opening its doors to abandoned newborns, therefore, the Ospedale di Santo Spirito was a sort of remedy offered by the ecclesiastical establishment, to tackle a problem which was suddenly becoming more serious precisely because of the clergy. With time, the official legend written on the fresco of the hospital came exclusively to blame women, in conformity with the traditional anti-feminism 27 

I have not been able to consult the study by Lehmann, Die Geburt in der Kunst. These aspects are pointed out in Bolton, ‘“Received in His Name”’. 29  On the Santo Spirito fresco, see the fundamental study by Walter, ‘Die Sage der Gründung von Santo Spirito’. 28 

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of ecclesiastical culture; but now it did so with greater acrimony, echoing the tone and the arguments of the Milanese text by pseudo-Dateo. In practice, documents of this kind demonstrate the emergence of the crime of infanticide as something which aroused particular concern in the ecclesiastical world of the late Middle Ages, a preoccupation which placed women at centre stage, women suspected of committing a crime to hide the fruits of their sins. The image of cruel mothers, throwing children born from sinful love into rivers and sewers, was to pass from the sermons of the friars to the accusations made during the trials for infanticide, to re-emerge later in the accusations of debauchery which Protestants described as typical of the ‘Papist’ female monasteries.30 But behind the controversies between the various Churches, a new reality was making progress which was to reveal itself as decisive in aggravating these forms of repression. It was increasingly the case to find political authorities intervening in the field of public morality, in the relationship between female honour and the honour of the city, disorder in the family and the legitimacy of the state — one aspect of the symbolic links between the political body and the female body which were of particular importance in pre-enlightenment society of the ancien regime.31 There was only one solution: sexuality had to be channelled into the family. For this reason, institutions of control were established on one hand for categories which were dangerous or exposed to risk — prostitutes, waifs and strays, unmarried young women, and widows — on the other, all relations outside marriage were condemned; but while for men the offence was only a moral sin, which was easily pardonable, for women and their children it was a crime punishable by law which carried the heavy civic penalty of being branded with dishonour. Those who had up to then been defined as natural children became illegitimate; and if they were poor, dishonoured women saw prostitution open itself up to them as their only future. And these processes of social exclusion advanced hand in hand with increasingly severe punishment for infanticide. One voice which stood out from the crowd was that of the chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson. In a collection of writings put together to mark the Diocesan Synod held in Rheims in 1408, which aimed to present to the bishop and the clergy those teachings which were necessary for the care 30 

‘[I]t troubles me to think of, much more to relate, those frequent abortions and murdering of infants in their nunneries’, Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. by Jackson, i. ii. 2, §4, p. 599. 31  Significant aspects of this phenomenon have been reconstructed by Zarri, Recinti; see in particular ch. I, part 2, ‘L’onore della città’, pp. 70–81; and ch. IV, ‘Nozze mistiche e nozze sacre tra Medioevo ed età moderna’, pp. 251–388.

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of souls, Gerson dealt with the problems which arose from the practice of public penance.32 We learn from his appeal that those parents and wet nurses, but above all those poor mothers (pauperes madres), who had lost children — often not by any fault of their own but because of some accident — were condemned to carry out extremely long acts of public penance lasting up to seven years, with fasting and suffering, which were heaped upon that bitterest of pain (ultra dolorem acerbissimum), the death of a child. The picture painted by Gerson shows in the meantime that the ancient practice of public penance was still alive and well right up into the fifteenth century, despite the establishment of secret sacramental confession after 1215 and the specialization of the Mendicant Orders in this office. The Chancellor of Paris was concerned to avoid adding pain to pain, and advised the ecclesiastical authorities to adopt an attitude of respect and understanding towards these women, in such a way as to re-unite the bonds of affection within the family. The plan to give ecclesiastical power a pastoral orientation was to make some headway among the ideals of reform which flourished in Western Christendom in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the meantime, Gerson advised the clergy to take seriously the task of explaining to parents the precautions they should take to avoid the accidental death of their children before and after birth. They should not strike pregnant women nor force them to carry out strenuous work; after birth, the principal danger was of babies suffocating, so babies should not be kept in their parents’ beds. The long series of suggestions shows the new sensitivity of a man of the church towards the condition of women and the problems of pregnancy and child rearing. Gerson’s experience is confirmed by what was happening around 1500 in the diocese of Fiesole. Here there is a sudden increase in the number of times the bishop is recorded as having lifted the sentence of excommunication against parents guilty of having brought about the death of their children. The parents were ordered to carry out penance in the form of a public humiliation and the payment of a pecuniary fine; and in the same period a Florentine craftsman invented the ‘arcuccio’, a device for preventing babies from being suffocated by their blankets. 33 Cardinal Borromeo followed the same path again at the end of the century as he attempted to breathe new life into the institution of public penance in his archdiocese, and devoted great attention to measures for avoiding the suffocation of babies: the most visible traces of his efforts remained the generalized 32  The text has been edited in a wide-ranging and perceptive study by Gauvard and Ouy, ‘Ger­­son et l’infanticide’; I would like to thank Carlo Ginzburg for bringing this to my attention. 33  Trexler, ‘Infanticide in Florence’, p. 108, but the whole article is fundamental.

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imposition of the ‘cunino’, a cot for newborn babies, who were to be kept out of their parents’ bed, and the excommunication ‘latae sententiae’ of mothers who did not possess one.34 These were harsh, drastic decisions, akin to Gerson’s in their concerns, but far removed in their method and spirit. For anyone hoping to understand a phenomenon like infanticide, so elusive and secret by its very nature, these are clues to a profound change. The cases which Gerson spoke of and those which the Italian bishops — including Borromeo — dealt with remain indistinct, since they could have been accidental deaths just as easily as deliberate acts. The fact that there is a higher percentage of females than males in the cases of infanticide dealt with by the bishop of Fiesole leads us to suppose that there may have been a deliberate selection behind the random nature of the incidents. But it is still true that while the ecclesiastical authorities saw themselves urged by Gerson to assume a pastoral, educational, and understanding attitude, and while public penance for serious sins with its humiliating harshness was giving way to private confession dominated by a morality of intention, the subject of infanticide was becoming more openly the competence of the criminal justice system of the lay power. In this transition, the forms and rituals of the one were taken up by the other — in France, for example, a similarity has been pointed out between ecclesiastical public penance and the ‘amende honorable’ of lay justice.35 As Richard Trexler has written, ‘What is certain is that in […] late fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe, homicide against children was becoming a distinct judiciable crime’.36 The process of criminalizing infanticide carried out by the lay justice system is documented from the moment of its appearance as a crime in the requests for pardon submitted to the King of France between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. These are extraordinary documents for their description not only of the crimes, but also of the circumstances that those who presented them held to be most suited to incline the King to clemency. Among the cases set out, a good number involve infanticide. The fact that there were men of the law who were ready to draw up these requests is itself proof of the fact that it was possible to obtain a pardon: and in a certain number of cases, these ‘lettres de remission’ were granted.37 Things were gradually to change. In the course 34 

See de Boer, The Conquest of the Soul, pp. 236–45. See Gauvard and Ouy, ‘Gerson et l’infanticide’, p. 66, which refers to the wide-ranging study Gauvard, ‘De grace especial’. 36  Trexler, ‘Infanticide in Florence’, p. 103. 37  Even if only in a very small percentage of cases: out of 1366 letters granted to the inhabitants of Poitiers between 1302 and 1502 only eleven cases of infanticide were pardoned: 35 

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of the modern age the ability to grant a pardon continued to be a substantial part of the King’s power; but crimes classed as ‘nefandum’ (unspeakable) were generally excluded from this sphere, and infanticide (even though there were exceptions to the rule) was an ‘unspeakable’ crime.38 The inclusion of infanticide in the category of ‘crimen nefandum’ was probably due on one hand to the emergence of the obsession with witchcraft and the stories of ritual infanticide, and on the other to the political powers’ advance into the sphere of the production of human life.39 As long as it was considered as an ordinary crime, one of those subject to the royal pardon, however, these cases of infanticide were described and recounted by lawyers, and animated by the feelings of those who petitioned. And by appearing in the light of day not as something horrendous, bestial, and unspeakable, but as acts motivated by social constraints and deepseated fears, they always sought justification with the same words: shame, dishonour, and fear. Public disgrace, shame of dishonour in the eyes of the world, fear of punishment for a husband, brothers, or parents. There was a clear awareness, therefore, of the social causes which led to the crime. But the process of criminalizing infanticide was rapidly to take giant steps, as the definition of the crime became simpler and more rigid. In the medieval statutes and in common and canon law the word covered a range of behaviour which was broader and in part different from the simple suppression of a newborn baby. To perform an abortion (by means of physical constrictions or with herbal preparations) was infanticide, as was the simple act of getting rid of the corpse of a still-born baby. It was infanticide to strike a pregnant woman in such a way as to induce an abortion.40 The stories which appear in the requests for pardon presented to the King of France open up a window onto a social life where the crime in its various forms was undoubtedly widespread. There were the most diverse of circumstances: wives who betrayed far-away husbands and then did away with the fruit of their betrayal; priests who forced their mistresses to get rid of the evidence of their sin; young, very young women, terrified by the thought of what awaited them, who got rid of their babies by drownBrissaud, ‘L’infanticide à la fin du Moyen-Âge’, p. 251, n. 91 bis. 38  In 1686, for example, the Milanese confraternity of San Giovanni obtained a pardon for a case of infanticide: see Cantù, Beccaria e il diritto penale, p. 322. 39  It is significant that infanticide had not yet been placed in the category of ‘nefandum’ in the centuries of the late Middle Ages studied by Chiffoleau, ‘Dire l’indicible’. 40  In French customary law this crime is known as ‘encis’; see Brissaud, ‘L’infanticide à la fin du Moyen-Âge’, p. 230–31, n. 4. This rule was generally valid; we find it applied in Germany in the seventeenth century: see Rublack, ‘Pregnancy and Childbirth’, p. 103.

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ing them, strangling them, or cutting their throats. But with the late fifteenth century the requests for pardon come to an end: a crime which, if discovered, knows no pardon, is enveloped in silence.41 The early modern age appears to be characterized, therefore by an intensifi­ cation of the surveillance over women’s sex lives and by the progressive transfer of the task of disciplining sexual behaviour from the family to the Church and the State. Sexual reproduction was rigidly channelled within the family as an institution, and any relationship not protected by marriage was criminalized. Pastoral projects such as Gerson’s had some possibility of obtaining consent and success thanks to the needs of the new political order, which aimed to guar­­antee and to control the conjugal unit. This was the common path taken by different political and religious cultures and realities: the rigid Protestant morality which the confessional State adopted as its own functioned as a norm for intervening to control the formation of families; and an analogous process led the post-Tridentine Catholic Church to combat the tradition which recognized practical consent between a man and a woman as the foundation of marriage, and to impose celebration in church and registration in the parish as the only means of access to relations between the sexes and legitimate marriage. With these considerations we have moved on from the history of infanticide as a social practice and a sin persecuted by the Church, to the history of a crime punished by law. It is a transition which is difficult to date but which has crudely obvious results. When the crime made its entrance onto the scene of judicial practice, it did so in the guise of a single, isolated protagonist: a woman as a mother with no husband. The centuries of the modern age mark a high point in the crim­­ inalization and persecution of women, but not of all of them in the same way. As Richard Trexler has remarked, ‘The law and the conscience of Europe in the sixteenth century vented its force upon old women and unwed mothers’. 42 The cruellest imagination was given free rein in the choice of punishment: buried alive, burned at the stake, forced to wear the corpse of their murdered baby, or a reproduction of it, round their necks on the way to the scaffold, women condemned for infanticide faced terrible suffering and were shown to the crowds with the aim of educating through terror. Such was the case of Francesca, a woman from Pistoia, who was condemned in 1405. She was forced to make the journey of infamy to the scaffold riding backwards on a don41  ‘The latest pardon granted for an infanticide in the Poitou series is Jan. 1478–79’, as pointed out by Davis, Fiction in the Archives, p. 194. 42  Trexler, ‘Infanticide in Florence’, p. 105.

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key, with a sack around her neck containing the tiny corpse of her murdered infant.43 Not unlike her, in 1495, a condemned woman in Metz had one of her hands cut off before dying at the stake, and was forced to carry a wooden puppet and a painted child around her neck.44 From city statutes to imperial laws, abhorrence of the crime is reflected in the terrifying nature of its punishments, and as the number of trials increased, so the punishments became harsher. Yet this does not mean that the number of crimes increased. As it has been observed, ‘Prosecution and incidence of a crime are not automatically related’.45 The age of religious reform, with its general tendency towards a stricter morality and strong and widespread social control, accentuated a process which was already under way.46 The imperial laws reflect a punitive will which concentrated above all on unmarried women, who were suspected of concealing their pregnancies with infanticide: from the criminal law of Bamberg in 1507 to that issued by Charles V, the famous Constitutio penalis Carolina of 1532, the punishment sanctioned for the crime of infanticide — understood in the sense of the murder of a baby born ‘alive and with his limbs formed’ — was the death penalty coupled with suffering and torment. This norm was to remain on the ordinary horizon of the courts of the Empire up until the reforms of the eighteenth century, acting as a fundamental reference point for European jurisprudence. The ‘Carolina’ also stipulated that there should be an investigation to ascertain whether any acts of infanticide had occurred which had remained secret: the female body became a field of investigation and often its own worst enemy, because it was enough for breast milk to be present or for the belly to swell and suddenly return to normal to spark an investigation and justify interrogation with torture.47 From this moment on, inspection of the female body became an ordinary procedure for ascertaining whether a crime had been committed (or even to 43 

This story is told in an enlightening study by Walter, ‘Infanticidio a Ponte Bocci’. Brissaud, ‘L’infanticide à la fin du Moyen-Âge’, p. 249. 45  Trexler, ‘Infanticide in Florence’, p. 103. 46  According to Richard van Dülmen, the process of criminalizing women was strongly influenced by ‘das moralische Bewußtsein nach der Reformation’: van Dülmen, Frauen vor Gericht, p. 29. 47  See Die peinliche Gerichtsordnung Kaiser Karls V., ed. by Radbruch, pp. 84–85. Alessi, Il processo penale provides a useful survey of the context. On the precedents to the ‘Carolina’ and the subsequent criminal laws inspired by it (in France 1556, Lithuania 1588, England 1623/24, and even Russia) see Trexler, ‘Infanticide in Florence’, p. 103, n. 40. On the effective practice of having midwives examine the breasts of women under suspicion, see van Dülmen, Frauen vor Gericht, p. 36. 44 

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prevent the crime, as we will see). Once a crime had been ascertained, harsh punishment followed. Hanged, buried alive, burned, drowned in a sack, or impaled, women condemned for infanticide might find their punishments alleviated in some way only by the margin of discretion in the sentences: sometimes ‘mercy’ might be shown, and instead of being burnt at the stake or buried alive, the woman might be decapitated.48 The only mitigating circumstance was the presumption of madness, of not being ‘compos mentis’. But the relentless march of the law against murderous mothers knew no pause. From the second half of the sixteenth century onwards pregnancy and child­­ birth became subjects of growing political importance. After a phase in which infanticide was deterred through punishment came the implementation of systems of preventative control: all unmarried pregnant women thus became potential murderers and had to be watched over by the public authorities. A veritable model of how the power of the state intended to tackle the question is provided by the King of France, Henri II. The obligation to report any pregnancy to the state by means of a ‘Déclaration de grossesse’, which he imposed in 1556, is an exemplary case of the addition of a legal sanction to a question of public morality, strengthening the institution of the family. The women themselves had to make their own self-declaration: those of them who, pregnant and unwed, ‘having hid their pregnancy and the birth, leave their child to die without it receiving baptism’,49 would be condemned to death. This was not an isolated case of political will; quite the opposite. In the first place the edict was renewed several times: in 1586 Henri III ordered it to be read publicly and solemnly in churches every three months, and the legal records document its long-lasting effectiveness.50 What is more, the French example 48 

We find the expression of ‘mercy’ in the sentence against a woman from Novazzano in the Italian bailiwicks of Switzerland, who was decapitated in 1579 instead of being buried alive; in the same way, in 1637 the sentence of burning at the stake for infanticide was commuted to decapitation: see Baratti, ‘Giustizia e criminalità’, in particular p. 375. On the spread of infanticide as a crime in this area, see Mena, ‘Pratiche dell’infanticido’. But on the history of the control over pregnancy in the Mendrisio area now see the important research by Spinelli, ‘Grossesses illégitimes devant la justice criminelle’, which I have been able to read thanks to the author’s kindness; only part of the thesis has so far been published under the title Spinelli, ‘Relazioni illecite in una comunità cisalpina’. Dr Spinelli has explored the rich documentation regarding illegitimate pregnancies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century in the bailiwick of Mendrisio, demonstrating among other things how the judicial procedures grafted themselves onto the dynamics of the community, and the prevalence of the battle against extra-marital relations. 49  See Phan, ‘Les déclarations de grossesses en France’. 50  Farr, Authority and Sexuality, p. 127.

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was followed throughout Europe. In 1587 an ordinance by the Palatine Elector used the same terms, adding that any illegitimate children who died would end up in hell, even if they had been baptized.51 On the basis of these precedents, James I of England issued a new piece of legislation on infanticide, and the amendments proposed by the Puritans in the House of Commons Commission to which the law was referred accentuated its harsh moralizing intent. 52 The crime was subject to capital punishment, and above all a clear distinction was introduced between infanticide within the family and that committed by unmarried women. If the former were held to be innocent until proven guilty, for the latter, any birth followed by the death of a child after a previously unreported pregnancy entailed the presumption of guilt. The aim was to control sexual behaviour. 53 These measures affirmed an ideal social order in which the triumph of the legitimate family subject to the power of its head advanced hand in hand with that of the absolute monarchy.54 Analo­g ous measures were passed in Sweden (1627) and Denmark (1638). With laws of this kind the sovereign power worked to defend the life of children, and above all to control sexuality by watching over unmarried women from the poorer classes and those whose husbands were absent. The figure of the ‘malleva­dore della sicurezza del parto’ came into being, the name given to the male figure who had to be nominated by any unmarried pregnant women, whose job it was to provide a guarantee for these woman and to ensure that the birth took place regularly and the baby was entrusted to the hospital, paying what was required. This is a figure we find in the most varied of political systems, the incarnation of the idea of woman as a defective person, a person with no legal status, unable to act publicly in her own right. The ‘mallevadore del parto’ was the subject of precise laws created by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo III, a true model tutor of morality in his state, according to the most bigoted Counter-Reformation criteria.55 51 

See Harrington, Reordering Marriage, pp. 250–51. See Hoffer and Hull, Murdering Mothers, p. 22. 53  According to Beattie, Crime and the Courts, p. 113, ‘The Act seems to have been aimed as much against immoral behaviour as against the killing of children’. On the interpretation of the measure in the eighteenth century Beattie refers to Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, i, 430–36. 54  This is an observation made by Renaut, ‘Le droit et l’enfant’, p. 381. 55  After the letter dated 9 October, 1691 aimed at repressing ‘amori disonesti’, which can be found in Legislazione toscana raccolta, ed. by Cantini, xx, 242, Cosimo III sent the ‘giusdicenti’ of the Grand Duchy a new circular on 25 July, 1701, in which he made it obligatory for unmar52 

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Women were also surrounded by a fine network of surveillance. In Milan, midwives who were called on to visit or to assist servants who had become pregnant were forced to report them secretly to their relatives and masters. Where it was not possible to spy on pregnant women indirectly, a direct form of control was chosen, in the most brutal and intrusive of ways. In the Alpine valleys of Switzerland, ‘prevardazione’ was invented: this was the periodical inspection (sometimes at three-monthly intervals) of the bodies of ‘tutte le donne libere o che hanno li mariti assenti’ (all unmarried women or women whose hus­­bands are absent) to uncover any cases of illicit pregnancy or birth.56 It is a measure which shows the extent to which a woman’s body was generally consi­dered to be a dangerous object, something which did not belong to her but to her husband or, in the absence of a husband, to the public authorities. In 1705, for example, the Landvoch ordered the consuls in the Bailiwick of Locarno ‘di far prevardare, secondo il solito, tutte le donne libere, o che hanno li mariti absenti, e ritrovando qualche sospetto di gravidanza, o di parto, o qualcheduna si trovasse absente, o inobediente, debbano subito notificarla’ (have all unmarried women, or those whose husbands are absent, preventatively inspected, in the usual manner, and if any suspicion of pregnancy or birth is found, or if some­­one should be found absent, or refuses to obey, they must immediately report her). The consuls entered houses together with the midwife and subjected the women to an examination without any respect for their privacy: the petitions which the communities presented to the cantons to have the practice abolished merely succeeded, with difficulty, in getting the consuls excluded from these visits. Measures of this kind were certainly not lacking in social approval: the com­­ ments made by chroniclers or witnesses in cases of infanticide were always extremely harsh. A single example will suffice: the famous anatomist Realdo Colombo told of how he had carried out the public dissection at the University of Pisa of the body of a certain Santa, who had suffocated her two twins. Santa was a saint by name, Realdo Colombo commented, but in practice she was diaried pregnant women to indicate a ‘mallevadore della sicurezza del parto’, justifying the measure with the fact that ‘da qualche tempo in qua molto frequenti siino gl’aborti, e infanticidi’, Legislazione toscana raccolta, ed. by Cantini, xxi, 129–30. On the question see Scaduto, Stato e Chiesa sotto Leopoldo I Granduca di Toscana, p. 169. On the policy of protecting the foetus in Tuscany, I am indebted to Dr Andrea Zanotto for his suggestions. On the lawyers’ proposals regarding the question see Alessi, ‘Le gravidanze illegittime e il disagio dei giuristi’. 56  Ceschi, ‘Review of A. Pastore, Il medico in tribunale’, pp. 625 ff. See Spinelli, ‘Grossesses illégitimes devant la justice criminelle’.

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bolical and had been rightly condemned to the same fate she had inflicted on her poor children.57 Harsh laws and merciless repression produced their effects: effects reflected in the statistics in horrifying numbers for at least two centuries. The Renaissance and the Modern Age: these uplifting labels applied to periods of European history correspond in the history experienced by women to an age of impending danger and agonizing death. The numbers speak for themselves. When the history of crime is written, the language of quantity becomes the most suitable for expressing an unvarying repetitiveness. How many women have been accused of infanticide? When, how, and what was the outcome of their trials? The documents have been subjected to all these questions, above all since the moment in which women historians identified this as a specifically female crime. Thus from the second half of the twentieth century onwards research into the subject has brought to light a memory which had been buried away, the memory of women tried for infanticide. From the shadow of the archives a crowd of women appear in the books of the historians: a crowd which grows from year to year, as research progresses. In Geneva between 1595 and 1712, thirty-one women were accused of infanticide, twenty-five of whom were condemned to death, while in the same period, out of 122 women accused of witchcraft, nineteen were executed.58 In England, too, the cases of infanticide punished by the courts describe an upward trend from the end of the sixteenth century onwards. If until 1580 the crime hardly appeared in the activity of the English courts, or was treated with relative leniency, after this date there is a sudden surge in the number of cases as the sentences became harsher. 59 The persecution of witchcraft lessened while that of infanticide increased out of all proportion: between 1580 and 1709, thirty-three women were hanged in Essex for infanticide, and eleven for witchcraft.60 We find this greater severity at the court of Chester in Cheshire between 1650 and 1699: 63 cases were dealt with and twenty women were condemned to death.61 The 1624 law offered new incentives to the courts 57 

‘Pisis accidit, dum mulierem […] in publico teatro secarem […] Sanctae nomen erat, quae cum ante mensem geminos peperisset, eosque miseros vix in lucem proditos luce privasset, ac suffocasset, eam iusti iudices suffocandam iusserunt […] Sancta nomine, revera autem demoniaca potius, et venefica’, Columbi, De re anatomica libri xv (1562), p. 318. 58  Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, p. 64. 59  See Hoffer and Hull, Murdering Mothers, p. 7. 60  See Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, p. 136. 61  Dickinson and Sharpe, ‘Infanticide in Early Modern England’, p. 38.

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to act, and from this point onwards they cited illegitimate pregnancy among the evidence. This is partial information which can only give us an idea of the actual activity of the courts, and an even vaguer one of the reality of the phenomenon. For the cities of Germany we have exhaustive statistics. In Frankfurt between 1562 and 1696, forty-three women were accused of infanticide, eighteen of whom were condemned to death. In Nuremberg between 1503 and 1743, sixty-seven women were sent to the scaffold for the same crime (ninety-four between 1384 and 1803). In Dantzig, sixty-two women were executed between 1558 and 1731.62 In Württemberg, an accurate analysis of the cases documented in judicial records provides us with very precise numbers and facts, which follow an analogous trend. Ulinka Rublack has shown how cases of infanticide were by far the most prevalent in the crowd of women tried by the courts of the Protestant Archduchy of Württemberg. 63 She has used these statistics to create a description of the conflicts which set women against the moral framework of a male society, regulated with extreme severity by the Lutheran State. The curve which these statistics describe shows an increase in repression in the first years of the eighteenth century. In early modern Burgundy the statistics also follow a similar trend: between 1582 and 1730 Parliament examined fiftyeight death sentences issued by the Courts of First Instance, and confirmed forty-seven of them.64 The great wealth of archives accumulated in Italy by the criminal courts is still far from having been exploited; but we do have important research concerning the Venetian Republic, and significant soundings for the other Italian states. Realities emerge which are different in their traditions, laws, and the incidence of prevention and repression. The Venetian Republic is that which has been most thoroughly explored.65 Here the punishments seem to have been more lenient: death sentences between the fourteenth and the sixteenth century were increasingly replaced by life imprisonment; in Padua, a prison sentence — first to 20–30 years and then to shorter periods — seems to have been the usual term in the eighteenth century. The true punishment was to fall into disgrace. Widows and house servants are the dominant figures in the Sicilian 62 

See van Dülmen, Frauen vor Gericht, pp. 58–75. Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany. 64  See Farr, Authority and Sexuality, p. 132. 65  Thanks especially to Povolo, ‘Note per uno studio dell’infanticidio’; Povolo, ‘Consi­ derazioni’; Povolo, ‘Aspetti sociali e penali del reato d’infanticidio’. 63 

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world of illegitimate pregnancy;66 and the social type of the woman guilty of infanticide has been precisely identified in Venice too: ‘a single woman, with no parents or father, who supports herself by her own work, which is of an occasional nature and is carried out in agriculture. An unmarried girl, often living alone with her mother’.67 This is the human type that clearly emerges throughout the long European season of the struggle against illegitimate pregnancies: family servants in city houses, humble labourers in the countryside, almost always unmarried. And we can see the same profile personified in Lucia Cremonini. But in the reality of the Italian states, the general outlines of the new Tridentine concept of marriage included very different forms of judgement and punishment. In the Papal States, sporadic information gives the impression of an increase in the number of cases of women sent to the scaffold for infanticide. In Perugia a list of those condemned includes among others the names of Pola da Bettona, hanged on 5 April, 1549, and then Lucia and her children Clemenza and Vincenzo, sent to their death for having suffocated and buried a baby which Clemenza had given birth to; next to them we find the names of other female couples: Mattea and Usepia, and Polissena and her daughter.68 In Bologna a list of those condemned to death in the seventeenth century includes among the very few women, two hanged for infanticide, one in 1652 (Carolina Zerbini from Piaonoro) and another (Pellegrina Bonetta from Crevalcore) in 1655: both unmarried. 69 Among those who were accused but managed to escape torture was Anna Maria Mazzini, a servant from the Apennine town of Veggio, she too taken by force by her master: in her case it was successfully argued that her child had been born dead. But if she manage to escape the scaffold, she had to face a life as a beggar, exiled from the territory of the Legation of Bologna.70 In the nearby Papal Legation of Ravenna, between the mid seventeenth and the mid eighteenth century, various cases have been identified of women sent to the scaffold 66 

See the cases indicated in the volume Fiume, Onore e storia nelle società mediterranee; see in particular Catalanotto, ‘Sulla soglia del disonore’. 67  Povolo, ‘Dal versante dell’illegitimità’, p. 145. 68  See Perugia, Arch. di Stato, ex Congregazione di carità, Confraternita dei ss. Andrea e Bernardino della Giustizia, 3, fols 6v, 23v, 26r, and passim (Giustiziati ed Oblati alla Croce 1525–1826). 69  Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, Vacchetta dei giustiziati, Rubrica, unnumbered fols. But there are many more cases of infanticide in the acts of the Court of the Tor­ rone, constituting one of the largest criminal categories in the course of the entire modern age. 70  See Niccoli, Storie di ogni giorno, p. 61.

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or exceptionally pardoned: and here too they are single women, servants to the nobility, and peasant farmers.71 We could multiply the statistics and try to derive an overall impression. But legal statistics are hardly satisfactory in a case where the ‘black number’ of crimes is by common consent particularly high. It would be simpler to consider the normative system from the point of view of the poor unmarried woman faced with the birth of a child: as Lawrence Stone has pointed out, ‘Because of the tremendous incentive to the mother to conceal the birth, the child was likely to be murdered in the first few hours, or abandoned in the street, either to die there or to be dumped in a workhouse, where the prospects of survival were not much better’.72 Generalizing from the bare statistics of the criminal courts is as easy as it is futile: we find little more than a confirmation of the contents of the criminal laws or the tendency of the courts to lean in a certain direction in a given place and time. It has been noted, for example, that procedures became more inflexible in Protestant Württemberg in the age of the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War: one indication of this, which has been identified among others, is the progressive disappearance of the tradition which allowed the woman convicted of infanticide to escape punishment if someone offered to marry her.73 The harshness and the novelty of the repression is underlined by the fact that we find some woman convicted of infanticide placed in the medieval tradition of the hanged who are saved from death by the miraculous intervention of the Madonna: the story of the miracle tells of a servant who, condemned by mistake in 1589 in place of her mistress, apparently remained hanging for three days on the scaffold without dying.74 Another servant was Anne Greene, who was made pregnant by her master, got rid of her child, and was hanged in Oxfordshire in 1650; but Anne came back to life, not thanks to the intervention of the Virgin, but to the work of four anatomists, who had obtained her body for their studies and had found her still alive. Here, it has been observed, science took the place of miracle.75 71 

See Bolognesi, ‘Le vicende demografiche’, pp. 650–51. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, p. 635. As for the statistical data, Alain Corbin has frankly recognized that even in post-revolutionary France, which made systematic use of them, ‘les statistiques judiciaries […] ne dissent pas le vrai’, Preface to Tillier, Des criminelles au village, p. i. 73  Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany, pp. 183–88, 191–94. 74  The case has been studied by Chartier, ‘The Hanged Woman Miraculously Saved: An occassionnel’. 75  Milanesi talks of the ‘substitution de la religion par la science’, in Milanesi, ‘La réani72 

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Studies carried out on compact groups of cases documented by continuous series of trial reports suggest we should pay attention to the time and the place. In these reports we find stories of the lives, the stratagems, and the tragedies of poor women, which seem to repeat themselves with exasperating monotony. By piecing them together to form an overall picture, using the individual cases as the tesserae in a mosaic, it is possible to describe the moral life of entire communities.76 In this way the colour of the period provides the background and contour to the stories of infanticide: there is the Friuli countryside of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its violent, rapist, priests; and there is the French village of the nineteenth century, with its state bureaucracy and its narrow-minded neighbourhood morality. But beyond the individual stories a general tendency of the age manifests itself, solidifying itself in some way in the laws and the choices made by the public authorities. And we can glimpse the particular human figure of the infanticide slowly emerging from a tangle of cases and the various legal formulae, and she is almost exclusively a female figure. In the long series of trials held in Surrey between 1660 and the end of the eighteenth century, on average one every eighteen months, there was only one case of a man accused, and he was not found guilty. The women who were tried were not the prostitutes the law officially aimed at: those who practized the profession were, as Bernard de Mandeville pointed out, completely indifferent to the threat of dishonour which was a consequence of giving birth outside matrimony.77 It was mostly poor young women, working as servants in others people’s households, and often made pregnant by their masters: for them the birth of a child meant the loss of their honour and hence of their job. One of the many examples which could be quoted is that of Marguerite Mengant, condemned to death for infanticide in León (Finistère) in 1722 at the age of thirtythree: she was a single woman who supported herself finding work from day to day. She had been raped by the owner of a mill: a scene of mute violence, typical in these cases. She was discovered on the morning on which she gave birth by the town midwife and the parish priest, and the first question put to her on the discovery of the crime was ‘if she had baptized the child’.78 mation d’un condamné à Montpellier’, pp. 37–40. The resuscitation of Anne Greene has been studied by J. Trevor Hughes in the British Medical Journal (December, 1982), which I have not been able to see. 76  Exemplary in this sense is the case of the study by Tillier, Des criminelles au village. 77  See Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, pp. 113–24 (for Beattie’s reference to de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, see p. 114). 78  The document is quoted by Flandrin, Les amours paysannes, pp. 200–03.

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In an overall context of this kind, the Bologna case followed all the same rules. According to the laws of the Papal State, city and countryside were subject to a strict regime of control: up until 1613 in the ‘contado’ the farmers were obliged to ‘denonciare al guardiano dell’ospedale de’ bastardini di Bologna tutte le donne, che si ritroveranno gravide nelli loro Comuni e Ville che non hanveranno marito’ (report to the guardian of the foundling hospital in Bologna all the women who are pregnant in their Communes and their Villes and do not have a husband).79 Here we can see the most important form of non-purely repressive intervention used to tackle the problem of birth out of wedlock: the ‘Ospedale dei Bastardini’, one of the many institutions in the civic world of the ancien regime which assumed the task of taking in and raising abandoned children. The spontaneous charity of Christian associations had disseminated hospitals throughout the city, and these offered a solution to the problem of newborn babies abandoned by their parents, first in a general fashion and subsequently in clear forms of specialization. It was the positive and benevolent face of the problem of infanticide, a char­ itable alternative offered to those mothers who were tempted to resolve their problems by suppressing their children: they could leave their babies at a hospital, where other women would take care of them, and charitable hands would protect the lives of these unwanted babies. The presence of these institutions, which had often been created in centuries long before private initiative had come together in the confraternities and devotional associations, still constituted up until the eighteenth century a fine network carrying out a complex social function. But by this time the geography and the aims of these foundling hospitals had profoundly changed with respect to the period of their origins: present by now almost exclusively in Catholic countries,80 they policed irregular births, as the Bolognese proclamation quoted above demonstrates. From charitable institutions, they had been transformed into tools in the Church and the State’s struggle against infanticide; and their presence had set into motion a complex exchange of favours and fraud linked to the cash payment given to the institute’s wet nurses, with the paradoxical consequence of adding a probable incentive to the suppression of illegitimate children.81 The unlimited charity 79 

The declaration, preserved in the Bologna, Archivio storico, Ospedale degli Esposti, Instrumenti, b.  39, fasc.  17, is quoted by Bianchi, ‘Figli illegittimi e assistenza pubblica a Bologna’, p. 93. 80  The observation emerges from the overall panorama outlined by Hünecke, V., ‘Gli abbandoni dal xv al xix secolo’. 81  A report from 1654 regarding the Genoese hospital of Pammatone illustrates the types

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which St Vincent de Paul still tried to induce his ladies to practise was opposed by the grim morality of an aristocratic society founded on honour and regulated by repressive laws.82 But let us stay in Bologna, in the ‘Ospedale dei Bastardini’, to see how the pos­­­sibility of an alternative to the suppression of her child might have presented itself to the eyes of Lucia Cremonini. And here we come up against a difficulty which is by no means small: in order to have access to the hospital it was necessary to pay a contribution and pledge oneself to keep up regular payment. Once private charitable initiatives had been transferred to public administration, the problems of the hospital’s finances meant that it was necessary to stipulate a condition of this kind, and not only in Bologna, to avoid a situation where recourse to the hospital became a safety valve for poor families. To guarantee payment, a system was being dismantled which had allowed babies to be abandoned by anonymous hands, thanks to the presence of a wheel where they could be placed. In this way the fundamental guarantee of anonymity guaranteeing the safety of the family’s honour had disappeared, another way in which control by the civic and ecclesiastical authorities extended to a preventative check over the exis­­tence of unmarried pregnant women. Strict orders for these women to be immediately reported were issued to ‘ogni e qualunque obstetrice, o comadre da figlioli, tanto della città di Bologna quanto del contado’ (each and every mid­­ wife, both in the city of Bologna and in the contado), who had to report ‘tutte le donne inhoneste che non haveranno marito che saranno gravide o che haveranno partorito’ (all the unrespectable women who have no husband and are pregnant or have given birth).83 On 25 January, 1710, in a city where the memory of Lucia’s case was still fresh, the cardinal legate renewed the order again, stiffening the threatened punishments to the point of the death penalty; but in the text of the edict we read that, despite everything, newborn babies were still being abandoned ‘su le strade e vie publiche’ (on the roads and public highof favours and dishonest practice, whereby people entrusted their own children to the ‘ospedale degli esposti’ then to take them back again and breastfeed them while receiving payment: see Gatti, Madri e figli in una comunità rurale, pp. 94–99. Gatti’s study provides rich analytical data on the demographic trend in a small community; however it does not allow us to make any positive conclusions as to the ‘netto regresso’ of infanticide which allegedly derived from the intensification of surveillance by Church and State; see Gatti, Madri e figli in una comunità rurale, p. 12. 82  See Aragon, ‘Saint Vincent de Paul et l’abandon’. 83  The printed edict, issued by cardinal Carlo Caffa — the legate of Bologna — on 22 March, 1666, is quoted in full in Bianchi, ‘La “Famiglia” dell’Ospedale’, p. 41.

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ways), with serious risks ‘di morire di stento, o da bestie et animali esser guasti et ammazzati, come altre volte è occorso’ (of dying of hunger, or being injured and killed by beasts and animals, as has already happened).84 The system consisting of police measures and forms of assistance, the Churches’ preaching and the laws of the state, suggested, therefore, a precise outline of the person who would commit infanticide: a single, poor, woman, lacking the protection of a husband or a father, but possessing an immaterial wealth — her honour — which was jeopardized by pregnancy and childbirth. It was she, put in a position to commit a crime by a situation which offered no alternative, who was watched over by the authorities and by society. This is not the posthumous discovery of a mystery which remained hidden to the eyes of contemporaries. On the contrary: over the course of the eighteenth century an awareness emerged in many quarters that the system of rules affected the weak and defenceless. A discussion, indeed a true movement of opinion, sprung up around cases of women condemned for infanticide; and this rapidly developed over the course of the century, taking a special place in the European sensibility and culture known as the Enlightenment. It was one of the aspects of a system of punishment which appeared at the time to be cruel and ineffective: the public system of terrifying punishments, the ‘spectacle of suffering’ (éclat des supplices)85 on the body of the criminal (Michel Foucault) appeared intolerable to anyone who judged it in the name of reason. But the case of infanticide had a place of its own for many and varied reasons, among which was certainly a new attention to individual sentiments and passions as a form of reality which could not be catalogued according to the morality of official religion. During the eighteenth century the first decisive signs of a new attitude to­­ wards mothers who had committed infanticide came from that Germanic world which had reached extreme forms of judicial cruelty towards them. Johann Jakob Moser, a cultured Lutheran man of law, was greatly affected by the death of a woman who had committed infanticide, had repented, and was Christianly redeemed. In his account of Maria Salome Hausmannin, executed in the Swa­ bian city of Nördlingen on 16 August, 1715, the woman’s final days completely overshadow her crime and become an opportunity to exhort his readers to the internalized practice of meditation on the catechism and to penance: the murderous mother was alone when she gave birth and killed her child, and she confessed that in committing this act ‘against nature’, ‘crueller than a wild beast’, 84 

The proclamation is reproduced in Bianchi, ‘La “Famiglia” dell’Ospedale’, p. 23. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. by Sheridan, especially chapter 2, ‘The Spectacle of the Scaffold,’ pp. 32–69 85 

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she had not thought that Almighty God could see her even inside the walls of her own house. The experience was a decisive force in Moser’s conversion to Pietism, and it also provided the impulse for his systematic collection of cases of the condemned who repented, the fundamental nucleus of which is made up of stories of infanticide (with one exception, all stories of mothers).86 It is an indication of how the consciences of the age were struck by the frequency and the cruelty of these episodes. In no other period did the theme of infanticide reach a frequency and an intensity comparable with that found in eighteenth-century culture; and we can find a sample of its extraordinary richness precisely in German culture. The German men of letters of the ‘Sturm und Drang’ — from Goethe to Schiller, Müller to Klinger — made it the subject of plays, poems, and ballads.87 It marked the point of arrival and the maturity of a problem which appealed to the imagination and sensibility of writers after it had occupied judges and reformers in various ways. Before narrating the tragedy of Gretchen in his Faust, Goethe himself had included the question of whether the murderess of a newborn child should be punished by death, in the discussion of his doctorate in Strasburg on 6 August, 1771.88 In reply to the question posed in the thesis (number fifty-five of those put forward), Goethe merely replied indirectly, observing that it was a question discussed among the learned. This was undoubtedly true: jurisprudence was faced with an increasingly large number of cases on the subject, which some believed showed the need to make the punishments even harsher, while others maintained it was proof of the failure of the traditional criminal justice system. One thing was clear in any case, to such an extent that the legal definition itself had been changed: infanticide was 86 

Moser’s work was pulished in Tübingen in 1730 under a pseudonym (Erdmann, Erbau­ liche Todes) and was re-published in 1767: Moser, Lezte Stunden. The case of Maria Salome constitutes the first case of the first section, devoted to stories of infanticide and exposed babies, on pp. 29–50. I am indebted to Dr Reimer Eck, in charge of the rare book collection of the Staatsbibliothek in Munich and Dr Uwe Gleitsmann of the Niedersächsische Staatsund Universitätsbibliothek in Göttingen, as well as to the help of my friend, Mauro Guerrini, for having been able to consult a microfilm copy of the work. Apart from a mention in Evans, Rituals of Retribution, pp. 81–82, a proper study is still lacking on this point, despite the large amount of scholarly literature devoted to the important figure of Moser (Stuttgart, 1701–85) and his vast production. The recent collection of essays Gestrich and Lächele, Johann Jacob Moser, does not touch on these aspects. I would like to thank Dr Raffaele Giampietro of the Library of the Scuola Normale di Pisa for his help in researching this. 87  There is a complete list in Rameckers, Der Kindesmord in der Literatur der Sturm-undDrang-Periode. 88  See Wächtershäuser, Das Verbrechen des Kindesmordes im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, p. 339.

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now exclusively understood to be a crime committed by a mother against her new-born baby.89 The most diverse figures were in agreement over the causes of the crime’s repetitive nature: Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, Cesare Beccaria, and Voltaire all expressed the same opinion. ‘Certainly’, affirmed Frederick the Great in 1750, ‘the crime of those new Medeas was unpardonable; but how could anyone avoid seeing that it sprang from the difficulty in which a woman found herself, faced with the alternative of losing her honour or eliminating the fruit of a guilty love?’90 This is the opinion which was consecrated in a famous passage by Beccaria: L’infanticidio è parimenti l’effetto di una inevitabile contradizione, in cui è posta una persona, che per debolezza o per violenza abbia ceduto. Chi trovasi tra l’infamia e la morte di un essere incapace di sentirne i mali, come non preferità questa alla miseria infallibile a cui sarebbero esposti ella e l’infelice frutto? La migliore maniera di prevenire questo delitto sarebbe di proteggere con leggi efficaci la debolezza contro la tirannia, la quale esagera i vizi che non possono coprirsi col manto della virtù.91 (The murder of bastard children is, in like manner, the effect of a cruel dilemma, in which a woman finds herself, who has been seduced through weakness, or overcome by force. The alternative is, either her own infamy, or the death of a being who is incapable of feeling the loss of life. How can she avoid preferring the last to the inevitable misery of herself and her unhappy infant! The best method of preventing this crime would be effectually to protect the weak woman from that tyranny which exaggerates all vices that cannot be concealed under the cloak of virtue.)

This passage left a profound mark, partly because its readers found confir­ mation of it in the daily events that surrounded them. Voltaire began his Com­ mentaire on Beccaria’s work by recounting how the strong impressions which he had on reading it had been deepened by the news which had just reached him of the hanging of an eighteen-year-old girl guilty of having abandoned her new-born child.92 89 

As we have seen (see above, ch. 1, n. 27), this was the accepted opinion at the beginning of the eighteenth century, formulated by the criminal lawyer Georg Jac. Friedrich Meister in the following words: ‘Infanticidium, in sensu stricto et proprio, est homicidium, quod a matre in infantes recens natos committitur’, Meister, Principia, quoted by Wächtershäuser, Das Verbrechen des Kindesmordes im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, p. 7. 90  Wächtershäuser, Das Verbrechen des Kindesmordes im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, p. 29. 91  Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene, ed. by Venturi, p. 78. 92  The 1766 text of Voltaire, Commentaire sur le livre ‘Des délits et des peines’ is quoted in an appendix to Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene, ed. by Venturi, pp. 371–79; see pp. 371–72.

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Thus behind the words of the reformers and the men of letters, the faces continued to appear of the women who were dying at the hand of the executioner. It was the death of Susanna Margarethe Brandt, who ascended the scaffold in Frankfurt in 1771, that provided Goethe with the model for Gretchen in Faust. The contrast between the poetic image and the real stories experienced by the women condemned to death for infanticide can be emblematically represented by a single detail: in reality, Susanna Margarethe’s execution remained memorable for the sumptuous meal prepared for the executioner, his assistants, and the condemned woman.93 Nothing could be further from the ethereal poetic protagonist of Faust, the product of a male imagination, which had little in common with the real background of the life of these women. It is the court records that can place us more directly in contact with this background: stories of violent lives, of sordid environments, and family contexts where rape and incest are habitual.94 But in order to be moved by these events, the men who wrote about them and their readers had to imagine the woman infanticide as a model of delicate and defenceless femininity, open to trickery and pain, the victim of social conventions. Criticizing the hypocrisy of a society which condemned women for infanticide without appeal by imagining them as sordid prostitutes, even Pestalozzi portrayed them as victims of an act of love, girls guilty only of having replied to a young man’s greeting with a smile. For Pestalozzi, it was in a context of this kind that infanticide offered itself as the only means of salvation to a woman who, young and poor, found herself facing the consequences of a pregnancy out of wedlock.95 The new sensibility which arose with the eighteenth century transformed the criminals of previous centuries into tragic figures. The great sentimental poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth century — from Schiller to Goethe and Leopardi — transformed them into unknowing victims of an irreconcilable conflict between nature and the law, and attributed them with pain and pity. The drama was part of Beccaria’s ‘cruel dilemma’ between the life of the new-born baby and the ‘inevitable misery’ which the creature would condemn himself and his mother to, just by living. An intrinsically tragic situation which offered no way out, it was the stuff of poetry. On another front, 93 

van Dülmen, Frauen vor Gericht, p. 67. See the case quoted by Wächtershäuser, Das Verbrechen des Kindesmordes im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, pp. 77–78, of a young woman of twenty-nine, the daughter of a miller, condemned to death in 1777 with a sentence which the Faculty of Jurisprudence of Göttingen suggested should be commuted to life imprisonment. 95  See Pestalozzi, Sull’infanticidio. 94 

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the culture of the jurists and the discussions on justice had to measure themselves against the unbearable harshness of the punishments they had inherited from previous centuries and draw up new responses more suited to the changed sensibility. An indication of the widespread popularity of the problem can be had from a German competition dating from the late eighteenth century on the best way of dealing with a woman who has committed infanticide, which received more than 400 responses.96 Besides the solutions and the proposals, eighteenth-century literature often presents the image of a defenceless woman, the victim of a conflict between the laws of nature and social norms imbued with superstition and prejudice. Even before rulers’ certainties on the need for capital punishment were shaken up by Cesare Beccaria’s famous Essay on Crimes and Punishments, written in collaboration with Pietro Verri, someone had reached the point of legitimizing infanticide. This was Alberto Radicati di Passerano, the Piedmontese nobleman forced into exile and stripped of his possessions, who favoured the radicalization of enlightenment concepts. In 1732, in his Dissertazione filosofica sulla morte, Radicati tried to imagine how the scene of the inevitable conflict between motherhood and female honour would have taken place: Una ragazza prevenuta sull’eccellenza della verginità disprezzerà costantemente i dolci rimedi che la buona madre, Madama Natura, le presenta per l’alleviamento delle sue pene, unicamente per fare una vita tra le più infelici sotto il giogo crudele dell’educazione […] Un’altra ragazza, malgrado i pesanti pungiglioni dell’onore, è formata dalla natura così da abbandonarsi ai desideri di un amante fedele e in breve tempo essa arriva a raccogliere il frutto dei suoi dolci abbracci. ‘Mio caro bambino, esclamerà, ti amo teneramente perché sei il frutto incantevole, innocente, amabile del mio amore! Tuttavia bisogna che ti trafigga il cuore per nascondere con la morte la mia vergogna e la mia infamia che la tua vita divulgherebbe tuo malgrado, se mai le azioni più giuste e più incantevoli possono portare con ragione i nomi di cose vergognose e infami. Perdonami dunque, carissimo e amatissimo pegno dei miei affetti più dolci, se ti privo dell’essere che ti ho dato, poiché la tua morte è l’unico mezzi per conservare la mia vita e il mio onore. E tu, sacra Natura, che conosci lo stato pietoso del genere umano, costretto dalla violenza della tua più crudele nemica, l’educazione, a fare delle azioni interamente contrarie alla sua saggezza e alla tua giustizia, perdona coloro che, costretti ad offenderti, scelgono sempre l’offesa minore, come faccio io, uccidendo il mio caro bambino per conservare la mia vita e il mio onore’.97 96  Evans, Rituals of Retribution, pp. 138–9. The competition was proposed by Adrian von Lamezan of the court of Mannheim. 97  Radicati, Dissertazione filosofica sulla morte, ed. and trans. by Cavallo, pp. 121–23.

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(A girl prejudiced in favour of the excellence of virginity will constantly despise the sweet remedies that the good mother, Dame Nature, presents her to alleviate her pains, only to have one of the unhappiest lives under the cruel yoke of education […] Another girl, despite the strong impulses of honour, is made by nature in such a way as to abandon herself to the desires of a faithful lover, and she will shortly come to reap the fruit of his sweet embrace. ‘My dear child, she will exclaim, I love you tenderly because you are the enchanting, innocent, lovable fruit of my love! Yet needs must that I pierce your heart so that with your death I may hide my shame and my infamy, which your life would spread despite you, if the most just and enchanting acts can ever rightly be called shameful and infamous. Forgive me, then, dearest and most beloved proof of my sweetest affections, if I deprive you of the life that I have given you, since your death is the only way to preserve my life and my honour. And you, holy Nature, who know the piteous state of the human race, forced by the violence of your cruellest enemy, education, to act in a way entirely contrary to your wisdom and your justice, forgive those who, forced to offend you, always choose the lesser evil, as I am doing, by killing my dear child to preserve my life and my honour’.)

As the testament of a rebellious spirit who had sacrificed everything for intellectual freedom, there was very little chance that this work would have any impact on contemporary reality. It is difficult for that matter to imagine how any woman could reason with such coolness during childbirth, an event, moreover, which she was dreading. It could be said, rather, that what we have here is a clear case of that divide which separated women’s experience from men’s words, a divide which is particularly profound in the history of motherhood. One thing is certain: men could reason like this. There was one man who not only made a similar speech to himself on the birth of his unwanted children, but also recounted it to others and proposed it as rationally defendable: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 1750 Rousseau won the prize from the Académie de Dijon for his Discours sur l’inégalité. This mark of recognition rendered him euphoric, making him feel ‘free and virtuous, above fortune and opinion’, capable of self-sufficiency and able to follow the teaching that his father, his fatherland, and Plutarch had imparted. Just as he found himself philosophizing on the duties of man, the birth of his third child made him reflect on his personal obligations; and it was thus, by following ‘the laws of nature, justice, and reason’ as well as those of the Christian religion considered in its eternal values outside all Churches, that he made a decision, whose ambiguous nature he was so fully aware of that he was only just able to articulate it in an aside at the end of a long passage full of tortured meanderings: that third child had been abandoned to a foundling hospital, like his first two and the two that followed. Far from feeling any sense of guilt, Rousseau tells of how

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he was so proud of that decision as to boast of it to Diderot, Grimm, Madame d’Epinay, and Madame de Luxembourg. The sense of guilt was to mature in time, but not to such an extent as to prevent the author of the Confessions from declaring that he had done what he considered to be the best thing for his children, something he would have wished for himself. Only several years later, while he was walking through the streets of Clignancourt, when a child came up to him and squeezed his knees in a gesture of great, gratuitous affection, did this make him feel a sudden emotion at the thought that perhaps that this is what his children might have done, children whom he had abandoned and perhaps condemned to die. Rousseau recounted how he returned to that place many times, agitated by a feeling that was both sweet and sad at the same time.98 All this, written with the aim of knowing oneself and making oneself known, and not justifying oneself, offers the most lucid testimony and the most eloquent proof of the differences which exist between a father and a mother. As to the practical effects, all the investment of feelings and ideas which the culture of the eighteenth century was capable of merely produced a limited relaxation of the laws, such as that carried out by Frederick the Great, for example: in one of his first acts as sovereign, with an order of the Cabinet dated 31 July, 1740, he replaced the harsh sufferings linked to the execution imposed by the Carolina with simple decapitation.99 As for the women, the portrait which this literature in their defence gives us is somewhat nebulous. The model which many enlightenment writers reacted more or less explicitly against was the mannered picture elaborated by the ecclesiastical culture of the previous centuries, with its insistence on the virtues of patience and sacrifice and with its offer of the final goal of sanctity. In elaborating a new and different idea of motherhood, writers generally drew on the prevailing values of the goodness of nature and love. But we cannot ignore the fact that besides their humanitarian considerations and feelings of pity for the mothers condemned to death, both Frederick the Great and Voltaire made a further significant observation: with the death of the newborn and the death sentence for the mother, the state was losing two of its subjects without taking into account any other children which the mother might have produced, had she remained alive.100 The Christian mother, called on to produce children for 98 

Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, pp. 126–27. Wächtershäuser, Das Verbrechen des Kindesmordes im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, p. 70. 100  ‘E non sottrae forse la durezza del giudice due cittadini allo Stato in un colpo solo ... col frutto abortito anche la madre, che avrebbe potuto risarcire il danno per via di gravidanze all’interno del matrimonio?’ See Wächtershäuser, Das Verbrechen des Kindesmordes im Zeitalter 99 

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the Church on Earth and the Kingdom of Heaven, was replaced by another figure, the provider of subjects and soldiers for the armies of the sovereign. This did not mean that ecclesiastical literature stopped creating a sense of guilt in women for the consequences of terminating pregnancy, deliberately or not. Here is an example of the arguments that a Piedmontese clergyman could still put forward to parish priests at the end of the eighteenth century, to warn pregnant women of the consequences of dancing or other forms of entertainment: Molto più gravamente peccan le Madri incinte, quando per lor colpa abortiscano, o per qualche sforzo; o per soverchio danzare, o per sollazzo, o per qualche altra cagione, la qual tanto più peccaminosa sarebbe, quando a questo effetto fosse diretta la loro intenzione. Tali madri son doppiamente ree di omicidio, e della vita temporal de’ figliuoli, e della vita eterna, pel quale in eterno gridano al supremo Giudice vendetta contro i genitori lor parricidi.101 (Pregnant Mothers sin much more seriously when they abort by their own fault, or because of some exertion: either because they dance too much, or because they seek pleasure, or for some other reason, which would be so much the more sinful if this were their intention. These mothers are doubly guilty of murder, both of the temporal and the eternal life of their children, for which these children will cry out for all eternity to the supreme Judge for revenge against their parricidal parents.)

Almost at the same time pregnancy was being put forward for society’s veneration by a famous physician, the inventor of the ‘medical police’, the direct ancestor of the modern public health system: That woman is worthy of all veneration and respect who finds herself in that state whereby by continually reintegrating the number of citizens who die, the constitution of the universe remains unaltered, republics flourish again, and our individual families perpetuate themselves […] It is necessary therefore that with paternal care it [the ‘good police’] should ward off all dangers which threaten the mother or the foetus or both at the same time, so that every woman whose fertile bosom holds a citizen, may happily and with all possible safety reach that goal which nature and the fatherland have established for her. Nature and the fatherland had a political reference point: the State. And consequently there was a change in the condition of the pregnant woman, who continued to see pregnancy dependent on the fact of her being a wife, but who could perceive a new and exclusive presence rising up behind that of her husband:

der Aufklärung, p. 29; and for Voltaire, Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene, ed. by Venturi, pp. 372–73. 101  Borgovini, La legge di Dio e della Chiesa, v, 129.

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… the pregnant woman is no longer simply the wife of the citizen, but in a certain sense the property of the State.102

After the Church it was the State which put itself forward as a candidate for the control of a woman’s reproductive function. Even so, there was no effective reduction in abortion and infanticide, neither then nor subsequently. Reasons which were valid in different situations — natural limits to the availability of food, cultural limits fixed by the law of honour, family models to be followed, forbidden sexual relations to be concealed, or complications inherent in the rules of the marriage market; but also all that which is obscure, hidden deep in our instincts for aggression and death — continued to produce forbidden forms of behaviour, which continued, however, to weigh almost completely on the responsibility of the mother. It is difficult to estimate to what extent this was due to a women’s double obligation to accept marriages which were often undesired and to prepare and distribute food that was barely sufficient: stories of female sanctity have been identified as the most conspicuous trace of the escape routes that some women managed to take.103 Besides the sanctified path of asceticism, those guilty of and criminalized for infanticide reacted to the female condition in their own way. In practice, infanticide, which had been transformed from a social and family practice into a forbidden act carried out in secret, was increasingly becoming an almost exclusively female and maternal crime; indeed, in the way it was considered and punished, the eighteenth-century sensibility which we have seen some expressions of, left subsequent legislators with a singularly mitigated notion of the crime as the fruit of two concomitant causes — female fragility on one hand, and the defence of honour on the other — each of which was to reveal itself to be capable of arousing not only compassion, but also feelings of an ambiguous solidarity.104 102  Frank, System einer vollständigen medizinischen Polizey. The passage has been rightly stressed in the wide-ranging and important study by Filippini, La nascita straordinaria, pp. 136–37. 103  Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. 104  Godefroy, ‘Infanticide’. From his research into Bolognese criminal sources of the nineteenth century, Casarini, ‘Maternità e infanticidio a Bologna’, has identified an ‘atteggiamento tollerante’ on the part of the authorities, and a ‘relativa clemenza’ by the judges, who accepted poverty and the defence of one’s honour as mitigating factors, and, faced with an increase in the number of cases of infanticide, strengthened controls over illegitimate pregnancies. On the ‘minor grado di rimproverabilità personale’ of the crime in the Italian penal code, and the tendency to underrate human life in favour of protecting the honour of the family, see the lucid observations by Padovani, ‘I delitti nelle relazioni private’, p. 244.

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In the crime statistics we find it as a typical example — perhaps the most telling example — of what can be called the ‘dark number’ of crimes, which in this case can be hypothesized as being far greater than the number of known cases. ‘Dark’ partly because it is concealed within the depths of a history of women, from where only the light of the judicial chronicles can make it emerge. The period which saw an increase in the number of documented cases of infanticide and a growing suspicion towards maternal behaviour was that which saw the criminalization of women and investment in policing to identify the guilty pushed to their greatest extent. Once the criminalization of women abated, the practice of infanticide returned to that secret place with no history from which it had only partially emerged. From here it marginally emerged, in autobiographical testimony, as a moment of public confession, when the legalization of abortion allowed women to speak of what has been defined as ‘fra tutte le scelte umane, la più private, la più anarchica, la più solitaria’ (the most private of all human choices, the most anarchical, and the most solitary), ‘scelta spaventosa’ (a frightening choice), but one which ‘appartiene di diritto alla madre, e soltanto a lei’ (belongs by right to the mother, and to her alone).105 We could continue to explore the relationship between unwanted births, practices of eliminating children, and normative systems at length. We could continue our tour of the long period of European history from the late Mid­ dle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, namely from a time when the ancient prohibition of a religious nature relied on the intervention of criminal law and the repressive structures of the state, up to the time when the compensatory system of the traditional Christian other world had been removed and women were seen as the necessary providers of subjects, and the lenient, widespread control over behaviour came to be replaced by judicial mechanisms which brought women guilty of infanticide to the scaffold. The birth of state systems of preventative medicine or, as Johann Peter Frank defined them, ‘medical police’, laid the foundations for the present day. In this history, the first to speak are ecclesiastical sanctions, then, and often with extreme harshness, criminal laws; and the discussion of crime and punishment which developed from the eighteenth century onwards devoted ample space to the question of infanticide. Finally, in the course of its examination of the history of the lower classes, it was the historiography of the late twentieth century which investigated crime, and female crime in particular, bringing to light a mass of stories buried in the criminal archives. 105 

Ginzburg, ‘Dell’aborto’, and Ginzburg, ‘Dell’aborto’ (2001). There is a particularly significant example of the forms of inquiry of the time into the experience of pregnancy and abortion in Cecchini and others, Sesso amaro.

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In the reality of the courts as in the images elaborated by the culture of the lawyers, philosophers, and social reformers, the figure of the murderous mother has gradually acquired a position of pre-eminence. Historical research has outlined a panorama of cases of infanticide in modern European history more than once, both from a general perspective and in individual detail. In the meantime, however, precisely because of the widespread obsession with that image of the murderous mother, it is not always possible to distinguish between real cases and stories invented with the aim of terrorizing.106 And faced with the series of legal cases and formulae one wonders whether the unity constituted by the crime can really help us to understand, or whether it simply risks amalgamating under abstract categories something that is characterised by different events and people. The single woman guilty of infanticide remains hidden behind the crime that envelops her and defines her, but also hides her, forcing those who approach the docu­­ments of an individual life to see the stereotype of the crime and the mem­­brane or the connective tissue, the filter of sentiments constructed over the centuries around a female type — a sort of mask. Ever since the time of Goethe and Pestalozzi, our culture has been profoundly moved by the drama of the mur­derous mother, and it has tried to understand her and often believed it could. The ancient Medea, the cruel witch who took revenge on the unfaithful man by taking his children away for ever, has been replaced by the heartrending image of Gretchen from Faust: an abandoned girl who dies in solitude, repentant and tearful, atoning for a sin that is not only hers, but is the fruit of the diabolical presence of evil in the world. And, in recent times, ever since those who have been excluded from history — the conquered, criminals, women — have become the subject of historical research and the archives of the criminal courts have been opened up to fascinated and perplexed scholars, infanticide has appeared as a solid object, capable of being exhaustively defined: a social phenomenon which has always existed but also a characteristic theme of the Enlightenment, or even a ‘paradigm’ like witchcraft.107 In reality, over the long course of history, the destiny of two beings necessarily joined by nature 106  One example: the wide-ranging and rich review of sources and studies edited by Da Molin and Stella, ‘Famiglia e infanticidio nell’Europa preindustriale’, places documentation from criminal archives next to the works of moralists and ecclesiastics such as Ludovico Maria Sinistrari, Bartolomeo Piazza, and Francesco Cangiamila, who were literally obsessed by the image of infanticide mothers. 107  This is the idea put forward by by Richard van Dülmen, who has taken up a tradition of interest in the subject which is well-rooted in German culture (van Dülmen, Frauen vor Gericht, p. 7–8).

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— a mother and a child — have become increasingly separate, to the point of opposing one another. While the clouds of suspicion progressively gathered over the mother as a poten­­tial assassin, charitable institutions destined for the ‘proietti’, orphans, and ‘innocents’ were promoted. It was infancy which appeared to the eyes of bene­­factors as the age most in need of help: the child ‘né da sé po’ fare né con lingua po’ explicare et richiede[re] il bisogno suo’ (can neither do things by him­­self nor can he explain and ask for what he needs with his tongue), and hence ‘merita maiore compassione’ (he deserves greater compassion).108 As for the mother suspected of abandoning her children, or worse, of getting rid of them, her crime was seen as an act which placed the person who committed it beyond not only human nature but also beyond that of the beasts: an unspeakable (nefando) crime which rendered anyone who committed it worthy of the most profound abhorrence and the most extreme punishments that imagination could devise. The fact remains that the words of the laws and the practice of the courts as they functioned in the society in which Lucia Cremonini lived outline that ideal type of woman infanticide which we have seen: a poor unmarried woman, who supported herself by her own work, unprotected by power or wealth. A trap had been set up for her, and into that trap Lucia Cremonini fell, together with others. The outlines of the figure painted by the criminal cases are those of Lucia. The words of the law had spoken of her even before she was born.

108 

Gilino, La relazione ai deputati, ch. xxiii: ‘De li expositi et cura qual se ha de loro’, quoted by Albini, ‘L’infanzia a Milano nel Quattrocento’, p. 159.

Part Two: The Mother

One thing is certain: at the end of this summary review of the way in which infan­ti­cide came to be identified as a particularly serious crime and of the forms in which it was persecuted, we cannot claim to have come any closer to understanding the story of Lucia Cremonini. What we have is a framework of legal definitions and juridical practices, and the intellectual constructs which came into being around them. We have concluded from this that Lucia Cremonini found herself living in one of the fiercest moments of the battle against infanticide, which identified the crime in question as something pertaining exclusively to the mother, and which, though it used systems of dissuasion based on examples of terrifying punishments, could see the limits of this approach. But one question remains unanswered: who was Lucia Cremonini? What kind of life did she lead, what did she feel, and what motivated her actions? For the moment, lost among the crowd of women convicted of infanticide, her individual characteristics remain vague and uncertain.

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Una figliola grande, giovane fatta (A Grown Girl, a Mature Young Woman)

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long with Lucia’s life, time has erased most of the things she did, said, or thought. If she had not committed the crime of infanticide and had not been caught in the spotlight of criminal justice, her life would have passed without a trace. But even as it is, what we know is not much. We know her name, and it gives us a starting point. A name is the path linking the signs left by a life, the Ariadne’s thread that allows us to follow her footsteps backwards through the labyrinth of existence. It has rightly been said that enough lines converge on a name and depart from it to make up ‘una sorta di ragnatela a maglie strette’ (a sort of finely meshed spider’s web) from which an observer can form a picture of the ‘reticolo di rapporti sociali in cui l’individuo è inserito’ (network of social relations in which the individual is placed).1 But is a network of relations enough to define an individual? The question goes far beyond the confines of historical knowledge, yet it directly concerns this knowledge at the same time, putting its ambitions to the test and questioning its practice. A name is a good term to start with when searching for an answer; and it is here, right from the beginning, that we come up against that mixture of the repetitive and the original which characterizes every individual. Someone who is born is, for our culture at least, a completely new individual who cannot be mistaken for anyone else: the moments of birth and death belong to that individual and to that individual alone. But 1 

Ginzburg and Poni, ‘Il nome e il come’, p. 186.

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the name that this individual is given is not his alone, and it certainly was not so in the period in which Lucia was born. Lucia was born on 29 September, 1686, in Manzolino, on the plain between Modena and Bologna, and she received not one but two names: Lucia Maria.2 These were given to her on the day of her birth during the Christian rite of baptism in the parish church of San Bartolomeo. The names were probably chosen by her parents, her father, Nicola, or her mother, Caterina Testoni (who was the only person in the course of the trial to use them both); or perhaps they had been suggested by her godparents, Giuseppe Maria Mantelli and Elena Mattioli. In accordance with ancient rules, her mother was not present at the baptism: rendered impure by childbirth, no mother could enter a church before a fixed time and a traditional rite of purification. This was the way in which the folklore rules governing the rites of passage had formed a close alliance with the Christian sacraments; and if other European cultures had begun to dissolve that alliance, it was still valid in the religious rites of the Po valley plain.3 Her father could, and probably did, accompany her, even though the birth of a baby girl was not considered to be a reason for celebration. It was the father, in any case, who gave the name. Those chosen for Lucia were not original, nor did they aim to be so: the originality of the sign, the tendency towards the exclusive possession of a name which immediately brings to mind a special individual, was not part of that culture. The choice was guided by a completely different criterion, a renewal of the name of someone who had already lived on this earth: it could be the memory of an ancestor, who thus came back to life in some way in the being who bore his name. It was in any case the act of a supplicant memory and a request for protection to the spirit of a saint, the saint which could guarantee the most effective form of aid. In Christian culture the saints took up almost all the room that other cultures reserved for the protective figures of the ancestors. It was the names of the saints which were invoked in ritual moments, not only in the face of life’s difficulties, but also simply in the everyday act of going to sleep at night. Their memory returned finally when someone entrusted their soul to them, if and when a will was made, or in prayers for the dying. Because it was necessary to find a patron who was popular and believed to be powerful, the same names mostly ended up repeating themselves. As a rule, in Catholic countries, a woman was given the name of the 2  As the Archpriest of the church of Manzolino testified, taking the information from the baptism register: Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663, quire of unnumbered folios inserted at fol. 32v–33r. 3  See Cressy, ‘Purification, Thanksgiving, and the Churching of Women’.

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Madonna. This was the name given to Nicola Cremonini’s little girl, with the addition of that of a very popular saint: the patron saint of sight, the sense that was by far the most important in common perception, giving St Lucy an important place in the panorama of patron saints available for baby girls (in Bologna the Church of the powerful Jesuit order was dedicated to Saint Lucy). Chosen according to the criterion of repetitiveness, that name had to accom­­ pany a human being throughout the course of his or her life until it became an essential part, a fundamental indication of that person’s existence, a sign to others and to oneself, something endowed with its own symbolic life of a potentially greater importance than material life itself, because guaranteeing a long life and honouring one’s name could represent a higher value than the very life of the individual who possessed it. All this was reflected in the organization and preservation of memories. Many documents from the past have been eliminated because someone wanted to erase the negative traces left by their name or by the institution and ideas it was linked to. Others were written for the opposite reason. The very survival of the name Lucia Cremonini, including the preservation of the documents relating her trial, is due to the infamy given to them by her crime. Criminal trials have filled archives and archives with the only purpose of documenting abhorrent crimes in time, and of preserving a memory of the guilty party. At times the trial records also contain some more immediate evocation of the great and terrible crimes they contain: portraits of the condemned and figurative representations of their crimes fill the walls of public buildings, their houses were razed to the ground, and columns known as ‘infami’ were erected on the land which was destined to remain vacant — all tools in a pedagogy of terror.4 As a university city, where the preservation of patriotic memories and the recording of the names of famous citizens had acquired considerable importance, Bologna had historians and chroniclers who were attentive to the events that took place in the city. In the nineteenth century a Bolognese canon, Antonio Francesco Ghiselli, devoted much of his time to setting down in writing memories taken from documents and ancient chronicles. And here we find a brief mention of the obscure name of the servant who committed infanticide, an echo of the notoriety that her trial had earned her. 5 If the new baby had 4 

We can think of Manzoni, Storia della colonna infame; see Ortalli, ‘Pingatur in Palatio’. A brief mention of the trial, taken from the manuscript Cronaca by A. F. Ghiselli, can be found in Frati, Il Settecento a Bologna, p. 27. Here I would like to remember with gratitude Antonia Cirigliano and Italo Bernabei, who were then my students at the Facoltà di Magistero of the University of Bologna, who pointed the passage out to me in a seminar paper in June, 1984. 5 

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received at birth a name which had already been used and repeated an infinite number of times, a name chosen for Christian babies to make their lives conform to the characteristics of a single model, now that name had been deposited in the city memory with an exclusively individual content, as a story of infamy. In practice what we know about Lucia derives from the information which was collected about her during the trial. She had lost her father, and had come to Bologna with her mother. Here she lived in a rented room in the house of a certain Cesare Barbieri. As we have seen, her mother went to work in the countryside, as a day labourer. Once she had grown up, the daughter also had to earn her living as a servant. She had been in the house of a certain Benedetto Zanardi for just over eight months and in that of another master — Francesco Maria Gualandi — for about six months. Both of her employers declared that she had been ‘honest and respectable’ (honesta e da bene) (Gualandi), ‘honest as she should be’ (onesta come doveva stare) (Zanardi) and that she had left her job with ‘due respect’ (I dovuti rispeti), not because she had been sacked (she resigned: ‘si è licinciata da esa’). It was her lawyer who gathered this testimony: it was part of the defence strategy to show that her employers guaranteed her ‘onestà’, proof that Lucia had been a girl of strict morals before the false step that had led her to commit the crime. This was far from being obvious: a twenty-year-old girl in service was exposed to all the risks of sexual temptation and violence. A servant lived in the house of her employers and was totally under their control: the master of the house or his sons considered her as theirs, and from the sexual intercourse which was frequently more or less imposed on them by the men of the master’s family, children were born. In earlier times these had been called ‘natural’ children, and they were left to grow up in their father’s house; in Lucia’s time they were defined as ‘illegitimate’ and as such were destined for orphanages. Surveillance over the behaviour of women in service had become tighter, uniting the interests of the family and the anti-sexual morality of the Church. It was in the interests of the family that nothing should threaten the preservation of its patrimony, which had to be passed down directly to the ‘legitimate’ descendants (in general the eldest son). With an agenda which partly converged with these interests, the Church had channelled all forms of legitimate sexuality into sacramental marriage. But the presence of poor girls in service was an opportunity and an incentive for sex with the masters of the house. A certificate of good service from the master was necessary in order to find work; it was necessary but not enough, and a certificate of good behaviour from the parish clergy was also required. Don Giovanni Francesco Manzini, rector of the parish of San Matteo delle Pescarie in which

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the house of Gualandi, Lucia’s master, stood, certified that she had spent the year 1707 in his parish and that she had ‘vissuta nel ditto tempo christianamente e frequentò li SS. Sacramenti, non havendo mai inteso cosa alcuna in contrario’ (lived in a Christian manner during this time and had frequented the holy Sacraments, never having ever heard anything to the contrary): ‘ancci, ne ho sempre havuto buone relationi’ (‘indeed’, he added, ‘I have always had good relations with her’). What the priest meant to say was that Lucia had regularly confessed, as set out in the rules of the Church. As the parish priest he had had the opportunity of hearing ‘reports’ on all the inhabitants of his parish, both in ordinary conversation and in the flow of intimate secrets that took the form of confession; and there was not much that could escape his ear. This means that he had not gathered any report of censurable sexual relations regarding the servant of the Gualandi household. And it has to be remembered that from an ecclesiastical point of view illicit relations between a master and his servant were the fault of the servant. If a confessor were to ascertain that relations of this nature had taken place it was the authoritative opinion of the ecclesiastical world that it had a duty to intervene and have the servant dismissed. So this testimony is of little value in telling us how Lucia actually lived her days as a servant. For the moment, it is the colour of the time that dominates: the grey thread of the context leaves no room for an individual profile. But the context was also made up of other people who had a decisive weight in Lucia’s life, and so we must turn our attention to them.

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he figure of the ‘young priest’ is particularly mysterious. We know nothing about him except these two attributes: he was young, and he was a man of the Church. If we know very little about Lucia, then we know nothing at all about him. We can only make abstract considerations regarding the differences between his condition and that of Lucia. A man and a priest: his sex and his status meant that he moved on another level and had different means at his disposal for leaving a record of himself. His education, the fact that he was a man, and above all a man of the Church, were the very same conditions of privilege that allowed him to avoid leaving any trace of himself in the trial. It is possible to imagine that the unknown, fleeting person who figures in the trial was perhaps then, or later became, a notable personage of the city. The trial for infanticide had no effect whatsoever on his public existence, nor did he do anything to emerge from the shadows which protected him. The historian has to accept that our curiosity will never be satisfied because of the divide that time has created between us and the events which took place in Bologna in 1709, above all, but also because of the fact that the priest was kept outside the reach of the judges who chose not to investigate him, even though it was in their power to do so. The silence that surrounds the father of the murdered baby in the trial records is striking: the paternal figure was the dominant character in written law and in the customs of the society of the time. And there were laws which severely punished anyone guilty of the crime then known as ‘rape’ — namely sexual intercourse with a woman outside marriage.

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But the Bolognese legal system did nothing to give a face to the ‘young priest’ who, according to Lucia’s account, had led her into a ‘dark, narrow corridor’ during the Carnival of 1709. The protagonist of a union that was as casual and hasty for him as it was decisive for the life of Lucia remains for us without a name as — perhaps — he did for Lucia. No judge questioned Lucia about him, no attempt was made to identify and apprehend him. Yet some slight clue about him had been given: Lucia had said that on the evening of Carnival, as she found the door to her house locked, she had been taken by the priest to the house of a certain woman in via ‘Fiaccalcollo’ (at breakneck speed). The omission made by the investigation conceals something that is worth understanding: the notion of equality before the law marks a profound divide between the present and the past, between the age after the French Revolution and the age before it. And yet the crime committed by the priest was a crime that had a place in the laws which were in force at the time: he could have been tried and punished; his very presence at the place where Carnival was being celebrated was itself an infraction of the rules governing the duties of the clergy. Carnival was by its very nature worlds apart from the ecclesiastical morality fixed over the centuries and finally regulated by the Council of Trent. Canon law had long since established the obligatory model for the priest, rigidly specifying how he should behave in his daily life and how the honour of the ecclesiastical body should be maintained (vita et honestas). Attempts at forbidding the clergy from participating in carnival licence had multiplied over time. The tradition initiated by St Carlo Borromeo had paid great attention to these themes, and it had been supported by many other bishops; but it also aroused reaction and controversy in that part of the clergy which often felt its privileges to be threatened.1 But there was much more than this for the priest to be judged on. What he had done was rape: this is how all sexual intercourse with a woman who was not one’s legitimate wife was then defined by civil and canon law. If the woman consented, then the crime was less serious and the punishment for the guilty party less severe: the statutes of Bologna, for example, stipulated a pecuniary fine.2 From the point of view of the law and the general morality and mentality, a woman’s position was clearly subordinate: even if the Council of Trent 1 

Indicative of this is the amazement expressed by the cardinal legate Aldobrandini in Ferrara in 1598 at the ban imposed by the bishop Giovanni Fontana on the clergy visiting Corso della Giovecca during the masked Carnival parade and on them wearing masks themselves: see Paliotto, Giovanni Fontana vescovo di Ferrara, p. 233 and n. 18. 2  ‘Si vero in volentem, puniatur pecunialiter’: Statuta civilia, et criminalia civitatis Bonon­ iae, ed. by Saccus, rubrica lix, i, p. 487.

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had begun to take her consent into account and consider it decisive for the purposes of marriage, this does not mean that there was anything approaching equality, or any true freedom of personal choice. As has been rightly written, ‘non è la donna che sceglie il matrimonio, ma è il matrimonio che si impone alla donna che non può non volerlo’ (it is not the woman who chooses marriage, but marriage which imposes itself on a woman who cannot but want it).3 Any kind of sexual relations, therefore, even if freely accepted, were considered to be a form of injury for which the guilty party had to provide compensation. The law protected female virginity as an asset which could only be alienated by means of a marriage contract. By considering women as weak beings, naturally exposed to the lures of the senses and the guiles of men and the devil, the law gave her the right to obtain redress from any man who raped her. The fundamental means of redress was marriage: if the man agreed to marry her the crime was erased. But in a society where inequality was rigidly codified, the barriers erected between the different states in which individuals found themselves by birth had to be taken into consideration. It was typical and frequent for a nobleman to abuse a woman of the lower classes, promising to marry her. What could be done in these cases? By elevating marriage to the status of a sacrament, the Council of Trent had given a supernatural value to the promise that a man and woman exchanged: in this way, it is said, the dignity of matrimony was consecrated, and willing consent became the substance of that which the Church defined as a sacrament. But things were different in practice. To deal with concrete situations, re­­ course was had not to abstract definitions but to the science of casuistry, which was soft and yielding, and able to adapt general rules to the effective power relations. The parish priests knew this well enough, they who had to ap­ply themselves to resolving the doubts of the faithful in the ‘congregazioni’ that were held on cases of conscience: these ‘congregazioni’ had been introduced in Bologna in the sixteenth century by cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, and they were still regularly held in the eighteenth century. In them, hypothetical cases were discussed, and those who were able to resolve them demonstrated that they were capable of administering their office; those who gave the wrong answers had to return to their studies and re-take their exams. In 1748, for example, the parish priests of Bologna discussed the following question: Lelio, a young man and the son of a rich nobleman, had managed to make love to Caia, the daughter of one of his peasant farmers, by promising to marry her. Was the 3 

Cazzetta, Praesumitur seducta, p. 116. See Lombardi, ‘Review of Cazzetta, C., ‘Prae­sumi­ tur seducta’’.

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young Lelio held to keep his promise? The correct answer was, no, Lelio was not held to compensate Caia for rape in the form of marriage. The lack of consent by Lelio’s father was enough to annul the promise. Nor could such an act be authorized which was correct in appearance only, but which in reality would have extremely negative repercussions: given the difference in their social status, Lelio’s family would be greatly dishonoured, and consequently the State would be damaged too. The loss of honour of a peasant girl was a problem that was easily resolved with money: it was enough to give Caia’s parents a sufficient dowry to marry her to one of her peers; if her relatives brought up the question of the future protection of their honour and that of the girl, she could simply be shut up in a monastery or a ‘conservatorio’.4 The ecclesiastical government of conscience, therefore, was dominated by the harsh logic of the privilege of caste, even under the leadership of a cardinal archbishop like Prospero Lambertini, later to become Pope Benedict XIV. If the nobles were thus protected from the risk of being called on to answer for their deeds, an even thicker curtain was lowered to protect the honour and the privileges of the clergy. It is useless to consult these exercises of casuistry for hypothetical cases of an ecclesiastical rapist. Not because they did not exist in reality: the oath of clerical celibacy on one hand and the striking increase in the number of clerics on the other created the conditions for cases of this kind to present themselves on a daily basis. In Italian society — and Bologna was no exception to the rule — there was not a family that did not try to entrust its surplus children to the Church: nuns if they were female, friars and above all priests if they were male. It was a system which in Catholic countries was deeply rooted in history and tradition, but one which created continual problems. On its side, it had the strength of the idea of holy celibacy and virginity, which expressed profound religious needs, older than Christianity itself, to which the Roman Church had given the legal form of canonical prohibition. Anyone who dealt with sacred things and communicated with God must refrain from dealings with sex and women. The idea that the hands of the priest offering at the altar might be impure profoundly disturbed the faithful, even before it infringed canon law. The law of the Church had to intervene to guarantee the validity of priestly mediation, regardless of the sins of individual 4  ‘Laelium in casu nedum posse, verum etiam debere ab hisce nuptiis abstinere […] alia via debet deflorator satisfacere puellae et parentibus eius, nempe ei dando tantam dotem, quantam puellae sufficiat ad aeque bene nubendum pro sua conditione, perinde ac si deflorata non fuisset; siquidem excessu dotis, maxime inter villicos, de facili sanat istam plagam’: Casus conscientiae Bononiensis diocesis, i, 291–92.

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priests: the widely-held opinion that sacred powers depended on personal qualities had been condemned as heresy. Nevertheless the obligation stipulated by the Council of Nicaea for bishops and priests not to keep women in their house had been progressively repeated and tightened. The second Lateran Council of 1139 had used the most exalted imagery to describe the sacred dignity of the body of the ecclesiast: temple of God, vase of the Lord, sacrarium of the Holy Spirit. The Fathers of the Council explained to those clerics who were sorely tried by the rule, that God would never have allowed them to be tempted above their strength.5 Nevertheless, the dignity of the ecclesiastical body was still protected by privileges and barriers. And it needed to be. While the canonical rules govern­ ing the clerical lifestyle were becoming increasingly strict, social pressure was growing to place sons and daughters under the protection of ecclesiastical privilege. When Erasmus’s humanist criticism and Luther’s harsh theological battle denied that clerical celibacy was founded on Holy Scripture, the Council of Trent responded by making the rule definitively tighter: on one hand those married men who wished to become priests were guaranteed that their bond of marriage would be unilaterally dissolved; on the other, anyone who maintained that it was lawful for priests to marry was excommunicated.6 In the meantime, Luther and various tendencies of the sixteenth-century Reformation with him, had turned their backs on the idea of the separation between clerics and laymen: all sinners in equal measure, men were also all equally included in God’s holy people, if they were baptized and believers. A starkly realistic consideration of the impossibility of dividing a human condition subject to sin into states of greater or lesser perfection led to a remedy that was the antithesis of that proposed by the Catholic Church. The Reformation responded to the obligation of celibacy, stressed and tightened by the Church of Rome, with the opposite obligation: following Luther’s example, pastors had to find a wife if they wanted to obtain a position within the Church. Serious commitments were required from men of faith, both celibacy and marriage. Behind the reciprocal insults of a Protestant world that accused priests and friars of frenzied revels and a Catholic world scandalized by the idea of the pastor as the Church’s spouse and a woman’s husband, lay serious attempts to make human reality conform to a religious ideal. Stronger than any abstract equanimity is the irony of a serious 5  ‘Cum Deus […] non […] patiatur, nos, supra id, quod possumus, tentari’: Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, ed. by Alberigo and others, p. 198, cols 1–5 (canon 6). 6  Session xxiv, ‘De matrimonio’, ‘canones de sacramento matrimonii’, Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, ed. by Alberigo and others, pp. 754–55.

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twentieth-century historian and man of the Protestant Church, who wondered which was the hardest: compulsory celibacy or compulsory marriage.7 But as our task here is to understand how a priest could walk into a woman’s life and turn it upside down without any fear of reprisal, we will have to pay some attention to the obligation of ecclesiastical celibacy in a Catholic area, its forms and its consequences. By grafting itself onto the vigorous trunk of widespread anti-clericalism, the message of the Reformation had given new impetus to the growing aversion to clerical privilege. Late-medieval anti-clericalism had given expression to the general sense of the loss of the ecclesiastical body’s religious function, from the pope to the humblest priest. That body had to be rendered sacred again, to rebuild the walls that Luther had assailed with evangelical violence (and to protect the clergy’s accumulated assets, which were being distributed in various ways in non-Catholic Europe). Thus in the Catholic part of the world the ecclesiastical body took up the defensive, becoming, in the words of Alessandro Manzoni, ‘una classe riverita e forte’ (a revered and powerful class).8 A relatively open class, however, which could be entered at the price of a cultural and religious apprenticeship. And if the upper levels of the hierarchy were reserved for the sons of rich and noble families, minor ecclesiastical benefices could always provide the means for escaping poverty and protecting oneself with the privileges of the clerical order, with the possibility, in theory at least, of ascending the highest rungs of the ladder. In a rigid society that handed power and wealth down from father to son, the clergy thus remained the only body which allowed a certain amount of social mobility, taking members of the lower classes up to the higher levels of power and wealth, or at least guaranteeing them a life free from want and hard labour. But in order to respond to the wave of criticism and to satisfy strong and widespread religious needs, it was also necessary to strengthen the rules governing clerical behaviour: from habit to tonsure, language and culture, and possibly even thoughts and devotions, an attempt had been made to give form to the Tridentine model of the chaste and well-educated priest. The pressure of criticism, now not only from the inside, and the Tridentine bishops’ work of reform annulled once and for all the hope widely-held among the clergy of the possible abolition of the rule of celibacy. A moralizing offensive was launched against what canon law defined as concubinage, but which in reality often had the social status of true marriage. So it was in Sardinia, where 7  8 

Bainton, Roly, p. 31. Manzoni, The Betrothed, trans. by Penman, p. 38.

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unions of this kind were celebrated with a special rite, and so it was in Friuli, where priests’ partners were known as ‘previde’. 9 And even during the acute phase of the ecclesiastical authorities’ offensive, the marriage of priests could still count on widespread tolerance, suggesting that there was a true ‘sfasatura tra la legge della chiesa post-tridentina e il sentire dei fedeli’ (gap between the law of the post-Tridentine Church and the feelings of the faithful). 10 The change was hard above all for the women: priests’ wives, who occupied a dignified and respected position, found themselves thrown by the law into dishonour and want.11 Falling increasingly into the sphere of transgression, priestly relations with women took on the form and the colour of veritable criminality, which often surfaced before the ecclesiastical courts and at times even before the lay courts. These were stories of ordinary violence and bullying, to which unmarried women were subjected as were married ones. Single women enjoyed little protection, often threatened by the ecclesiastical aggressor with being passed off as public prostitutes if they resisted.12 The stain on a woman’s honour always and in any case damaged the honour of their family, which had to make amends as best it could. The result was a continual flow of problems caused by the sexual misconduct of priests and friars, who were protected by the privileges of their order and in particular by the legal privilege of being judged by an ecclesiastical court. It was there that reports arrived of raped girls or jealous husbands, and accusations were made by parishioners denouncing the scandal and disorder caused by their priests or by one of the many idle clerics who wandered 9  ‘Tutti i preti di qui sono ammogliati […] sposano pubblicamente […] convivono ciascuno con la moglie e tutti trattano costei da legittima sposa ed anzi da prima signoria del paese’ (all the priests from here are married […] they get married publicly […] each of them live together with their wives and everyone treats her as a legitimate wife, and indeed as the first lady of the town), wrote a Jesuit in 1568 from Sardinia: quoted by Marongiu, ‘Unioni e convivenze “more uxorio” in Sardegna’, p. 7, n. 1. In Friuli in 1570, the visitor Bartolomeo da Porcia recorded not only widespread priestly concubinage, but also ‘voci insistenti che i preti fossero giunti a formalizzare col matrimonio le proprie unioni’ (insistent rumours that priests have formalized their unions with marriage): Paolin, ‘La visita apostolica di Bartolomeo da Porcia’, p. 137. 10  See Di Simplicio, Storia di un anticristo, p. 92. 11  Significant testimony to this is the letter written by Orsola, the wife of a priest in the diocese of Feltre, on 19 May, 1552, edited in Prosperi, La storia moderna attraverso i documenti, pp. 204–05. 12  Thus a priest from Foligno defended himself against the accusation of having entered the house of a widow by force one night, in 1567: see Metelli and Metelli, Criminalità a Foligno nella seconda metà, pp. 159–60.

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the streets. In these cases, where the documents of the trials of the diocesan ecclesiastical courts have been preserved and inventoried, the colour of daily life unfolds before our eyes in the continual emergence of questions concerning priests and women: stories which were often cut short by bloodshed, by women being thrown out of the priest’s house and forced to take themselves off to somewhere far away from the notoriety of prostitution and the weight of suspicious pregnancy. In practice the violent break created by the Protestant Reformation meant that any display of anti-clericalism was condemned as a masked form of Luther­ ­an heresy: Boccaccio’s novellas had to undergo a clean-up to remove the clerical status of many of the protagonists of his amorous adventures. But if censorship made the books chaste, priests’ lives remained lascivious. Leonardo Mirai, a parish priest from the mountains of Friuli around the turn of the sixteenth century, is a good example of how a priest in the post-Tridentine age could continue to practice ancient customs undisturbed: he had women and children, he used violence and trickery to exploit all the margins of prestige and power that his rank allowed, and he escaped the consequences of accusations and trials before the Episcopal court.13 In other cases of this kind too, the Episcopal court showed itself to be ‘surprisingly indulgent’ towards priests who had raped girls and single women with a violence that had even led to the death of the victims.14 But times were changing. Such open displays of the unlimited exercise of clerical power over the women of the parish were no longer allowed. In exchange, new and less open opportunities were offered for the ecclesiastical body to stimulate and satisfy its sexual fantasies: the sacrament of confession increasingly concentrated on sexual themes, offering space and an incentive for relationships with women. Open violence thus became hidden violence, whose designated victims were the weakest and most defenceless categories, women first and foremost. It is not that there was any lack of prohibitions and sanctions: the crime of ‘sollicitatio ad turpia’ was subject to stiff punishment. But it is a fact that compared with the continuous chain of official documents condemning such acts, which covers all four centuries of the post-Tridentine age and which refers to the seriousness of the problem, there are extremely few documents concerning the trials that effectively took place. When there were trials, they were inquisitorial trials which took place and passed sentence in the greatest of secrecy, and which only touched on those sexual acts by clerics which originated in the context of confession. 13  14 

See Comuzzi, Susanna e il parroco Mirai. See Metelli and Metelli, Criminalità a Foligno nella seconda metà, p. 160.

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The silence and the protective shadow of secrecy were the result of precise choices by the ecclesiastical authorities. It was necessary to hide the sexual misconduct of priests for the same reasons that made the clergy encourage noble families to prevent their sons from marrying peasant girls: if the honour of the nobles was a question of state, the honour of the priesthood was at one with the honour of the Church. The Church therefore was keen to avoid the scandal of the trial, unless it was forced on them by formal accusation. The documents from the archives of the Episcopal court are not lacking in their share of trials against ecclesiasts regarding the question of women; but every time, they originate in an accusation made by another man: a betrayed husband or an offended father. And, as we will remember, Lucia had neither a father nor a husband. After an accusation had been made, a trial was held before the Episcopal court because clerics enjoyed the privilege of being tried by the ecclesiastical authorities. But this did not produce true justice, even when the priest was accused with serious and circumstantiated proof, nor even when he was guilty of infanticide. This can be shown by an episode which took place in 1593 in a village in the Carnia region of Friuli. Maria Marcuz, who had confessed to infanticide, accused the priest Francesco Thimeu of having seduced her with violence and of having led her on the road to infanticide, even teaching her how to carry it out. He had said to her: ‘Quando tu avrai partorito, subito potrai metter la mano sopra la bucha della creatura’ (when you have given birth, you can immediately put your hand over the baby’s mouth); and he had shown her ‘con la man il modo che havesse da tenire, che in spacio di un’hora tal creatura saria morta’ (with his hand the way she had to hold it, so that in the space of an hour the baby will be dead). Maria did ‘tutto quello mi haveva ordinate esso prette, con metter la mano sopra la boccha della creatura subito che io l’hebbi partorita’ (all that the priest had ordered me to do, by putting my hand over the baby’s mouth as soon as I had given birth to it).15 The priest Francesco Thimeu was accused and tried. The sentence consisted of a suspension ‘a divinis’ and he was sent away from the parish; but he soon returned, without any further consequences. We do not know how many pre Francescos there have been. But admitting, though not conceding, the extreme and exceptional nature of the case, we can gain from this not only proof of the slowness and the tendency of the body of ecclesiastical judges to protect their own, but also a singular analogy between the condition of the priest and that of the unmarried woman. If the priest was excluded de iure from the marriage market, any woman who had a child by him lost the possibility of being able to marry. But there is another more signifi15 

Comuzzi, ‘“Fu nel mese di Ravador…”’, p. 41.

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cant analogy: both had to fear for the loss of their honour and damage to their status from the birth of a child. For this reason, the background noise of the sexual misconduct of the clergy which accompanies the history of ecclesiastical celibacy contains the recurrent high note of the cases of clerics who attempted to hide the proof of their contravention of the rules with infanticide. We can see the substantial solidarity of the body of ecclesiastical authorities towards them in the decision by Pope Innocent III — the pope who linked his name to the new clerical ideal of celibacy — not to suspend ‘a divinis’ a monk who had induced his mistress to abort.16 The Church was always very determined in defence of its privilege to try its own members in its own courts. There are famous examples in European and Italian history in particular. It is enough to recall one of these, linked to the famous work of a great man of culture, the Servite friar, Paolo Sarpi. In 1606, the Venetian state’s decision to incarcerate and try before its own courts two priests guilty of violence and aggression against women and various other crimes, unleashed a war of words which risked becoming a true war. But the situation in Bologna at the beginning of the eighteenth century was far different from that in Venice a century earlier, because the authority of the pope was felt on a political as well as an ecclesiastical level, investing the spiritual and the temporal world. The sexual transgressions of priests had to be eliminated or at least concealed. The accusation made by the mother of Lucia Grimaldi, a nineyear-old girl raped by a Bolognese canon in 1625, was presented before the Episcopal court; but, as Lucia recounted years later, the court ‘ha soffocato ha causa’ (buried the case).17 She became a prostitute, the inevitable consequence of the priest’s violence and the court’s injustice.18 It is hardly surprising therefore if the documents of the Episcopal court of Bologna bear no trace of the ‘young priest’ Lucia met during the Carnival of 16  Innocent III allowed him to officiate if the conceived conceptus was not ‘vivificatus’: Corpus iuris canonici, ed. by Friedberg, ii, col. 802. It is a case which has become famous in the historical and theological literature on abortion. For Noonan, Contraception, pp. 232–33, Innocent III’s letter (canon 20 of the Decretals), allows us to correct the idea that the Church constantly condemned all forms of contraception as murder. The same case is referred to (with some inaccuracy) by Duden, Der Frauenleib als Öffentlicher Ort: English translation: Duden, Disembodying Women, trans. by Hoinacki, p. 59. Lavenia, ‘“D’animal fante”’, pp. 483–526, points to another case dealt with by Martin de Azpilcueta, Doctor Navarrus, who, from his position in charge of Carlo Borromeo’s penitenitary, had to resolve the case of a priest guilty of having convinced the woman he had made pregnant to have an abortion. 17  On the episode, see Pastore, Crimine e giustizia in tempo di peste, pp. 112–14. 18  As noted by Niccoli, Il seme della violenza, pp. 184–86.

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1709. It must also be remembered that giving in to sexual temptation was not a crime, but a sin; and therefore in the likely, but for us unverifiable, event that the priest felt the need to erase his sin, it was enough for him, as it was for other clerics in his condition, to turn to the secret court of the confessional. It is true that some ultra-zealous confessors of the time believed that it was possible to break the seal of the confessional to denounce forbidden sexual practices and put a stop to them. Many priests, therefore, did not hesitate to celebrate mass without confessing this type of sin for the fear of possible reprisals.19 But they could count on the widely-held opinion that the burden of the fault lay with the woman. For centuries clerical culture had elaborated the model of woman as Eve the temptress, easy prey to the snares of the devil, tool of moral perdition. ‘Woman’ was essentially the female body. And in that body, according to moralists and preachers, there was no place in which the devil had not set his snares. Arguments of this kind, infinitely repeated, were the backbone of a cul­­ture elaborated and spread by the clergy, a culture condemned to revolve around the object of repressed desire, rendered intolerant and violent by the will to eliminate the results of any transgressions against the norm. An integral part of these transgressions was recourse to abortion and infanticide. We have looked for an individual profile, and what has emerged is a social type. The characteristics of the man that Lucia met disappear behind the figure of the cleric in search of adventure, covered by anonymity and protected by the code of silence of the institutions of a state which was called the Papal State and which had ecclesiastics in positions of government. It is not a portrait, therefore: at most it is a shadowy profile, a silhouette, which reduces a person to a stylized outline created by the background. The highly individualized features of the portrait which allowed the people of Renaissance Florence immediately to recognize Lorenzo de’ Medici and the men of his circle in the paintings by Ghirlandaio were a prerogative of the elite. Pictorial and written sources left the minor figures in the background, making it possible for the historian to create an alternative to the social type only by means of a description of the con­­text and the behaviour prevalent in the environment. This is the only road we can take if we wish to know Lucia Cremonini any better. 19 

According to what was reported to the Inquisition on 8 February, 1746, by father José de Oliveira, professor of theology at the University of Coimbra, many priests celebrated Mass without confessing, and put off confession until they could find a confessor in whose discretion they could trust: ‘Nonnulli sacerdotes violatae castitatis rei diu non praemissa confessione sacramentali, ex qua revelationis periculum timebant, celebraverint’, and they looked for ‘satis fidum sibique probatum confessarium quem aliquando perquirebant quanvis longo itinere’; Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, D 3–k, fasc. P ii D.

Chapter 6

Il Carnevale prossimo passato (The Last Carnival Past)

A

fter a childhood spent in the shadows, two moments in Lucia’s exis­­ tence were caught in the intense spotlight of public attention: two Bolog­­nese Carnivals, that of 1709 and that of 1710. Lucia took part in the festivities of the former — the meeting with the priest and the sexual encounter that left her pregnant — of her own will; she took part in the latter at the will of others. But for the moment let us look at the first of the two Carnivals. One thing is immediately clear: it was no coincidence that Lucia’s pregnancy began during Carnival. Carnival was an annual moment in which social relations were turned upside down and rules were set aside. To go out wearing a mask, to experience the turmoil of the crowd which gathered in the piazzas and under the porticos, to see the city decorations were all things that invited people to forget their everyday poverty and to celebrate the abundance of food and the pleasures of the flesh, pleasures which would then be mortified during Lent. Popular wisdom in the form of a proverb linked Carnival to an increase in the number of pregnancies.1 Besides the presence of the University (‘Bologna, la dotta’, or ‘the learned’), another fundamental characteristic of Bologna was the pleasure of the senses, the triumph of greed and sex (Bologna la grassa). And Carnival was the ultimate triumph of feasting and bodily pleasure. 1 

This is not confirmed however by an examination of the demographic statistics of a community of peasant farmers in Piedmont from the early nineteenth to the twentieth century: Gregory, Scetticismo ed empirismo, pp. 109–10.

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But Bologna was also the second city of the Papal State. Political power was in the hands of a special sovereign who was also the spiritual head of the universal (‘Catholic’) Church: his two ‘souls’, the spiritual and the temporal, manifested themselves in the forms and contents of the exercise of power in the city. Here he had to reckon with the old local ruling class of senators, who had ensured their own room for autonomy through the ‘capitoli’ they had stipulated with Pope Nicholas V, which were continually appealed to and contested. But the city’s entrance into the Papal States had had serious consequences on the government of local life, from taxation to the administration of justice, power networks, and public spectacles of a sacred and profane nature, including Carnival naturally. In early modern societies, precisely because it had been delegated by God, power had many duties towards the people, more than can be imagined from the perspective of a modern democratic society: it had to guarantee food supplies, protect public health from epidemics, regulate the water supply, ensure public order, and much more besides; and among these thing, the organization of festivals was certainly not the least important. Only during the course of the eighteenth century was a new idea of the use of time linked to work and economic productivity to induce even the authorities of the Papal State to begin cutting back on festivals, a measure which, though of a limited nature, raised all sorts of controversy and reaction.2 In the period we are looking at, however, feasts were still an essential part of social life. Their importance was such that the most violent controversies were unleashed by the periodical attempts to reduce their duration or put some restraint on the way they were celebrated. Only the voice of the penitential preachers, and the Capuchin or Jesuit missionaries in particular, returned repeatedly to a grim vision of life dominated by death and Hell. But even this rigorist version of Christianity, which had been strongly invigorated in the previous period thanks to the Protestant and Catholic reformers, ended up by siding with the festive explosions which were almost its necessary complement. Indeed even a particularly bigoted sovereign like Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany, organized and financed feasts and games (football, for example) during Carnival.3 And this moment of transgression was also valid for the clergy. The Tuscan priest, Vincenzio Benedetti celebrated it in a way that his anonymous Bolognese colleague — the one encountered by Lucia — might have liked: ‘mascherato da lombardo, con gabbana e calzini bianchi e cappello 2 

See Venturi, Settecento riformatore, i, 136–41. See Addobbati, La festa e il gioco, p. 36. On the new idea of the ‘redditività economica’ of time which imposed itself in the eighteenth century, see p. 76. 3 

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grande all’antica, armato di coltella o sciabola a spiedo interveniva alle veglie da ballo col suo violino, scherzando e familiarizzando con le ragazze’ (dressed up as a Lombard, with a white coat and socks and a big old-fashioned hat, armed with a knife or a sword, he took part in the evenings when there was dancing, with his violin, joking and familiarizing with the girls).4 He was also good at improvising serenades and ‘stornelli’, and for the ‘Calendimaggio’ feast of 1704 he composed a pretty May song imitating a work by Francesco Redi; but as he had spent May Day singing gaily through the streets of the town instead of saying Mass, a scandalized parishioner reported him he had to face the Episcopal court, which sent him away from the town. The alternating play of transgression and prohibition was part of custom: in Bologna it was precisely the ecclesiastical authorities governing the city who produced alternating bans and concessions, prohibiting festivals and then organizing them. In the registers of the Consiglio degli Anziani, to illustrate the greatest public works, pictures were drawn of the most significant carnival events to have taken place in Piazza Maggiore. Those in power were present at and took part in the festivities held to entertain the people, without any contradiction being felt to exist in the behaviour of the ecclesiastical authorities who preached war on Carnival on one hand, while organizing it on the other. In practice it was considered proof of political wisdom to grant the people the amusement and escapism of the carnival feast, while preaching the merits of Christian asceticism. The model of a rigid Catholic social life, devoid of immorality and free of heresy had been officially proposed and imposed in Bologna, the second city of the Papal State, ever since the time of the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent. Under austere bishops like Gabriele Paleotti, Tridentine reform became the victorious reaction of Lent against Carnival. And Carnival was the object of accusation even into the early eighteenth cen­­tury. On 10 January, 1702, a proclamation which appeared ‘in the usual places’ had forbidden under pain of a fine of five hundred scudi and five years in prison che niuna persona di qualsivoglia stato, grado e condizione […] ardisca di fare o per­­ mettere che si faccia, in publico o in privato, tanto in questa città di Bologna, come fuori in qualsiasi luogo della Legazione nelle case proprie o d’altri, alcuna azione carnevalesca, e in specie festini, balli, maschere o travestimenti con abiti improprii senza maschere, comedie, rappresentazioni di qualsivoglia sorte, e generalmente ogni e qualonque altra azione, spassi, e divertiment carnevaleschi.5 4  5 

Tognetti, Processi informativi ed atti criminali, pp. 25–26. The proclamation is quoted in Camerini, Il magnifico apparato, p. 45.

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(that no person of any state, rank, or condition whatsoever […] shall dare to carry out or allow to be carried out, in public or in private, both in this city of Bologna and outside in any place in the Legation in their own houses or those of others, any carnival activity, and especially parties, dances, masquerading or dressing up in unsuitable clothes without masks, plays or representations of any type, and generally any and every other carnival action, amusement, or entertainment.)

It was the pope’s desire that Christians lasciato l’uso dei divertimenti profani, applichi lo spirito e l’attentione maggiore a procurer di evitar ogni occasione di offendere il Signor Iddio, per ottenere che s’induca a deporre il suo giusto sdegno, e con esso il flagello col quale ci percuote (leaving off the custom of profane forms of amusement, should apply their spirit and their greatest attention to bringing about the avoidance of any opportunity to offend our Lord God, to make him put aside his rightful scorn and with it the lash with which he strikes us.)

It was necessary to placate God’s anger, which manifested itself in the ‘correnti calamità, che tuttavia crescono in Italia’ (present calamities, which are never­ theless on the increase in Italy). The pope was of the opinion that Carnival entertainments could unleash God’s wrath precisely because they were an opportunity for ‘molti scandali, e trascorsi pregiudiciali alla buona disciplina della vita Christiana, e all’honestà de’ costumi’ (many scandals and transgressions which are prejudicial to the correct discipline of Christian life and the propriety of customs). The idea of God as a judge who frowningly follows human actions and shows his wrath with scourges — earthquakes, epidemics, storms — underpinned the pope’s reasoning. It was a form of reasoning that could be defined as popular: it was used by preachers to induce people to penitence during natural disasters such as earthquakes, droughts, floods, or man-made tragedies, above all war. At the time, God’s wrath still manifested itself in the form of lightning, and men still placed themselves under the protection of the saints, as Martin Luther had done on the road to Erfurt on a July day in 1505 when his fear of lightning led him to vow to become a monk. If his life, and the subsequent history of Europe, had been changed by lightning it was because nature was nothing but a tool of God’s greatness and goodness, as a German Lutheran theologian reasoned in the mid eighteenth century.6 6 

Ahlwardt, Bronto-Theologie, quoted in Kittsteiner, Die Entstehung des modernen Gewissen, pp. 34–35.

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There was no real need for the pope’s proclamation, therefore. The entire Christian tradition was punctuated by examples and warnings of this kind: the sins of men unleashed the wrath of God. And among the various sins, there was one in particular which had seen an increase in the minds of men over the previous centuries to the point of assuming a dominant position and almost eclipsing the others: that which centred around sexual urges. Bridling the senses was the aim which penitential preachers worked hard to put forward. To women above all, because they were at the greatest risk of falling into sin. Had it not been Eve who had involved Adam in original sin, the source of all evil? And had that sin not been of a sexual nature, as the exegetes were increasingly saying? Were women for that matter not increasingly occupied with their own appearance, spending money on clothes and jewellery, and bankrupting their poor husbands with their great expense? There was not a city statute that did not devote pages and pages to regulating women’s clothing and ornaments.7 Here is where the battle against sin had to start. ‘Perché mai’ (Why on earth), the Capuchin Friar wondered, pretendono certe figlie di addobbarsi, di tanto abbellirsi, se non per essere vedute, amate e più rispettate? Che dirò di quelle che talora si fanno vedere col seno scoperto, studiando di averlo a loro genio, e che sia aggradevole alla gioventù? (do certain girls insist on dressing themselves up, to make themselves so attractive, unless it is to be seen, loved, and respected more? What can I say about those who sometimes show themselves with their bosom uncovered, trying to show it off in a way they think is best and more attractive to young men?)

To see and be seen: it is sight, women’s sight, which is the sense that has to be controlled and punished. ‘What are they doing at the window? What are they doing at the door? They are watching the people passing by, observing anyone who happens to come along; and how many different things present themselves to their eyes?’ This is why people go to parties and dances. The remedy of not going to parties is not enough if the gaze is not chastened. And if the supreme example was that of the heroic sanctity of the girl who ‘dato di piglio ad un coltello, si cavò ambo gli occhi’ (having taken hold of a knife, cut out both her eyes), under normal conditions it was enough to subject one’s gaze to strict discipline: ‘Moderate i vostri sguardi, portate sempre modesti e bassi i vostri occhi’

7 

A systematic collection organized by region has begun with the volume Muzzarelli, La legislazione suntuaria.

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(Moderate your gaze, always keep your eyes chastened and lowered).8 Lowering your eyes was an obligatory theme in devotional language, a language elaborated by clerical culture to educate women.9 And the fact that women were kept under tight surveillance meant that there was a long set of rules governing the place, the time, and the way in which courtship could take place: the window, the door, the street, and the piazza were steps on the vertiginous road to ruin. Carnival, with its masquerading and dancing, represented the greatest possible exposure to the opportunity of sin. The long war against popular entertainment, in the form of sexual and gastronomic freedom, meant that the upholders of official religion had to combat this annual feast, which overturned order and rules. From their point of view, the account which Lucia Cremonini gave of her 1709 Carnival was a confirmation that their diagnosis was right. But the official religious culture did not only express itself through the preach­­ing of the moralists. A long series of rules governed legitimate behaviour in the permitted and institutionalized ways in which the two sexes could meet: betrothal and marriage. Legal norms and religious legitimacy had to be imposed on sexual relations, correcting and eradicating where possible the forms and rites of a tradition inspired by the natural religion of fertility. Sex had to be made possible only within marriage and only for the sake of procreation: all forms of amorous behaviour, therefore, were subject to rigid verification by the moralists to ascertain how much unjustified pleasure they involved. Confessors had their handbooks providing descriptions of illicit sexual relations, to be used in the pedagogy of their dialogue with penitents. Marriage had been sanctified as a sacrament, but at the cost of creating a rigorous inventory of the legitimate acts it could contain, and above all at the socially higher and more difficult cost of creating a vacuum around it. The forms of courtship ritualized in the ‘sponsalia’ or betrothal were the first to undergo restrictions. This promise of future matrimony remained, however (from an ecclesiastical point of view), the most resistant and dangerous form of social legitimization of the bond of love, and it remained alive and undisturbed alongside the official anti-sexual morality of the ecclesiastical body and monastic asceticism. Once the Christian conquest of the lay world was underway, marriage offered itself as the decisive battle. The ecclesiastical point of view was charac­terized on 8 

Da Crescentino, Dottrina cristiana, pp. 196–304 (I am indebted to Walter Barberis for bringing this to my attention with his kind gift). 9  On the ascetic and literary topos of Christian modesty, see Pozzi, ‘Occhi bassi’ (1986), and Pozzi, ‘Occhi bassi’ (1996). But the question of sight as a sense to be tamed or to be exalted still requires adequate study.

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one hand by the concrete and realistic awareness of those things that reached the ears of confessors, and on the other by a conviction of the radically corrupt nature of natural instincts thanks to original sin. That which had been good in the Garden of Eden had, after the fall of Adam and Eve, become the dangerous, irresistible cause of the ruin of the human race. Marriage had to exist to propagate the human race and above all to maintain and enlarge the Christian presence in the world. But the sexual instinct was a source of corruption and irreparable ruin: it undermined institutions, broke the bonds of society, and created illusions of a possible happiness other than that of the Kingdom of Heaven, the only true source of happiness for the Christian. Hence the insistence and the determined, patient, and unfaltering persistence with which the ecclesiastical authorities periodically repeated the same instructions on the question of betrothal, the ‘sponsali’. Any contact outside the home was forbidden, even when it took place at the woman’s window, and women were put on their guard against the illicit use of the promise of matrimony. It was the trap which men used to snare women and take their virginity, leaving them with the prospect of a life ruined by motherhood out of wedlock. It was necessary therefore for the promise of matrimony to take place under the control of the family. The authority of the father, although constrained within certain limits by canon law which protected the principle of exogamy, remained the fundamental point of reference. Without the consent of the head of the family there could be no legitimate marriage. The alliance between family and Church was created more in practice than in principle and it was an alliance which protected the barriers of social propriety. ‘Non è cosa nel vivere nostro civile che abbia più difficultà che el maritare convenientemente le sue figliuole’ (There is nothing in our civil society that is more difficult than suitably marrying one’s daughters), as Francesco Guicciardini wrote. 10 The rules of the post-Tridentine age made the parish priest the father’s precious ally. It was he who had the task of closely interrogating the future fiancé to ascertain the seriousness of his intentions and his father’s consent. The rules of good Catholic morality allowed the betrothed couple to see one another once the binding promise had been made, but never alone, and never far from others. As the moralists’ adage went, no one will ever think that a man and a woman alone in a remote place are reciting a Paternoster together. Hence the ‘conversazione’ of the betrothed — in the old sense of being together — had to be carefully channelled within precise rules. It was the family’s job to make sure that no opportunity was left open for freedom which might lead the betrothed 10 

Guicciardini, ‘Ricordi’, ed. by de Caprariis, p. 119.

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couple to consummate ‘rape’, namely sexual intercourse outside marriage. Those who did not do their duty were punished by an excommunication reserved to the bishop, which was sometimes aggravated by a pecuniary fine.11 Anyone who con­­­travened these rules, therefore, was threatened with excommunication; but the ease with which it was possible to receive absolution, even with a simple confession made immediately before legitimate marriage, offers us a glimpse of the true state of affairs. And the resistance of Carnival in the regime of the strict ecclesiastical governing of customs in the second city of the Papal States is also significant.

11 

In the statutes of 1788 diocesan synod of the cardinal of Bologna, Andrea Giovanetti, the fine added to the excommunication amounted to 10 golden coins (decem aureorum): Synodus dioecesana Bononiensi, p. 144. But see all of chapter xi of book ii, De Matrimonii Sacramento, pp. 139–53.

Chapter 7

‘He robbed me of my honour and took my virginity’

L

ucia clearly remembered what she had eaten that carnival evening with the priest: mortadella, tagliolini, bread, and wine in the inn of the Morelli at San Bernardino. Her memory of her sexual encounter, on the other hand, was briefer: ‘mi sverginò, e doppo la prima volta mi conobbe carnalmente doi o tre volte’ (he took my virginity, and after the first time he knew me carnally another two or three times). The food was more important, and food and sex were in any case concrete realities, not susceptible to any fantastic re-elaboration or sentimental colouring. If it is difficult to recreate the sentimental life of the past in general, then that of the lower classes presents its own particular difficulties. It is as if the senses and the feelings were not meant to be involved in equal measure. There is no expression of tenderness, affection, passion, and all of that which (for us) makes up the spectrum of our emotional lives. Did love exist for Lucia? Those who have studied love in the peasant society of prenineteenth-century Europe have been unable to provide an answer to the question, or have described human landscapes devastated by hardship and violence, where relationships between men and women were difficult and those between women and women even more so.1

1 

‘L’amour existe-t-il?’: Flandrin, Les amours paysannes, p. 79. For the sentimental life of the seventeenth-century Bologna countryside see Niccoli, Storie di ogni giorno, ch. i, pp. 3–22: ‘Amarsi “al tempo che si sgarbiva la fava”’.

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To know the feelings of the past is an irresolvable problem when all we have at our disposal are the meagre traces left by a trial; and what we have read here contains no expression of any feelings. In general, the sources that mention them are those produced by religious or political authorities, and they have an educational or punitive aim: for women in particular there are works of morality which teach how to distinguish between true love — the love of God — and the deceptive and guilty forms of human love. What we do not have is a transcription of the words said and heard, of forms of courtship. When we find them, it is because a relationship had ended badly, that is to say, not in marriage. Men and women appeared before the judges when a promise of marriage had not been kept, or in any case when the bond between them had been broken or was threatened. Then any re-evocation of the sexual relations that had taken place was forced to assume the frosty tone used for a description of something taken by deception, without respecting a pact. In the matrimonial court cases in which a promise had been broken, the descriptions of these encounters speak of rapid, violent relations, extorted by the man with a promise or marriage and submitted to rather than accepted by the woman.2 As we have said, the law defined as rape any form of sexual intercourse with an unmarried woman. But it is enough to read some of the reports of the rape trials to overturn this definition: the relations described constituted rape in the current sense of the word, namely rapid, violent, wordless aggression. It is enough to leaf through a couple of files from the criminal trials of the period Lucia lived in to have some idea. Here, for example, is the formal accusation made by Camilla Franchini, reported in Bologna on 13 April, 1723: ‘Mi levò la scaranna di sotto, et io caddi in terra poi esso Giacomo m’alzò la stanella et si sfbbiò li suoi bragoni, et poi mi venne sopra la panza’ (He pulled the chair away from under me and I fell to the ground, and then he, Giacomo, pulled up my skirt and undid his trousers, and then came on top of me on my belly).3 Pulling the chair away is the rough trick which is also found in the accusation made by Maria Tonelli on 13 March: ‘Ritrovandomi io a sedere in una scaranna, il medesimo Mazzanti mi prese, e mi tirò in terra, e poi mi si tirò adosso, e poi mi alzò la stanella e la camiscia d’avanti, ed esso sciolse le braghe’ (I was sitting on a chair when the same Mazzanti took hold of me, and pulled me to the ground, 2 

The sexual intercourse that resulted in pregnancy for Caterina Armani from Agrone (Brescia) in 1658 was ‘più subíto che accettato’, according to the documents of the trial studied by Faoro, ‘“Nefandum dogma”’, p. 433. 3  Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7846/3, fasc. 21, unnumbered fols.

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and then he got on top of me, and then he lifted up my skirt and the front of my blouse and he undid his trousers).4 The rapid scene of violence described in the statement made by Isabella Amadori on 18 January is not dissimilar: Mi pigliò all’improviso a traverse, e mi fece andare in ditto fosso e poi mi buttò a terra colla faccia voltata all’insu et io perché hebbi assai paura, non ero ardita di dire cosa alcuna, e poi alzatomi i panni d’avanti et particularmente la camiscia mi si buttò sopra e slacciatosi li suoi bragoni si cavò fuori da essi il suo uccello ben grosso e duro e l’apontò alla mia naturra, nella quale lo fece entrare a forza con mio gran dolore perché ero putta vergine (He suddenly grabbed me from one side and he made me get into the said ditch and then he threw me to the ground with my face upwards and, because I was very scared, I was not bold enough to say anything, and then lifting up my clothes in front and my blouse in particular, he threw himself on top of me, and undoing his trousers he took out his cock which was big and hard and placed it against my nature, which he forced it to enter giving me great pain because I was a virgin.)5

We could multiply the number of examples; but the pattern repeats itself, and not because of some polite formula. The accusations are full of details narrated with a language that knows no euphemisms or periphrasis. The judges continually found themselves listening to accounts of this kind. Rape as male overpowering, continued in other forms in the judicial rites. Women who had been made pregnant by force were taken by the authorities before a judge and were forced to speak. Subjection to violence was their lot: this was the part they played in their accounts, the natural way in which the roles had been distributed. They described wordless scenes: if women appeared in them as passive and silent figures, even the men rarely spoke and then only to make some scornful remark. On 12 April, 1723, Anna Maria Giovagnoni, brought before the court because she had given birth to a baby had by her master, described how intercourse had begun in the following way: ‘Mi prese e buttò sopra del letto alla supina […] mi principiò a dire che stasevo per serva, et che però voleva che facessi a modo suo, e poi ciò ditto mi also li panni’ (He grabbed me and threw me on the bed on my back […] he started to say that I was a servant and so I had to do what he wanted, and having said this he lifted up my clothes).6 Scorn and silence were the rule in the relationship between master and servant. Thus on 18 January, 1723, as she had been found to be pregnant, Isabella Amadori 4 

Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7846/3, fasc. 23. Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7846/3, fasc. 29. 6  Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7846/3, fasc. 30. 5 

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declared that it was her master’s responsibility. He had taken her by violence and in silence, then ‘fatto questo si also in piedi dicendo “razza sfondradona è un pezzo che te l’havevo giurata” ma però mai più mi haveva ditto cosa alcuna sopra di questo, e poi se ne andò via’ (having done this he stood up saying, ‘You, breed of big whore! I‘ve been meaning to do this to you for a while’, but he never said anything else about it, and then he went away).7 The words were few, the language of emotion was absent, and women figure in these stories like an object, aware of being one, a passive victim of sudden, mute violence, almost like an unleashing of the forces of nature: this is the role they were assigned and the role which offered itself up to them as their only form of self-representation before the judge. Was this really the way it happened? Men accused of rape almost always defended themselves by portraying themselves as victims of female provocation, accusing the women of having taken an active part, like expert temptresses. But the battle was not even, and what was at stake differed greatly: for the man there was the danger of marriage or a dowry in compensation; for the woman, the loss of her honour and being forced into the infamous profession of prostitution. It was inevitable therefore that women should represent themselves as passive victims of male violence even when things had been otherwise: it was the only way in which they could call on the protection of the law.8 We will not look at these stories to find the free, private dimension of a rela­­ tionship between two people. Also because, in looking at the words of the witnesses, it is clear that the surrounding society’s gaze was able to follow practically every detail of every act and every encounter. Everything was public: even the bed was a place which was normally used by more than one person, and what took place there was registered and recounted without reticence. The words that were used to describe the relations between the sexes were those of a group of men, united and vain in commenting on each of their conquests, while the female group appears more closed and subdued, ready to spy, criticize, and fall apart through jealousy or envy. One fact cannot be disputed: despite the campaign by the public and ecclesiastical authorities of the Tridentine period to regulate the preliminary forms of love and bring marriage within the fold of the holy edifice, in reality courtship long continued to present itself among the lower classes as a request for sex by the man in view to a possible marriage, 7 

Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7846/3, fasc. 29. This clearly emerges from a comparison between the records of the same cases heard before different courts, as has been demonstrated well by Lombardi, ‘Il reato di stupro tra foro ecclesiastico e foro secolare’, pp. 360–65. 8 

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which when it took place was mostly celebrated after the birth of one or more children. Representations of love as a sentiment did exist, having spread into popular culture through the literature of chivalric poems and romances read during the ‘veglie’ or evening gatherings. Even here the prohibitions of ecclesiastical censorship and the preaching of the moralists, in their repetitive complaints, are an indication that the criticized practice persisted, rather than the sign of a change in customs. The thirst for amazing and moving stories was satisfied in many ways. Stories of unhappy love circulated in the literature of the cases of justice. In Bologna a long-lasting echo had been left by the case of two people defined in a pamphlet as ‘unhappy lovers’: the noblewoman Ippolita Passarotti and Ludovico Lantinelli, who both met their end on the scaffold in 1587 for having poisoned her father.9 These were stories from another social level, a world where feelings and passions were at home. It is difficult to imagine to what extent they could have seduced the imagination of the popular world, which looked on those stories bridging the social gap with their imagination. The eyes of the servants penetrated their masters’ houses and built up their own idea of the way in which the other class lived, so close and yet so far away: and Lucia, as we know, had had an experience of this kind. There was also another place where the events of the day and the affairs of the dominant classes, like those of the lower classes, were commented on and judged: the church. There the sermons of the parish priests, the bishops, and above all the missionaries attempted to lead behaviour back to the official morality, which was valid for rich and poor alike. The ecclesiastical world kept its eye on the dominant classes in particular. The family which is discussed in the instructions for the clergy is above all that of the senatorial class. We can see evidence of this in the mission carried out in Bologna at the beginning of the eighteenth century by one of the most famous Jesuit missionaries, Fulvio Fontana. The Jesuits had been the first to discover the peoples of the mountains and the fields, and they had designated and pursued their cultural conquest with the slogan the ‘Indie di qua’ (Indies over here), portraying the ignorance and natural goodness of the inhabitants with the exotic colours of the American savages. But Fulvio Fontana belonged by now to another epoch with respect to that of Francesco Saverio and the popular missions aimed at farmers and shepherds. In his Bolognese mission he exercised his oratorical skill on the theme of love and the family. What the Jesuit proposed 9 

Croce, Caso compassionevole. On the echoes of the case in subsequent literary works see Natale, ‘La piazza della crudeltà e delle meraviglie’, pp. 191–92.

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in his pilgrimages through central and northern Italy and Switzerland was an idea of the family as a reality of affection and reciprocal aid between husband and wife, parents and children. The model of the Christian family he put forward contrasted with the hedonism of the upper classes and the bourgeois pursuit of success and social climbing by means of culture and the professions. One of his works against the fashion of male chaperones, the ‘cicisbei’, aroused a storm in the polite society of Bologna where Lucia Creminini was carrying out her duties as a servant.10 Fontana wanted his words to be a vehicle of virtue capable of penetrating like the sunlight ‘both in the palazzi of the great and in the hovels of the peasants’.11 But he concentrated his gaze on what happened in the palazzi rather than the hovels because it was there that love was dominant. And he invited Bolognese noblewomen to meditate on the words of someone no better defined than a ‘Santa Dama’, who ‘era solita dire, che assai più paura haveva dell’amore che del diavolo, perché l’amore è una passione veementissima’ (used to say that she was much more afraid of love that she was of the devil, because love is such a strong passion).12 ‘Living fashionably’, this was the great threat perceived by the Jesuit missionary; and the fashion he targeted was the game of love with the ‘cicisbei’, encounters with these knights in attendance ‘alle carrozze, nelle sale da giuoco, nelle camere, negli appartamenti più segreti di propria casa’ (at the carriages, in the gaming rooms, in the bedrooms, and in the most secret apartments of one’s house), where they were received by their ladies dressed (or rather undressed) ‘alla succinta’ (scantily). The fashion of the ‘cicisbei’ was ‘l’invenzione più diabolica che potesse mai ritrovarsi’ (the most diabolical invention that there has ever been).13 The Jesuit’s accusations aroused a strong reaction in the city. While his pamph­­let was selling out, the noble families of the city asked the inquisitor (unsuccessfully, it would appear) to ban it.14 Nor did he merely limit himself to words. Fontana used to interfere personally in the love affairs of the nobil10  Fontana’s book was entitled Lo specchio proposto alle dame nella vita d’una gran dama descritta dallo Spirito Santo […], and it led to a case being brought against him at the court of the Inquisition by a group of noblemen. I would like to thank Giampaolo Brizzi for having provided me with a reproduction of the copy belonging to the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Arciginnasio of Bologna. See Fontana, Raccolta d’alcune lettere, letter XXIV, pp. 112–15. 11  Fontana, Sei instruzioni cristiane direttive, p. vii. 12  Fontana, Lo specchio proposto alle dame, p. 32. 13  Fontana, Lo specchio proposto alle dame, pp. 25–31. 14  The story is told by his nephew, Fontana, Raccolta d’alcune lettere, pp. 112–16.

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ity: the secrets and moral scruples that he picked up in confession led him to intervene directly in those illicit relationships to try and convert the sinners. There had been an irresistible temptation to use the secrets learnt in confession for some time, especially in the Company of Jesus, a body of specialists in spiritual direction, which was led to moral interventionism by its very nature. Later in the century it was a pope of Bolognese origin, Prospero Lambertini, Pope Benedict XIV, who was firmly to condemn those who believed this type of intervention legitimate: at stake was the secret of the confessional, or, as it was called at the time, the sacramental seal.15 What was more, poking your nose into the sexual misdemeanours of polite society was not without risk: Fulvio Fontana was once confronted by a nobleman with a pistol in his hand and risked seeing ‘cambiato il teatro delle missioni in treatro di tragedia’ (the theatre of the missions transformed into a theatre of tragedy).16 In Bologna, therefore, as in the vaster European world, Christian culture was engaged more than ever in the ancient endeavour of constructing a dam against the pleasures of the world. With the growing availability of economic means and consumer goods the pleasure of life grew and new codes of behaviour were elaborated. These gave women yet again, as they had done in the Renaissance courts, the task of dictating the rules of the game of love, with a more or less fictitious autonomy in the governing of the rules of the relationship between the sexes. The consumption of goods and sensual love coincided in making woman the ideal centre of pleasure. But here European culture was divided along deep fault lines marked by religious education as well as by the economy. In England, which received exotic goods and riches through trade, opposing the wind of fashion that invited freedom, pleasure, and the tendency to follow the natural force of inclination, were the Calvinist traditions of the dominant classes: the new social rules were founded therefore on respectability.17 In the Catholic world of Italy, responsibility for enforcing moral canons was held by a clergy lined up in the defence of tradition and concerned about the risks that the fashions of the dominant classes might incur on the lower classes, and on their servants in the first place. By creating a positive model of the Christian family in his sermons, father Fontana dealt frankly with the problem of the risks women in service were exposed to:

15 

On the condemnation of ‘sigillismo’ see Prosperi, L’Inquisizione romana, pp. 413–34. Fontana, Raccolta d’alcune lettere, p. 21. 17  As suggested by Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, pp. 69–81. 16 

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Che se poi la guerra vi viene dal padrone e non sapete come fare a difendervi, siete in obbligo de lasciarlo mentre potete, e di far quanto vi ordinerà il dotto e prudente confessore, a cui dovete necessariamente dir tutto, per non errare. (If then war is waged by your master and you do not know how to defend yourself, you must leave him while you can, and do what your learned and prudent confessor orders you to do, and you must tell this confessor everything so as not to make a mistake.)18

It was not much of a remedy. As we have already seen, the answers that the Bolog­­ nese confessors were trained to provide in the case of unequal relationships had to protect the noble honour of the master Lelio and not that of the Caia the peasant girl.19 In practice, love remained something for gentlemen. The watertight bulkhead of early modern society guaranteed a separation between aristocratic and popular morality. Let us return to Lucia. Perhaps she had heard the sermons of father Fontana; and perhaps she had spoken of love and fashion with her female companions on feast days. But we cannot say anything certain about the nature of her sentimental education, nor in general about the culture and the education she had received. We do not know if she could read and write or whether any traces of her writing remain. For her as for other girls of her condition, she may only have received a religious education at most. Never as then had the Church been so concerned to educate the faithful: the ideal of the ‘educated Christian’ had produced, besides the work by Paolo Segneri junior of the same title (the ‘Cristiano istruito’), a vast literature and a network of educational institutions. But the teaching imparted by the parish, the preachers, or by those zealous propagators of Christian doctrine who, as Cesare Bianchetti had done in Bologna, gathered up poor children from the streets, was of an oral, mnemonic nature, limited to a few notions: principles of a religious and moral nature, prayers, the elementary knowledge needed to take the sacraments of confession and communion. In Bologna at that time, as in the small communities of its territory, there were schools of another type; but access to reading and writing was rigorously reserved for boys. Even in the city system of parish schools of doctrine, the idea of including girls (and the inter-class nature of those schools) had already created problems in the immediate aftermath of the Council of Trent. And as late as the eve of the French Revolution, cardinal Gioannetti was 18  Fontana, Sei instruzioni cristiane direttive, p. 252. On the dangers for the other servants see p. 238. 19  See above, p. 96.

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concerned that the parish priests should take care to separate girls and boys in the Sunday meetings devoted to the teaching of doctrine.20 As for the education of Lucia’s senses and her affections, we do not know if there had been any other men in her life before that meeting with the priest in the square. In its rapid and casual nature, her relationship with the priest does not seem to have followed on from any previous acquaintance with him. There is no evidence of any other encounters with men — but this does not mean that none had taken place — of the kind that normally precede the promise of matrimony, engagement or ‘sponsali’. Marriage was present in Lucia’s horizon of hopes, as is shown by her expectation of a dowry from the parish. And courtship and sexual relations generally preceded marriage. The percentage of weddings of women who were pregnant or had children varied over the course of the centuries, but never disappeared. In Catholic Italy the ecclesiastical and state authorities used all means possible to combat any cohabitation not sanctioned by public rituals in church and official registration. But an ancient way of understanding the legal union as the sanction of an agreement which had already been made and of a proven fertility continued to exist. The very decree by the Council of Trent on the reform of marriage limited itself to ‘urging’ the married couple to avoid cohabitation before their ecclesiastical benediction.21 The attempt to channel young peoples’ choices towards a simple alternative between the conjugal or the ecclesiastical state (for women, either a nun or a wife) came up against an obstacle precisely in the ‘sponsali’. Marriage regulated by the decrees of the Council of Trent on Catholic soil was something that had to come before any sexual relations. And this because the birth of children outside marriage was not tolerated, because of a system of alliances carefully regulated by the family with the decisive support of the Church. Hence the shower of interdictions which targeted the ways and the circumstances in which young

20 

On the organization of children’s schools in the regions of Emila and Romagna in the eighteenth century, see the wide-ranging collection of studies edited by Brizzi, Il catechismo e la grammatica. The Synodus dioecesana Bononiensi, pp. 22–28, recalls the work carried out in the previous century by Cesare Bianchetti in teaching Christian doctrine in the streets to the ‘infima plebecula’. It is worth noting that for the Roman Arciconfraternita della Dottrina Cristiana, the fact that girls frequented the teaching of catechism was a condition for them receiving a dowry: see Catto, Un panopticon catechistico, p. 181. 21  According to Sánchez, Disputationum de sancto matrimonii sacramento, the council did not ban cohabitation, a sign that it did not consider it to be a mortal sin: see Flandrin, Les amours paysannes, p. 180. On the demographic sources for the study of marriage see Da Molin, Famiglia e matrimonio nell’Italia del Seicento.

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people could freely frequent one another: dances, feasts, casual meetings in the streets and the squares of the city. The only thing that is certain in fact is that Lucia knew that the man was a priest. Hence to accept to have intercourse with him — but had she accepted it or had she simply submitted to it? — was different from amorous and sexual relations with a potential husband. A woman’s job was to preserve her body intact and bar access to men: this summed up her honour. Lucia told the notary questioning her a story which contained a justification for her behaviour in its initial gerund: Essendo io putta onorata e da bene […]’ (Being an honourable and respectable girl […]). Giacomo Arrighi, the lawyer of the poor who took up her defence, also appealed to the argument of honour and, subordinately, to that of the ‘simplicity’ of his client. A humble, naïve girl, guided in her behaviour by the larger cultural threads of a society on whose lowest rung she had found herself living : this is the impression we have of Lucia when reading the few traces left of her life in the institutional documents. Is this what she was really like? One fact is certain: the first defensive reaction of someone who, because she was a woman, an orphan, and poor, had no protection, could only be to remain silent and throw herself on the pity of others. Those institutions, for that matter, had up to that point shown her a relatively protective face, following her and guiding her through her twenty-five years of life. But what does all this tell us about the feelings of a woman in Lucia’s con­­ dition, about the state of mind in which she experienced childbirth that Decem­­ ber morning in 1709? We have an explanation as formulated by Cesare Beccaria: every woman placed between the alternative of ‘l’infamia e la morte di un essere incapace di sentirne i mali’ (either her own infamy, or the death of a being who is incapable of feeling the loss of life) could not but choose the second alternative. But this explanation does not help us to understand. Beccaria speaks of a woman who rationally calculates what is to her best advantage; something far from the emotional condition of Lucia, who had just been through the shattering experience of childbirth — in complete solitude.

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he had always been alone, so she said. Was it true? At first sight it would seem difficult to believe. The documented scenes from Lucia’s life in Bol­ ogna — the crowd on the day of Carnival, the morning she gave birth, with the police and the neighbours crowding round her bed — are as far as it is possible to imagine from what we usually understand as solitude. But the solitude Lucia spoke of was something else. She had experienced a secret pregnancy alone. It is difficult to imagine how she spent the nine months in practice: we can imagine her uncertainty in interpreting the signs from her body, her initial fears, the neighbours’ looks and questions, those of her mother; finally the last and most impenetrable shadowy zone, the moment of birth, before the curious face of a neighbour appeared at the door again. A secret pregnancy meant in the first place not being able to seek the advice and experience of married women or widows. What could a girl know about pregnancy, who could help her interpret symptoms which were difficult to understand even for those who had already experienced childbirth? Pregnancy was something far different for those who experienced it legitimately from within marriage than for someone who was young and single, and had been kept in the dark about the secrets of married life by other women: at the time, it has been said, the secrets of the body divided women rather than united them.1 1 

‘For unmarried women, the state of pregnancy was one in which other women — neighbours, friends, and midwives — were not companions, but threats’: Gowing, ‘Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England’, p. 87, but the entire article is valuable.

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And here solitude appears with its true face, acquiring another meaning and another weight. Alone meant without a husband. This was the fundamental condition required for bringing children into the world. ‘I do not have a husband, nor have I ever been married’. This is how Lucia began her account of the circumstances surrounding the birth. Not having a husband was a condition of serious weakness from the legal point of view. Women were subject to male authority. Poor, with no father and no husband, Lucia found herself in a condition of isolation, and she was aware of it. There was her mother, however. But when she had given birth her mother had been absent. Lucia pointed this out: Questa mattina ho fatta detta creatura qui in questa stanza dove mi trovavo sola, ché mia madre era in campagna andando a lavorare da de’ contadini, che è tornata hoggi. (This morning I gave birth to the said baby/creature here in this room where I was alone, since my mother was in the countryside working with some farmers, from where she returned today.)

Her mother confirmed this; what is more, she violently distanced herself from the act committed by her daughter: she had nothing to do with ‘quella furfante di Lucia Maria mia figlia’ (that scoundrel Lucia Maria, my daughter). It is possible to doubt this. Lucia had after all lived through the whole of her pregnancy under the eyes of her mother and her neighbours, up until the final moment. Before the judge, Lucia Cremonini remained alone and completely isolated, the only person responsible for what she had done. Had she been so before that moment too? The question arises from a comparison with other stories which have come to light in the legal documents, from the secret world of the sup­­ pression of unwanted babies: often entire family groups appear in them, united in carrying out infanticide. The responsibility certainly weighed differently according to whether it concerned men or women. In France in 1692, a certain Claude Collet, who had helped his mistress to suppress the baby born from their relationship, was condemned to accompany her up to the scaffold; but she was hanged and he was merely a spectator.2 The mother’s condition was far dif­­ ferent. In a list of those condemned to death in Perugia in the late sixteenth century we find numerous cases of infanticide perpetrated by family groups and especially by pairs of women, united in the crime and the capital punishment: Mattea and Usepia (condemned in 1552), Clemenza di Vagnotto with 2 

See Farr, Authority and Sexuality, p. 132.

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her mother Lucia and her son Vincenzo (condemned in 1587), Polissena di Valentino and her daughter (condemned in 1590). 3 Analogous stories took place in the same period in the Medicean Grand Duchy of Tuscany, where they were treated with much less severity, however: a random survey in the records of the Florentine prison of the ‘Stinche’ at the end of the sixteenth century shows, among the names of those committed for infanticide, those of Camilla di Meo from Razzuolo, who had ‘tenuto mano a una sua figliola a soffocare il parto d’una sua creaturina’ (helped one of her daughters to suffocate a new-born baby of hers) (1587); Cassandra di Giovanni from Neppio and her daughter Maria, charged with ‘haver soffocato un parto’ (having suffocated a new-born baby) (1590); Agnola di Pagnolo and her daughter Camilla, from the town of Bagno di Romagna, imprisoned for the same reason.4 Mothers standing behind their daughters, joined to them by a bond stronger than the instinct to self-preservation, were caught up in the same ruin, and they often offered themselves up to it without resistance, with displays of affection that moved the spectators. In Ravanna, Livia and Maddalena from Linara, mother and daughter, were executed on 29 November, 1609. The member of a religious order who followed them in their final moments depicted images of a profound and intensely tender bond: when the mother was brought ‘dalla figlia per esortarle alla S. Confessione, strettamente s’abbracciarono e ben più di trenta volte si basciarono insieme, atto che fece tutti gli astanti intienerire’ (to her daughter to exhort her to make her Confession, they embraced one another tightly and kissed each other more than thirty times, something that moved all those who were there).5 Caterina Cremonini on the other hand, came out of her daughter’s trial alive. Her work in the fields had removed her from the final scene of the crime. Who knows what she would have done if she had been there. The judges did not attempt to dig any deeper into her position. And yet they might have suspected and incriminated her for having hidden her daughter’s pregnancy. They 3 

Perugia, Arch. di Stato, ex Congregazione di carità, Confraternita dei ss. Andrea e Bernar­ dino della Giustizia, 3, fols 6v, 23v, 26r. 4  Firenze, Arch. di Stato, Stinche, 176, fols 10r, 217r, 254r. Other cases of infanticide are documented on fols 5r and 234v. 5  See Successo della morte di Livia e Madalena da Linara giustiziate in Ravenna sotto li 29 novembre 1608 […] descritto da Bernardino Sacchi, confratello della Compagnia della Morte d’essa città di Ravenna, e già confessore della Compagnia della Misericordia di Roma, Forlì, Bib. Comunale, Collezioni Piancastelli, MS V/60, p. 42. The document is quoted by Casali, ‘Religione e “istruzione” cristiana’, p. 450 n. 333. There is no trace of the trial or the sentence: that this was a case of infanticide is only a hypothesis.

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could have done the same thing with the neighbours. If we look closely at the testimony given at the trial there was enough evidence to incriminate both the mother and the neighbours. The neighbouring women had realized that Lucia ‘haveva la panza granda perché era gravida’ (had a big belly because she was pregnant): in the statement made on 10 November they admitted having spoken to Lucia about it and having asked her why ‘haveva della panza grossa’ (she had a big belly). Who knows how many times they had talked about it among themselves? ‘Lei diceva che ciò procedeva perché non gli venivano le sue purghe e perché beveva dell’acqua’ (She said that this came from the fact that her purges hadn’t come and because she drank water).6 Lucia denied to her neighbours, therefore, just as she had denied before the judge ever realizing that she was pregnant. The argument she used and which was reported by the other women opens a window onto her behaviour during pregnancy. In her relationship with her surroundings, Lucia had defended herself against the undeniable evidence of her own body by using an explanation which was neither new nor original. Many other statements, made before and after her own, geographically near and far, make use of the same pseudoscientific explanation, the ‘mal di madre’ or ‘madrazza’: an illness whose symptoms consisted of the disappearance of the menstrual cycle and a swelling of the belly. We always find the same thing, under different names, in places and times far removed from one another. Jeanne Archigny, a forty-year-old domestic servant from Mâcon in Burgundy had spoken in 1634 of dropsy: she had hidden her pregnancy, she had cured herself with concoctions, and she had gone on a pilgrimage, all practices which were considered measures to hide a pregnancy, but equally measures to get rid of the baby in some way.7 Like Jeanne, Lucia also earned her living as a domestic servant; like Jeanne, she ran the same risk of losing her job and her reputation. Through the channels of an oral culture spread by women, therefore, Lucia could have learnt of the existence of that explanation for the symptoms of pregnancy. Had she believed it to be a true explanation and had perhaps drawn some reassurance from it? Or had she used it to hide the truth of her condition from others? We do not know. The ‘mal di madre’ was certainly an ancient invention, which continually reappears in the statements made by women trying to deal with an unwanted pregnancy. Its persistence in the stories of infanticide serves to demonstrate these women’s desperate attempt to find a medical alternative to the natural evidence of preg6  Statement by Francesca Pilati, 7 December, 1709, Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. 20r. 7  See Farr, Authority and Sexuality, pp. 130–31.

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nancy.8 Lucia had good reason to believe that she was not the victim of a hysterical pregnancy; but she could still hope that she was. Her fear and the vain attempts she made during the long months of her preg­­nancy emerge in fragments of her testimony. And here the person who should have known more about it than anyone else and who made a greater effort than anyone else to deny it, was Lucia’s mother. The widow Caterina, forced by want into a life of hardship and hard agricultural labour, was certainly not in the dark as to the facts of life. And yet she said that she had accepted the explanation that the swelling of her daughter’s belly ‘procedeva perché beveva dell’acqua per la febre che quasi sempre haveva’ (came from the fact that she used to drink water for the fever that she almost always had); therefore, she said, she had taken her ‘a far segnare dal prete di Granarolo, all’ospedale a far cavar sangue’ (to be blessed by the priest of Granarolo, and to the hospital to be bled). But the testimony of the mother refers back once again to the context: what she describes — blood-letting and a pilgrimages to a healer — were the two most widespread systems for resolving the problem of unwanted pregnancy at the time. Blood-letting had been known since antiquity as one of the methods for abortion: it was known by physicians and discussed by moralists and theologians. As we will see later, the question was complicated by the Church’s intervention against any abortive practice. Women knew about it too. A few years before Lucia’s case, it had been enough for Antoinette Marechale, a domestic servant from Brittany, to have her blood let four times in succession to procure an abortion in the fifth month of pregnancy; but not enough to save her from the death penalty for infanticide.9 The mother, therefore, had attempted to resolve her daughter’s pregnancy by means of an abortion. Compared with words and behaviour like this, which return unchanged through the centuries in the stories of women’s lives, Lucia’s experience appears so much more the dramatic as it is the less original. In practice, there is no detail of the crime she committed which can be called original or unusual. This is true, for example, of the way in which Lucia first attempted to explain the death of the baby: as she gave birth upright, the child fell on the ground with no protection and died. It was an explanation that mothers accused of infan8 

The explanation was also used later on: in trials for infanticide held in Bologna in the period between 1816 and 1823, the accused maintained ‘di aver scambiato i segni fisici della gestazione per quelli di una malattia, ch’esse chiamavano la madrazza. L’arresto del mestruo mensile e il rigonfiamento del ventre ne sono i sintomi’: Casarini, p. 281. This is what Francesca had also done, a woman condemned for infanticide in Pistoia in 1406: see Walter, ‘Infanticidio a Ponte Bocci’. 9  This case too is quoted by Farr, Authority and Sexuality, p. 131.

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ticide habitually gave the judges.10 In the same way, many details in these stories repeat themselves, as individual experiences overlap and are confused in an impersonal trajectory. It is as if the pieces of the mosaic of the event have been re-used, as if someone has taken them from other pictures. It is difficult to escape the impression that there is a law governing the lives of these women, which pushes them through successive stages as if they were on a pre-existing track, their movement guided by necessity. But this necessity does not have the characteristics of an ineluctable fate. Its roots are concretely historical, formed by social conditioning and power relations. And in the end it has to be observed that the way out for those who found themselves facing an unwanted pregnancy had already been thought of: there were hospitals which offered to take the women in, in their condition, and to let them give birth; there was also the possibility of entrusting newborns to foundling hospitals. In Bologna, as we have seen, there was the Ospedale dei Bastardini. Why didn’t Lucia turn to this solution? Other women in Bologna at the same time had the same problem as Lucia. Let us see how they tackled it. In 1723, at the age of 46, the widow Sabatina Bruni was tried for having drowned the baby she had just given birth to. Sabatina initially said she had been made pregnant by a stranger, one night, in a remote spot in the middle of the countryside around Modena: according to her account, the man ‘si pose a giacere vicino a me e di potenza mi conobbe car­­nalmente una volta sola, quantunque io gridassi e dicessi che non volevo’ (lay down near me and knew me carnally by force once only, however much I shouted and said that I didn’t want to).11 But the reality was different: it was later discovered, after some coins had been found by chance among her clothing, that Sabatina had been made pregnant by a man with whom she had had frequent intercourse, a certain Felice Ghini. It had been he who had given her the money, and she had suppressed the new-born baby ‘per non privarsi delle quattro genovine, che gli haveva consegnato quell’huomo che haveva fatto il fallo con lei, e che gli haveva racomandato di mandarlo ben custodito al luogo de bastardini’ (so as not to lose the four ‘genovine’ that that man had given her, he who had sinned with her, and who had told her to send [the baby] wellprotected to the foundling hospital).12 Sabatina Bruni’s story is to some extent 10 

See Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany, p. 164. Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7846/2, fasc. 13, fol.  4 rv (Statement of 28 May, 1723). I would like to thank my friend Massimo Donattini and Dr Diana Tura of the Archivio di Stato di Bologna for their help in locating the document. 12  Letter to the auditor of the Torrone by don Gaspar de Robles, a Celestine curate, on 18 11 

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analogous to that of Lucia Cremonini: a poor single woman, a child which is about to be born, an alternative between the life of the child and a certain amount of money. But Sabatina had been married and had other children, she knew how to recognize the symptoms of pregnancy, had calculated the cost of sending the child to the Bastardini, and compared it with the advantage of keeping the money for herself. The four ‘genovine’ received by Sabatina are not comparable to the dowry promised Lucia, which had another, immaterial, kind of value. Nor could her situation be considered similar to Lucia’s naïve and helpless solitude. Let us look at another case. In precisely the same period as that of the trial against Lucia, another Bolognese mother calmly faced the institutional procedure of abandoning a child. On 24 September, 1709, Arsilia Ringarda Caterina Guastavillani, a young Bolognese woman, perhaps from a senatorial family, was formally accused by an anonymous person: as she was ‘gravida di cinque o sei mesi incirca, si dubita possi mandar a male la creatura, come si suppone habbia fatto altre volte’ (around five or six months pregnant, it is suspected that she might send the baby to a bad end, as it is supposed she has done other times). The court notary, who was immediately sent to notify her of the duties of her state, found himself facing a woman who used to giving orders rather than obeying them: Signor sì che son gravida et sono di cinque in sei mesi, e per questo cosa pretende V. S. da me? Io son giovine e libera e posso fare della mia vita ciò che mi pare. (Yes, sir, I am pregnant and I am between the fifth and the sixth month, and so what does Your Lordship want from me? I am young and free and I can do what I like with my life.)13

A confident and well-protected woman, Arsilia Guastavillani had no difficulty in immediately producing a man who could stand as guarantor for her. The notary issued her with the written document (fede), with an order preventing any­­one from molesting her because of her pregnancy. Birth took place regularly on 30 September in the house of the public ‘mammana’, Giacomina Foresti, (who testified to it), the ‘creature’, a girl, was taken to the Bastardini, and the fee June, 1723; Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7846/2, fasc. of unnumbered fols inserted between fols 10v and 11r of the fasc. 13  Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 40, unnumbered fols (Città, 1709, Tombesius Notarius, ‘Super pregnantia D. Arsilia Ringardae Catt. Guastavillani et fideiussione petita de tuto fetu’).

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of twenty-five Bolognese lire was regularly paid. Arsilia Guastavillani was able to continue to live her life freely as a ‘young and free’ woman. Everything went smoothly for Arsilia. In Lucia’s case everything went wrong: she could not do what she wanted with her life. She had no man who would offer to stand as guarantor for her, and she had no money. She only had her honour, ‘moneta della donne da non disprezzare’ (a woman’s coin that should not be despised) as it was defined by one reformer of charitable institutions in Modena. For her that coin was the only possible way of receiving a dowry and avoid falling to the lowest rung of the social ladder, that of the mendicant and the prostitute. She obviously could not aspire to the protection of a ‘conservatorio’ like the Baraccano, an institution created for girls ‘in conserva dell’onore’ (in preservation of their honour). She was therefore completely exposed to the violence of a cultural as well as an economic and political mechanism which arrogated to itself, as it has been said, ‘the right to administer a woman’s physical integrity and her participation in the institutional world’.14 Weighing on her existence was the wager represented by that dowry: would she really have obtained it if her crime had not been discovered? What we know about this kind of charity, the laborious checks, and the tricks which existed for not paying it, legitimizes many doubts.15 But these are reflections made in conditions of safety, far from the tumult of emotions which were unleashed in the room of that Bologna house at dawn on 5 December, 1709. The murder of a newborn was not a rationally conceived and coldly executed act. Its context was solitude and abandon. The feelings that accompanied it cannot be recreated. From the great work of analysis and the many definitions elaborated by male culture concerning the female experience of childbirth we can borrow the ancient definition of the newborn as the subject which a moment earlier was part of its mother’s womb: to deny it life, to kill it, was a way of eliminating the fact of its birth by throwing it back to its condition as an object.16 Then life could begin again, leaving the episode of that morning as a secret parenthesis.

14  Ciammitti, ‘La dote come rendita’, p. 129. On p. 128 is the passage quoted above from Ricci, Riforma, pp. 112–14. 15  How complicated and uncertain were the ways for obtaining a dowry for poor women unprotected by the institutions reserved for wealthy families is shown by research by D’Amelia, ‘La conquista di una dote’. 16  An observation following suggestions by Julia Kristeva, made by Gowing, ‘Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England’, p. 107.

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The system of control over pregnancy then in force prevented this. Fear of the severity of the laws had the effect of increasing Lucia’s solitude. That was the reason for the hurry that induced the porter Domenico Prata to make his formal accusation on the morning of 5 December, 1709; that was at the root of the desperate denial of responsibility by Lucia’s mother, Caterina. It was the law, the system of generalized suspicion towards women without a husband that created the vacuum around Lucia, eliminating any form of participation, any bond of solidarity and affection. This is why from that neighbourhood community made up of curiosity and daily talk, and from the close link with her mother, there emerged before the court the figure of a woman alone, who had experienced all the vicissitudes of her pregnancy in an absent and dream-like state.

Chapter 9

‘M’indussi col detto cortello

a dare la morte a detto mio figlio partorito vivo mettendoli la punta di detto cortello nella gola’ (I Forced Myself with the Said Knife to Kill my Said Son whom I had Given Birth to Alive, by Putting the Point of the Said Knife into his Throat)

A

s the one and only person responsible, there was nothing Lucia could do but confess. Her guilt had been ascertained beyond all possible doubt by the notary and the police, who had easily entered that rented room (while it would have been quite a different matter to enter a patrician residence). The trial had clarified the details and the context. The picture was com­­plete, and the criminal had been categorized and ordered among all the other legal cases, making her action entirely plausible and clear in the eyes of the judges: an adult woman (fatta), a servant in the city houses with a knowledge of the techniques of abortion, careful to hide her pregnancy, as if she had premeditated getting rid of the child as soon as possible. All that was missing was the con­­fession. In the beginning, as we have seen, Lucia denied everything, and, confronted with the evidence, shut herself off in silence. She had been arrested, the experts had made their reports, and the facts had been ascertained. Then, suddenly and without any apparent reason, came the queen of all proof: the confession. The criminal justice system was based on the rules of the inquisitorial trial. The

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judge officially had to ascertain responsibility for the crime, and tried to obtain a confession by the guilty party. Even when the nature of the crime and the identity of the guilty party had been established with the greatest precision by the evidence, the trial mechanism tended towards a confession as its natural crowning; and in order to obtain one, where the evidence permitted, it was pos­­ sible to resort to torture. In Lucia’s case the evidence was more than suffi­cient; but there was no need for torture. Her words, as they appear in the report, seem as if they were spoken in a humble, colourless voice. The judges’ accusatory questions find no opposition. On the contrary, the confession seems almost to anticipate and surpass the prosecution in accepting guilt and crudely describing the details of the crime: La mattina istessa che io partorii il figlio maschio […], trovandomi sola in casa mentre mia madre si trovava in campagna, a fine non si scoprisse che io havevo partorito m’indussi col detto cortello a dare la more a detto mio figlio partorito vivo mettendoli la punta di detto cortello nella gola, che feci penetrare calcandolo bene sin dalla parte di dietro nel collo, per la quale ferita da me datali detto mio figlio ricevé la morte. (On the same morning on which I gave birth to the baby boy, […] as I was alone in the house while my mother was in the countryside, so that it should not be discovered that I had given birth, I forced myself with the said knife to kill my said son whom I had given birth to alive, by putting the point of the said knife into his throat, which I made to go in by pushing it down hard right down to the back of the neck, and because of this wound inflicted on him by me my said son died.)

This confession brought the trial to a close. Lucia thus accepted she had deliberately killed her son, and she recreated the details of the crime. By doing this, she consciously assumed the sub-human characteristics attributed to mothers who had committed infanticide: barbarous, bestial, or even worse than the beasts who were still capable of a maternal instinct, the author of an unspeakable crime, she had placed herself outside the confines of the human race. And just as she was precipitating out of humanity, Lucia seemed belatedly to recognize the humanity of the child — ‘the baby boy’/my son, ‘my said son whom I had given birth to alive […]. because of this wound inflicted on him by me my said son died’. With this she made an essential symbolic gesture: identifying the murder victim. It was her son: through her he had existed and through her he had come to die. This was the murdered child for her. It is now time for us too to ask ourselves who he was.

Part Three: The Son. The Seed and the Soul L’uom fu bambino, embrione, seme e sangue,pane, erba ed altre cose. (‘Del sommo bene metafisico’, Campanella, Le Poesie, ed. by Giancotti, madrigale 3).

The much shorter life of her son weighed down decisively on the life of the young Bolognese woman. It is apparently impossible to write his history. Can a history be written of someone who did not live? The aim of history, wrote Herodotus, is to create a memory of ‘great and wonderful actions’ and to ‘[preserve] from decay the remembrance of what men have done’.1 As from the nineteenth century, ordinary men have come to take their place alongside the ranks of the great. First the male middle class: in the nineteenth century, Augustin Thierry wrote a history of Jacques Bonhomme, a collective name for the anonymous crowd whose importance had been revealed by the French Revolution. Then, a century later, the underclass, the colonial peoples: Eileen Power, heir and protagonist of the women’s struggle for civil and political rights, wrote the history of Bodo, the peasant farmer, and his wife, Ermentrude. The history of children is the latest arrival in humanity’s slow progress towards a knowledge of its past: the history of the attitude towards childhood, the way of conceiving and modifying it, the decisive weight that childhood experiences have on adult life. Today the growing importance of social problems such as abortion and medical practices concerning the embryo have forced us to question past ideas and knowledge of conception and childbirth: this is what has been brought together under the heading of the ‘history of the unborn’.2 1 

Herodotus, The Histories, i. 1. 0. The promising title of an article by Duden, ‘I non-nati’, corresponds in practice to a reflection on the transition from domestic pregnancy to the medicalization of childbirth in 2 

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The emergence of this new term is a sign of the need to adapt our vocabulary to the change in our knowledge and in the existing problems: in the seven­ teenth century, in a delicate period of change in the paradigms on human nature, the Roman archiater Paolo Zacchia felt the need to specify that it was possible to speak of an ‘infant’ from the day of its birth and not from that of its conception.3 But the possibility of writing the history of someone who has not been born, or if born, has not lived, continues to remain outside our scope. Here we are dealing with a baby who was born and immediately killed, who was only allowed a life inside the womb, and, who, after the trauma of birth, suffered the radically agonizing trauma of a violent death. Only those who have followed in the footsteps of Freud have attempted to shed light on these areas of experience, and in particular on the trauma of birth and the relationship between the memory of a life in the womb and early childhood.4 But the retrospective light projected onto the dawning of life requires those traces that are preserved by the individual, symptoms which can be analysed, words. The infant is by definition incapable of speech. Unlike those who investigate the individual psyche, the historian cannot stop in the absence of subjective testimony. The newborn, the baby murdered on the very threshold of existence, even the unborn, is not absent from the historical process just because it is devoid of speech. It is enough to reflect on what legal historians have taught us: from a legal point of view, the baby who sees the light of day joins the chain of hereditary succession and modifies it, even if its life is of the shortest. It is traditionally granted a legal status. This would be enough for special attention to be paid to this microscopic period of life; but even the unborn have a history: their silence can be a very effective weapon, and there has never been a lack of voices pretending to speak in their name. In the second half of the twentieth century. The Acts of a conference edited again by Duden have opened the question up to the relationship between religious representations and medical practices regarding birth, above all in the period between the eighteenth and twentith century: see Duden, Schlumbohm, and Veit, Geschichte des Ungebornen; Thierry, The Historical Essays and Narratives of the Merovingian Era, ch. 20; Power, Medieval People, ch. 2, pp 18–38. I am grateful to Silvana Seidel Menchi and Professor Jürgen Schlumbohm for having been able to read this important work while the present volume was being prepared for print. 3  ‘Infantia a die nativitatis, non a conceptionis’: Zacchia, Totius stati ecclesiastici protomedici generalis, iii, 4. But Zacchia specified that, ‘Apud ipsos medicos foetus iam in utero perfectus, et omnibus membris absolutus, infans vocatur’. 4  I refer here to Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and his discussion of Otto Rank’s proposal to identify the trauma of birth as the original cause of neurosis: Rank, The Trauma of Birth.



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a dispute between corporations of physicians in eighteenth-century London, for example, nothing more effective was found for accusing hospital midwives than to use the image of an unborn baby. 5 But it is against mothers above all that the dead babies’ accusing finger continues to point, as was said to have happened in a sixteenth-century court in Nuremberg.6 But let us stay with the facts. It is undeniable that Lucia’s son, who was born but did not live, left an important sign in the history of others and in that of his time: feelings, ideas, and professional knowledge were invested in him; an impressive judicial machine was put in motion following his death. We must ask ourselves, therefore, who he was, and what was known or thought of that new-born baby who briefly saw the light in Bologna that Thursday morning in December, 1709. There is little direct information about him. He was born at the regular term of nine months, he was a boy, and he had the time to give out a cry (uno zigo) before his mother killed him. Here too any attempt at understanding will have to proceed by an indirect route, by turning not to him but to what the society of the time knew or thought it knew about beings like him.

5 

Regarding the figure on the frontispiece of the Petition of the Unborn Babes, published in 1751 against hospital midwives, see Cody, ‘Living and Dying in Georgian London’s Lying-In Hospitals’, p. 311, n. 5. 6  In 1549 in Nuremberg a woman called on a dead baby to testify and its hand rose up from the corpse and pointed to her as the murderer: see Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany, p. 71.

Chapter 10

Un puttino maschio (A Baby Boy)

N

o woman is happy if she is expecting a girl’ a gynaecologist of Somali origin explained, in our present day, speaking of Chinese women living in Florence.1 It is a statement which implies a complicity with the average Italian reader. Market values agree too: a baby boy costs much more than a baby girl on the black market of adoption.2 The most diverse cultures come together in their rejection of babies of the female sex. In the past, in Italy, the birth of a baby girl was long considered a misfortune. Mothers of girls were burdened by feelings of guilt and the concrete dangers of scorn, widespread hostility, and abandonment. For this reason, they turned to the saints to ask for male children. Among the miracles of the blessed Gerardo Cagnoli was the birth of a son in 1345 to a devout Pisan woman, which concluded her negative succession of female births.3 When a miracle did not happen, the undesired baby girl could always be abandoned to the foundling hospital: the percentages of those enrolled speak for themselves.4

‘

1 

Interview in the newspaper ‘la Repubblica’, 7 December, 2002, ‘Cronaca di Firenze’. A boy costs up to 17,000 euros, while a girl not more than 10,000. The information is quoted by the Italian newspapers of 1 August, 2004. I am unable to provide a more accurate ref­­ er­­ence for this report. 3  See Sigal, ‘La grossesse, l’accouchement et l’attitude envers l’enfant mort-né’, p. 25. 4  In the Florentine hospital of San Gallo in the first half of the fifteenth century, the number of girls varies from 61 to 66 per cent: see Trexler, ‘The Foundings of Florence’, especially p. 268. 2 

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The birth of a baby girl was long accompanied by public signs of displeasure. In Romagna a century or so after Lucia’s birth, social rites still clearly distinguished between joy for a male and sadness for the birth of a female: se l’infante è maschio viene adornata la donna che lo porta al battesimo con un nastro bello e di vivace colorito, che le pende dalle spalle; se è femmina, non vi è l’ornamento del nastro, ed il padre in atto di mestizia sta dietro alla portatrice (if the infant is a boy the woman who takes him to baptism is adorned with a pretty, brightly coloured ribbon, which hangs from her shoulders; if it is a girl, there is no decorative ribbon, and the father walks behind the bearer, in an act of mournfulness.)5

A male was accorded a different kind of dignity and a higher position in the hier­­archy of the species: if in practice all human beings are born of woman, in representations of the family tree, the roots, the trunk, and the branches which bear the members of the family are all male. In the conceptions of reality, codified and taught as indisputable truths, women were assigned a subordinate position, a lesser dignity, and a lower value. Even where women clearly had a decisive role — the gestation and birth of new lives — theology affirmed that they had a merely passive role: the cold, dark earth where man planted his seed, the vehicle of blood and life.6 It was true that the Christian idea of Redemption as the saving of all humanity also included women; but the promise concerned the next life. In this world, their obligation to obey and subject themselves to their husbands was confirmed, right from the fundamental words of St Paul (Ephesians 5. 22). In popular as in official culture, the male was credited with a condition that was by nature different and higher. The origin of life depended on him, as we have seen. The Biblical account of how Eve was created from Adam’s rib was discussed and interpreted to make it agree with experience. But attempts to reconstruct the original scene of creation in a different way had little success. Even a highly authoritative Dominican theologian like Tommaso de Vio da Gaeta, (Cajetanus), had been censured and re-written in the post-Tridentine period because he had given too free an interpretation of the biblical account. Women depended on men. It was not surprising therefore that the birth of a male was written in the family books, as an event; that of a girl was not. The time when ‘non faceva nascendo ancor paura la figlia al padre’ (Not yet did the 5 

Tassibum, Arti e tradizioni popolari, p. 291. ‘So a woman cannot be the active principle of generation but the passive only’: Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 67, 4, ad tertium. 6 

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daughter at her birth cause fear to the father)7 was lost in a mythical distance even in Dante’s time. Nor was it a problem of the dowry and the economic and legal rules of marriage: if anything, it was these rules which derived from the profound root of the lesser value accorded to the female sex. The baby which Lucia gave birth to was a boy. In common opinion this circumstance made her crime even more serious. The law did not say so, but common conscience did.

7 

Dante, Paradiso, xv. 103–04.

Chapter 11

Ben compito in tutte le sue parti (Well-Formed in All its Parts)

I

t was the first concern when a baby was born: was it complete in all its parts? It was and it still is: the first problem to verify with the birth of a new individual is the completeness of the organism. What changes if any­­thing is when and how this is ascertained, always sooner and always more charged with anxiety before the growing possibility of intervening to correct the facts of nature. We say, ‘complete’, or even ‘perfect’, in the sense of a process which has reached its conclusion, just as today zoologists still talk of a ‘perfect insect’ to indicate that which follows on from the larva stage. But time and progress in pre-natal diagnostic techniques have meant that, perhaps not the emotion, but certainly most of the surprise at the arrival of a new baby has been consigned to the past. If the process of birth is monitored today by a series of images, almost like a film, once the nature of the being in gestation was shrouded in mys­­tery in the opaque maternal womb. Nothing was known of how its limbs were organized, whether its form was regular or not, what sex it was, or what its state of health was. We must also take care not to transfer the preoccupations of the present back into the past. The completeness that is spoken of here is something different from the absence of imperfection, which is looked at and investigated today obsessively, right from the beginning of pregnancy. Here the question which lawyers and physicians considered was whether birth had taken place at term or whether it was a case of premature birth or an abortion: if it was an abortion, it was necessary to ascertain whether this was spontaneous or induced. The definition given by the midwives at Lucia’s trial was the following:

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Diciamo [la creatura] esser nata del suo debito tempo di nove mesi, e viva, essendo ben compita in tutte le sue parti e membri, havendo li suoi capelli in testa et unghie nelle dita delle mani e piedi. (We say that [the baby] was born at the due term of nine months, alive, and was well-­­ formed in all its parts and limbs, with hair on its head and nails on the fingers and toes of its hands and feet.)1

The verdict that it was a complete human being allowed the moment of birth to be established, and guaranteed that it had been a birth at due term and not a premature expulsion. Completeness or perfection was not the same thing as the ‘normality’ which has become familiar to us now. The ‘perfect’ body was the point of arrival of a process of maturity and growth. The judgement as to whether the being was ‘complete in all its parts’ reflected an idea of the human body as a set of limbs regulated by a form. Basing itself on ancient medicine, and that of Galen in particular, medical and legal culture used to debate the monstrous deformities that forced indivi­ duals into segregation or even exclusion from the city. It was an ancient question: in the Roman world the elimination of monstrously deformed babies was normal and openly theorized.2 What actually happened in Christian societies remains unknown. As for the causes which produced this sort of result, there was great debate. An example can be found in the handbook for reports by forensic physicians which the chief medical examiner of Messina, Giovanni Filippo Ingrassia, elaborated around 1570: apart from those caused by human violence, he linked birth deformities to the length and the vicissitudes of pregnancy. It is worth noting that Ingrassia even managed to explain Plinian monsters by means of this single cause: pigmies and giants were placed respectively under seven months’ and over ten months’ gestation.3 As for the existence of imaginary human species such as those described by Pliny the Elder in his 1 

Statement by Barbara Lucignani, public midwife of Bologna, Saturday 7 December, 1709: Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fols 11v-13v. 2  Seneca the Younger, De ira, trans. by Basore, i. 15. 2 (i, pp. 144–45): ‘[…] Portentosos fetus exstinguimus, liberos quoque, si debiles monstrosique editi sunt, mergimus, nec ira, sed ratio, est a sanis inutilia secernere’; Augustine did not miss the opportunity of countering this with the differing Christian viewpoint, as pointed out by Nardi, ‘Aborto e omicidio nella civiltà classica’, p. 370, n. 4. 3  Ingrassia’s work remained in manuscript form and was only edited in the last century on the basis of a seventeenth-century copy. On Ingrassia, see Zaggia, Tra Mantova e la Sicilia nel Cinquecento, pp. 176–77 and passim. For the relationship between monstrosities and gestation periods, see Ingrassia, Methodus dandi relationes pro mutilatis, pp. 241–43.

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Natural History — men who walked on their hands, men with no head and eyes and a mouth on their chest, and so on — the accounts of Christopher Columbus’s travels and that of others who followed his ocean voyages, document how the search for ‘uomini con un solo occhio e altri col muso di cane’ (men with only one eye and others with a dog’s face) long continued.4 The immense broadening of the European horizon in the Early Modern Age led in any case to the maturing of a new scientific knowledge of nature, in which the monstrous and the marvellous was also orderly catalogued.5 These Plinian monsters continued to be discussed for some time, and were imagined to exist in some remote corner of the world. But the discovery that the human beings spread across the globe all had the same limbs and the same appearance supported the conception of the profound unity of the human race elaborated on the basis of ancient culture. On one hand, it is significant that Pietro Pomponazzi, the philosopher who denied the immortality of the individual soul, should comment with his students on what he had found in Pigafetta’s account of Magellan’s expedition: that there was no trace of the famous Anti­ podes which had been discussed at such length. On the other hand, the task of affirming the unity of the human species, a unity solemnly sanctioned by an offi­­cial document issued by Pope Paul III, fell precisely on the Dominican and Franciscan friars, tutors of orthodoxy and front-line soldiers in the missionary conquest.6 It could not have been otherwise, without risking the collapse of the very foun­­dations of Christianity as a universal religion, reducing it to a religion of the ‘chosen people’. The Americans descended from Adam: they were not ‘talking animals’, as those who had an interest in relegating them to a sphere of inferiority tried to maintain.7 The search for the diverse and the strange developed more in the direction of animals and plants: naturalists’ collections were enriched by ‘rare and exquisite things from that new world’.8 Nevertheless there was signi­ ficant resistance to a full acceptance of the notion of the unity of the human race: the Spaniard Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda argued on the basis of Aristotle 4 

Colombo, Il giornale di bordo, ed. by Taviani and Varela, p. 94. Research by Olmi, L’inventario del mondo, has enlarged and enriched the census of the curiosities of sixteenth-century culture carried out by Céard, La Nature et les prodiges. 6  See Hanke, ‘Pope Paul III and the American Indians’. 7  Despite a certain ideological rigidity, the fundamental work on the victory of the idea of a unity in Adam over poly-genetic theories is that by Gliozzi, Adamo e il nuovo mondo. 8  From a letter by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher to cardinal Flavio Chigi, 1666, quoted in Olmi, L’inventario del mondo, p. 251, n. 98. 5 

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that behind a human appearance there might be inferior forms of humanity, a view countered in a famous and passionate controversy by Bartolomé de las Cassas, who defended the native American Indians. True power relations manifested themselves in the practice of slavery and the convict­ion that the African peoples were destined by nature to serve, or that the native peoples of America were incurably ingenuous like children. Even if it was recognized that all human being possessed a soul, in the end the differences between them came to be fixed on a scale which relegated some of them to the lowest level, entrusting them to European control just as children are entrusted to adults. Representations of this type kindled the modern idea of differences of a natural kind, with a single humanity divided into races of greater or lesser dignity. Once Pliny’s monsters with their great but imaginary variety of forms had disappeared, the need for difference transferred itself to secondary characteristics or the imaginary attributes of human groups socially constituted as different: African slaves or Jews. A notion of ‘race’ came into being which implied the idea of the superiority and domination of one human group over another, as the result of a historical fact (the conquest of the Gauls by the Franks, or the Angles by the Saxons) or a natural, hereditary difference. This second outcome announced itself in the Iberian peninsula with the systematic recourse to religious factors in the unification of the state, emphasizing the ancient and deep-rooted Christian prejudice against the Jews: the widespread hostility against the Iberian minority of baptized Jews (the ‘conversos’) resulted in very detailed genealogical research to ascertain whether the blood that flowed in a person’s veins was stained by Jewish ancestors. In practice, just as the human race in the world was emerging as increasingly uniform from a physical point of view, so the great variety of animal and vegetable species were being discovered and catalogued. Thus while geographical knowledge was progressively reducing the space of the unusual and the imaginary, the search for the natural limits of normality turned to the extravagancies and aberrations of the species. And here it came up against the profound current of the fears and experiences of the female world. This is what the magical and scientific culture had to reckon with, attracted as it was by theological speculation about sexual intercourse between demons and witches or the natural possibilities of ‘come si possan produr nuovi, e prodigiosi parti’ (how new and prodigious babies can be produced).9 A woman’s body, considered to be a 9 

As stated by the Neapolitan physician Della Porta, Della magia naturale, book ii, ch. xvii, pp. 69 ff., all of book ii ‘insegna a meschiar fra lor gli animali, accioché producano nuovi, et utili animali’ (teaches how to interbreed animals with one another, so as to produce new and

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necessary tool for reproduction, but also a malign and threatening reality, was studied through its products, applying the categories of an increasingly narrow concept of normality to the beings which it produced.10 But behind the discussions and the research into how monsters were produced it is possible to perceive a desire to understand the mechanisms of the origin of life, which was to develop significantly. Such interest in the barrier which divided normal humanity from monsters is documented in the long and detailed list of rules set out to sanction the humanity of those beings which came to the light from their mother’s womb. At baptism it was the priest’s duty to verify the baby’s humanity. The fundamental principle was that a monster must not be baptized. But what was a monster? The rules established by the Roman Ritual required great caution, and consultation with bishops and experts; but in the case of the imminent risk of death, the monstrous being could be baptized if it had a human appearance (humana species). The question was further complicated, and was articulated according to the various possible ways in which the body of the monster could be organized: if the monster had two heads and two chests, for example, it meant that it was two distinct human beings, each with their own soul, and hence to be baptized distinctly twice.11 The handbooks for curates went into further detail in a subject that was revealing itself to be increasingly complicated: a human form was not enough to guarantee humanity in the first place. The hypothetical case was that of a being which appeared to be human, but which was the offspring of an animal and a woman. Since it was the male seed which determined human identity, in a case of this kind, the being had to be defined as a beast and not a human. If on the other hand the newborn looked like a monster — with an animal head, for example — but was the offspring of a man, it had to be baptized as human: it was by Adam’s male seed that original sin was transmitted, the native inheritance of the species. Baptism therefore could, and had to, take place.12

useful animals) (p. 37). As for the discussions of the monstrous babies generated by demons, the treatises on witchcraft by theologians and exorcists are full of them. 10  See Niccoli, ‘Il corpo femminile nei trattati del Cinquecento’. 11  The rules in the case of the birth of monsters are set out in the Chiesa cattolica, Rituale Romanum Pauli V, pp. 5–6 (De Sacramento Baptismi rite administrando), and repeated in the handbook for the clergy of the same year, Possevino, De officio curati. 12  Possevino, De officio curati, pp. 90–91: the Roman Ritual also indicates, besides the two heads, two hearts, the traditional seat of the soul; Possevinus’s handbook, however, only refers to the heads.

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The question of baptism was only one aspect of the problems that the birth of a monster created. It was necessary to understand the meaning of the message that the monstrous baby brought with it. The meaning, not the causes: and here there was a general agreement in tracing these causes back to an excess or a lack of male seed, the bearer of form and life. But those who came into this life brought with them a sign from the supernal world: it might be a sign of peace and divine blessing, but it might also announce some terrible event. Nature’s monsters were letters sent by God to men, whose task it was to decipher them. ‘Se li mostri sono errori della Natura è che essa falla come un grammatico errasse nel parlare. Gran cosa è adonque che un maestro sapientissimo erra’ (If monsters are Nature’s mistakes, this means that she errs as if a grammarian erred in speaking. It is a serious matter, therefore, when a most learned master errs) — as an anonymous pamphlet commented on the birth of twins joined at the groin (a monster with four arms, four legs, and two heads); but the anonymous author added: ‘È però da tener che sempre vi sia il ditto di Dio’ (nevertheless, it must be held that God’s finger is always there).13 For this reason, every irregular or monstrous baby became an opportunity for interpretation, discussion, and prophecy. It was in this way that a simple curiosity for nature’s monsters came to be accompanied by a sense of fear. The monster ended up by signifying the irruption of evil, a demonic presence. Women’s emotions and fears must have been so much the stronger, the vaster and more uncertain was the horizon of know­­ledge and prediction. Disturbing images grew up around the products of female gestation, therefore: imagination continued to enjoy a free reign during pregnancy, and the attempt to interpret the ‘signs’ inscribed in physical differences was part of a general tendency to wonder at the facts of nature, reflecting the conviction that human nature had a very wide range of variability. In practice, however, those beings which fell outside the norm, as irregular or monstrous, who had long been subject to the final judgement of the midwife, mistress of life and death, had to pass increasingly stringent examinations of a religious and civil nature: if the ritual of baptism attempted to adapt itself to the irregular bodily forms that could still house an immortal soul, the rules of the political community were more draconian. Hugo Grotius openly wrote that the law of the Republic of the Low Countries governed those whose bodies were capable of housing a rational soul: all the others were suffocated at birth.14 It is difficult to say when 13  I take the quotation from Rizzi, ‘L’ischiopago cinquecentesco del ghetto di Venezia’, pp. 2–8. I would like to thank Dr Alessandra Baduel for the reference. 14  De Groot, Inleidinge tot de Hollandsche Rechts-geleerdheid, ed. by Dovring and others,

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the tendency to suppress irregular births dates from; it is a fact however that the medicalization of monstrous births — that is, entrusting them exclusively to medical science — advanced hand in hand with the sense of fear towards any unsettling sign to emerge from a woman’s body. But let us not lose sight of the point we began with: the official statement that the being which had been born was ‘well-formed in all its parts’ responded to the question of whether Lucia’s son had been born at term and was not therefore the fruit of an abortion. The physician’s eye was required to certify the normality of Lucia’s son and to answer the question of whether it had been born after the right period of gestation and with all its limbs fully formed. That eye was the point of arrival of a historical process that had seen the bar as to what was considered normal raised progressively to divide the abnormal from the true human being. That bar had been raised thanks to the increasingly decisive intervention of medical and legal culture into human birth: a medical examination was required before a newborn could be defined as a human being, which led to the possibility of its being placed, for example, in the chain of inheritance, consequently modifying the way in which goods were passed down.15 All this stood behind the medical and legal act which was carried out in Bologna. The formalized language of medical culture gave a positive answer to the question of whether or not the being which was before it was one which was undoubtedly and fully part of the human race. Lucia’s son therefore had all the physical requirements for being human, or at least of becoming so. Because one fact is certain: neither the completeness of his limbs nor the life that he was robbed of were enough on their own to define him as a full human being.

p. 11: the passage is quoted by Roodenburg, ‘The Maternal Imagination’, p. 704. 15  A fundamental reference on this question is the course held by M. Foucault in 1974–75 at the Collège de France, Foucault, M., Les anormaux, ed. by Marchetti and Salomoni; Foucault, M., Abnormal, ed. by Marchetti and Salomoni.

Chapter 12

A ‘Creature’ Without a Name, or When a Man is not a Man

W

hat was found in the bag behind Lucia’s bed was defined as a ‘cadavere di creatura’ (the corpse of a creature).1 And from then on it was always spoken of as a ‘creatura’, nor did it have any other name. At times Lucia used other, more affectionate words such as ‘puttino’, or ‘puttino mas­­chio’; for her, the moment of confession was also the moment in which she fully recognized her son: ‘detto mio figlio, partorito vivo’ (my said son, whom I gave birth to alive). But, in the official language of the interrogations and the medi­­cal and legal examinations, the identity of the murdered baby remained fixed in one word, ‘creatura’. The term was normally used in legal language for cases of abortion or infanticide.2 Just as a living being was a ‘creatura’, once it had ceased to live it became the corpse of a ‘creatura’. It is a definition which might seem natural. Behind the human being who has been generated but has not yet been born — or has never had the chance to be born — all that can be seen is the work of those who have made it from nothing by creating it: its mother, its parents, and behind them, nature, God. Perhaps it is above all in the being which has been rejected by those who have generated it that the irrepressible need to make sense of life suggests the pres1  From the report of the inspection carried out on 5 December, 1709: Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7663/3, fasc. 56, fol. 7r. 2  As Vincenzio Lavenia has pointed out to me, Sardi, L’aborto ieri e oggi, p. 155, observes that the use of the term was normal in the statutes of the Italian communes.

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ence of a divine Creator. Indeed it also seems natural for there to be no name for someone who has not yet had time to live. It has always been convention in these cases to use circumlocutions or impersonal terms, varying from those of with religious aura (as in the case of ‘creature’) to objective descriptions which refer to the being’s dependence on the mother from whom it has been ‘taken’.3 Although the idea that every human being has the right to a name is profoundly embedded in this and in every culture, there is some equally deeprooted mechanism which makes us consider it obvious that those who have not lived have no name. But explanations of this kind do not take us very far. In reality, there is nothing natural in all this. The impression of naturalness is the deceptive effect of representations which are deeply-rooted in our culture. That barely perceptible detail, a void — the absence of a proper name — is not the fruit of chance, nor is it immediately comprehensible. That baby was undoubtedly a human being. Men and women with the appropriate expertise and specific knowledge confirmed it for the court and compiled precise reports to this effect. But that little human being remained without an individual identity for those who concerned themselves with him at the time. And so he remains for those who have to tell this story at a distance in time. Now, there are commonly accepted conditions which allow us to speak of an individual and write that individual’s history. These are normally implicit. In trying to make them explicit we can roughly distinguish between the subjects and the objects of history, placing Lucia’s son in the second category. We know in fact that a human being carries with it a biological inheritance; we also know that a living being has pre-natal experiences of a relationship to its context. But we wait for the moment when it consciously interacts with its environment to try to understand that individual in its specific personality and account for its actions, those which it carries out and those which it is subjected to. In this case, therefore, we can speak of a human being which has only been able to exist as the object of the actions and decisions of others. But the difficulty remains of how a human being who has not received a name can be the subject of history. That baby died, but there is no name to act as a sign of his memory, a fulcrum for the lever of remembrance, or the focus of emotions. What is more, he does not appear to have been buried. And yet right from its very origins, the human race has recognized itself and its members by 3 

As in Giacomo Leopardi’s youthful poem, ‘In morte di una donna fatta trucidare col suo portato dal corruttore per mano ed arte di chirurgo’ (On the death of a woman murdered with the baby she was carrying by her seducer at the hand of the surgeon): see, Leopardi, Tutte le opere, pp. 323–24.

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burying its dead. Something, therefore, prevented the society of the time from fully recognizing the murdered infant as a human being. Let us begin with an indisputable if generic fact: the choice of a name for a new-born baby is an act which is profoundly rooted in our culture. In its apparent banality, a name is the strongest thread which human society has invented to give a consistency and a durability to the relationship between its members. To give a name and to take it away, to change it, to remember it, or deliberately or inadvertently to erase it, are decisive acts and processes in designating and giving a cultural value to the natural facts of birth and death: they mark important transitions in an individual life and in social relations. To change your name, hide it, or take that of someone else, are operations which alter our perception of individuality, in ourselves and in others. The same person can have different names just as they have different clothes: a stage name, a religious name, the name of a sect or an academy, or some other organization, public or secret. But an individual identifies himself and is identified by his name, as a single person and as a member of a social group. To defend the honour of one’s name or to leave an honourable name are acts that for many people have a value which is greater than that of their very existence. All this was true in Lucia Cremonini’s time just as it is, to a certain extent, in ours, even though our age has experienced profound changes in names, through fashion and death. Fashion announces the irresistible advance of an image in the place of a name, and change in the place of permanence. Thus, if in the past any change in identity meant the choice of another name, today it means a change in one’s physical appearance, and in the face in particular: as it has been said, ‘changing one’s face is a desperate attempt to appear different from what one is’.4 As for death, our age has experienced the elimination of the identity of millions of human beings which preceded their physical elimination: when a name is replaced by a number stamped on the skin, the question arises of whether it is still possible to speak of a human being. Let us return to the case of the baby who died without a name. The general question of whether it is possible to write the history of those who have not lived becomes specific here: the absence of a name is the simplest and surest way of excluding a person from history. Names can be forgotten, and it becomes necessary to restore a memory of them. These can be people’s names but also place names. Humanist erudition, from Petrarch and Flavio Biondo onwards, worked to restore ancient place names just as they did to remember and cel4 

An observation made by Borgna, Le intermittenze del cuore, p. 134, together with other observations and reflections on experiences of an identity crisis after an organ transplant.

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ebrate the names of famous men. But the work of historians over the centuries to cultivate the memory of the most important figures implied abandoning all the others to oblivion, until the great collective upheavals of the modern age brought forward the theme of how to remember the names of the common people. The anonymous crowd of the past was, for the Catholic Manzoni in Italy, ‘la turba dispersa che nome non ha’ (the scattered crowd which has no name),5 while in France, for Michelet, the people who were the protagonists of the Great Revolution crowded before the ideal court of history to claim the right to be remembered,6 and in War and Peace Tolstoy tried to describe the Russian countryside from the point of view of the endless mass of soldiers. But here we are not talking about a name that has been forgotten, but rather a name which was absent right from the start. The person who did not give a name to the baby was not thinking about the book of history, but the divine book which the Gospels defined as the ‘book of life’. One thing is clear: the choice of a name for a new-born baby was the symbolic moment in which the child was placed within a network of protective bonds, the first of which was that given to the being which arrives from the divine world. Not only for Christian cultures: in the ancient world, as Hermann Usener has pointed out, the choice of a name for a new-born baby implied the invention of a deity of the moment.7 The linguistic act not only had the aim of indicating the newborn, but also of placing it under divine protection; hence the act of naming consisted of creating the necessary deity: as many deities as there were human beings and names. We can imagine the consequences of the arrival of the Hebrew God and the religions which derive from Judaism — Christianity and Islam — on this system of names. The rare cases in which the ancient system survived in the margins of the great monotheistic religions allows us to form an idea of the unlimited narrative and evocative freedom which was once implicit in the choice of a name. As has been noted by a shrewd observer of contemporary Africa, ‘the introduction of Christianity and Islam reduced this exuberant world of poetry and history to several dozen names from the Bible and the Koran’.8 5 

Manzoni, Adelchi, ed. by Bonino, p. 51 Michelet, History of the French Revolution. 7  Usener, Götternamen. On Usener, see the article by Arnaldo Momigliano and other studies in Arrighetti and others, Aspetti di Hermann Usener. Usener’s article was reviewed with interest by Marcel Mauss, in L’Année scoiologique, now in M. Mauss, Œuvres (Paris, 1969), ii, pp. 290–97. 8  Kapuściński, Heban; English translation: Kapuściński, The Shadow of the Sun, trans. by Glowczewska, p. 67. 6 

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A name is given within a rite which symbolically reduplicates and copies the process of birth, transforming a fact of nature into a cultural fact. It has been defined as a ‘rite of passage’. We owe this definition to Robert Hertz, who, in his brilliant study of the representations of death in a primitive culture, identified the symbolic and ritual link between death and birth, formulating it in these terms: As for birth, it accomplishes, for the collective consciousness, the same transformation as death but the other way round. The individual leaves the invisible and mysterious world that his soul has inhabited, and he enters the society of the living. The transition from one group to another, whether real or imaginary, always supposes a profound renewal of the individual, which is marked by such customs as the acquisition of a new name, the changing of clothes or the way of life.9

It is a precious observation: it reminds us that the transformation of birth was conceived of as strictly linked to that of death. And it could not be otherwise: the unknown land stretching out behind the new-born baby is the same as that to which the dying are lost. The imaginary arithmetic of life obeys a principle of conservation, whose general characteristics can clearly be seen in the testimony furthest from our own present, with its deceptive appearance of rationality. Just as the traveller through the land of the dead described in Virgil’s Aeneid (vi. 713–51) witnessed the reincarnation of the shades of the dead for a new existence, so something very similar is recounted by travellers and scholars of other cultures. Thanks to a 1920 study by Marcel Granet, Hertz’s hypothesis has received important confirmation from a culture that certainly cannot be defined as ‘primitive’: that of China.10 Part of Chinese tradition was the rite of the deposition of the newborn on the ground (if female) or on the bed (if male), where it was left for three days; only after this, once picked up and recog­nized, did it receive its name and was welcomed into the family. At the other end of life was the old man, who, when he reached the age of seventy, began his ritual abandonment of the world: when he reached his death, it was his turn to be placed on the ground. Granet saw in this a clear analogy with the treatment of the new-born baby.11 If birth meant passing from an indistinct existence to a 9 

Hertz, ‘Contributions à une étude sur la représentation collective de la mort’, pp. 87–88. English translation: Hertz, ‘A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death’, p. 80. 10  Granet, ‘Le dépôt de l’enfant sur le sol’. Granet does not mention Hertz. 11  ‘Le mourant, comme l’enfant naissant, est déposé sur le sol’: Granet, ‘Le dépôt de l’enfant sur le sol’, p. 192 (italics in the original).

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personal life well-individualized by a name, then dying involved an equal and opposite process: to prevent or retard the disintegration of the personality, the relatives of the dead man invoked his name. The dying man did not abandon the family, but entered a different age category, that of the ancestors; a tablet placed in the ancestral temple reminded people of his presence. If we turn our gaze from China back to European traditions, we find singular analogies. The practice of deposing the newborn on the ground was confirmed by antiquarian studies of pagan Rome. The significance of this was discussed by jurists, to understand whether it was true that infanticide was legally practised before the advent of Christianity.12 But this anthropological curiosity ‘ante litteram’ meant that the practice was sometimes recorded among ‘popular errors’. The physician and priest Scipione Mercurio pointed out that around Verona the widespread custom existed ‘di por la creatura in terra nuda subito nata’ (of placing the baby on the ground naked as soon as it is born).13 For him it was a surviving pagan tradition which had to be eliminated. Indeed in precisely the same territory some years earlier, a bishop had noted and prohibited an analogous rite of deposition on the ground, practised for the dying. The body placed on the ground symbolized the link with nature; life came from the earth and to the earth it could return, and for this reason the rite of the deposition was practised for those who had difficulty in dying.14 But official Christian culture combat these representations and rituals because it had substituted nature with faith in the care for human beings, by a God made in their image. All this can help us to understand why birth as a fact of nature did not automatically entail the granting of a name as the cultural recognition of the baby’s entrance into the family and society. Let us return to the Christian society where Lucia Cremonini’s son lived for such a short space of time. It was not because of the brevity of his existence that his identification by name had been omitted. Children who lived for the space of a morning regularly received a name. And this was something relatively frequent. Many children were born, 12 

See above, p. 50. ‘È grave quell’errore, qual prima d’hora fu osservato da’ gentili con una superstizione, et hoggi l’ho veduto nel veronese usare: di por la creatu[ra] in terra nuda subito nata senza haver riguardo alla tenerezza delle sue membra’ (it is a serious error, that which has been observed before now among the gentiles with their superstition, and which I have seen today in the area around Verona, of placing the baby on the ground naked as soon as it is born, without any regard for the delicate nature of its body), Mercurio, De gli errori popolari d’Italia libri sette, fol. 263v. 14  According to the bishop of Verona, the custom of placing ‘l’amalato in terra, acciò mora più presto’ (the sick man on the ground in order that he may die quicker) was practiced in his diocese: Giberti, Breve ricordo di quello hanno da fare i chierici, fol. 3r. 13 

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many died: according to an approximate calculation based on demographic statistics, in Florence of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, thirty per cent of babies died during childhood.15 In pictures of women in danger of dying in childbirth, whom Savonarola urged in his sermons to learn the ‘arte di ben morire’ (the art of dying well), it is possible to see beautiful ‘deschi da parto’, or birth trays.16 In the streets of the city, funeral processions met processions of the newborn being taken to the Baptistry. It is enough to look through the family books to see how closely the birth and the death of beings who in any case received a name came together: with that name they were remembered in the family memoirs while their bodies were being buried in the family tomb.17 Family portraits of the premodern period often show numerous children who did not live, lined up next to their parents. Their names are repeated from one to the other, the sign of a life that was seen to transmigrate rapidly from one subject to another before it fixed itself to one of them with greater stability. When the name of a newborn was taken from an ancestor, we can read the touching remarks on a human being who, though departed, now seemed to come back to life again.18 For the name of an ancestor to be bestowed on a baby it was necessary in the first place for the father to recognize that baby as his own, and thus place it in the legitimate line of succession for the family’s material and immaterial 15  See Haas, The Renaissance Man and his Children, p. 163. But see the entire chapter vii: ‘“Mori subito”. The Demographic Agonies of Childhood in Premodern Florence’, pp. 155–76. 16  See the engraving of the ‘Predica dell’arte di ben morire’ published by Savonarola in 1496 and reproduced in Däubler-Hauschke, Geburt und Memoria, p. 30. 17  In the family books children are remembered by a name, even if they only lived for a short time. Some examples: Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli records in his notes the case of his sister Bartolommea, who ‘morissi in pochi dí’: Morelli, Ricordi, ed. by Branca, pp. 191–92; and that of his own sons, Antoniotto, born at seven months (‘credendo non vivesse il feci battezzare il dí medesimo in Santo Giovanni’, p. 361), and Lionello, who also died shortly after birth (pp. 367–68). Bernardino Fracastoro of Verona recorded the births of Benedetta Bartolomea (10 October, 1488), Tomio Bartolomè (13 August, 1489), Agnolo Alessandro (7 November, 1491), Margherita (13 July, 1494), Gentile Margherita (4 April, 1499), Carlo Paolo (24 January, 1502), Margherita Gentile (18 August, 1505): Margherita died at the age of six in 1500, Gentile Margherita died at the age of four on 14 August, 1504, Carlo at two years and a few months on 18 August, 1504, and the second Margherita Gentile at four months on 23 January, 1505: Family Memoirs from Verona and Vicenza, ed. by Grubb, pp. 38–39. 18  Bonaventura de’ Bovi noted the fact that one of his grandchildren had been given the name Isabetta Elena, which had been his wife’s name: ‘Vivit ergo Isabetta in perpetua vita triumphans et in ista caduca iteram militans’, in a note dated 21 March, 1475: Family Memoirs from Verona and Vicenza, ed. by Grubb, pp. 31–32.

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goods. But this paternal power, which was supported by patriarchal structures and legitimized by Roman law, had been superimposed by the world of Chris­­ tian values. There was another paternity that had to be considered above and beyond the earthly father: the image of the right to life and death which the father was believed to exercise over his children in the pagan world was evoked, for it to be condemned. Now, it is precisely in the sphere of the practices and conception of death that the lack of a name revealed itself to be important. A name was the connota­ tion of individuality, which revealed itself to be precious precisely in the relationship with death, then by far the most dominant dimension of existence. The memory of names had for centuries been granted space in the registers of the confraternities, for prayers to be said for their souls; and in the ancient church diptyches the act of writing down or erasing a name had a value which was not only one of memory: it mimed the divine act of writing down or erasing the name from the Book of Life. Considered from this point of view, the fact that Lucia’s son was not given a name seems anything but ‘natural’. That baby had not fulfilled the conditions then in force for ‘completing the transition from the invisible world inhabited by its soul to enter the community of the living’. To have a name, it was not enough just to be born: it was necessary to be born again. Without this you could not even die: or rather, you could not enter the world of the dead and find the peace granted to the dead. The new-born baby murdered in Bologna was no exception to the rule: he remained without a name or a burial. That little body was probably given to the University to be studied by those who practised anatomy: in cases of this kind, the students could also save the money given for masses for the soul, the currency used to pay for the corpses taken from the poorest families.19 He had not received a second birth, or a name, and so he could not receive a ‘second death’. In the culture in which Lucia Cremonini lived, the second birth was the deci­­sive moment in one’s existence, and it took place in the course of a rite which had been elaborated centuries earlier. It had been instituted to fulfil what the Christian Gospels said about the new birth: Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith unto him, how can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? Jesus answered, 19 

A case in Bologna in 1712, which shows how normal this practice was, is referred to later, on p. 369.

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Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God ( John 3. 3–5).

And the mandate that Jesus had given his Apostles had placed the birth of water and the spirit at the centre of the new religion: Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned (Mark 16. 15–16).

Chapter 13

Baptism

B

aptism was the rite which had superimposed birth in spirit, the rebirth of the soul, onto birth as a fact of nature. It was here that Christian culture had fixed the solemn moment of the giving of the name. Without the baptismal rite of rebirth it was not possible to enter the Kingdom of Heaven; nor was is possible to be accepted into the earthly kingdom either. We can under­­ stand therefore why this passage from the Gospels had the great impact it did on the subsequent history of Christian cultures and why some of the greatest con­­flicts in history took place around it. Nor is it possible to understand the events surrounding Lucia Cremonini without it. Spiritual unction, illumination, the vestment of immortality: the terminology of the earliest rites of Christian initiation underline and accompany a complex series of acts and forms of behaviour which insisted on the importance of pre­­paration or the catechumenate. With the freedom granted by Constantine and the subsequent favours obtained from the ruling powers, the forms of Christian recruitment changed profoundly and created the conditions for making the sacrament of spiritual rebirth into the sacrament of birth tout court.1 Since rebirth in water and spirit was the fundamental condition for entering the Kingdom of God, the history of the Christian expectation of the resurrection and eternal salvation revolved around baptism as a sacrament; and the announcement of salvation was of a universal nature. In this, baptism differed 1 

From the huge literature on the subject we can point out the brief but substantial general study by Saxer, ‘L’initiation chrétienne du iie au vie siècle’.

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from Jewish circumcision, which only concerned the chosen people. ‘And he that he is eight days old shall be circumcized among you, every man child in your generations, […] And the uncircumcized man child […] that soul shall be cut off from his people’ (Genesis 17. 12–14). In the Christian concept of God’s people, he who was not baptized was cut off from eternal life. In the way in which the Kingdom of Heaven was conceived we again find a dualism between nature and spirit, physical birth and spiritual rebirth. The hope of entering the Kingdom of Heaven, which was essential for the Christian religion, responded to the desire to wrench the body ‘free from the grip of the animal world’.2 The Christian concept of the immortality of the soul rested on an intense reflection on the body, bringing the promise of deliverance from the suffering, death, and decay to which nature had destined it. But in order to obtain access to a perfect and eternal life it was necessary to add a second birth to normal birth which in itself was a promise of death. It was inevitable therefore that the image of a rebirth for eternal life should initially present itself in the form of a repetition of the only birth that had been experienced. This is how St Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians, the fundamental original text which was long destined to be an object of reflection and interpretation, responded to the anxious questions about our eternal fate: But some man will say, how are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body. All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.3

In the Christian world, therefore, the transformation of the earthly body into a body destined for eternal life recalled, by analogy and by opposition, the only birth of which there was some experience. At the beginning of everything was the bare seed sown by man. It had to die for the transformation of birth to take place and for God to give the living being the body of flesh which had been destined for him. But if, as it has been noted, ‘the seed is the oldest Christian

2 

Brown, The Body and Society, p. 32. i Corinthians 15. 35–40. Marrou, ‘Le dogme de la résurrection des corps’, included in Marrou, Patristique et Humanisme, pp. 492 ff. 3 

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metaphor for the resurrection of the body’,4 this is because there was no better way to imagine rebirth than by looking at the process of natural birth: the metamorphosis from a seed to a complete living organism was evoked to suggest the forms of the analogous metamorphosis from the earthly to the resurrected body. So that the flesh and blood, born of the seed and exposed to corruption, might inherit the Kingdom of Heaven where nothing is corrupted, a transformation had to take place. What kind of a transformation this was, not even St Paul could say; it was something that was announced as a mystery: Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed (i Corinthians 15. 51–52).

What was meant by this phrase was something that all Biblical interpreters had to ask themselves in the centuries that followed. Its concern for the body and its preoccupation with the fate of the body distinguished the Christian concept of resurrection from the philosophical and religious doctrines which had conceived the idea of the immortality of the soul in the ancient world. It was an absolutely fundamental, decisive point for Augustine, who insisted more than once on the radical difference between the Christian faith and pagan philosophy: there could be some agreement over the immortality of the soul, but not over the Christian conviction that human bodies could ascend to Heaven.5 But who was to undergo the transition of resurrection, and how, was the problem, and it was here that the exegetes concentrated their anxious questions. The ambiguity between the corruption of the body and its metamorphosis at the sound of the divine trumpet, St Paul’s announcement that ‘we shall not all die’ left much room for doubt and attempts at interpretation, as the passing of the centuries gradually deluded the expectation of Christ the judge’s imminent return. 4 

Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, p. 3. ‘Indeed nothing has been attacked with the same pertinacious, contentious contradiction, in the Christian faith, as the resurrection of the flesh. On the immortality of the soul many Gentile philosophers have disputed at great length [...] when they come to the resurrection of the flesh, they doubt not indeed, but they most openly deny it, declaring it to be absolutely impossible that this earthly flesh can ascend to Heaven’, Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, trans. by Parker, Psalm 89 (88).  ii. 5, p. 261. See also Augustine, The City of God, xxii. 4, xxii. 11. According to von Moos, ‘Le sens commun au Moyen Âge’, pp. 37–42, the rejection of intellectualism, which was typical of Augustine and which also led him to oppose Origen’s theory of the transformation of the body into an intangible reality, was to continue to gain strength up until the 12th century. 5 

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In practice, the resurrection was understood in the first place and for long as referring to the body — ‘Vermi nati a formar l’angelica farfalla’ (worms, born to bring forth the angelic butterfly)6 — but always linked to the fate of the living body. Christians wondered about the appearance of their soul temporarily detached from their bodies, individual judgement after death, the place and the condition of the souls in that intermediary period before the resurrection of the body, and many other questions which arose when Christ’s return no longer appeared to be imminent. What were the containers like which were destined to divide the damned from the saved, and how many were there? What kind of suffering afflicted the former and what kind of beatitude did the holy souls enjoy?7 Spiritual rebirth and resurrection were closely united by a necessary link: the universal and obligatory nature of baptism was the other side of the universality of resurrection. There is a confirmation of this in heretical doctrines, where the rejection of the obligatory nature of baptism for all newborns went hand in hand with the doctrine that reserved the survival of the soul for those few chosen ones who had been regenerated by faith, eliminating, together with the sacrament of birth, the generalized guaranteed of rebirth for the good and the wicked. But if baptism was presented by the Scriptures as the necessary and exclusive gateway to the Kingdom of Heaven, with the victory of Christianity in the Roman Empire it also became the condition for admittance into civic and political life. In the medieval cities, the Baptistery was the symbolic place of collective belonging. It was there that people came in the moments of greatest difficulty, as is shown by the appeal made by Dino Compagni to his fellow citizens in November, 1301, when Florence was threatened by the advance of Charles of Valois: Cari e valenti cittadini, i quali comunemente tutti prendesti il sacro baptesmo di questo fonte, la ragione vi sforza e strigne ad amarvi come cari frategli […] E sopra questo sacrato fonte, onde traesti il santo battesimo, giurate tra voi buona e perfetta pace, acciò che il signor che viene truovi i cittadini tutti uniti. (Dear and worthy citizens, you who all commonly receive holy baptism from this font, reason exhorts you and forces you to love one another as dear brothers […] And on this sacred font, from which you received holy baptism, swear good and perfect peace between yourselves, so that the lord who is coming will find the citizens all united.)8 6 

Dante, Purgatorio, x. 124–25. L’anima dell’uomo, ed. and trans. by Tolomio. 8  Compagni, Cronica, ed. by Luzzatto, p. 78; English translation Compagni, Chronicle of Florence, trans. by Bornstein, p. 38. 7 

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Two centuries later, the crisis of urban society in the Low Countries and the affirmation of the new monarchical power was symbolized by the solemn baptism of Charles V in Ghent.9 The Baptistery was the place that welcomed all the members of the community at the moment of their birth. And it was also the place which preserved a written memory of those who had been born. The information that allows us to know the individuals of the past was elaborated and preserved precisely within the institutions and concepts of collective belonging. The barrier between the baptized Christian and all the others long remained insurmountable, and only very slowly was it eroded away, eliminated, or substituted in the course of the last few centuries, in periods and in ways that differed from country to country. It was a singular type of barrier: those who were outside were insistently invited to come in, by persuasion or by force, by threats or by seduction. Those who refused had to face serious consequences. In Europe it was members of the Jewish community who experienced this more than anyone else, with a series of episodes of terrible violence unleashed by waves of fanaticism for salvation. These go from the chronicles of the first crusades, which saw entire families of German Jews prefer suicide to avoid forced baptism, to the pogroms of the modern age, generally unleashed by the preaching of the friars, as in the case of the terrible massacre of Lisbon in 1506, to arrive almost to the present day, as anti-Semitism grew on the sediment of Christian anti-Jewish sentiment.10 Even when the forced imposition of baptism had been condemned on a theoretical level, the sacrament was still held to be valid once it had been administered: hence the furtive gesture of a Christian wet-nurse could be enough to sanction the irredeemable difference of the child of Jewish parents from its family and lead to its forced separation from them, to be educated in a Christian institution or family. But it was above all with the expansion of Europe in the world that the question of baptism took on a new dimension unlike any experienced so far, in the number of new peoples to Christianize and the quality of reflection on the very nature of the sacrament. While entire populations of Indians were being collectively baptized in America, members of religious orders sat in the slave ships that left Africa, spraying holy water onto the heads of the slaves, giving them 9 

See Strøm-Olsen, ‘Dynastic Ritual and Politics in Early Modern Burgundy’. The persecutions suffered by the Jews of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz in 1096 are narrated in the Cronica by Rabbi Salomon: see Falbel, Kidush Hashem, pp. 7–124. On the massacre of Lisbon, a popular revolt sparked by the Dominicans, see Yerushalmi, The Lisbon Massacre of 1506, French trans. in Yerushalmi, Sefardica, pp. 35–173. 10 

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Christian names. This obsession with the salvation of souls led to such excesses that the ecclesiastical authorities had to intervene to regulate the question, while reflection by more open minds succeeded in going beyond the material aspect of the rite, placing the external baptism of water and salt after the baptism of the heart.11 But one thing was always clear: the essence of the bond which linked the entire population of a territory passed through the sacramental rite. Precisely because of the extraordinary importance of this sacrament in defining an entire religious and social system, reflection on its meaning and on how and when it was to be administered accompanied the entire history of Christianity. It is the question of the baptism of infants in particular which provides a thread capable of uniting the theological doctrines of the soul, scientific exploration of human nature, and the political administration of the Christian city. The point which remained firm throughout the history of Western Christianity was the obligatory nature of baptism for newborns as their second birth. With­ out it they could not become part of the Church and the gate to eternal salvation would not open to them. Only in this way could the stain of original sin inherited through the seed of Adam be erased. Hence the urgency of the sacrament and its progressive proximity to the moment of natural birth. In principle, birth and rebirth were two different things, and in practice they long remained distinct in time. The example given by Nicodemus speaks of an old man and the impossibility of going back to the maternal womb. In practice, the early Christians approached baptism only when they had made a conscious choice, often deliberately delaying the moment at which they took it, in the conviction that the sacrament would erase all their sins. Augustine, baptized as an adult by Ambrose, was the most famous protagonist and also the most convinced critic of this practice: a famous example of a primitive interpretation of baptism as the fruit of an individual, informed choice, Augustine was to contribute decisively to the transformation of the sacrament into a rite destined in the first place for new-born babies. The biblical image of the human being ‘shapen in iniquity’, conceived by its mother in sin (Psalm 51. 5), is present in Augustine’s concept of the newborn, where the sublime nature of gratuitous Redemption corresponded to the abyss of sin. Man could not save himself with the means given to him by nature, as the followers of Pelagius believed: he had 11  The opinion that ‘Baptismum cordis Baptismus est, qui spiritu constat, non externo opere’, was held by the Italian heretic Celio Secondo Curione, De amplitudine beati regni Dei: see Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento e altri scritti, p. 191. The scene of the member of the religious order baptizing the slaves was described at the beginning of the seventeenth century in de Sandoval, Un tratado sobre la esclavitud, ed. by Vila Vilar, pp. 384–85.

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to turn his back on natural birth as soon as possible and follow the only path open by rebirth ‘in water and spirit’. To understand how spiritual rebirth could take place, Augustine concentrated his reflection on natural birth. Human seed and generation were at the origin of the existence of the individual and the entire human species, and he chose to start from here, making it the essential point of reference when forming his conception of history, drawing the city of God on the canvas of the earthly city. The fall of Rome in 410 ad was a capital event, a dramatic overturning of all the certainties that had been fostered by the order imposed by the Roman Empire. The Christian religion, which by this time enjoyed a hegemony in the Roman Empire, found itself under accusation: its gods had not protected Rome as the ancient gods had managed to do. The reply came from Augustine’s The City of God, a work whose scope and power was to support a Christian vision of history through the centuries. But even before this, it was the response of a man to his state of anguish before history: a history of the world and its inhabitants seen for the first time in its entirety, through the eyes of a Christian. Where the ancient historians had seen the memorable deeds of great men, the political vicissitudes of peoples and sovereigns, legends, and strange and memorable facts, the eyes of the Christian saw an innumerable mass of individuals and wondered as to the destiny of each one of them, just as he felt the need to recreate the entire design of the history of humanity. It was a historiographical revolution whose effects were to be felt long afterwards. Christianity had promised all individuals the dignity of the sons of God, with no differences between slaves and free men, or between men and women, as St Paul had written. With Augustine came the problem of the meaning and the destiny of the life of every human being, not in an abstract way, but in a consideration of the historical process. In the eyes of the Bishop of Hippo, the human race was constituted by the imperceptible particles of individual lives, which he saw emerge for a moment from the turbulent eddy of the current, then to immerse themselves ‘with death into the unknown’. Although a grandiose scenario, the vision proposed by Augustine appears to lead to the most desperate of outcomes. ‘Like a torrent of rainwater’, the drops of individual lives swell the current of history, appearing and disappearing in the flow of the centuries, which carries them ‘like a mass of water towards the ravine’.12 Ravine, ‘abisso orrido, immenso’:13 many centu12 

Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, cix. 20, quoted by Carena, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxiv–xxv. From the poem by Giacomo Leopardi, ‘Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’asia’, l. 35, in Tutte le opera i. 23, pp. 80–84. 13 

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ries later, when the Christian vision had been thoroughly corroded, Leopardi was to fix his gaze on the anguish of death as the individual end of the world. Augustine however had evoked the desperate scenario of the natural history of the species in order to measure the alternative of Christian hope against it. Beside the human city was the city of God. It had a number of places — a limited number — for those citizens destined for eternal salvation. What signs were there for identifying them? It was necessary to recapitulate the entire design of human history, beginning from the time when our two first parents began to propagate the race until all human generation shall cease. For this whole time or world-age, in which the dying give place and those who are born succeed, is the career of these two cities concerning which we treat.14

Thus the seed St Paul spoke of had been identified. It was the male seed, and it played an essential role in human generation, also according to medical and legal culture. The woman’s contribution was utterly secondary: the female body was defined as the earth which received the seed, a necessary but completely pas­­sive place. The long life enjoyed by this form of representation is the most impressive document of the extraordinary persistence of a male prejudice, which, in arrogating to itself the faculty of the continuity of the species and the transmission of goods and powers (from those of the king to those of the humblest subject, always absolute lord of his own house), remained obstinately deaf and blind to the concrete experience of pregnancy and birth. The new life taking shape within its mother’s womb was held to be the exclusive fruit of male sperm, bearing the heat of its father’s blood in the cold, dark place offered by the female body. At the beginning of Christian speculation on the subject, Tertullian had put forward the theory that the male seed even acted as a conduit for the soul, and, as proof of this, had used nothing less than the male experience of sexual intercourse, when it seemed that, issuing from the man’s body together with his semen, came something of his very soul too (aliquid de anima). This theory of transmission from father to son (‘ex traduce’, hence the term ‘traducianism’) seemed to be purpose-made to gain the consensus of a sceptical and materialistic tradition which was not to forget it.15 14 

Augustine, The City of God, xv. 1. Tertullian’s passage was underlined by Gassendi, Opera omnia, ii, Physicae, section iii, part one, book iv: De generatione animalium, pp. 260–95 (p. 280). But Fortunio Liceti had already given an expurgated version of the same theory, maintaining that what the father communicates to the embryo ‘in coitu’ is only a part of its irrational soul: Liceti, De ortu animae humanae, p. 386. 15 

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Tertullian’s theory is just one example of many which could be taken from a long history: blood — a vital, mobile liquid, spiritual vehicle created from the transformation of material food — was long a subject of meditation for the most astute and restless representatives of medical and philosophical culture. But behind thoughts of which only traces remain, it is easy to imagine the existence of many others. The central doctrine of Christianity, the Incarnation, carried in its very formulation a reference to the ordinary experience of human generation. An extraordinary birth, but still a human one, the Saviour’s birth was also the guarantee of rebirth after death. All Christians had to attempt in some way to imagine the formation of God’s human body in the body of the Madonna. The mystery of life seemed to be concentrated precisely there, and here high culture and folklore tradition came together. God had to be placed within female physiology and human genealogy, two tasks which occupied an immense area of Christian culture. We do not have to be reminded of the importance of genealogy in a culture which sought to legitimize the present and anticipate the future in its origins. From early on, the image of the tree imposed itself in the Western representation of genealogical succession: a majestic male oak, from the acorn of the progenitor embedded in the (female) ground, up to the highest leafy boughs, ever more rigorously pruned, where the female shoots sprouted. The commentary on the Apocalypse written in the Iberian peninsula in the eighth century by Beatus of Liébana is a famous example of this.16 But a special fate was reserved for the elaboration of the genealogy of Jesus. The authors of the canonical Gospels were careful to place him in a totally male genealogy, which descended back from his legal father, Joseph, to Abraham (Matthew 1. 1–16), or directly back to Adam, the son of God (Luke 3. 23–38). But the fact remained that Jesus’s blood did not derive from his father’s seed, but from his mother’s blood: and the pagan polemicists exploited this for their arguments, from Celsus to the emperor Julian. Eusebius of Caesaria resolved the question by placing Mary in the royal tribe of Judah.17 16  See Klapisch-Zuber, C., L’ombre des ancêtres, ch. iii, pp. 61–84. But the whole work is of great interest. 17  On this see Bizzocchi, Genealogie incredibili, pp. 118–26; and Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes, trans. by Ryle and Soper, pp. 79–94. The medieval theories of procreation are the subject of the vast and ambitious work by van der Luft, Le ver, le démon et la vierge, which I have not been able to take into account here as it came out while this work was already in its final stages. But, as the author writes, it is certain that in medieval theories of generation, the centrality of ‘paradoxes stupéfiants’ (p. 369) like that of the Virgin Mother and God Incarnated, influenced the medical theory and embryology of the theologians and the theological opinions of the physicians.

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There remained, however, the indelible presence of a female protagonist at the most important birth in the entire history of humanity. In the world of representations and in popular devotion it was this figure that was to become increasingly important. Here, the patrilineal genealogical tradition of the Messiah yielded to female domination: some have seen this as a sign on the ‘fem­­ inization of birth taken to the point of eclipsing the father’.18 It is a fact, however, that many complex and contradictory consequences for the ordinary conditions of women’s lives were to derive from this female protagonism in the very act of foundation of the Christian tradition. In the first place, the apparent exaltation of the maternal figure hid the reality of the model of a mother totally subordinate to her son, ready to recognize in Him a supreme value to the negation of herself. The birth of Christ, moreover, was not only a potential mirror of all births: it was the miraculous event which created the possibility of the second and definitive birth, that which led to the Kingdom of Heaven. Learned speculation and popular representation revolved around this point for centuries, giving rise to doctrines on which the Churches and the most radical heresies rested. Hope in life after death based on that divine birth was thus linked to the hope of survival in the continuity of generations which every human birth brings with it. Let us turn our attention to one point here: life was brought by blood, life was blood itself. In the case of Jesus, the exception that confirmed the rule was the origin of that blood: not the divine Father but the earthly mother. This gave rise to many problems which occupied the thoughts of theologians and the simple devoted, and the elaborate formulations of the ecclesiastical authorities for centuries. The subject of particular debate was the way in which the Madonna had been conceived, since it had to be understood how she could have been born of the seed of Adam without inheriting original sin, in such a way as to offer the divine Son unvitiated flesh and blood. But if the Madonna’s maternity and the Son’s humanity remained fixed points in Christian faith and theological reflection, the unique nature of that event prevented the normal reproductive acts of the species from being reflected in it. Theories of birth as an ordinary and repetitive fact concentrated on blood: that was the vehicle of life. Proof of this was the fact that it was blood which opened the door to death when it left the body or ceased to circulate in the limbs. And if human blood was the vehicle of life but also of death, the blood of Christ — object of lively devotion and profound mystical fascination — was the guarantee of eternal life. This is the point where the history of the human race divided. 18 

Baschet, Le Sein du père, p. 323.

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Augustine looked for the beginning and the foundation of history, and he found it in the natural reproduction of the species: ‘the sexual intercourse of man and woman, then, is in the case of mortals a kind of seed-bed of the city’.19 Biblical genealogies allowed him to begin from the first couple and their children, gradually to follow the subsequent history, that of the earthly city and that of the other city. Two parallel but radically divergent histories: Cain who kills Abel is also the first founder of a city, and sets in motion a human history marked by war as a continual struggle for power, a war waged for peace and justice, but one condemned to be waged under the nightmare of fratrici­dal violence. Cain and Abel and Romulus and Remo tell the same story. The city of men is born from natural generation and condemned to the unchanging repetition of endless violence. The history of the city of God unfurls in parallel. ‘But’, continues Augustine, ‘while the earthly city needs for its population only generation, the heavenly needs also regeneration to rid it of the taint of generation’.20 The story of the original sin of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3) was linked in Augustine’s thought to God’s promise to Abraham (Genesis 17), which became the promise of Christian redemption and salvation, no longer merely for the Jewish people, but for the regenerated people. The sign of the alliance had changed: no longer circumcision, but baptism. ‘And he that is eight days old shall be circumcized among you, every man child in your generations […] And the uncircumcized man child […] that soul shall be cut off from his people’ (Genesis 17. 12–14). Augustine indeed draws on Genesis 17. 14, but he also introduces the term ‘soul’: ‘And the uncircumcized man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcized, that soul shall be cut off from his people: he hath broken my covenant’.21 In response to a certain Vincentius Victor of Mauretania Caesariensis, who had asked him in 419 whether baptism was necessary for salvation, Augustine wrote the treatise On the Soul and its Origin, in which he referred to the Passio Sanctae Perpetuae et Felicitatis. Commenting on the vision of the boy Dinocrates, who was admitted to Paradise thanks to his sister’s prayers, Augustine maintained that unbaptized children could not enter Heaven or rest in peace in any other place between Heaven and Hell, as the Pelagians had thought.22

19 

Augustine, The City of God, xv. 16. Augustine, The City of God, xv. 16. 21  Augustine, The City of God, xvi. 27. 22  Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, p. 71 20 

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How could the soul of someone who had not yet lived, and hence had not com­­mitted any sin, be condemned for eternity? Augustine’s explanation was long destined to leave its mark in history. To clarify his thought against the fol­­ lowers of Pelagius who accused him of falling into fatalism, he took an extreme example: two twins born of a prostitute, who die immediately, one of which is baptized and saved, and the other of which dies without baptism and is damned. It is an outcome which, for Augustine, was not due to the random mechanical and impersonal nature of blind fate, but to the will of a God above human understanding, who in one case saves mercifully and in the other abandons the member of the human ‘massa perditionis’ to the just consequences of inherited sin.23 Because the point is this: children are born sinners not in themselves but because of the original sin committed by Adam and Eve. All humanity is condemned by this. A desperate vision of the human condition and of history as a process of violence and overpowering led Augustine, with all his second thoughts and contradictions, to the doctrine of divine predestination: God chooses who to save, and who not to. The apparent cruelty of the divine decree is shown in all its incomprehensible harshness in the two twins, where one child is baptized and the other dies before it can be baptized. Why is one saved and the other condemned for eternity? No answer is given to this question other than the fact that the human race is naturally destined for Hell. Through the seed of Adam, every individual inherits if not his father’s soul — as Tertullian had maintained — then certainly his father’s blood and with it a life marked by original sin: consequently he is in himself deserving of eternal condemnation. Only gratuitous divine mercy, through the death and resurrection of Christ, can save those who receive baptism, and with it heal the sin of birth with spiritual rebirth. The need remains then for Christians to live in such a way as to avoid condemnation at the final judgement. And as they await this, in the meantime, their souls have to remain shut in their appropriate receptacles.24 23  Augustine, Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum, ii, chapters 5–7, cols. 577–83. This theme in Augustine’s anti-Pelagian thought is underlined by Lettieri, L’altro Agostino, pp. 405–08. 24  Augustine, Enchiridion, xxviii. 109: ‘Tempus autem quod inter hominis mortem et ultimam resurrectionem interpositum est animas abditis receptaculis continet, sicut unaquaeque digna est vel requie vel aerumna pro quod sortita est in carne cum viveret’; (Now, for the time that intervenes between man’s death and the final resurrection, there is a secret shelter for his soul, as each is worthy of rest or affliction according to what it has merited while it lived in the body), Augustine, ‘Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love,’ trans. by Outler, chap. xxvix. 109, p. 74.

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What the soul actually was, what it looked like, and what kind of relationship it had with the body was a deeply felt problem, and Augustine appealed to the common experience of dreams and visions to reach the conclusion that the soul must have some resemblance to the body.25 But the anthropological concept that was being created around the body-soul connection included many other faculties. For Augustine, for example, besides the soul, which remained something closely linked to the body, was the ‘mens’, the intellectual, wholly spiritual part of man. It would take too long even to mention the complicated series of terms and concepts which were elaborated in response to the need to distinguish between intellective and physiological faculties in the tradition of ancient thought which medieval culture inherited and made its own. In its analysis of the intellect and the cognitive functions, the contribution of the ancient world to the medieval concept of the individual and the soul revealed itself in all its richness. It is certainly not by chance that in the Divine Comedy, it is a Homeric hero, Ulysses, who urges us to reflect on the destiny of human ‘semenza’ (seed) as linked to knowledge.26 The rhetorical exaltation of the dignity of man — a genre that was to be practised by the humanists — rested on the immortality of the soul and even more on the human capacity to raise itself above its natural condition by means of knowledge. But totally Chris­­tian was the attempt to narrate the history of the soul’s journey from its descent into the mother’s womb to its ascent to the heavens. The need to see the two ends of the journey was at the origin of the famous visions recounted by the mystic Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), translated into images in the miniatures which decorate the text. She recounted the mira­ cu­­lous vision of the human being enclosed in the womb of a woman (integram for­mam hominis) with the emotion of someone who sees herself as the beholder of a supreme mystery granted by God. That human form was born from curdled blood, as cheese curdles from milk, according to an ancient image (perhaps of biblical origin and certainly part of everyday experience). And just as cheese turns out more or less substantial and compact, so human beings 25  ‘Animam […] habere posse similitudinem corporis et corporalium omnino membrorum quisquis negat potest negare animam esse, quae in somnis videt vel se ambulare vel sedere … quod sine quidam similitudine corporis non fit’: Augustine, De genesi ad litteram libri xii, ed. by Agaesse and Solignac, xxxiii. 62, p. 442; (if you deny that [the soul] can have a resemblance to the body with all its parts, you can also deny that it is the soul which in dreams seems itself walking or sitting [...] none of which could happen without some likeness of the body), Augustine, ‘The Literal Meaning of Genesis’, ed. and trans. by Hill, p. 501. 26  Dante, Inferno, xxvi. 118–20.

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could be more solid or more weak, more or less capable of raising themselves up to spiritual things. The still-hidden being thus took on a wholly human form and inherited its own predispositions. But the decisive moment was when the formed baby made itself felt with its first autonomous movement: that, for Hildegard, was the sign that life had been infused into the form. The soul sent from Heaven to inhabit the human being which was already complete but still hidden revealed its presence, therefore, thanks to the first movement felt by the mother. An utterly female feeling of conception and pregnancy led her to identify the moment at which the soul had been infused as the vivid sensation of that autonomous movement (motum vividae motionis). In Hildegard’s vision the soul was a ball of fire sent by God, which took possession of the human form and made it alive.27 What the African bishop and the North-European visionary had in common, in their different times and their different approaches, was the capital problem of the origin of human life and its fate in the next world. The Christian concept of divine judgement and resurrection was linked to two alternatives, between which it continually found itself oscillating: on one hand the doctrine of God the just judge of sin and merit; on the other the remote God, incomprehensible to a human mass destined for eternal damnation with the sole exception of a chosen few. In the everyday reality of a Christian world organized in a legally regulated structure, something that was intrinsically an irresolvable conflict involving great theological principles found a compromise thanks to baptism. Only by passing through that sacrament could a Christian enjoy the gratuitous act of divine Grace which allowed him to enter the protected area of the sons of God: the gateway to salvation was thus opened up to him. An infant could obviously not proffer the words of the declaration of faith, but it was easy to get round this difficulty. Hildegard of Bingen suggested the maternal analogy 27 

‘Et ecce vidi in terra homines in vasis suis lac portantes et inde caseos facientes […] Et ita vidi quasi mulierem velut integram formam hominis in utero suo habentem. Et ecce per secretam dispositionem superni conditoris eadem forma motum vividae motionis dedit, ita quo velut ignea sphaera nulla lineamenta humani corporis habens cor eiusdem formae possedit, et cerebrum eius tetigit et se per omnia membra ipsius transfudit’: Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. by Hart and Bishop, pp. 61, 77–78; (And behold! I saw on the earth people carrying milk in earthen vessels and making cheeses from it [...] And I saw the image of a woman who had a perfect human form in her womb. And behold! By the secret design of the Supernal Creator that form moved with vital motion, so that a fiery globe that had no human lineaments possessed the heart of that form and touched its brain and spread itself through all its members), Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. by Hart and Bishop. The Bible speaks of man created by God like cheese from curdled milk: Job 10. 10. But see Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, trans. by Tedeschi and Tedeschi, pp. 57–58.

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between the spiritual food offered by the Church and the food of the body: in both cases somebody had to do the work of chewing for the infant who did not yet have any teeth. Baptism could be administered to a child, therefore, as long as there was somebody to pronounce the words of faith for him. Later, when the child was grown, it would do good or bad, and the divine judge would take these into account at the final judgement. Only by denying the value of baptism could the divide between the two theories of predestination and free will be truly opened up. But the question remained more or less latent, to reappear in full in the sixteenth century with Luther and Calvin. In practice, ever since the seventh century, the oldest penitentials of the Eas­ tern Church, like those of the West, had imposed severe punishments on those parents who through their negligence let their new-born babies die unbaptized. As far as it would appear, Byzantium provided no clear answer as to the eternal fate of unbaptized children: according to the Thesauros, the handbook by the monk Theognostos, they were to be excluded from Heaven and from the place of punishment.28 Unlike the Augustinian tradition received in the West, Eastern theology did not accept the idea of original sin as handed down from father to son through the male seed. On the other hand, it was always very concerned to urge parents not to forget this sacrament. For this reason Theognostos quoted the story of a miracle which had a tradition dating back to the seventh century: that of a baby who died in Laodicea before the priest had had time to confer baptism on him. Since no one was guilty of neglect, neither the father nor the priest, the priest called on the angel of God, asking for the baby to be given back life for the time needed to baptize him. And the request was granted. At the basis of this tale was the idea of the innocence of the child, an idea which was slowly to impose itself in the West too, struggling against the Augustinian doctrine. Indeed, precisely because it had to combat the Pelagian theory of the goodness of human nature, the Western Church was forced early on to choose the path of obligatory infant baptism, differentiating itself in this from the way in which the Eastern Church developed. The Byzantine Church was also to provide some indication as to the limits within which to baptize, varying between eight days after birth according to the Jewish model of circumcision, and forty days as the term of ritual impurity contracted by the mother through childbirth. But behind these limits established by the authorities, it is possible to sense the need to ensure the fate of the soul of the newborn, which invested theological discussions, required the intervention of institutions, and left traces in the delicate area of miracles. If the 28 

See Baun, ‘The Fate of Babies Dying Before Baptism’.

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theoretical discussion of the soul was long the subject of theological exercises in the schools, so parents’ anxieties were fuelled by the question of eternal salvation. The miracles of the resurrection of new-born babies who had died without baptism, even if rare, received great attention in hagiographical literature and edifying stories, both in the East and the West. But the problem remained extremely difficult to solve, caught as it was between the obligatory nature of bap­­tism for salvation and the threat of an incomprehensible decree which predestined some to damnation without any fault of their own. The great construction of Dante’s other world gives us an idea of the compromise solutions which were put forward in the new reality of the medieval Christian city states. According to Aquinas, children who were not baptized were ‘separated from God’ and did not participate in divine glory, but were in full possession of natural faculties.29 Describing the blessed of the ‘candida rosa’ of the Empyrean, Dante based himself on Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas to place among them also the souls of children who had died before they had known good and evil. He subdivided them by distinguishing between the three fundamental ages in the history of salvation: from Adam to Abraham when their parents’ faith was enough for salvation; from Abraham to Christ, with male circumcision as the imperfect form of baptism; and from Christ onwards, when only baptism could provide salvation (hence, ‘sanza battesmo perfetto di Cristo | tale innocenza là giù si ritenne’, ‘without the baptism absolute of Christ,| such innocence below there was retained’, ‘là giù, ‘below there’ being the Limbo of the ‘sospesi’).30 To this he added a further form of predestination, that whereby, in the act of creation, God granted individuals a greater or lesser perfection.31 Thus, by recourse to direct divine intervention, an explanation took shape of the differences between one individual and another and an explanation of how the same male seed could produce two different children, favoured by God to a different extent: this was the case of Jacob and Esau, emblematic then and later for those who upheld divine predestination. At the origin of everything, however, was still male seed. In Il Convivio, Dante describes its work, starting from when it ‘cade nel suo recettaculo, cioè ne la 29  The passage from Dante, Purgatorio, vii. 31–36, ‘Quivi sto io coi pargoli innocenti […]’ (There I abide with the little innocents) is an expression of a tradition of this kind. 30  Dante, Paradiso, xxxii. 83–84. 31  Dante, Paradiso, xxxii. 40–84. According to Nardi, ‘I bambini nella candida rosa dei beati’ (1937), and Nardi, ‘I bambini nella candida rosa dei beati’ (1944), Peter of Abano was also among Dante’s sources, given his attention to the influence of the stars in determining the natural diversity between individuals (per participationem naturalium bonorum).

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matrice’ (falls into its receptacle, namely the matrix).32 And it is again male seed that Dante, following Aquinas and Peter Lombard, considers to be the vehi­­cle for the powers of the soul of he who generates: from this he derived the ‘vertú formativa’ (formative virtue) which ‘prepara li organi a la vertú celestiale, che produce de la potenza del seme l’anima in vita’ (prepares the organs to receive the celestial virtue, which brings the soul from the potentiality of the seed into life).33 Having then to explain individual differences, he makes them derive from the random play of various changeable factors, such as the relevant goodness of the ‘complessione del seme’ (temperament of the seed), the ‘disposizione del seminante’ (disposition of the sower), or the ‘disposizione del Cielo’ (‘the disposition of Heaven’, or the arrangement of the constellations of the Zodiac).34 The history of the species is always linked to the seed of Adam, and, subordinately, to that of his male descendants. Even before the figure of the tree had stabilized as a way of representing genealogy — and the tree always had a male trunk and roots — images of the edifice of family relationships represented them inscribed within the outlines of a male figure, that of Adam: all human beings originated in a paternal seed, all men were born of Adam and died in him.35 There were various stages on the route from the seed to the individual, however. Theology had to reckon with the knowledge of living organisms which Arabic culture had inherited from ancient medicine. That knowledge allowed scholars to create a picture of the development of the human being from the embryo to the complete organism. But in reconciling ancient wisdom and Christian theology, Aquinas had put forward a distinction between the powers of the soul as the only substantial form of man, thus producing a vegetative, a sensitive, and a rational faculty.36 The gradualism of his conception has also aroused interest in recent discussions on the legalization of abortion. To this regard, Ronald Dworkin has written: [Aquinas] understood that an embryo is not an extremely tiny but fully formed child who simply grows larger until birth, […] but an organism that develops 32 

Dante, Il Convivio, iv. 21. Dante, Il Convivio, iv. 21. 34  Dante, Il Convivio, iv. 21. 35  See Klapisch-Zuber, C., L’ombre des ancêtres, p. 40. 36  For a brief overview, Gilson, Le Thomisme, pp. 241–80 is still useful. On the elaboration of a theory of the human being after the rediscovery of Plato, Aristotle, and the Arabic commentators, Wéber, La personne humaine au xiiie siècle, is fundamental. 33 

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through an essentially vegetative stage, then a stage at which sensation begins, and, finally, a stage of intellect and reason.37

In Aquinas’s construction, however, the principle remained unchallenged that, at birth, the human being presents itself endowed with a soul as an immaterial substance capable of surviving the death of the body and hence exposed to the risk of sudden death without baptism. And here, as Dante’s complicated subdivision shows, the eternal fate of children born to Christians but not baptized represented a special case, capable on its own of indefinitely interrupting the process of Redemption and the organization of the souls in God’s eternal kingdom. The introduction of baptism registers took place within this context and was marked by it. These records were given the task of documenting the fact that baptism had been duly carried out according to the decisions of the ecclesiastical authority, in a period in which the central power of the papacy had increased to such an extent that scholars have spoken of a ‘papal revolution’. The turning point came in the context of the decisive advance of the ecclesiastical body into the terrain of the definition of human identity in a world ruled by the sacred authority of the pope. It is the thirteenth century which provides us with a fundamental document here. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 opened with a solemn definition of Catholic faith, presented as the narration of a divine birth guaranteeing human rebirth: the ungenerated Father generates the Son, who, through the Trinity, is incarnated and conceived by the Virgin Mary, dies and descends into Hell with his soul, is resurrected with his body, and ascends to Heaven, showing the way to human beings who can save themselves with the sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ and baptism. But the transition from divine birth to human rebirth was conditioned: it could only take place within the Church and with the sacraments which only the Church could supply. The Church of Rome, and no other: the members of the Greek Church who administered baptism to those who had already received it from priests of the Roman obedience were excommunicated. In this document even marriage is brought into the ecclesiastical sphere with the obligation to publish the banns. And the same happened for confession, the sacrament which had to be taken annually and had to be imposed in cases where death was feared, with the threat of sanctions against any physicians who tended patients who had not confessed. Here, the architecture of human life, regulated from birth to death by the sys­­tem of rites of passage, was given a unitary structuring under the government 37 

Dworkin, Life’s Dominion, p. 41.

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of the ecclesiastical body and the authority of the pope, in the shadow of the story of the generation of the Son and the divine Persons. A robust construction which summarized centuries of doctrinal elaboration, in which the power of salvation was entrusted exclusively to the ecclesiastical body, this document did not remain a theoretical statement, but signalled the beginning of the great acceleration in sacramental practice as regulated by the clergy. It was thus that the act of giving a name left the house and entered the church. In the statutes of the thirteenth-century Synod of Angers it was prescribed that in the case of an emergency baptism laymen should not proceed to the attribution of the name: thus when it became obligatory to take newborns to church with a priest, the name, the sign of identity par excellence, entered the sphere of the church and took its place among the controversial issues in the relationship between family and ecclesiastical authority.38 The result of the power relations between the two contenders can often be read in the choice of names. In certain areas, for example, we find a period of transition during which the name of the saint of the day of baptism is added to the name chosen by the father or the family.39 In the Ethiopian church the name given to the child on the day it was born was joined to the name given at baptism, up until the twentieth century.40 But in general the custom of giving children the name of the saint of their day of baptism (and not that of their birth) imposed itself. A famous example is Martin Luther, born on the eve of St Martin’s day.41 And in the age of religious conflict inaugurated by Luther the battle over names became an open struggle. Since a name had to declare a person’s allegiance to one or other Church, for reasons of control and doctrinal coherence there was a further reduction of those allowed: saints’ names in the Catholic world, names from the Bible in the Protestant world. As for those babies who did not live long enough to receive baptism they generally remained without a name and were not included in the baptismal records. But long before those records had been established, their removal from the Book of Life was represented in the harshest and most painful way possible 38 

According to the statutes of Angers, ‘the attribution of the name had to take place in a holy place, under the control of a priest’: Lett, L’enfant des miracles, p. 209. On the moment in which the name is written see Chiesa cattolica, Le pontifical romano-germanique du dixieme siecle, ed. by Vogel and Elze, i, p. 24. 39  In the Florentine family books of the fourteenth century, for example, see KlapischZuber, ‘Constitution et variations temporelles des stocks de prénoms’, pp. 37–47. See KlapischZuber, ‘Le choix de prénom’. On the history of names see Mitterauer, Ahnen und Heilige. 40  Mitterauer, Ahnen und Heilige, p. 170. 41  Mitterauer, Ahnen und Heilige, p. 351.

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by the refusal to bury their bodies alongside all the other members of the community of the dead: those who died as babies did not enter the ‘Holy Land’ of the Christian cemetery. It was deduced from this — wrongly — that it derived from a form of indifference: it seemed that the little being had entered life for such a short time that it was feared that ‘after its death it would return to disturb the living’.42 A completely mistaken opinion: an act like the omission of burial cannot be attributed to chance or distraction; nor do we have the right to deny the past with the strength of feeling. The ancient world had placed those who died in childhood together with all those who had been deprived of life by violence, and it had imagined them as being obsessively present in those places where they should have lived.43 The folklore of Christian Europe provides a confirmation of this with a fundamental difference: it was the spirits of the newborn who had died without baptism which never left the places of the living. Sources agree in considering the spirit of the infant who died prematurely as a ominous, threatening presence, liable to damage the living, impossible to chase away. But the reason for their exclusion was now due to the new characteristic of the Christian cemetery, a place where the dead were united as they awaited resur­­rection. While special rules were dictated for baptized children, including a festive and solemn rite with garlands of flowers and songs celebrating their angelic purity, those children who had not been baptized had no right to enter the sacred space: buried in a field, a cellar, under the threshold of the house, they fuelled the fantasies of witchcraft. Theological doctrines and folklore beliefs were unanimous on this point, and here it is not easy to establish a relationship of cause and effect. A single example may suffice: there seems to have been an English folk tradition in which a piece of paper was placed on the body of the dead baby at burial, with its name written on it, like a sort of ‘passport to Heaven’.44 This is one of the many ways in which an attempt was made to get 42 

Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, trans. by Baldick, p. 30. In this, children who died prematurely found themselves together with those condemned to death, as observed by Cumont, Lux perpetua, ch. vii: ‘L’astrologie et les morts prématureés’, pp. 303–42, and 444. 44  Radford and Radford, Encyclopedia of Superstitions, ed. by Hole, p. 346: I have taken the quotation, which I have not been able to check, from the vast study by O’Connor, Child Murderess and Dead Child Traditions, p. 35. O’ Connor’s study is useful above all for Irish folklore. For German folklore, see the article by Schauerte, ‘Volkskundliches zur Taufe’. In Paul V’s Roman Ritual, the ‘Ordo sepeliendi parvulos’ makes it obligatory for there to be a ‘corona de floribus’ or aromatic herbs, as a symbol of the virginity of the body, as long as it is an ‘infans, vel puer baptizatus’: Chiesa cattolica, Rituale Romanum Pauli V, pp. 191–201. As for the burial 43 

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round the ancient exclusion of the unbaptized from the Kingdom of Heaven; and yet in the English tradition the ban on burial in sacred ground, the harsh ecclesiastical sentence which was felt as the earthly transcription of an eternal condemnation, was no longer in force. Traces of it remained, however, in the concern to give a name to the unbaptized child, almost a surrogate of the sacrament which it had not received. We have to wait till the modern age for the custom of naming and burying the unbaptized to make headway in the funeral rites of the reformed Churches. In certain parts of Germany in the eighteenth century, in Catholic Churches too, we find evidence of the practice of allowing burial outside sacred ground with the appropriate registration in the parish records. 45 In other Catholic areas — Italy and Ireland — things were different: those who were born could cease to live, but they could not ritually enter the community of the dead. The diocesan authorities registered with concern what took place at the funerals of those little corpses, outside the sacred areas and outside Church control: they were buried by night, in the fields, after passing furtively by the church, and they remained there, available for anyone who might want to use them for the purposes of magic.46 It is an example of the full awareness that existed of the risks that were run by leaving open that gap in the protective tissue offered by the rites of the legitimately sacred. But there was nothing that could be done. At the end of the eighteenth century, the bishop of Novara still forbade burial near rural tabernacles or images of the saints: it seemed to him that this was a way of tempting God himself and of forcing him to bring those beings back to life for them to be baptized.47 The increasing rigidity of the official rules concerning the obligatory nature of baptism in order to enter Heaven was not due to any special cruelty by the theologians, insensitive to parents’ anguish. In reality it was the establishment practice, the medieval ecclesiastical tradition is clear in excluding unbaptized babies from the cemetery: see Lett, L’enfant des miracles, p. 211–13. As for the theme of ghosts, the studies by Jean-Claude Schmitt remain fundamental, in particular, Schmitt, Les revenants ; English translation: Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, trans. by Fagan. 45  See Labouvie, ‘Geburt und Tod in der Frühen Neuzeit’. 46  As we read in the decrees of the Synod of Arezzo of 1597: see Corrain and Zampini, ‘Documenti etnografici e folkloristici nei Sinodi Diocesani della Toscana’, p. 653. 47  ‘Infans sine baptismo vita functus ad sacella campestria, vel Sanctorum imagines, aut reliquias defferri ne sinant, neque ob eam causa benedictiones usurpari permittant, it quasi tentato Deo mortui revocentury ad vitam’: from the synodal decrees of 1778, quoted by Corrain and Zampini, ‘Documenti etnografici e folkloristici nei Sinodi Diocesani del Piemonte e della Liguria’, p. 3.

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of the practice of baptizing infants which shows the existence of profound cultural forces at work in favour of the rite of second birth. The need for a second, true birth was deeply rooted in pre-Christian cultures and long remained alive in European society. Without it, there could be no subsequent transition from the living state to that of the dead. Exclusion from the usual forms of funeral rites was experienced therefore as a hash necessity: without a second birth there could be no second death, the definitive farewell, marked by a ritual, which followed death like a physical fact. Theologians were left with the task of finding a solution to the need for a well-organized afterlife, where the dead could find a stable place. This was no mean feat in a society in which religion was a commitment by the living in the service of the dead. Even in the medieval period of European revival, when man’s value, his reason, and his works were being reconsidered in a positive light, the inheritance left to Christianity by the Augustinian doctrine of predestination continued to defy rational analysis; and the hardest point to accept was always the damnation of the child who had died before the age of reason. The only way out was to renounce the obligatory nature of baptism and grant the human being with a positive value. But this was impossible for a number of reasons. One answer was to identify a series of places in the geography of the other world for the many categories excluded from beatitude; and particularly controversial was the nature and the position of the place destined for those who had died without baptism. A discourse on the soul with no body was gradually elaborated, and this ended up by increasingly clouding over the idea that the living being was a unity. An indication of this is the dramatic start to the discussion of the state of the souls of the saints before judgement when, in the fourteenth century, Pope John XXII maintained that the full beatific vision of the greatest good (God) could only be had after the resurrection of the body. The violent reactions of the universities, theologians, and crowned heads forced him to abjure on his deathbed, and were only calmed when the Dominican inquisitor, Jacques Fournier, as Pope Bendedict XII, officially defined the question by stating that the souls enjoyed the beatific vision of God before they were reunited with their resurrected body. His Benedictus Deus, dated 29 January, 1336, ratified what has been defined as the ‘accentuated dualism between body and soul’, by now accepted in the dominant culture.48 Leading to a dualism of this kind was the force of a feeling that had profoundly influenced the history of the relationship between the living and the dead: one 48 

The definition is by Bertolani, ‘Petrarca tra epistolografia e teologia dei poeti’, p. 88. On the controversy see Trottmann, La vision béatifique.

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which had always made it unbearable to conceive of the dead in a condition of expectation and uncertain placement. The burial of the body, sanctioned very early on as one of the works of mercy, had to be accompanied by its definitive placement in the other world (in its three-fold division into those who were blessed, those to be purged, and those who were damned). It was with these thoughts that a chronicler from Todi commented on the papal document: Et venne uno edicto in Tode da parte del papato che le anime sancte, quando uscivano del corpo, in quell poncto vedono la faccia de Dio. Et chi crederà el contrario, lo pubblicava per hereticho, però che le anime sancte non hanno bisogno de purgatione. (And an edict arrived in Todi from the papacy, that the holy souls, when they left the body, see the face of God at that point. And those who would believe the opposite it called heretics because the holy souls do not need purgation.)49

This shows how the doctrine determined by the papacy had a dual function: it resolved the ambiguities concerning the theological definition of Purgatory, and above all it responded to the profound and widespread need to provide a stable regulation of the relations with the world of the dead. The spirits of the dead were an ominous and threatening presence and the following observations on primitive cultures hold for them too: Son séjour parmi les vivants a quelque chose d’illégitime, de clandestin. Elle vit en quelque sort en marge des deux mondes […] Comme elle n’a pas de place où elle puisse se reposer, elle est condamnée à errer sans relâche […] Aussi n’est-il pas étonnant qu’au cours de cette période l’âme soit conçue comme un être malfaisant.50 (The stay of the soul among the living is somewhat illegitimate and clandestine. It lives, as it were, marginally in the two worlds […] As it has no resting place it is doomed to wander incessantly […] It is thus not surprising that during this period the soul should be considered as a malicious being.)

It took Christian culture centuries to find a solution to the problem, and the vari­­ ous answers which arose from a rejection of Purgatory were to mark profound differences between the various modern European cultures. In what is defined as the late Middle Ages, there was a particularly strong need to ensure that all the dead reached a relatively stable condition in a well-defined place in the otherworldly continent. Purgatory, built on strong theological and legal bases, responded to this need by allowing both a perfecting of the administration of 49  50 

Fabrizio degli Atti, ‘Cronicha’, ed. by Mancini, p. 170. Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, trans. by Needham and Needham, p. 36.

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justice after death and the organization of socially regulated relations between the living and the group of the dead, transformed into ‘venerated and protective ancestors’.51 But if this was the question that had to be resolved, one thing was clear: the condition of the newborn who died without baptism slipped inex­­orably through the net of systematization. Its soul remained definitively and irremediably in a temporary condition. In this, high Christian culture revealed itself to be incapable of resolving the problem which folklore culture was well aware of. If beatitude was the condition of the saints, who immediately saw the face of God after death, the system of punishment began immediately, with the absence of the beatific vision. And among those souls who could not see the face of God were those of children who had died without baptism. Faced with the theological definitions solemnly elaborated by authoritative members of the ecclesiastical body, the problem is, as always, to understand what corresponded to them in the convictions of the simple Christians, mostly illiterate, who were not used to the subtleties of school phraseology. How was it possible to conceive that a new-born baby, even before it had started to live, should have inherited such a quantity of evil as to make God condemn in to an eternity of suffering? Was innocence not the very condition of the infant? It was not innocence, but the Innocents that then occupied such a large space in social life and religious traditions. The children who, according to the Gospel account, had been murdered by Herod’s orders, were the object of a cult as saints. An important Florentine hospital which accepted abandoned babies was named after them; and this is a clue which cannot be overlooked as to how abandoned infants were also perceived as infants without sin. In the martyrologies of the Holy Innocents, which spread together with relics as a result of the crusades in Palestine (and one of these gave rise to the famous Paris cemetery of the Innocents), a distinction was made between a life without sin and baptismal holiness earned with martyrdom.52 And yet forms of devotion to the Inno­­cents expressed the idea of the newborn as a completely new being, free from any ancestral debt, something which conflicted with Augustine’s idea of the inheritance of sin left by Adam. In describing the little martyrs joyously welcomed into the Limbo of the holy fathers, a regular canon from sixteenthcentury Ferrara set into verse a mothers’ lamentation: Ma questi, che lattian, con questi petti c’hanno commesso, in la innocentia pura? 51 

Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, trans. by Needham and Needham, p. 57. As we can see in Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, as observed by Benvenuti Papi, ‘Il culto degli Innocenti nell’immaginario medievale’. 52 

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(But these ones, who feed at our breasts, what have they done in their state of pure innocence?)

And this lament referred back to the core of the Redemption, as it was expressed as a divine declaration at the beginning of the little poem: Né voglio, che la prima inquitade piú appaghino i nipoti, per lor avi, ma voglio, com’ha già predetto il vate ch’ogni anima la propria colpa aggravi tal, che non pata il patre per il figlio, né la paterna colpa quel depravi.53 (Nor do I wish for the grandsons to pay any longer for original sin in the place of their ancestors, but, as the poet has already said, I want every soul to be weighed down by its own sin, so that the father should not suffer for his son, nor the sin of the father afflict the son.)

In protesting the innocence of the newborn, a new morality thus found a voice, a morality which was more open to the future than to the past. But in Christian culture, the innocence promised by the Redeemer did not automatically begin with birth as a fact of nature. This could be understood precisely by examining the condition of the ‘creatures’ whose potential life had been immediately interrupted, their short existence: could they be considered ‘innocent’, that is to say, saints like the little Jews massacred by Herod’s soldiers? The answer was given once and for all by St Bernardino of Siena in a sermon held in Florence in 1425: Gli innocenti. Non di quegli che sono affogati ne’ privai o uccisi in corpo per forza di medicine che non ànno l’anima, non s’intende per loro, ma per quegli ch’ànno l’anima pel santo battesimo; quegli sono gl’innocenti. (The innocents. Not those who are drowned in the latrines or those who are killed in their mothers’ body by drugs, who do not have a soul, we do not mean them; but those who have a soul through holy baptism, they are the innocents.)54

In the preacher’s direct and popular way of speaking we find a way of conceiving of baptism which is totally new and unexpected: not as an act which saves 53 

Opera intitolata il fascicolo della mirrhata, redentrice, et salutifera humanità di Cristo per D. Cherubino Tolomeo detto de gli Assassini di Ferrara, can. reg. lat., del 1538, colophon: ‘Impresso in Ferrara nella officina di Francesco Rosso da Valenza, nel 1538’, fols B 1r, I, IVv. I have used the copy in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, fondo Guicciardini. 54  Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari, ed. by Cannarozzi, iv, 412. The passage is also quoted by Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 368–69, n. 2.

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the soul, but as a moment of true creation. These beings that were thrown into the sewers as soon as they were born, or whose mothers condemned them not to be born, the fruit of abortion or infanticide, they ‘do not have a soul’. It is a glimpse into a way of thinking that up until now has remained in the dark. It represented the evolution of the living individual as a process in which the soul made its entrance into the body at a certain moment. That entrance was the result of intervention by a higher divine power channelled onto the new existence at the moment of its birth. Baptism is placed here, as the rite which confers the soul; and here we have the invention of the name. ‘The name’, as Robert Hertz has observed, ‘is only one of the elements of the soul’.55

55 

Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, trans. by Needham and Needham, p. 146, n. 285.

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To Die without a Soul Continuo auditae voces vagitus et ingens infantumque animae flentes At once were voices heard, a sound of mewling and wailing, Ghosts of infants sobbing Virgil, Aeneid, vi, 426–27

The Doctrines of the Churches According to St Bernardino, therefore, those new-born babies who had been killed unbaptized had no soul. Other sources confirm that his expression was cur­­rently used in everyday language to indicate infants who had not been bap­­ tized. One example will suffice: a list of people condemned to death in Perugia between the sixteenth and seventeenth century includes the case of a certain woman named Pola da Bettona, who, on 5 April 1549, was ‘impiccata nel campo della battaglia per haver sotterrrato vivo un suo figliolo piccolo senz’anima’ (hanged on the battle field for having buried alive one of her little children with­­out a soul).1 It would seem therefore that it was normal to define a child which had been killed as soon as it was born, and which had not been baptized, as being without a soul. It is as if two different languages are juxtaposed in the voice of the preacher: a learned voice, and the voice of the people. Let us try to listen to them both. 1 

Perugia, Arch. di Stato, ex Congregazione di carità, Confraternita dei ss. Andrea e Bernardino della Giustizia, 3, fol. 6r. See above p. 67.

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The entire history of the imaginings of the other world, so abundant and rich in the Middle Ages, is permeated by a discussion of the fate of unbaptized infants; but this discussion also interweaves with the thicker thread of the relationship between ‘us’ and ‘the other’, with the sense of identity and limits which characterizes European Christian culture in the period in which this culture gained self-awareness and expanded in the world. Hence we can only attempt a rough summary here, and ignore the framework of the insatiable curiosity about the ‘other’ world, which expressed itself in the form of visions, miracles, or fantastic stories, re-elaborating Jewish, Muslim, or Eastern and Slavic folklore traditions.2 But we must first gain a preliminary sense of the violence implicit in the peaceful theological discussion, a violence which inspired this discussion and which often became its tool. The question of the fate of Christian children who had died without baptism marks the extreme and most delicate point of this discussion, where the need for the protection and justice which religious intercession and divine power could provide, clashed with the powerlessness of the sacred. It was possible to break into the houses of the Jews with violence and baptize their children during the crusades; it was possible to use a violence disguized by legal artifice to allow the missionaries, in league with the conquistadores, to baptize the native Indians of America en masse; it was even possible for the first Jesuits in China to leave the protective shell of their own culture dressed up as mandarins, if this was the price to pay to conquer and baptize neophytes. But the Christian and European desire to save the world through baptism was to receive its most painful setback in the death of its own children in those cases where there had been no time to administer the sacrament of salvation. That defeat was unacceptable. It was a battle of life against death: not the death of the body, but the death of the soul. The desire to save souls fuelled the apostolic heroism of the Christian preachers, whose greatest aspiration was to die at the hands of others, the ‘infidels’ or the ‘pagans’, while they conquered souls for the Christian Paradise. The fact that marching behind or beside them were conquerors of another type was merely incidental, an unpleasant but necessary price. Nor could the ties of blood or affection between parents and their children be of any importance: baptized children had to be taken from their families or there was the risk of losing their souls again. In the long period which runs from the Crusades right up almost to the present day, it was the Jewish minorities in Christian lands, those ‘others’ who were the closest and 2 

See the exemplary research by Bloch, ‘La vie d’outre-tombe du roi Salomon’, now in Bloch, Histoire et historiens.

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most obstinately difficult to assimilate, who experienced this most and for the longest: the armed baptizers who sacked the warehouses of medieval cities were replaced by the gentle Christian wet-nurses of the Modern Age and the religious institutions where the Jewish orphans of the holocaust found refuge. But every time, the wall of baptism was erected to divide a people from its children. If this was the historical value of the fundamental sign of European identity, it is easy to understand the theological torment surrounding the problem of the salvation of Christian children, and the attempt to organize missions capable of approaching the soul in the twilight land of birth. The condition laid down by the word of Jesus — to believe and be baptized — resulted on one hand in the exclusion of the overwhelming part of humanity from the Kingdom of Heaven; on the other, it worked against those children who, according to the Gospels, were particularly dear to Jesus. Hence, although it fired missionaries and preachers with Christian zeal, the invitation of the Gospels often seemed difficult to reconcile with the universal nature of the message of salvation. But the long struggle made by religious reflection to find a solution was not merely due to abstractly theological reasons: ever since the beginning of the history of the Church as an institution whose confines were those of the Roman Empire, baptism had provided access to a great social and political reality. Hence the long search to fill the silences of Scripture: it was necessary to find the place reserved for the defective humanity of those who had died without baptism. This was an extreme case, in which the voluntary and conscious nature of faith and the Christian and Pauline claim for penitence as an inward change, as opposed to the ritual precepts of the Jews, contradicted the absolute value attributed to a rite which was administered to beings who were not conscious of receiving it. The discussion, never wholly absent after initially taking shape in Late Antiquity, grew increasingly heated in the Middle Ages, to reveal all its explosive potential in the age of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, when the exclusive nature of the sacrament for salvation came to be denied for the first time. It was not merely a question of constructing a convincing geography of the other world, but of elaborating a system of justice capable of reconciling the universal nature of the Redemption of Christ with the harsh condemnation of those who had not been baptized, a category which was growing out of all pro­­portion. Its initial characteristics of a prevalently historical nature were now joined by geographical ones: after Adam and the Patriarchs and Prophets of Israel, and the great men of pagan Antiquity, it was the multitudes from outside Europe who presented the problem of what possibilities for salvation might exist for those who had not been baptized. But the most distressing aspect of

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the question was the eternal fate of infants who had been born and had immediately died in Christian lands. Could the door to salvation have closed in their faces, they who had not had time to commit sin? Augustine’s concept of original sin as the radical corruption of human nature and the consequent theory of predestination had opened up the terrible scenario of eternal condemnation and the abyss of a divine justice which was incomprehensible and totally arbitrary: the only choice before that abyss was to humiliter ignorare, as Anselm of Laon had written in his Sententiae, or to give thanks to a God who saved those he wanted to and condemned those who had been aborted to eternal punishment, according to an opinion held, among others, by Aelred of Rievaulx.3 With the advance of the civic dimension of religious life and the active participation of the laity, the incomprehensible God of predestination, a supreme, remote power, seemed destined to leave the stage and be replaced by a legislator subject to his own laws, a careful administrator of reward and punishment: in the cities justice had assumed the placid face of Peace.4 But the face of legal power as a function of the state was to take on all the solemn and mysterious characteristics of a God who committed himself to ‘reward good and punish evil’, as Giannozzo Manetti wrote in Florence in the fifteenth century, ‘ma la retributione dà per gratia e la punitione fa con misericordia’ (but he gives retribution by grace and punishment with mercy).5 The condemnation of new-born babies who had not been able to commit any evil became the subject of discussions which were increasingly heated as the tension around the organization of society increased. Thus the eternal fate of children who had died without baptism emerged in heretical doctrines. Session XV of the Council of Constance (6 July, 1415) condemned a series of articles by John Wycliffe in which he accused those who denied the salvation of the ‘parvulos fidelium sine baptismo decendentes’ of being ‘stolidi et praesumptuosi’ (stupid and presumptuous).6 It was the first sign of the storm approaching. The growing discredit thrown onto

3 

On Anselm of Laon, see Weberberger, ‘“Limbus puerorum”’, p. 92. On Aelred of Rievaulx and his concept of infancy, see Boquet, ‘De l’enfant-Dieu à l’homme-enfant’, p. 132. I am grateful to Peter von Moos for kindly providing these references. 4  On this, the article by Zdekauer, ‘“Iustitia”: imagine e idea’, is still important. 5  Justice, wrote Manetti, ‘non è altro se non retribuire el bene e punire el male; la quale cosa fa il nostro signore Iddio, ma la retributione dà per gratia e la punitione fa con misericordia’: from an unedited ‘protesto’, quoted by Dessi, ‘La giustizia in alcune forme di comunicazione medievale’, p. 210. 6  Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, ed. by Alberigo and others, p. 422.

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sacred things handled by an increasingly criticized clergy advanced alongside the theology of predestination.7 In this way, the theory that condemned unbaptized children to Hell came to receive official confirmation. This is what happened in 1439 when the Coun­ cil of Florence defined what had to be believed regarding the fate of newborn babies who had died without baptism. It was the unexpected and almost un­­­ noticed result of a solution given to a different problem.8 The decree of Ses­ sion VI, dated 6 July, 1439, ‘Laetentur caeli et exultet terra’, marked the end of the schism and the union of the Christian Churches of the East and the West. In defining the cardinal points of the common doctrine it recognized baptism as the gateway to eternal life. And here, rigidifying previous formulations (among which a declaration of faith proposed by Clement IV in 1267), the Council affirmed that those who died without baptism would immediately descend into the depths of hell (mox in infernum descendere). It was a victory for the legalistic concept of divine justice, typical of Western Christianity and based on the doctrine of original sin.9 The model of Christ’s baptism, fixed in pictorial form at the time by Piero della Francesca’s masterpiece, was meant to remind everybody what the sacrament of salvation was, even though the image of a rite administered to a consenting adult was to foster uncertainty and doubt in the minds of those who saw it practised on unknowing infants.10 In practice, from this moment onwards, discussion increased while the Church’s invitation to baptize newborns knew no rest, and the written registration of baptism, which the Council of Trent was to render obligatory, became generalized. The harshness of the decree, the point of arrival of a theological discussion that had long remained open, made it necessary however for there to be a series of clarifications and adjustments, and an insistent discussion came to 7 

On the progressive advance of Augustinianism from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Age, also taking into consideration the theories by Kolakowski, Dieu ne nous doit rien, see von Moos, ‘Das Geheimnis der Prädestination im Mittelalter’. 8  The debates of the Council held in Ferrara and Florence mostly concerned the question of Purgatory: see Gill, The Council of Florence, pp. 270–304. 9  Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, pp. 192–95 insists on the different viewpoint held by the Greek Church. 10  It is perhaps for this reason that the Tuscan baptismal font by the Della Robbia family includes the iconography of the sacrament established by Piero della Francesca in association with the image of the birth of John the Baptist and his father Zaccaria in the act of writing his name, thus completing the representation of the canonical rite. The baptismal font, which dates to around 1511, is in the Church of San Leonardo in Cerreto Guidi, near Florence.

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concentrate on the characteristics of the ‘fourth place’ in the landscape of the Christian afterlife: the ‘Limbus puerorum’ destined for children who had died without baptism. The question of Limbo is a hidden and apparently secondary history. Com­ pared with Purgatory, it has gone almost unobserved, because it has not been the subject of dogmatic definitions or the cause of confessional lacerations. It was over Purgatory and the power of prayer and offerings by the living to intercede for the dead that the first clashes erupted: first between the Greek and the Roman Church and then between Luther and Rome. The fictitious unification between the Christians of the East and the West was to be followed by the irreconcilable rupture between those of Northern and those of Southern Europe, Protestants and Catholics. But in the background to the conflict, before and above all after the Reformation, there was also the question of Limbo, as a consequence of the debate over baptism. It was a debate which saw the dominant presence of the Dominican Order, whose most important theologians felt themselves called on to provide a rational explanation for the severity of a sentence which was otherwise justifiable only by appealing to the inscrutable nature of divine predestination. Part of the Dominican tradition was a conviction of the autonomy of the natural order, and babies who had died without baptism were imagined to be destined to live for all eternity in a natural world which had been restored after the Uni­ versal Judgement. The debate mostly leads back to the same city where the council decree had been approved: Florence. The archbishop of the city, the pious Dominican Antonino Pierozzi, and the humanists Giannozzo Manetti and Donato Acciaiuoli, all participated in it, taking different approaches to a fundamental theme: what might happen to the souls of the ‘parvuli’ who had died, tainted only by original sin. According to the Archbishop, on the day of the Final Judgement, they would be resurrected with their bodies, at the age of thirty-three, to live on earth without suffering, indeed enjoying the full development of the natural powers of the soul and thus becoming wiser than any philosopher. In his Summa Theologiae, written around 1440 and 1454, and hence immediately after the Council of Florence,11 St Antoninus designated precise places for the souls: on one hand Hell, the ‘locus miseriae’ at the centre of the earth, or in any case under the earth; on the other the ‘locus gloriae’, the empyrean. The souls of the ‘parvuli’ were to be placed in Hell, it is true, but, if Hell were a house full of flames, then 11 

See Howard, Beyond the Written Word, p. 31.

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their place could be described as being near the roof, where they would not feel the effects of the fire.12 Given the pastoral nature of St Antoninus’s work, it is very likely that his theories circulated among the Florentine humanists. The discussion which absorbed Donato Acciaiuoli, Giannozzo Manetti, and the Florentine librarian Vespasiano da Bisticci in 1450 suggests that there was a background of theological culture and ecclesiastical preaching on the subject.13 It was precisely the humanist Giannozzo who made himself the spokesman of the Augustinian doctrine of the irredeemable condemnation to Hell of those babies who had died without baptism; Donato Acciaiuoli reacted in protest: since God was Justice and Truth, it was impossible to think that he should punish those who had never committed sin. What was at stake was divine justice, or at least the possibility of reconciling this justice with human reason. Hence the Dominicans committed themselves to redefining the doctrine of the fate of the souls in Limbo, without lessening in any way, however, the severity of the decree which divided human beings right from their first moment of life. In conformity with this decree, Savonarola wrote that only ‘l’anima d’uno fanciullo piccolo, che muore con la grazia del battesimo per la Gloria di Dio vede la faccia sua’ (the soul of a little child, who dies with the grace of baptism, will see God’s face, thanks to His glory).14 But by accepting Antonino Pierozzi’s doctrine, he could reassure his readers: Nel Limbo […] non hanno pena alcuna […] Dapoi la resurrezione […] abiteranno sopra la terra, la quale sarà allora ben purgata e glorificata. (In Limbo […] they do not suffer any pain […] After the resurrection […] they will live above the earth, which will then be completely purged and glorified’.)15

The Dominican theologians had to perform numerous exercises in theological reasoning to preserve the obligatory nature of infant baptism without tumbling into the abyss of predestination. Particularly bold here was Tommaso de Vio, 12 

Sant’Antonino, Summa maior, ‘Prima pars’, tit. viii, ch. 1 (on original sin). See Cagni, Vespasiano da Bisticci e il suo epistolario, pp. 125–28. On the letter by Donato Acciaiuoli to Giannozzo Manetti, dated 20 September, 1450, see Garin, ‘La giovinezza di Donato Acciaiuoli’. In reality the first exhaustive study on the context and the content of the letters was provided by Franceschini, ‘Dibattiti sul peccato originale e sul Limbo a Firenze’, which also includes as an appendix the three letters we have regarding this discussion. I would like to thank Dr Franceschini for allowing me to read her article before publication. 14  Savonarola, Prediche sopra i Salmi, ed. by Romano, p. 129. 15  Savonarola, Triumphus crucis, ed. by Ferrara, book iii, ch. ix, pp. 445–46. 13 

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the famous Cajetanus, who introduced a new argument capable of limiting the extent of the condemnation: in his commentary on Aquinas’s Summa, he main­­­­tained that parents’ prayers were valid in the place of baptism when it was impossible to administer the sacrament.16 But Augustine’s condemnation of unbaptized children continued to appear a great injustice to those who were not theologians. 17 The learned, the laity, and churchmen were prompted to voice their opinions by the strength of widespread concern for the eternal fate of the souls of infants, and the ancient practice of abandoning infants was profoundly changed by it. It was certainly not by chance that some of the most important institutions to this regard were created or adapted precisely between the fourteenth and the fifteenth century, to receive foundlings ‘benigna e graziosamente’ (kindly and freely) and raise them ‘al le spese del detto Ospitale’ (at the expense of the said Hospital), as we can read in the 1318 statutes of the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena.18 Here the new forms of Christian charity were very soon characterized by a concern for the fate of the soul.19 This was the fundamental impulse behind the creation of the impressive reality of the Foundling Hospitals for children and new-born babies abandoned by their parents. Once they had become children of the Hospital, the unbaptized children weighed down on the consciences of the administrators, who were afflicted in the same way as parents were. In his Cronica, fra Salimbene tells the story of the tormented soul of the ‘dominus’ of a hospital, who was punished because he had let children in his care die without 16 

The passage (Summa Theologica iii, quest. 68, art. 2) was censored as from the 1570 Roman edition of Tommaso de Vio’s commentary on Aquinas’s Summa (Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, Summa totius theologiae D. Thomae Aquinatis cum commentariis (Rome, 1570)). The cen­­sorship of Cajetanus is found in Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Indice, Protocolli i, fols 224r–354r; see in particular fols 236r–242r. On the doctrinal aspects of the question see Bellamy, ‘Baptême (sort des enfans morts sans)’. 17  ‘Quest mi pareria grande ingiustizia e certamente io non posso credere’ (this would be a great injustice, and I certainly cannot believe it), objects Eleonora d’Este, the interlocutor chosen by the Ferrarese physician Antonio ‘Musa’ Brasavola in his unedited vernacular dialogue Vita de Iesu Cristo, written around 1540, concerning the condemnation of unbaptized children: Bologna, Bib. Univ. di Bologna, MS 1862, fol. 28. 18  On the Senese hospital see Piccinni, ‘Linee di storia dell’Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala’. See also Sandri, L’Ospedale di S. Maria della Scala; Gavitt, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence, and the long introduction to Hünecke, I trovatelli di Milano, pp. 7–13. A critical overview of research on the subject can be found in Grandi, Benedetto chi ti porta. 19  ‘There was an almost obsessive concern with the baptism of children’, observes Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers, p. 279.

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baptism in order to set his accounts in order. The question of the economic limits of charity were to be felt particularly after the state took control over hospital assistance, when the initiative of spontaneous associations was replaced by a centralized administration under the control of the prince.20 But it was a fact in the meantime that, when abandoning their children, the parents of foundlings were often concerned to state whether they had had them baptized or not. The sacrament weighed on their consciences in a way that can by physically measured: the archives of the Florentine Ospedale di San Gallo and that of San Gimignano still preserve the little bags of salt, the ingre­­dient necessary for baptism, which the parents — even if generally very poor — had bought and placed round the necks of their newborn when they aban­­doned them.21 It was not some abstruse theological doctrine, therefore, which agitated peoples’ consciences: it could be said, rather, that theologians were called on to defend the reasons for their position and to regulate a subject which defied any form of rational systematization. The death of those who had not lived created a gap between the places of the living and those of the dead which it was impossible to close. The wailing of the infants who had not lived, which echoed through the Hades visited by Aeneas in Virgil’s poem, continued to fill the Christian afterlife. In learned as in folk culture the problem remained unresolved of how to find a stable place in the afterlife for those souls which, lacking baptism, could not be placed among the saved or among the damned. It was said that these souls wandered on earth among the living. And for this reason, while on one hand they tried to create clear boundaries around Limbo as a place of containment, on the other hand theologians looked favourably on the idea that after the Last Judgement the unbaptized ‘parvoli’ would wander on earth as the place destined for them.22 20 

The soul of the ‘dominus’ apparently appeared to the Dominican fra Leone from Milan, telling him that it was being punished ‘quod pueros ex occulto concubitu genitos et ad hospitale proiectos ex quadam indignatione sine baptismo mori permiserit, quia videbat hospitale ex tali expositione in labores et expensas incurrere’ (because he had allowed children born of clandestine relationships and deposited at the hospital to die without baptism out of indignation when he saw the labour and expense the hospital would incur from such abandonments): Salimbene de Adam, Cronica, ed. by Scalia, i, 105; quoted by Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers, p. 362. 21  Accordino to Lucia Sandri, at San Gallo ‘i sacchettini […] abbondano singolarmente di sale’ (the little bags […] are particularly full of salt) compared to those of the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala in San Gimignano: see Sandri, ‘Gli esposti di San Gallo di Firenze nella prima metà’, p. 1008. 22  Viguier, Institutiones ad christianam theologiam, pp. 594–95, quoted this opinion, jus-

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Up until this point, the way in which places were allotted in the afterlife had translated the new idea of justice brought by Christianity into the geography of the other world: those who believe and are baptized will be saved. But the problem now returned in a new epoch of European history and Western Christianity. The debate over the form of the afterlife, which occupied theological culture in Europe from the fifteenth century onwards, was rekindled against the backdrop of European expansion in the world. Room had to be found in the Christian system for new groups of humanity: the Muslims of the Iberian peninsula, the Jews, and the inhabitants of the New World discovered by Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. The conflicts among the living redesigned the world of the dead. It is against this background that Dominican culture made a final attempt to offer some glimmer of hope for those who had not been baptized. Indeed in the age of the Reformation and European colonial expansion, echoes of the new social and geographical dimensions of reality were felt in the geography of the other world. For this reason, in an age which experienced great religious and cultural conflict, the question of baptism was one of if not the most controversial doctrine of all. The most radical voice to make itself heard was that of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who, with his affable irony, was the first to question the superstitious rituality of baptism and the hardly evangelical harshness of the condemnation to hell of those who were not baptized. In contrast, Erasmus pointed out, the Jews were more lenient, as circumcision could be delayed or even replaced by the simple intention to carry it out: Circumcision was removed but baptism took its place — almost a harder condition, I should say. Circumcision was postponed until the eighth day, and if in the interval some accident carried off the child the pledge of circumcision was taken for the deed. When children are scarcely out of their mothers’ wombs, we plunge them into cold water which has stood (I won’t say stank) for a long time in a stone font; and if a child dies when one day old, or dies at birth, through no fault of parents or attendants, the wretched creature is consigned to eternal damnation.23 tifying it by reason of space: after the general resurrection, the children would be able to leave Limbo and move freely on earth to leave room for the bodies of the damned. 23  ‘Sublata est circuncisio, sed successit baptismus, duriore prope dixerim conditione. Illa dif­­ ferebatur in octavum diem, et si quis interim casus intercepisset puerum, votum circuncisionis pro circuncisione imputabatur. Nos pueros vix dum e latebris uteri materni egressos in figidam aquam, quaeque diu in alveo saxo constitit, non enim dicam computruit, totos immergimus; et si vel primo die atque in ipso partus ostio perierit, nulla parentum aut amicorum culpa, deditur miser aeternae damnationi’, Erasmus, Opera omnia, ed. by Halkin and others, i.3, p. 503. English translation: Erasmus, Colloquies, trans. by Thompson, p. 685.

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When they were brought back to their spiritual meaning and the fundamental value of faith, therefore, these religious practices lost all consistency. It was faith, not water, that rendered baptism valid: if it had been otherwise, a physician akin to Erasmus wrote later, by merely washing your head you would remove the effects of the holy water.24 But with the light touch of irony, this criticism of rituals, which originated in a religion that had been internalized, initiated one of the greatest battles in the history of Christianity. An eminent scholar of the Protestant Reformation had good reason to define Erasmus as ‘one of the spiritual fathers of Anabaptism’.25 And this helps us to understand why there was such a violent reaction against Erasmus by Luther and the Catholic Church: only the cautious policy of the Roman Curia, aware of Erasmus’s intellectual prestige, was able to prevent the same condemnation which was later to be inflicted on his works from being inflicted on the man during his life. But it proved to be difficult even for the new Churches created by the Refor­­mation to defend infant baptism. We can see this when, in the space of a few years, Luther’s theses spread together with those of Zwingli and the Ana­ baptists, and Calvinist theories took shape in Geneva. It was Luther, who had by now chosen the route of public controversy, who voiced Augustine rigor on the subject in his 1519 ‘Sermon on the Holy and Blessed Sacrament of Baptism’. Luther made the sacrament into a declaration of war on sin, whose value was linked to its ability ‘to extend to the whole of life, up until death, indeed up until the Final Judgement’.26 Sin had to be drowned in the water of baptism. Luther considered the rite of baptism as a sign of faith and the beginning of the life of the Christian. If that life was to be entirely dominated by penitence, therefore, as he had already stated in his first thesis on indulgences, baptism was merely the initial act, not the resolution. It was a theory that was anything but revolutionary: in uniting the water of the sacrament to faith, Luther distanced himself equally from the subsequent development of the doctrine in opposite directions: the Anabaptist idea of faith as a conscious individual choice at the basis of the sacrament; and the Tridentine Catholic concept of the autonomous and objective power of the water and the words of baptism to 24  Wier, De lamiis, p. 171. The passage is quoted by Valente, Johann Wier, pp. 199–200; see pp. 225–47 for an analysis of the Erasmian nature of Wier’s thought. 25  The definition is by Walter Köhler, and is quoted by Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation, p. 178. 26  Luther, Von der heiligen und hochwürdigen Sacrament der Taufe, pp. 727–37. The following discussion picks up on a number of considerations already set out in Prosperi, ‘Battesimo e identità’.

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transform the condition of the catechumen (ex opera operato).27 Luther’s thesis was profoundly rooted in the Christian tradition of baptism as the sign of life and death at the same time.28 But his appeal to the decisive value of personal faith, added to Erasmus’s corrosive criticism, earned him adherents who developed the position even further. Only a few years separate Luther’s Sermon from the open debate on the baptism of adults in Zwingli’s Zurich and the extreme results of interpreting the rite as the simple sign of a true inner change. In his discussion with those who denied infant baptism, Zwingli defended the traditional practice of the sacrament against those who, with the Scriptures in their hand, maintained that the Apostles had never baptized children.29 Faced with the radical outcome of the theory that made salvation depend on faith, Luther fell back on a defence of infant baptism with the argument that the little ones did not lack faith, but only the ability to reply. They were ‘quasi in somno’ (as if asleep), but the adult who responded in their name to the priest’s ritual questions spoke for them and could guarantee that they had faith because God himself granted them with it as they took the sacrament.30 This is the start of a long history which it would be difficult to reconstruct, even summarily. In practice, in this period, the question of how to interpret and administer baptism was at the centre not only of elaborate intellectual con­ structs and arduous theological definitions, but also of phenomena of great importance on which the political order of Europe and the forms of its expansion in the world was to depend. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the discovery of America and the religious conquest of its inhabitants, and the conflicts connected with the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent involved contrasting interpretations of the relationship between rite and faith and gave life to the most diverse experiences of the way in which the Christian obligation to baptize was interpreted. The doctrine established by the Council of Florence was taken up again and clarified in the decree of 17 June, 1546, in which the Council of Trent estab27 

This is clearly demonstrated by Trigg, Baptism in the Theology of Martin Luther. As Ladner has written, baptism ‘was and is seen as both a death and a resurrection’: Ladner, Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages, i, 260. 29  Zwingli, ‘In catabaptistarum strophas elenchus’, p. 52. 30  ‘Item dicunt infantes non credere, quis hoc eis dixit? quare non loquuntur ipsi, cum in somno sint. Ego faciam quod Christus iubet, nempe ut ducatur puer ad baptismum. Ipse dabit interim fidem, non operator Deus secundum tuutm somnium’: 1524 Sermon: Von der heiligen und hochwürdigen Sacrament der Taufe, in Luther, Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, i, p. 670, ll. 6–15; passages of this kind are the basis for the theory shared by scholars of various confessions about a traditional and conservative Luther: see Huovinen, Fides Infantium, p. 83. 28 

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lished the official position of the Catholic Church on the subject. The decree affirmed that Adam’s sin had infested all men, and hence even the newborn, who had not had time to commit any sin. Original sin was transmitted through natural generation, without the need for any conscious act. It was necessary therefore for newborns to be baptized, and anyone who denied this had to be excommunicated (Anatema sit).31 The Catholic Church, threatened in its very foundations, sought refuge in tradition, and this confirmation in turn rigidified the tradition: only tradition, indeed, could provide a solid basis to support a construction which otherwise threatened to collapse. But the fundamental problem remains unresolved: how to reconcile a Christian faith based on free and conscious individual consent with the ritual practice of the sacrament. Indeed, by consolidating the theory that based the effectiveness of the sacrament on the faithful execution of a rite, independently of the faith of the person who received it, that decree opened the way for new and more serious contradictions. In practice, the doctrinal acceleration set in motion by the decree of the Council of Florence corresponded on one hand to a loss of consensus, and, on the other, to the construction of new forms of power and aggregation on the basis of a shared religious identity. Between the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century the relationship between subjective faith and the objective value of the rite was stretched to breaking point. Unlike the extreme position of those who were defined as ‘Ana­ baptists’, who linked the validity of the sacrament to the faith of the recipient, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin chose to preserve infant baptism, but to make it a community and not a private act. Against the literal reading of the Gospels by those whom he defined as ‘Catabaptists’, who quoted the example of the Apostles who did not baptize children, Zwingli pointed out that the Gospels did not even say that Christ himself baptized, and yet this did not mean that the sacrament had to be abolished.32 This was at the basis of the radical rupture which immediately developed with those who held that baptism had to be taken by conscious and consenting adults: the ‘Anabaptists’ or ‘Catabaptists’, as their enemies controversially called them, were harshly persecuted by all the Churches, and they often paid for their ideas with their lives. At stake was the very foundation of society itself. The state derived its legitimacy from Christianity: it was not possible therefore to allow a ‘Church of the perfect’ to establish itself as detached from or even 31 

Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, ed. by Alberigo and others, p. 666. ‘Christus non baptizavit; ergo secundum vos non erit baptizandum?’: Zwingli, ‘In catabaptistarum strophas elenchus’, p. 52. 32 

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hostile to a political power accused of not being Christian. But the criticisms made by Erasmus and the Anabaptists forced many changes to a Christianity where rituals were shaped by doctrines, and the liturgy by intellectual knowledge. Against the traditions of the ‘Papist’ Church, Zwingli began a series of reforms that substantially modified the meaning of the rite. Calvin was to follow him along the same path, trying to make a concept of baptism as a confession of community faith pronounced also in the name of infants penetrate into the Church of Geneva. But a rite of this kind could not pretend to decide on eternal salvation, because this depended exclusively on divine predestination. It was for this reason that, for Calvin, it was sheer madness to condemn infants who had died without baptism.33 For Calvin, who had not forgotten Erasmus’s teaching, there could not be said to be a substantial difference between Jewish circumcision and Christian baptism: both were merely signs, declarations, professions of faith. The Catholic rite was slowly but decisively pruned as a result of the Refor­ mation, both in its Lutheran and its Calvinist versions. Luther had shown the way by printing a book of instructions for baptism in 1523, where he reduced the number of exorcisms, omitted the admonition to the godparents and the reciting of the Credo, and introduced a prayer which insisted on the image of the Flood as the purification of Noah. In his revised version of 1526 he further simplified the rite so as to make it clear that baptism was made of water and the Word.34 Other reformers took more decisive steps along the same path. The magical effectiveness of the sacrament and its exclusive value for salvation were replaced by the value of the conscience and the conscious choice of faith, or confidence in the divine decree of predestination. Thus in the world of the Protestant Reformation infant baptism remained as a sign to mark the entrance into Christian society, but it lost its value in automatically transforming individuals and took on the meaning of a community confession of faith. In practice, the greatest divide, which inaugurated the modern history of the Christian Churches, was that between the Catholic Church with its harsh reconfirmation of the obligatory nature of baptism for salvation, and the Calvinist Church, which placed less value on visible signs and stressed the inscrutable nature of God’s judgement. Most of Europe, in adopting the ideas of the Reformation, kept infant baptism, but gave it the value of a promise and a good omen, committing the community and the family to transmit its 33  Calvin, Institutio christianae religionis, iv. xv. 20, pp. 974–75; Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. by Allen, vol. iii, pp. 343–44. 34  See Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Ritual, p. 51.

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faith to the infant, effectively strengthening the bond between generations and the consciousness of belonging to the elect. As Bayle wrote, Of infants who for the moment are incapable either of faith or repentance, God requires but one condition: and this is to be born in the Church and of people who are at least within the general alliance of Christianity.35

In the Calvinist tradition therefore, divine election took on the hash connotations of family property: it was parents who transmitted grace to their children, as pastor Pierre Poiret was to write.36 In the Catholic world on the other hand, baptism continued to be the only gateway to Paradise. It was only in the field of religious conquest that missionaries and inquisitors, preachers and parish priests — all those who had the power to open that gate to those who found themselves outside it — became aware of the need to elaborate forms of persuasion and indoctrination to fill the sacrament they administered to Jews and Muslims, the native Indians of America and African slaves, with a content of knowledge if not of true faith. Before the new panorama had been created according to the designs of the institutional Churches, the battle was not waged in the rarefied atmosphere of the scholastic dispute, but was fought with ideas and arms in the streets and in the courts. The questions under discussion invested the very foundations of Christian society, and consequences of great moment derived from the solution that was reached, foremost among which was the definition of the boundaries and the forms of entry into the ecclesiastic community. For this reason the questions were widely debated. At the University of Paris, a young student from Sardinia called Sigismondo Arquer defended the thesis that ‘i fanciulli si possano salvare senza battesimo’ (children can be saved without baptism). It was objected that ‘se uno vuol tener cotesto bisogna quasi per forza che ne tenga 35 

‘Dans les enfants qui ne sont capables ni de foy, ni de repentance actuelles, Dieu ne requiert qu’un condition, c’est la naissance dans l’Église et de personnes qui soient au moins dans l’alliance generale du Christianisme’: Bayle, Seconde Apologie pour M. Jurieu, p. 45; reprinted in Bayle, Œuvres diverses, ed. by Labrousse, v (1990), part 2, pp. 535–84 36  ‘[…] Eos qui resipuerunt et gratiam Dei sunt vere amplexi, suntque adeo in salvationis statu progeniem producete in qua divina gratia […] extendat ses […] unde est quod infantes denascentes parentibus in statu salutifero costituti, salvi revera sint’: Poiret, Cogitationum rationalium de Deo, pp. 149–50; anastatic reprint in Bayle, Œuvres diverses, ed. by Labrousse, sup. vols, iii. Poirot’s work was written in 1672–76 when he was still a Calvinist Pastor in Anweiler, before subsequently converting to follow the mystic Antoinette Bourignon. There are some astute observations on the strengthening of the bond between fathers and sons in the Calvinist world by Davis, ‘Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny’.

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un’altra, cioè che alla salvatione non giovi el battesimo ma la predestinazione’ (if someone wants to maintain this, another thesis must also be maintained almost necessarily, and namely that it is not baptism that leads to salvation, but predestination); and this meant taking the side of the ‘heretics’.37 Arquer was to pay for the choice implicit in this phrase with his life; but the episode demonstrates that many things could be deduced from that single problem. And the most restless minds who went back to Scripture and analysed the meaning of its words with the attention of the philologist, denied the automatic nature of the rite and frankly derided it, as did the Italian heretic Camillo Renato, who wrote ironically of those who held baptism to be valid even if administered by a ‘mad and senseless’ Turk (matto e senza sentimento).38 These were not isolated statements. Only a few years after the Council of Trent had stressed the validity of the rite for infants too, a council of a completely different kind met in secret in Venice. It was made up of exponents of an Anabaptist Church, whose fundamental doctrine was the rejection of the baptism of infants ‘se prima non credono’ (if first they do not believe).39 And it was on this premise that the Venetian group reached the point of denying the divinity of Jesus and the immortality of human souls, affirming that the life of every individual was the fruit of human seed, both in the flesh and in the spirit.40 This simple point shows how rapidly a radical crisis of the old order had come to mature, even in the heart of the Church of Rome, around the question of baptism: it was a new conception of the individual and of divinity that was being asserted. It is possible to understand the strong defensive reaction not only by the Church of Rome, but also by those new Churches which had been created by the teachings of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. The Anabaptists and the Antitrinitarians were ruthlessly hunted down while the orthodox doctrine was re-elaborated, adapting it to new conditions. For the Catholic world, it is interesting to look at the way in which the question was tackled by a theologian of some originality, the Dominican Ambrogio Catarino Politi from Siena. For Catarino, the form of the Final Judgement announced by Christ, with damnation for those who had committed evil and 37 

The episode is narrated by Ristori, ‘Benedetto Accolti’; on Arquer see Firpo, ‘Alcune con­ siderazioni sull’esperienza religiosa’. 38  Renato, ‘Trattato del Battesimo e della Santa Cena’, p. 102. 39  As stated in the confession made by don Pietro Manelfi to the inquisitor Leandro Alberti in Bologna on 17 October, 1551: Ginzburg, I costituti di don Pietro Manelfi, p. 33. 40  Ginzburg, I costituti di don Pietro Manelfi, pp. 34–35. The Anabaptist council met in Venice in September, 1550.

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Paradise for those who had done good, allowed the existence of a third place to be surmised. Children are not baptized and hence cannot enter Paradise; but they have not committed any wicked deed either, and so they will not be among the ‘maledicti’. If God is just he cannot punish children. The fundamental principle of justice is that no one must be cheated out of that which is his by nature. Therefore, these unbaptized children are destined for that happiness which is naturally due to them. Catarino even imagined that they would not be exiled from the Kingdom of God at all, but would receive visits and revelations and have some relationship with those who are in heaven, who would console them. They would not enjoy the beatific vision of God, of course. And it is very likely that their place will be on earth, which is the place proper to man. Since Limbo is situated under the earth, this means that when the dead are resurrected, the inhabitants of Limbo will also be resurrected and they will come to the surface where they will live in the enjoyment of their natural perfection. Catarino put forward these opinions for debate cautiously, as probable.41 But his aim was clear: to defend the image of a just God who rewards according to merit and chase away the spectre of absolute predestination of an Augustinian stamp; what is more, it was necessary to reassure parents anxious as to the eternal fate of their children who had died without baptism. It was not for nothing that Calvin had to combat the tendency of the people of Geneva to turn to the nearest Catholic priest in secret to have them administer the sacrament to their newborn, according to the traditional rite: that rite with its exorcisms, administered at the first opportunity without waiting for the simplified, public bap­tism of the Calvinist Church, offered them greater safety before the everimminent danger of the death of their little ones.42 To sum up we can say that, if the Catholic Church confirmed the value of the sacrament as the exclusive gateway to salvation, the interpretations made by the Reformation moved in the opposite direction, insisting on its meaning as a sign and on the subjective value of the profession of faith. In the meantime, baptism was becoming increasingly like a border between countries at war: by now this sign of religious identity divided not only Christians from Jews or Muslims, but also Christians from Christians. The novelty of the controversies over the validity of baptism conferred by heretics, compared with the controversies of the early Christian centuries, such as that over the Novatian 41 

Ambrosius Catharinus Politus, De statu futuro puerorum, ed. by Bonhomme. See Spierling, ‘Daring Insolence Toward God?’. There is a summary overview of the documentation regarding baptism in the French Reformed Church in Grosse and others, ‘Anthropologie historique’. 42 

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Schism, lay in the fact that they were a barrier between peoples.43 Although the Christian nature of the baptism practised by other Churches was recognized, the sense of religious division and conflict was so strong that those who converted to Roman Catholicism from the Reformed Churches besieged the Inquisition with their scruples over the sacrament they had received. Those in particular who were born (and had been baptized) in a Calvinist country and who became Catholic priests, anxiously wondered whether the sacraments that they administered were stripped of all their value by their initial and perhaps false entry into the Church.44 And then there were cases of Christians whom the Turks had ‘pigliati nella loro infantia, et che non hanno mai conosciuta fede christiana’ (taken in their infancy, and have never known the Christian faith): the Inquisitor of Malta, for example, wrote about them on 20 August, 1601, stating that in order to convince them to return to orthodoxy he had had to threaten ‘di fargli abbrugiare’ (to have them burnt) as apostates.45 But it was right in the heart of the Papal States and as a consequence of the work of the foundling hospitals that a particularly delicate problem arose in the eighteenth century: two churchmen from Perugia, brought up among the exposed at the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Misericordia, were discovered to have received holy orders without the Ospedale having baptized them, even ‘sub conditione’. A crack had opened up within the very system of institutions which had been created to deal with what St Vincent de Paul had defined as the worst of all evils: the death of unbaptized infants.46 In the case of the prelates from Perugia, besides the doubt over the salvation of their souls, there was also the risk of an indirect sacramental catastrophe which potentially involved a great number of people. For this reason it was decided that a whole series of sacraments had to be repeated in secret, from baptism to ordination. But in order to ease the conscience of the faithful, it was ordered that ‘o prima o 43 

See the entry ‘III. Controverse’ by R. J. De Simone in Dictionnaire encyclopédique du christianisme ancien, dirigé par A. di Bernardino, ed. by F. Vial (Paris, 1990), i, 337–38. 44  This was the case of the Capuchin fra’ Angelo ‘de Raconis’, who was born in France of Hugenot parents, and who, in doubt as to the validity of the baptism he had received, presented the problem to the Roman Inquisition in 1618, which in turn consulted the Nunciature of Cologne and the Sorbonne: Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, M 6, n–r, Dubia de Sacramentis, i, 1618–98, fasc. i. 45  Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, Dubia varia, 1570–1668, fasc. iii. 46  ‘Il male peggiore di tutti è che molti morivano senza essere battezzati’ (the greatest evil of all is that many died without being baptized): conference by St Vincent with the Ladies of Charity, c. 1640, quoted by Aragon, ‘Saint Vincent de Paul et l’abandon’, p. 159.

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dopo [non] traspirare a chicchessia il minimo anche remoto indizio, e vago sospetto’ (neither before nor after shall the smallest, or remotest clue or the vaguest suspicion transpire to anyone whatsoever). The two prelates, therefore, had to justify the journey they had to make from Perugia to Foligno ‘con altro titolo’ (with another purpose’, using a pretext, and hence a lie).47 After this, to avoid a repe­­tition of such cases, an order was issued always in the future to baptize found­­lings ‘sub conditione’. It was the solution in widespread use at the time, as the rigid definition of the rules governing the rite put into place in a centralized fashion by the Papacy authorized all kinds of scruples. The need for safety felt by the faithful translated ecclesiastical certainties into a clear rejection of anything that was not fully guaranteed: it was for this reason that in the eighteenth century an Irish woman who was taken into a London hospital to give birth, rejected an Anglican baptism.48 Such mistrust was increased by the fact that the modern realities of state power had grown up protected by the symbolic walls offered by religion. The stronger the religious bond constituted by that sacramental sign the greater was the interest of the political power; hence baptism generally maintained its function of registering those babies born into Christian society, albeit with different forms of theological justification: what counted was that the body of Christian society remained united and that the ‘perfects’ did not defect. As for the specifically religious effectiveness of the sacrament, transformed from a rite of spiritual re­­ birth into the moment of entry into the community, this was entrusted to the subsequent construction of an awareness of Christian belonging, a construction which began immediately with the pastor’s sermon, which was given great importance. Even in the Catholic world, the defence of the effectiveness of baptism ‘ex opere operato’ went hand in hand with an insistence on an education in the form of catechesis which had to accompany the baptized as they grew up. Catechistic literature stressed the godfather’s duties with textbooks that set out the notions that had to be imparted to the infant;49 but much more important was the construction of institutions directly controlled by the ecclesiastical body, from the ‘Compagnie della Dottrina Cristiana’ for the sons of the 47  Protagonists of this complicated and adventurous story were Vincenzo Moretti and Mattia Paghi, who had been exposed in 1710 and 1724 respectively. The decision by the Inquisition to rebaptize them was taken on 11 February, 1762: Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, M 3–f, Dubia de Sacramentis. 48  See Cody, ‘Living and Dying in Georgian London’s Lying-In Hospitals’, p. 325. 49  See for example the work by the Bolognese Augustinian friar, Ghirardacci, Nuouo, e spirituale nascimento.

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baptized, to the ‘Case dei Catecumeni’ for converts, and the Jews in particular. The convictions and the consciousness of the adult Christian, therefore, were important complements to baptism for all the Christian confessions. But no analogy can hold in the extreme case of the infant threatened with death: here the conviction of the absolute dependence of the soul’s eternal life on contact between the baptismal water and the body of the child forced the Catholic world to undertake the most hazardous forms of experiment in order for that decisive contact to be made. Midwives and physicians became the parish priest’s fundamental allies in the administration of emergency baptism: the midwives, often accused of crass ignorance, had to learn the sacramental formula and undergo periodical examinations; the physicians studied techniques and instruments for reaching the baby with the holy water while it was still in the womb. None of this took place in the Calvinist Church, while a moderate recourse to emergency baptism was allowed by the Lutherans. The picture was complicated when different concepts and rituals were present at the same time: in the German areas, where the fundamental Christian confessions cohabited, the registers of births and deaths recorded the behaviour of the parents of the reformed faith, who sought the help of Catholic midwives or priests for an emergency baptism in situations of danger.50 Against a collective practice dominated by the concern to be protected by a rite, important minorities developed an intellectual distance from a religion which now placed itself under the protection of state power. The violent repression of the Anabaptists and the mechanisms of control and repression against dissent put in practice by political authorities prevented the free expression of doubt and criticism. But what emerged is enough to show that, far from closing, the gap between rites and convictions had widened. A lucidly radical work like the Colloquium heptaplomeres by Jean Bodin, which was written around 1593, had to wait till 1857 for publication. Here, in the form of a discussion between seven wise men from different religions, Bodin made a decisive criticism of the historical form taken by Christianity, which used the notion of original sin to justify the need for the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity, the suffering and death of Christ, and obligatory baptism for eternal salvation. ‘Person’, one of the interlocutors observes, ‘indicates that which exists individually’; and sins are individual too, hence no sin is transmitted from Adam. The idea that a God must be incarnated and die ‘to free most innocent 50 

As emerges from the study by Labouvie, ‘Geburt und Tod in der Frühen Neuzeit’, which looks at the records of births and deaths in Lorraine, Kurtrier, a county of Nassau-Saarbrücken, and other small German principalities.

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children from so great an enormity of sin’, therefore, is cruel.51 It is difficult to say to what extent Bodin himself shared these ideas. 52 But the fact that they were formulated and written down shows the undoubted existence of what has been described as the ‘libertine theology’ of the period: elaborated and transmitted in secret, it continued to spread in restricted environments. Only in a small heretical Church were the rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity and the connected rejection of the need for infant baptism ratified after intense debate, constituting the basis of a different form of Christianity: the Unitarian Church, which was established in Poland thanks to the country’s characteristic tolerance, accepted the theological reflections of two noblemen from Siena, Lelio Sozzini and his nephew Fausto. Their work broke the bond that linked the doctrine of the Trinity to obligatory infant baptism and the promise of eternal punishment or reward for human souls. For them Christ was only a man, chosen by God to govern the people of his faithful, and the profession of Christian faith consisted exclusively in imitating Christ: those who did their best to practice the evangelical virtues by imitating Christ as a man who knew poverty and suffering gained immortality; the others had to submit to the natural law of death. As for baptism, that which was administered with water was to be understood as a public profession of faith: a rite which foreshadowed the remission of sins granted in reality only thanks to faith and penitence.53 This, in a nutshell, was the position of the Unitarians, a small group which was exiled from Poland and found refuge in Holland, and had a profound influence on the history of tolerance in Europe. Their founder, Fausto Sozzini, it has been said, had a ‘una religione dell’attività morale e della coerenza intellettuale’ (religion of moral activity and intellectual coherence).54 The Churches now had to reckon with the reduction of Christianity to morality and the conviction that salvation was due not to the sacraments administered by the Church but to the seriousness and the coherence of individual conduct. 51  Bodin, Colloquium heptaplomeres, ed. by Noack, book vi, p. 300; English translation: Bodin, Colloquium of the Seven, trans. by Kuntz, p. 397. I would like to thank Michele Ciliberto for pointing this passage out to me. 52  ‘Peu […] importe […] l’attitude personelle du savant magistrate devant le problème religieux’, observes Busson, Le Rationalisme dans la littérature française, pp. 559–60, who defines the Colloquium as ‘la somme de la théologie libertine de la Renaissance’. 53  For the history of the Unitarians and the thought of Fausto Sozzini, see Socini, An Christiano homini baptismo aquae carere liceat, ed. by Scribano, which was published for the first time in Socini, An Christiano homini baptismo aquae carere liceat (1613). 54  Cantimori, D., Eretici italiani del Cinquecento e altri scritti, p. 352.

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The ecclesiastical and political powers waged an unremitting war against opinions and tendencies like those of the Socinians and the many Christians without a Church who populated European society after the wars of religion. But even for the most traditionalist Christian Churches, the question of where the souls of unbaptized children were to end up remained without a definite answer. Theological imagination was intense, and there are traces of the question in most of the literature on the future life, which Ezra Abbot, the learned Harvard librarian, compiled in his important survey.55 In exploring the afterlife, to identify the exact place of unbaptized infants — by definition a condition of natural happiness and privation of the beatific vision — the controversy between Jansenists and Jesuits in the Catholic world and between the Arminianists and the Gomarists in the Calvinist one took up ancient solutions and new questions, which were later to return in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The questions concerned the dimensions of the Heavenly Kingdom and its ability to receive most if not all of the human race; but it was the very notion of justice which had undergone a change in meaning. As the idea of justice fuelled revolutionary movements and political struggles in the world, religion was called on to verify the traditional solutions to the question. And the gates of Heaven opened or closed on the basis of what was happening on earth in the meantime. The solutions put forward by the conflicting parties had to measure their effectiveness against their ability to respond to a double challenge: on one hand was the widespread and painful experience of infant death, which continually presented official religion with questions which were difficult to answer; on the other was the advance in medical knowledge as to the origins of human life, which challenged theology’s pretence to be the queen of the sciences. For this reason, while the Christian Churches appeared to defend the medieval tradition or to propose reform, namely a return to the origins, new alliances and paradigms were created: a choice had to be made between the magical protective function of religion for most of the faithful and an alliance with the new scientific knowledge. Only by bearing this aspect in mind is it possible to understand why the question of the fate of unbaptized infants continually returned, forcing the ecclesiastical authorities and theologians to make repeated and profound adjustments. Now we must consider this profound and so-to-speak daily aspect of the problem. 55 

Not only that collected in the section ‘Future State of Infants’: Abbot, ‘Literature of the Doctrine of a Future Life’, pp. 860–63, nos 4510–83. I would like to thank Pierroberto Scaramella for having obtained a copy of this for me.

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Miracle and Science Placed somehow at the crossroads between official religion and folklore tradition, baptism functioned as a rite of passage, capable of transforming birth from a natural into a cultural fact. The birth of the body had to be followed by the birth of the soul. And it is precisely to this relationship between natural birth and spiritual rebirth that we are led by baptism’s power to ‘give the soul’. There is a clue to the way in which its effectiveness was understood in the magical uses to which the material vehicles of the sacrament were put. The holy chrism and water were the ordinary tools of operations of a magical kind. Strict rules governed access to those sources of extraordinary powers. When the fire was lit in churches on Christmas Eve and the baptismal water was blessed, it became customary to bless plants and roots too and distribute holy water to those present. An edict by a bishop in Abruzzo in 1575 described the crowd of ‘infiniti dell’uno et l’altro sesso che con vasi stavano ad aspettar per haver l’acqua del santo battesmo per operarla similmente at infiniti superstitioni et diaboliche incantationi’ (an infinite number of people of both sexes who were waiting with vessels to receive the water of holy baptism to use it both for infinite superstitions and diabolical incantations).56 The prohibitions of the postTridentine period provide a glimpse of traditional practices which now clashed with the new concerns to remove any suspicion of magic from what was officially sacred. But the practices which were recorded by a Church careful to distinguish religion from magic again show us the idea at work of the power of baptism to confer life. Those who had not been baptized seemed to be confined to an uncertain condition in an indefinable place, without happiness or suffering. There is pictorial evidence of the way in which it was possible to imagine the condition of the ‘pargoli innocenti’ in a painting commissioned from Enguerrand Quarton in Avignon in 1453.57 Here, next to a group of the resurrected who ascend to Paradise, is another group of children forced to remain underground with their eyes closed (because they cannot see God), while all the others rise towards the light. Not long after the decree of the Council of Florence, this image introduced by the painter (without the patron, despite his attention to detail, having mentioned it) shows the profound difference 56 

See Tanturri, Episcopato, clero e società a Chieti in età moderna, p. 23. It was commissioned by Jean de Montagnac. I am indebted to Dr Chiara Franceschini for pointing this painting by Enguerrand Quarton out to me. The interesting diffusion of the image of Limbo in the 15th century is documented by Baschet, Les Justices de l’au-delà; see for example pp. 655–59; and by Comino, ‘Bambini nati morti e santuari del ritorno alla vita’. 57 

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between the two categories of the dead: buried in the earth, far from the possibility of ever seeing the light, those infants push at the wall which will not open with the force of a remorse which it is impossible to redeem. In practice, besides ecclesiastical policy and theological controversy, the prob­­ lem of unbaptized infants was above all a family drama. An extremely com­­mon drama: pre-natal and perinatal mortality meant that most people had some experience of a child who was not born alive or who died shortly afterwards birth. The symbolic exclusion of these children was also marked by the form of their burial, which could not take place in holy ground. If an unbaptized child happened to be buried there, the cemetery had to be re-consecrated. For the Church, it was this condition of impurity which meant that a baby going to be baptized had to stop at the church door, making the rites of exorcism fundamental. This was a consequence of the dual nature of the infant in medieval culture, which has been pointed out by Jean-Claude Schmitt: ‘on the positive side, he is the child of miracles and hagiography; on the negative side, he is the child of the devil, or sometimes the accomplice, but more commonly the victim, of a witch’.58 The pre-baptismal rites, dominated by exorcism and the renouncement of Satan, aimed during baptism itself at freeing the baby from the power of the devil. If all this had not taken place, then it was inevitable that the little corpses had to be buried in the fields like animals, and their spirits were imagined as a lasting evil presence, tormented souls destined to wander without peace.59 In their case, death could not bring about their definitive detachment from the living. Hence the theologians’ difficulties, which were reflected in forms of folk culture. Here unbaptized children were seen as members of the ‘wild hunt’ or the ‘furious army’ of those who had died prematurely, who wandered on earth continuing to haunt or to attack the living. At the root of this form of representation was the perception of human life as a journey with a beginning and a development, but also with a natural conclusion, which could not be anticipated by violence without creating a state of torment in the dead and affliction in the living. When the portion of life destined for an individual was cut short or cancelled before time, the dead person was imagined to remain in the places where he should have lived for a time equal to the life that had been taken from him. This belief can be found in a folklore tradition known as the ‘wild hunt’ or the ‘furious army’: it is from the fifteenth century onwards that among their ranks we find unbaptized children alongside those who had been executed and 58 

Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound, p. 85. There are astute observations on ‘les enfants-revenants’ in the fundamental study Lett, L’enfant des miracles, pp. 213–14. 59 

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those who had committed suicide:60 the same categories of the dead who were generally excluded from ritual burial.61 The threat of the survival of unsatisfied and revengeful spirits increased with the strengthening of the protective function of baptism and in particular of the exorcisms which preceded it. It was inevitable that children who had died before these rites should appear as an evil presence. Indeed, in his Decretorum libri viginti, Burchard of Worms suggested the remedy of a sort of second death: by piercing the body of the little dead child with a wooden stake their spirits would no longer haunt the living.62 The weight of these negative presences was increased by a sense of guilt in cases of more or less deliberate infanticide. There are only occasional indications of this: in the Christian system, the place for obtaining pardon for sins was confession, which, because of its oral and secret nature, has left no traces except for the rules fixed in the penitential canons and the handbooks for confessors. As we have seen, the system of sins included infanticide as a sin from which one could be absolved by paying the price of a greater or lesser penitence.63 It is nevertheless with the sacrament of penance administered according to canon law that we find traces of other forms of administration of the sense of guilt, which operated in competition with the legitimately sacred institutions. In the second half of the sixteenth century a capillary system of control ordered that much of what had up to then been reserved for the confessor’s ear be poured out before the external forum of the Inquisition. It is thus that a number of singular stories were recorded in the documents of the Inquisition. Protagonists of these stories were strange figures of pilgrims who wandered round the countryside, knocking on doors and begging, saying they had returned from Santiago de Compostela. They would have been confused with other forms of mendicancy of the age without arousing the Inquisition’s interest had it not been for certain special powers they boasted 60 

The popular opinion appears in Cysat, Collectanea cronico-historica, quoted in Crusius, Annales Suevici, both published in Frankfurt in 1596, which speak of an ‘exercitum furiosum, in quo essent omnes infanti non baptizati’. This work is among the sources collected by Meisen, Die Sagen vom wütenden Heer und wilden Jäger, pp. 121–22. See Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, ii, 767; for further folklore references for the French area, see Gélis, History of Childbirth, trans. by Morris, pp. 490–94. On the transformation of the theme with respect to its apocalyptic origins, see Fiore, ‘“Caccia selvaggia” e “schiera furiosa”’. 61  In eighteenth-century England, where suicide had been de-criminalized by this time, these categories were still differentiated at burial: see MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, pp. 212–13. 62  See Burchardus Wormacensis, Decretorum libri viginti, cols 974–75. 63  See Trexler, ‘Infanticide in Florence’.

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of possessing : they said they could see the souls of the dead and the hidden sins of the living. They also said they could free the living from the impending and inauspicious presence of the dead. But it was their claim to forgive secret sins that made them suspects in the crime of abusing the sacraments. We find them at the centre of a number of episodes, residual fragments of stories of the daily life of the period. They allow us a glimpse of the habitual exchanges between true or false pilgrims and the world of the inhabitants of the countryside, with their fears and sense of remorse. These men presented themselves as mediators with the invisible world of the dead. They could vary the stories they told: in the German world, for example, they presented themselves by saying they had been on Venusberg and were able to cure people from the effects of witchcraft and evoke the souls of those who had died prematurely, ‘composto dai bambini morti prima di essere battezzati, dagli uomini uccisi in Guerra e da tutti gli “ecstatici” — da coloro cioè la cui anima aveva abbandonato il corpo senza più farvi ritorno’ (made up of children who had died before they had been baptized, men killed in war, and all the ‘ecstatic’, those whose soul had left its body without returning).64 In the Italian world of the Po valley plain, it was the Roman Inquisition which persecuted a group of pilgrims originating from around Spoleto in 1608. Some peasant farmers had told their confessors and repeated to the Inquisitors the stories that the members of this group had recounted: there were twelve of them, like the Apostles, and they said they had been born on the eve of St John the Baptist’s day ‘del sangue, o stripe del nostro Salvatore’ (of the blood, or the lineage of our Saviour). They started up conversations with the farmers at work in their fields, or knocked at their doors in the evening asking for alms and a bed for the night. They said they had come back from a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and had extraordinary powers: Professano indovinare peccati occulti, et richiedono elemosine per farli perdonare, et per far anco liberar le anime dal purgatorio. (They claim they can guess hidden sins, and ask for alms to have them pardoned, and also to free the souls from purgatory.)65

64 

Ginzburg, The Night Battles, trans. by Tedeschi and Tedeschi, p. 63. The records of the trial relating to this are preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Modena, and were pointed out to me by my late friend Albano Biondi. I have provided an account of them, and there is an article based on a reading of them by Laura Roveri in a collection of studies dedicated to his memory, Prosperi, Donattini, and Brizzi, Il piacere del testo, under the respective titles: Prosperi, ‘Croci nei campi, anime alla porta’, and Roveri, ‘Gli stregoni erranti’. 65 

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Once they had been received into the house, they revealed to their hosts the presence of tormented souls at the door to the house or on the roof. These were the fruit of secret sins which had never been confessed and they brought the family bad luck. Those who were convinced and gave them an offering in the form of money or in kind did so because they recognized in those wandering souls, which the strange mediators said they could see, the ‘creature senz’anima’ (creatures without a soul) which were the fruit of spontaneous or induced abortions: these were the secret sins which had never been confessed to the priests, which the self-styled pilgrims guessed at. And perhaps they were precisely those little bodies buried in the fields or under the threshold to the house that fed their fear and remorse. In the name of those restless spirits, bearers of bad luck, the pilgrims asked for offerings and promised to use the money they received to pay for masses or to light candles. They guaranteed that at that price their sins would be forgiven and the spirits would find peace, leaving the family house free from their negative influence. These strange visionary and omniscient pilgrims easily managed to overcome the peasants’ avarice: their promise found a strong ally in the existing sense of guilt. And the work of the Inquisition was not enough to remove this type of practice completely, so strongly was it rooted. One clue to its tenacious survival was recorded by the Inquisitor of Pisa in 1642: two peasant farmers, Silvestro Andrea from Collodi and Raffaele Giovanni Battista, described the arrival of a pilgrim who requested alms in exchange for the pardon of unconfessed sins, and one sin in particular: the death of children ‘without a soul’. Silvestro Andrea admitted before the Inquisitor that he had had one such child, who had died without a soul ‘perché non si capiva se era maschio o femmina’ (because it wasn’t clear whether it was a boy or a girl).66 These were probably archaic forms of removing sins, which we only find in this period because they had been intercepted by a new and more rigid form of ecclesiastical discipline. The name Santiago de Compostela, the sanctuary where medieval legend said the world ended and it was possible to see the souls, brings back ancient models of religious mediation in an age in which we imagine they no longer functioned. But those improvised specialists in the forgiveness of sins found their path blocked by the Tridentine parish and the court of the Roman Inquisition, two institutions which were able to strike at 66 

Pisa, Arch. Arcivescovile, fondo ‘Inquisizione’, filza 14, fols 708r–709v (1642–44), the ‘spontanee comparse’ of the two peasant farmers, on 17 April, 1642 (Silvestro Andrea) and 25 April of the same year (Raffaele Giovanni Battista). For an analytical description see Casella, ‘Inventariazione del fondo del tribunale dell’Inquisizione pisana’, pp. 85–86.

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the unauthorized religious mediators and channel the guilt and remorse of the families towards the sacrament of confession. And yet this persistent obsession with restless spirits and inauspicious presences reveals not only the strength of the sense of guilt of the living but also the impotence of the officially sacred, incapable of offering a rite of passage to the remote land of the dead for those who had not lived. The threat long remained both in folklore culture and in the cultures of Reformed Europe. The obsession with the spirits of the dead in the cultures of Protestant Europe has suggested a possible connection with Luther’s abolition of Purgatory: once that zone of reciprocal exchange between the living and the dead had been removed, it has been argued, the memory of the dead weighed down on the living without the possibility exorcism.67 In Catholic countries, however, folklore presents phenomena which are not dissimilar; and perhaps for analogous reasons. By regularizing and spreading the image of the world of the dead ordered in stable containers, Tridentine Catholicism, left some of them without a fixed abode. Right into the twentieth century, Carlo Levi recorded that same fear for the permanence among the living of the spirits of children born without baptism in the countryside of southern Italy, which had been displayed almost a thousand years earlier in Burchard of Worms’ Decretorum libri viginti. As Levi recounts, in rural Basilicata, baptism was still delayed to the age of reason and was administered only when imminent death was feared; the sacrament, therefore, had the archaic form of concern for death and burial: Quando mi chiamavano a curare qualche ragazzo, magari di dieci o dodici anni, la prima domanda della madre era: ‘C’è pericolo che muoia? Perché allora chiamerò subito il prete per battezzarlo. Non s’è ancora fatto, finora: ma se dovesse morire, non sia mai’. (When I was called to the bedside of a ten- or twelve-year-old, the mother’s first question was: ‘Is there any danger of his dying? If so, we must call a priest to come and baptize him. We’ve not had it done, but if he were to die […] God forbid […]’.)68

Given various names in southern Italy — ‘monachicchi’, ‘munacielli’, ‘mazzamaurielli’ — these spirits were considered to be irritating and annoying. To 67 

A hypothesis put forward by Davis, ‘Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny’. Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, trans. by Frenaye, p. 146. The ‘monachicchi’ Levi speaks of are the spirits of children who had died prematurely without baptism, the children Burchard speaks of when he records the practice of piercing them with a wooden stake to exorcize their presence (see above, p. 199): see Burchardus Wormacensis, Decretorum libri viginti. There are numerous analogies in the information collected in O’Connor, Child Murderess and Dead Child Traditions. 68 

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defend yourself against them you had to get hold of the red hat they wore on their heads.69 Their bones were called ‘pagan bones’ and they were sought after by witches.70 In a society where life was threatened by death and the places of the living contained those of the dead, it was not resurrection that was required but the fulfilment of a hard and inexplicable life. Now, in the common experience of families, the exclusion from Paradise which ecclesiastical culture spoke of took the concrete form of an exclusion from the blessed ground of the Christian cemetery, and this transcription into everyday reality of the damnation in the next world and the threat of spirits obsessively present around their parents’ house was to provoke excruciating feelings of pain and shame. Without taking this into account it would be impossible to understand the frequent and widespread recourse to the extraordinary resource of miracle. And faced with the irresolvable problem of how to redeem a life that had not been lived or of how to open the door to the other world for those infants who had died without baptism, a special miracle was invented. Scholars have called the miracle ‘répit’: a momentary awakening of the dead child for the time needed to administer emergency baptism. It was a solution which had the inestimable advantage of allowing burial in holy ground, with the hope of eternal salvation and the consequent promise of turning the dead into a pacified spirit. For this reason, the miracle repeatedly reappears in the medieval religion of God’s marvellous works on earth: if this was the price to pay for access to the Kingdom of Heaven, it had to be paid in some way. Every time the sentence of exclusion was pronounced for the unbaptized, the exceptional remedy of a mira­­cle made an appearance. Augustine himself, the author of the most rigid formulation of inscrutable divine predestination, recounted in his Sermons the episode of the miraculous resurrection of an infant in order to be baptized and, immediately after, to die.71 Something of the kind took place for confes69 

Perhaps a reference to the practice of touching the little hat of the baby to be baptized to become godparents to the newborn and equal to its parents (attested in the decrees of the Synod of Amalfi, 1594); see Corrain and Zampini, ‘Documenti etnografici e folkloristici nei Sinodi Diocesani dell’Italia meridionale’, pp. 28–29; but the authors remind us that capturing the little hat (berretto) of the spirit to force it to reveal hidden treasure is found in Petronius, Satyricon. 70  See Peruzzi, ‘Un processo di stregoneria a Todi nel ’400’, p. 9. 71  ‘[…] Baptizatus est, sanctificatus est, unctus est, imposita est ei manus, completis omnibus sacramentis assumptus est’: and the mother buried the child with joy: Augustine, ‘De Sancto stefano’, Sermo 324, col. 1446–47 (‘he was baptized, sanctified, anointed, hands were laid on him; when all the sacraments were completed, he was taken from her’, Augustine, ‘Sermon 324’, trans. by Hill, p. 166).

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sion when in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council made it obligatory for everyone and set out the conditions for absolution by a priest. Jacques de Vitry tells of the miracle of a sinner who had died after making an invalid confession, who obtained a brief resurrection allowing him to make the confession in the correct form to a true priest.72 There was good reason for considering penance as the ‘second plank’ which those who were drowning in sin after baptism could hold onto to save themselves. But the case of the miraculous baptism of dead infants remains a special phenomenon with unmistakable characteristics, even for the period. It was around the time of the Council of Florence and in the post-Tridentine period that the ‘répit’ was transformed from the occasional miracle it had been in the previous centuries, to a regular practice in specialized sanctuaries. The first indications of this practice come to light in Provence in 1388.73 But it is around 1478 that we find evidence of a veritable pilgrimage by the parents of children who had died without baptism, who brought the bodies of their little ones to Neuchâtel, where there was a sanctuary which specialized in the miracle of momentary resuscitation.74 The phenomenon spread rapidly, despite resistance and suspicion. It must not be forgotten that among the charges brought against Joan of Arc in the Rouen trial was that of having provoked the ‘répit’ of a baby to have it buried in consecrated ground.75 As Jules Corblet noted in the nineteenth century in his learned work on baptism, the first official reaction was the negative one of the diocesan Synod of Langres in 1452. A description was read there of the form in which the ‘miracle’ took place: it was the heat produced by the burning candles and the surrounding crowd which produced the illusion of colour returning to the cheeks of the dead children.76 Corbet listed the sentences of condemnation by the Inquisition and other diocesan synods of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thus documenting the hostility of a part of the clergy towards a widespread phenomenon which was difficult to control, one of those forms of devotion which the ecclesiastical authorities unwillingly tolerated and attempted to eliminate. 72 

The story can be found in the Historia Orientalis and is quoted by Jotischky, ‘Penance and Reconciliation in the Crusader States’, pp. 76–83. 73  According to Gélis, ‘Les sanctuaires “à répit”’, p. 182, the first cases took place in Avignon in 1388, around the tomb of Pierre de Luxembourg. 74  See Vasella, ‘Über die Taufe totgeborener Kinder in der Schweiz’, p. 5. 75  See Duby and Duby, Le procès de Jeanne d’Arc, p. 79. I would like to thank Peter von Moos for bringing this to my attention. 76  Corblet, Histoire dogmatique, liturgique et archéologique, i, 421–23.

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The history of these sanctuaries and the pilgrimages to them has long been the object of research which has shown how widespread they were in Switzerland, France, Bavaria, the Austrian Tyrol, and the Italian Alps.77 In his Atlas Marianus published in Munich in 1657 as a first edition and later republished on more than one occasion, the Bavarian Jesuit, Wilhelm Gumppenberg listed dozens of sanctuaries which specialized in these miracles, and subsequent historical research had added others to the list. The scholar who has devoted greatest attention to the subject, Jacques Gélis, counted around 230 of them in France, more than fifty in Belgium, around thirty in Switzerland, around twenty in Austria and the same number again in Italy, and around ten in Germany.78 The documents that have been studied so far mainly regard the sanctuaries located in the territory of what was Lotharingia, along the Alpine chain in particular, from Provence to Piedmont, and from Switzerland to the Austrian Tyrol, areas which are also historically characterized by the presence of the witch hunt, a phenomenon which in its obsession with infanticide, may be linked to the flourishing of the ‘répit’ miracle. New research continually brings to light fresh episodes of a tendency which appears to be increasingly widespread in the reality of the Early Modern Age.79 77  The history of research into this question has its roots in the history of folklore and devo­­tion. It began with Saintyves, ‘Les résurrections d’enfants morts-nés’ (1911), reprinted in Saintyves, ‘Les résurrections d’enfants morts-nés’ (1931). A bibliographical review by Santschi, ‘Les sanctuaires à répit dans les Alpes occidentales’, provides an overview of research after the fundamental study by Vasella, ‘Über die Taufe totgeborener Kinder in der Schweiz’ and the work by Müller, ‘Zur Taufe totgeborener Kinder im Bündnerland’; Müller, Die churrätische Wallfahrt im Mittelalter (see in particular pp. 75–78 on the Madonna of Tirano, on which see also Giussani, Il santuario della Madonna di Tirano. See also Paravy, ‘Angoisse collective et miracles au seuil de la mort’. After the fundamental research by Silvano Cavazza enlarged the field of study and created an interpretative paradigm based on the article by R. Hertz, ‘Contribution à une étude sur la représentation collective de la mort’ (see in particular Cavazza, ‘La doppia morte’, which are not taken into account in the rich work Gélis, History of Childbirth, trans. by Morris), the subject has been further examined in Gélis, ‘Les sanctuaires “à répit”’ and Renzetti, ‘Resurrezioni temporanee e battesimi nei santuari del’, which is edited with an introduction in Ceschi, ‘Risvegli’. For a useful review, see Seidel Menchi, ‘Les pèlerinages des enfants morts-nés’. I would like to thank Dr Brigitte Schwarz and the ‘Società svizzera per le tradizioni popolari’ of Basle for providing information and bibliographical help. 78  Gélis, ‘Les sanctuaires “à répit”’, p. 183. But this list has been supplemented, thanks in part to research by Gélis himself, for example in Gélis, ‘Lebenszeichen-Todeszeichen’. 79  The ephemeral traces documented by Sensi, ‘Santuari del perdono e santuari eremitici “à répit”’, can be supplemented by a study of the Piedmontese cases of Boves and Vico: Comino, ‘Bambini nati morti e santuari del ritorno alla vita’.

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Alongside geography there is history, or at least a summary indication of the period: the first appearance and spread of the phenomenon in the second half of the fifteenth century was followed by a subsequent flourishing, in Catholic countries, over the entire period from the Council of Trent to the eighteenth century. In the case of the sanctuaries of Lausanne, Neuchâtel, Geneva, and Oberbüren, the miracles were concentrated in the second half of the fifteenth century, as sudden bursts of interest. In Neuchâtel the miracle of the temporary resurrection of a dead child is documented in 1474 by a notarial deed; in 1478 parents of children who had died without baptism were already coming there in pilgrimages from as far as Provence. In the Augustinian convent of Geneva, Archduke René, known as the Bastard of Savoy, founded a chapel in 1498 dedicated to the Madonna Mother of God, and commissioned an image which became the pole of attraction for pilgrimages which specialized in the resuscitation of children to be baptized.80 The Protestant Reformation contested a situation of this kind, where the miracle of baptism was habitual. For the reformers, these were false miracles. In Geneva, Fargel verbally attacked the monks, accusing them of fraud and trickery. The monks replied that the death of an unbaptized child was a greater tragedy than the ruin of two cities.81 On 10 May, 1534, the Council of Geneva prohibited all pilgrimages with dead children for baptism. After a stormy period of conflict with the monks, the affair ended with the burning of the miraculous image of the Madonna in the Hall of the City Council on 31 October, 1535. The other sanctuaries in areas which had gone over to the Reform were subject to the same fate. Particularly interesting is the case of the chapel of Oberbüren near Berne, the sanctuary which was the most frequented, the best documented, and the most rapidly removed. Here the tradition of pilgrimages to baptize dead babies is clearly documented in the late fifteenth century: the influx of pilgrims was so intense that the Council of Büren decided to transform the chapel into a new church. In a letter of complaint to the Roman Curia in 1486, the bishop spoke of two thousand cases over the previous few years. As for the fabrication of miracles, the method described by the bishop consisted of warming the little corpses by the fire in a room annexed to the church, and then taking them into the colder church. A feather which was placed on their lips tended to rise up due to the difference in temperature, and this was enough for a miracle to be declared. The success was so great that in 1507 the city of Berne charged its 80  81 

See Vasella, ‘Über die Taufe totgeborener Kinder in der Schweiz’, pp. 5–6. Vasella, ‘Über die Taufe totgeborener Kinder in der Schweiz’, pp. 8–9.

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treasurer with supervising the practice. But when it sided with the Reformation, imperative orders arrived from Berne in February, 1528, to close the sanctuary: masses were forbidden, the gates of the church were closed, the miraculous statue of the Madonna was thrown to the flames, and the resistance of the town of Büren was easily overcome. In 1530 the church was demolished, and in 1532 so was the bell tower. But even in 1534 police measures were required to stop the pilgrimages, so strong must have been the impulse behind parents’ requests for the mediation of a miracle. This is shown by the finds from archaeological excavations carried out in the area between 1992 and 1997, which unearthed skeletons of hundreds of babies and even four-month old foetuses. 82 In other places too, together with miraculous images and pilgrimages, the Reformation removed the practice of emergency baptism and devotion to the ‘répit’ sanctuaries. There were no more emergency baptisms in reformed Geneva. Those parents who were worried about the uncertain survival of their new-born babies and had them hurriedly baptized by the wet nurses, came up against the strictures of the courts (the first known case dates to March, 1544), as happened to a family which brought its dead baby to a nearby sanctuary in 1542, where the miracle of the ‘répit’ took place.83 But just as criticism of miracles was becoming systematic and destructive under the Protestant Reformation, those men of the Catholic Church who were closest to the popular world, the preachers and the missionaries, began to look with favour on the apologetic force of this type of practice. This can clearly be seen in those circles which were most devoted to the Madonna, and especially among the Jesuits. In practice, new sanctuaries were established in the Catholic area, where the miracle continued to take place, without the Inquisition — which did however receive accusations and gathered information to this regard — seriously attempting to put a halt to the phenomenon. Indeed it became an increasingly mass phenomenon. The statistical growth over time is indisputably documented. In the monastery of Ursberg, more than 24,000 cases of this type of resuscitation can be counted between 1686 and 1720.84 82 

See the entry by Daniel Gutscher in Iconoclasme. Vie et mort de l’image médiévale, catalogue of the exhibition by C. Dupreux, P. Jezler, and J. Wirth (Musée d’histoire de Berne, 2001), p. 253, which refers to Gutscher, Ulrich-Bochsler, and Utz Tremp, ‘“Hie findt man gesundheit des libes und der sele”’, which I have not been able to see). I would like to thank my friend Enrico Castelnuovo for having obtained the catalogue for me. 83  Spierling, ‘Daring Insolence Toward God?’, pp. 104, 110. 84  Pfleger, ‘Zur Taufe toter Kinder’, p. 214. I would like to thank Silvano Cavazza for providing me with a copy of this article.

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The miraculous power of images of the Virgin was exalted by a widespread hagiographical literature, which only the isolated voices of rigorists contested. We have already mentioned Gumppenberg’s Atlas Marianus; we can also add, for example, the Relation des miracles de Nostre-Dame de l’Ozier, published in Lyon in 1659 by Pierre de Brissat,85 or La lucerna sopra il candelliere accesa by the Capuchin friar Zaccaria di Salò, published in 1679. 86 Protests were not lacking from that part of the clergy which was faithful to the Tridentine model of a non superstitious religion, and particularly notable in his careful work of documentation was the abbot Jean-Baptiste Thiers.87 But in the meantime, the registration of baptism imposed by the Council of Trent was also extended to those which were administered in the case of a miraculous resuscitation, something documented in the ‘livre des mort-nés’, a register held by the curate Félix between 1640 and 1670 at the sanctuary of Notre-Dame de Beauvoir, in Moustiers Sainte-Marie in Haute Provence.88 Here we find effective cases of resuscitation, which can be explained as babies born in a state of apnoea who then start to breathe, but also include detailed accounts of the chain of events which led the parents of babies who were undoubtedly dead and had at times even been buried to turn to the sanctuary. There were significant numbers of these cases in a period in which theological orthodoxy had been thoroughly defined: in 1669 we find as many as 123 episodes of ‘répit’. On the basis of this it is possible to study the geography of the phenomenon, its apologetic uses (the undoubted frequency of the miracle in areas bordering on Protestant countries), its links with witchcraft and folklore practices, and its long duration: reports by early nineteenth-century prefects show, for example, that the officially prohibited rite continued to be practiced. The sanctuaries which received these requests — those in particular at the foot of the Alpine valleys, traditionally devoted to pilgrimage because of their location — responded to a widespread need. Mothers who were expected to give birth, who were under the suspicious control of the political and ecclesiastical authorities, as shown by the institution of foundling hospitals and the criminalization of infanticide, were offered devotion to the Madonna as the divine Mother, mirror and incomparable model. In the spread of the ‘répit’ sanctuaries, we can see a reaction to official theology, with the creation of what have been called ‘corrective rituals of an unpopu85 

Cited by Gélis, ‘Les sanctuaires “à répit”’, p. 185, n. 2. See Cavazza, ‘Da Maria Luggau a Trava’. 87  Thiers, Traité des superstitions selon l’écriture sainte. 88  This is also cited by Gélis, ‘Les sanctuaires “à répit”’, p. 185, n. 3. 86 

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lar dogma’;89 and one of the reasons for their development was undoubtedly the harsh condemnation of unbaptized infants to hell, which we can image to have been spread among the laity by preaching. But in reality it was the whole concept of the human being in the transition between non-life and life, and then between life and death, which was being re-defined, both in learned culture and in popular rites and practices. We will see later how the dynamics of the formation of human life were being explored by physicians and theologians. We can gain some idea here of the reasons for the renewed alliance between a clergy which performed miracles and families distressed by the death of their infants, by observing the scene through the eyes of the protagonists. A brief dossier compiled between May and June, 1643, by the inquisitor of Vicenza provides us with the testimony of a father who had taken his dead baby to the Madonna of Terlago, in the diocese of Trent. It is a singular document which it is worth reading to gain an idea of the horizon of everyday life within which the miracle took place: Havendo mia moglie Catarina già alcuni giorni partorito un figlio morto, mi disse Bernardino Carlassaro da Corneto, che alla Madonna di Terlago diocese di Trento, e discosto dalla città cinque miglia si facevano dei miracoli di resuscitare li fanciulli morti senza bettesimo, mi risolsi di cavar dalla terra il mio, e portarlo alla detta Madonna […] così fece anco Bernardino sudetto con un suo figliolo pur morto negli stessi giorni […] Giunti là trovassimo una chiesa, che la nominano col titolo di S.to Andrea, fuor della quale ci è una capelletta. Ivi trovassimo un huomo, che podava le viti e questo intendendo da noi perché eravamo andati là disse, che intanto andassimo nell’hosteria a reficiarsi, e così mettessimo le cassettine sopra un muretto, et andassimo nell’hosteria e l’hostessa ci disse, che verrebbono delle femine a battezzare i fanciullini dentro della cappelletta, che però ve li portassimo dentro pure delle cassettine; furono dati duoi botti alla campana, e comparvero due donne, e dei putti e putte, che entrarono nella cappelletta, o stavano lì d’intorno. Io intanto con Bernardino sudetto, e con Francesco Zenone, che era venuto in nostra compagnia andassimo in chiesa a far oratione, et usciti poi (ma io un buon pezzetto doppo li miei compagni) vedessimo, che erano stati levati fuori i fanciulli dalle cassettine, e postili in terra avanti l’altarino della capelletta, e toccavano a quei corpicini il polso, il naso, e la testa, e dicevano che davano segni miracolosi, e che però si potevano battezzare, battendo il polsi, et il cervello, e tra di loro dicevano: ‘tastate qui, che batte il polso’. (As my wife Catarina had given birth to a dead baby several days earlier, Bernardino Carlassaro from Corneto told me that at the Madonna of Terlago in the diocese of Trent, five miles away from the city, children who had died without baptism could 89 

See Seidel Menchi, ‘Les pèlerinages des enfants morts-nés’.

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be resurrected by miracle. I resolved to dig mine up from the ground and take it to the said Madonna […] the foresaid Bernardino also did the same with his son who had also died in the same period […] When we got there we found a church, dedicated to St Andrew, outside which there is a little chapel. There we found a man, who was pruning the vines, and when he understood from us why we had gone there, he advised us to go first to the inn to restore ourselves, and so we put the little coffins on a wall, and we went into the inn; and the woman innkeeper said to us that some women would come to baptize the little children inside the chapel, and so we should take the children in their coffins in there. The church bells were struck twice, and two women appeared, and some boys and girls, who entered the chapel, or stood there around it. In the meantime, I and the foresaid Bernardino, and Francesco Zenzone who had come with us, went into the church to pray, and when we came out (though I came out a good while after my companions) we saw that the children had been taken out of their coffins and placed on the ground in front of the altar of the chapel; and [the women] touched the wrists, the nose, and the head of those little corpses and said that they showed signs of a miracle, and that for this reason they could be baptized; and beating their wrists and their heads, they said to each other, ‘feel here, there is a pulse beating’.)90

The father who made this statement, Lorenzo della Pozza from Corneto, was a man of thirty who did not seem to be particularly disturbed by his experience, nor particularly convinced of the authenticity of the miracle. Questioned as to whether he had seen signs of life, he replied: Io in mia conscienza non viddi moto di sorte in quelle creature, solamente un puoco di sangue al naso della creatura del mio compagno, dove le donne haveano premuto, e lo asciugavano con una pezzetta —. Soggiunse: — doppo questo le sudette donne fecero, che venissero compadre, e commadre, et con dell’acqua in un’ampollina battezzarono quelle due creature, e poi un huomo, ch’havevano anco veduto lì intorno, disse, che restasse una delle sudette donne a racontare i segni miracolosi perché potesse far la fede del battesimo. E così esso huomo fece la fede a me, et al mio compagno Bernardino, del battesimo dato alle creature, e che le donne havevano veduto segni di vita in quei fanciulli […] —. Subdens: — quelle genti, ch’erano ivi alla chiesa, dissero, che la Madonna fa questi miracoli, e molti ne vengono portati, e quelli, che vengono con buona fede, e speranza alla Madonna, ricevono la gratia.

90  Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, M 6–n, Dubia de Sacramentis, fasc. ix, unnumbered fols. This is a statement made in the legal form of the ‘spontanea comparitio’ since the lay deputies of the Inquisition had not allowed a full trial to take place. See Prosperi, ‘Scienza e immaginazione teologica nel Seicento’, p. 186 and n. 44.

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(Speaking according to my conscience, I did not see any movement in those creatures, only a bit of blood from the nose of my companion’s baby where the women had pressed down, and they dried it with a cloth’. He added: ‘after this the foresaid women had a godfather and a godmother come, and with some water in an ampoule they baptized those two babies; and then a man, who had also been seen thereabouts, said that one of the foresaid women should remain to recount the miraculous signs so that a certificate of baptism could be written. And so the man wrote out a certificate for me and one for my companion Bernardino, saying that the baptized had been baptized and that the women had seen signs of life in those children […] He added, ‘those people who were there at the church said that the Madonna causes these miracles, and many children are brought there, and those who come in good faith and hope in the Madonna receive grace.)

Did he believe in the miracle? ‘According to his conscience’ not very much, evi­­dently, or perhaps he was intimidated by the inquisitor and tried to distance him­­self from what had happened. But he had done everything he had been asked: he had participated in the rite and the compilation of the certificate of the miracle, he had paid (giving alms for the spiritual benefit received is part of the deeply-rooted historical tradition of the sacraments), and finally he had got what he wanted: ritual burial. This is recounted by Francesco Zenzone (or Zenzini), the friend who had accompanied the two fathers: Doppo battezzati furono sepolti in quel cemeterio alla nostra presenza, havendo un huomo di quel luogo cavato la fossa. Poi quelle donne dimandarono denari. (After being baptized they were buried in that cemetery in our presence, once a man from that place had dug the grave. Then those women asked for money.)91

The final act of the rite illuminates the entire scene that preceded it. The father brought the little corpse to the place which had been indicated to him and watched the scene from a distance. When the rite was over and the certificate of baptism had been drawn up, the moment of burial had finally come. The ceremony concluded with the final payment of the offering, very similar to what would have taken place in the parish cemetery if the baby had received the sacrament before it had died. There is no tension or expectation of a miracle, no hope of life: all that has to take place is the necessary rite for the little corpse to be buried in sacred ground. Archaeological investigation has documented the great care taken over burial: the little corpses were placed in an orderly fashion one next to another in the protected area of the church, facing the east, with 91 

‘Spontanea comparitio’ by Francesco Zenzini, 16 May, 1542, Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, M 6–n, unnumbered fols.

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their hands joined as if in prayer, as proof of the fact that they had been baptized and had a consequent right to be fully considered as Christians.92 Many of the stories that were collected in the records of the ecclesiastical authorities can only be understood by considering the importance of burial. One of these, which took place only a few years after the facts narrated in Ter­ lago, shows us the scene of baptism administered to a dead child, without the need for a miracle. It happened in Pomposa in 1651. There had been time to for the baby to receive a summary baptism from the wet nurse before it died. It had been taken to church for burial; and here the assistant parish priest wanted: […] supplire a tutti quei riti, cerimoniali e preci che usa la Chiesa con chi in tal caso sopravive, con assignarli padrino e madrina, che risposero sempre a quelle interrogationi che sogliono farsi a chi deve essere battezzato solennemente; col soffiargli in faccia e dire quelle parole ‘Exi ab eo’, fargli il segno della croce in fronte e nel petto, con dire ‘Accipe signum Crucis’, col benedire il sale e porgliene parte in bocca, con soggiungere ‘Accipe salem’ etc., col toccarli con la saliva l’orecchie e le narici, con ungerlo coll’olio de’ catecumeni, colle interrogationi ‘Credis in Deum’ etc., ‘Vis baptizari’ etc., con ungerlo col sagro crisma: e per dirlo in una parola con usar tutti quei riti e cerimonie ch’usa la Chiesa in tal caso con i vivi. ([…] to add all those rites, ceremonies, and prayers that the Church uses with those who in this case survive, by giving them a godfather and a godmother who always reply to those questions which are habitually put to those who have to be solemnly baptized, by blowing in their face and saying these words, ‘Exi ab eo’, by making the sign of the cross on their forehead and chest and saying ‘Accipe signum Crucis’, by blessing the salt and placing part of it in their mouth, adding ‘Accipe salem’ etc., by touching their ears and nostrils with saliva and anointing them with the oil of the catechumens, by asking the questions ‘Credis in Deum’ etc., ‘Vis baptizari’ etc., and by anointing them with the holy chrism: in a word, by using all those rites and ceremonies that the Church uses in this case with the living.)93

The person who denounced the fact asked the Inquisition to look into the affair; but it was not followed up by the congregation of the Holy Office of 21 June, 1651. It was a story without a miracle: the little corpse, for that matter, could be buried in consecrated ground because it had been baptized by the midwife. The question is then, why did the priest from Pomposa want to carry out the rite in its solemn form? Resurrection and the afterlife were not at stake, as they had been guaranteed by the midwife’s baptism, no earthly life was entirely 92 

See Ulrich-Bochsler and Gutscher, ‘Wiedererweckung von Totgeborenen’, pp. 257–58. Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, Dubia varia, 1571–1668, fasc. xix. 93 

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lost. The result of that rite of life for the little corpse was burial. It is clear that a special value was attributed to this ritual, something that the simplified rite of emergency baptism did not possess: it was a question of reassuring the parents as they approached the burial, who had probably paid for this (as the witness implies). Something of the kind took place, it would seem, in Calvin’s Geneva, with those parents who preferred the rite to be secretly administered by a Catholic priest of the area instead of the publicly-performed rite, because it was considered to be more effective.94 The secret of its efficacy lay in the exorcisms, which had been rigorously removed from the reformed rite but were still an essential part of the Catholic rite. The expulsion of evil spirits was profoundly linked to the sense of impurity and danger connected with the new-born baby’s journey from non-existence to life. Indeed the rite of Christian baptism had always contained an essential part devoted to exorcisms.95 This reminds us that in folklore culture, burial in sacred ground was an essential step in the transformation of the evil and unsatisfied spirit of the deceased person into a member of the protective and peaceful class of the family dead. In practice, then, if the baptismal rite was that which could ‘give the soul’ to the newborn, exorcisms had the task of removing that threatening shadow of impurity and death which the new being brought with it from the mysterious land it had crossed. For this reason it was necessary for a special form of pro­­tection to surround birth, and a miraculous image of divine maternity, like that of the Madonna, was the most suitable. A vast iconographic tradition had identified the Madonna as the perfect model for pregnancy and birth; and it was into her womb that the faithful were invited to contemplate the descent of the soul of the baby infused by God.96 But it could also be an image of the crucified Christ associated with the relics of some saint, like the one found in the Tyrolese abbey of Ursberg, which was at the centre of one of the last waves of pilgrimage and baptismal miracles. Rebuilt in 1663 after the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, in 1685 the abbey received the relics of saints Prospero, Candido, and Carità from the Roman catacombs. Immediately afterwards, the great factory of miracles was set in motion, in competition with other centres specializing in ‘répit’. People came in their thousands from consider94 

‘[T]hey thought Catholic practice was more effective’, Spierling, ‘Daring Insolence Toward God?’, p. 98. 95  I have not been able to consult Kelly, The Devil at Baptism. 96  Representations from late fifteenth-century France of the descent of the soul of the newborn, reflected in particular in the Annunciation and the miraculous conception of Mary, have been studied by Baschet, ‘La parenté partegée’.

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able distances, bringing little corpses with them to be baptized. The accurate accounts kept by the monks allow us to count more than 24,000 cases of this kind between 1686 and 1720. But times were by now moving towards a more rational examination of miraculous phenomena; and so it was that in 1750 the papal envoy Eusebius Amort was sent to the abbey by the bishop of Augsburg to carry out an inspection, which resulted in a careful examination of the facts and the places and the compilation of learned and detailed report.97 Formal accusations, inquiries, and condemnations by the ecclesiastical author­­ities were signs of a scientific and rationalistic culture which was affirming itself even within the clergy. Hence the attempt to find natural causes for the allegedly miraculous facts. A culture had been established even within the ecclesiastical world which conceived of the transition between life and death as a clear break. Where the body of the faithful saw the miracle of resurrection, the more enlightened clergy suspected the presence of fraud and the cunning exploitation of superstition or, at most, a case of apparent death — a possibility which obsessed the minds of the age. What was more, the medieval notion of the infant as an ambiguous creature, half-way between God and the devil, had been superseded by this time. A new concept of infancy had developed in its place, which saw childhood as an age of natural innocence, if not potential innate sanctity, associated with devotion to the Baby Jesus.98 God’s judgement of the creature who gave itself up to the creator as soon as it was born was not to be feared. That judgement could only be just, since justice was the essential attribute of God. And, as a devout count from the Marche in the Papal States wrote in the nineteenth century, since it was inconceivable that ‘Dio potesse odiare e punire eternamente quelli che non fecero il male’ (God should hate and eternally punish those who have not committed evil),99 a solution had to be found for the innumerable souls of unbaptized infants: a special suspension of judgement in their case, for example, and a baptism administered by God himself. Hypotheses of this kind became more common while the ‘répit’ sanctuaries were increasingly regarded with suspicion. But somewhere where miracles were no longer enough was medical science, which was putting itself forward to assist. Let us look at a scene of life (and death) in a Roman family. The head of the family, Giovanni Battista Sacchetti, recorded the fact that on 29 December, 1597, his pregnant wife had been subjected to a surgical operation: as soon as she had died, she was ‘subito sparata per 97 

See Gélis, ‘Lebenszeichen-Todeszeichen’. See Scaramella, I santolilli. 99  Leopardi, Considerazioni sullo stato dei bambini morti, pp. 7–8. 98 

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vedere di dare l’anima alla creatura’ (immediately cut open to try to give a soul to the baby).100 This was a remedy which had been long considered and advised. It is difficult to say how often it was carried out, but ecclesiastical sources confirm that it was recommended every time a woman died in childbirth. It was necessary to ‘give the soul’. The most explicit testimony of this is provided by the great Dominican preacher, Giordano of Pisa, in a sermon dated 23 April, 1305, devoted precisely to baptism: E disse poi di quelle che’ssi muoiono in parto, e hanno la critatura viva in ventre. Riprese molto le genti, che’lle sotterrano così, e disse ch’era grande peccato; e disse d’una, che fu in Pisa al luogo loro, che morì nel parto; e disse: ‘Io mandai per quattro medici e per balie, e paga’gli molto bene; e sì la isparammo e traemmole di ventre il fanciullo, et era vivo, e battezammolo, et ebbe l’anima. Or non fu questa grande misericordia? Molti se ne perdono, e sono nel limbo a colpa vostra; densi isparare, et è grande misericordia’. (And then he spoke of those who die in childbirth, with the baby alive in their womb. He greatly criticised those who buried them like that, and he said that it was a great sin. And he spoke of one woman who lived in Pisa, the place they were from, who died in childbirth, and he said: ‘I sent for four physicians and wet nurses, and I paid them very well; and we opened her up and pulled the child from her womb, and it was alive, and we baptized it, and it had a soul. Now was this not a great act of mercy? Many children are lost, and it is your fault they are in limbo; but you have to open up [the mothers] and this is a great act of mercy’.)101

These experiences from the past became relevant again in the post-Tridentine climate of sacramental rigour. When the Sacchetti episode took place Carlo Borromeo had just passed his decree, bringing this ancient practice back into force.102 It was an anticipated reply to the rules that Paul V’s Roman Ritual was to establish for the administration of baptism: if, as it appeared, the sacrament administered with the rite by aspersion was only valid if the holy water made contact with the child’s body, then a surgical operation could force the hand 100 

The document is quoted by Fosi, All’ombra dei Barberini, p. 38, n. 39. Varanini and Baldassari, Racconti esemplari di predicatori del Due e Trecento, ii, 347–48. See Giordano da Pisa, Quaresimale fiorentino, ed. by Delcorno, p. 316. Thomas Aquinas had been cautiously in favour of performing caesarean section on a dead woman: ‘Evil should not be done that good may come, according to St Paul. [...] If, however, the child be still alive in the womb after the mother has died, the mother should be opened in order to baptize the child, Summa theologica, iii, quest. 68, art. 11. 102  There is a detailed reconstruction of the theological and canon law tradition on this question in Filippini, La nascita straordinaria, pp. 36–43, to which can be added the hagiographical sources quoted by Sigal, ‘La grossesse, l’accouchement et l’attitude envers l’enfant mort-né’. 101 

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of nature and prevent hell from swallowing up those who had not had time to live. But this practice was not merely the revival of an existing tradition. There were two possibilities: either you could reach the as yet unborn child and make contact between its head and the holy water of baptism, or you could bring the baby out by cutting open that womb which it had difficulty leaving by natural means. Both routes were followed, leaving behind experiments and instruments which are considered today as stages and documents in the history of obstetrics, but which in reality belong to the history of religion. In practice, due in part to the theological uncertainties over the validity of baptism in the uterus, and to the many doubts which reached the Inquisition with descriptions of babies still in the womb or simply covered by the amniotic sac,103 it was caesarean section which won the day. To this we must add the fact that being defined as possessing a soul gave the foetus full legal humanity, granting it, however far it was from being born, the right to inherit goods, thus modifying the chain of succession (rumpit testamentum).104 There are no statistics as to the number of times canny husbands managed to prevent the dowries of their dying wives from returning to their family of origin, but there must undoubtedly have been some cases.105 The fact remains that, before it became a surgical technique to guarantee the life of the baby and the mother, caesarean section was a means to ‘give a 103 

In 1794, a Florentine father was assailed by the doubt that his son, who was then twentynine, had not received a valid baptism, because at the moment of birth, the midwife, fearing that ‘potesse perir l’infante senza battesimo’ had baptized him ‘aprendo con una mano i labbri interni della vagina, aiutata in ciò dal padre, e coll’altra versando l’acqua sovra i capelli’ and ‘per la situazione perpendicolare in cui trovavasi la partoriente sovra la sedia gittando l’acqua con un bicchiere non poteva questa penetrare alla cute del capo per la quantità de’ capelli, ma scorrere alla sfuggita sulli medesimi, come bene osservò con gli occhi propri il padre dell’infante, a cui peraltro non erano ancor note le predette dottrine’. It was only in fact after later reading a treatise on cases of conscience that the doubts arose in the father’s mind: Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, M, 6–p, Dubia de sacramentis, fasc. 8. For the case of the new-born baby wrapped in the placenta, see further on, p. %%, n. &&. 104  Ingrassia, Methodus dandi relationes pro mutilatis, p. 302. 105  My friend, Alberto Malvolti, has pointed out one to me, taken from Fuecchio, Galleni private archive, Memorie di Casa Galleni. It reads as follows: ‘Nel dí 31 dicembre di quest’anno (1620) morí Ortenzia sorella di Valerio, e moglie di Berto Guidotti gravida d’otto mesi […] Non lassando ella figli in virtù dello statuto di Focecchio doveva restituirsi la dote a detto Valerio suo fratello, perciò, seguita la di lei morte, il marito fece aprirla per veder, se gli riusciva cavar il feto ancor vivo […] ed avendo il marito di essa per avvalorare la sua ragione fattolo battezzare subito estratto dall’utero, sebben morto, come fu detto, e come per verità ricusò il curato di seppellirlo in luogo sacro. Sopra un tal fatto insorse una fiera lite […]’.

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soul to the creature’. As late as the eighteenth century, a Sicilian man of the church, Emanuele Cangiamila, carried out his own opinion campaign to convince the political authorities of the validity of the method, the only one able, in his opinion, to save citizens for paradise. On that occasion, the statistics he showed regarding the results of his work in Sicily convinced many authoritative figures: the presence of the surgeon at the abbot’s side had allowed them to extract many ‘creatures’ from their mother’s womb and baptize them just in time. The women in labour were obviously terrorized by those visits which announced their imminent death; but the man of the church advised those who wished to follow his example to be quite firm: they had to remind those mothers that marriage was justified by the aim of providing children for heaven; it was their duty therefore to sacrifice their lives readily and without resistance.106 It was a doctrine based on the idea of woman’s maternal function, mixing traditional ecclesiastical misogyny with modern notions of the development life in the uterus, and the result was to reveal itself as fatal for pregnant women. In the caesarean section, the only remedy suitable for reaching the little body with baptism, the priest and the physician exchanged roles, and the life of the soul was the prize gained with the physical death of the mother and foetus. Cangiamila’s proposal had a rapid and widespread success throughout the Catholic world, from Europe to Peru, leading to the issuing of precise instructions on the subject and the setting up of commissions to supervise their implementation. A bond was thus formed between theology and medical science, under the aegis of the state. Now that the notion of life had been accepted as a continuum beginning with conception, the salvation of the foetus’s soul led to intervention on the body of a pregnant woman, which was accepted by the state not only from the point of view of a modern demographic policy, but also that 106 

The work by Cangiamila, Embriologia sacra, enjoyed notable success: after its first edition in Palermo it was reprinted several times and translated into several languages, and received statements from authoritative figures expressing their approval. The work has been studied by N. M. Filippini, from Filippini, La nascita straordinaria, pp. 59 ff (there is a list of the editions on p. 63), to his recent article Filippini, ‘Die “erste Geburt”. The 1751 Milan edition, Cangiamila, Embriologia sacra (1751), is dedicated ‘alli SS. Angeli custodi’ and seriously examines the problem of whether the guardian angeli is chosen ‘allorché [the human being] nasce nell’utero materno con l’infusione dell’anima ovvero quando ne sorte a respirare quest’aere’. Da Pozzo, Sermoni degli angelisanti nostri custodi, had no doubts as to the answer: the guardian Angel ‘ci protegge e guida per quelle sotterranee vie del ventre materno’; and he quoted as proof the miracle of the son of the Infanta Uraca who had been taken alive from his dead mother’s womb, thus escaping Limbo. The text has recently been used as a document of ‘una storia rimossa’ by Ossola, Ciliberti, and Jori, Gli angeli custodi, pp. 319 and 280.

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of religious unity as the basis for political unity. There was good reason why, as from 1680, the French monarchy had imposed its exclusive control over Catholic midwives even for Protestant women in childbirth.107 In a context of this kind, as Johann Peter Frank, founder of modern ‘medical police’ (which was to become the great political construction of the ‘public health’ system), was to maintain, it was the state which had to take up the defence of those ‘citizens who are still enclosed within their mother’s womb’. This was the legacy left by the eighteenth century to the subsequent development of the question, which was to assume the most diverse aspects: while on a strictly medical level one unforeseen and positive result was the elaboration of a surgical technique — the live caesarean section — which was able to resolve difficult births and save the earthly life of many women, the relationship between theological doctrine and abortion law was periodically to reawaken doubts and conflicts.108 Let us stop at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Things had changed since St Bernardino of Siena preached his sermons: if the division between the ‘innocents’ who died baptized and the ‘creatures’ without a soul was accepted then as an unavoidable fact, now it could be overcome. Medical and theological progress had made it possible for there to be an unprecedented advance into the terrain of the construction of the human being. This had also changed the social condition of ‘creatures’ such as Lucia’s little boy: they had become the object of great investment by powers and disciplines of all kinds, just as a special system of surveillance had been put into place over unmarried mothers. Everything revolved around one word: the soul.

107 

Gélis, History of Childbirth, trans. by Morris, pp. 495–96. As has been demonstrated by Betta, Animare la vita, Cangiamila’s ideas and the very con­­cept of ‘embriologia sacra’ found consensus among nineteenth-century physicians and theologians. It was in this way that we arrived at the excommunication of anyone who induces the abortion of a foetus, whether it is formed or not: the constitution ‘Apostolicae Sedis’, issued by Pius IX in 1869, which renewed the indiscriminate condemnation contained in Sixtus V’s bull ‘Effraenatam’. I would like to thank Betta for having allowed me to read his work before publication. 108 

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Ensoulment Costor che fan sí gran disputazione dell’anima ond’ell’entri o ond’ell’esca, o come il nocciuol si stia nella pesca, ... Aristotile allegano e Platone Those who hold such great disputations on the soul, where it comes from or where it goes, or how the kernel remains in the peach, … quote Aristotle and Plato Luigi Pulci, Sonetti (Morgante e opere minori, a cura di Aulo Greco, [Torino 1997], ii, 1422)

B

ut what was the soul for Lucia and her contemporaries? How and when did they think the soul entered the body, how did it leave, and where did it go? These are questions we would like to ask the judges and the accused. Naturally, generic questions like these addressed to people who cannot reply, people who, just because they lived at the same time and breathed the same air, did not necessarily hold the same opinion, will only receive indirect and incomplete answers. We could, for that matter, reply that in a certain sense everyone knows what the soul is: everyone, at least, who, without necessarily thinking much about it, uses a term which originated in ancient thought and which was assimilated by European Christianity. But it is faced precisely with this widespread and general way of speaking that the question becomes inevitable. To explain more clearly, we could use Wittgenstein’s famous formula to

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say that ‘what we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’.1 The reason for this is simple: the metaphysical background still inhabits everyday language and the metaphors which surround birth and death; but it is trite simply to observe that this is just a far-off echo, an image which has become remote and unrecognizable. In everyday language, when there is no specifically religious end, life and death have a single referent: the individual organism. The range of terms in current use is dominated by medical vocabulary, with its technical anatomical and pathological jargon and its difficulty in distinguishing intermediary states between life and death, and it includes a return in a new guise of the ancient conflict between the heart and the brain as the ultimate seat of life. The soul has thus become once again the fundamental synonym of the breath of life, as in the ancient definition: ‘anima est qua vivimus’. The mental horizon of Lucia’s age looks completely different. To explore it we have to go back to the mentality of an age in which metaphysics was not only considered to be the object of science, but was also the supreme and decisive field of inquiry. Kant’s declaration of war in his Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that will be able to present itself as a Science (published 1783) was still to come. Theology still stood at the summit of the system of sciences, and per­­vaded it at all levels. The nature of the human soul was discussed and analysed by theologians and philosophers; but it is more difficult to say how it figured in everyday language, and how this usage was changing. It is certain that people commonly spoke of the soul, using an ancient term (anima) which had accumulated layers of interpretation and discussion. Together with the body, it constituted the human person. With death the unity of the person was destroyed, and the soul separated from the body and proceeded towards its destiny, which was different from that of the body. The soul had been discussed, and continued to be discussed, and it is easy to prophesize that it will long continue to be so. History, therefore — as is generally the case — cannot provide us with an answer here which makes any pretence at being definitive; but it can help us to understand something of the way of thinking that led Lucia’s judges to make their decision, and Lucia to submit to it. The problem of the soul has been considered from three different points of view: as a question arising from a sense of wonder about the origins of the life of a human being who previously did not exist and who, once born, plays a role in the world which is his and his alone; as anguish over the end, over what happens to the life that leaves the dying being and why the living individual is suddenly and irrevocably transformed into a thing; and finally, as analytical reason1 

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, i.116, pp. 41–41e.

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ing on the various functions which denote the living being (breathing, learning, imagination, memory, feelings, and so on). The idea of the soul that has emerged has been profoundly different according to the various points of view; and it is easy to see that of the three, the second has been the most common. The soul, a synonym of the life which inhabits a body and which can leave that body, has been considered above all from the observatory of death — the death of others, naturally. The question of what happens when the living being ceases to live did not originate therefore from a purely cognitive need: it is an attempt to respond to a primary need of the living to communicate with the dead. To arrive at the source of this question we must go back further than the very origins of the religion which was then dominant, Christianity, which pre­­ sented its truth as one revealed by God, but also as one which was able to inherit and complete the discoveries made by human reason. The ancient and famous University of Bologna, whose existence and importance Lucia was certainly aware of, taught its students to discuss the soul starting from the works of Aristotle. Aristotle and Plato formed the intellectual bases for understanding man and the world. Their conceptual constructs were the strong walls which Christianity had crowned with its theology as a sort of upper storey or roof, which did not demolish the ancient bases but completed them, indicating what had to be thought about the soul and its origin and destination, and about God and his relationship with human beings. Theology was the elaboration and study of a higher truth revealed directly by God, set out in the books of Holy Scripture, and interpreted by those who had the power to do so. At the University of Bologna, at a short physical distance but an unbridgeable intellectual one from the life and thoughts of Lucia, Carlo Sassi, a professor of philosophy, had long taught (from 1657 to 1696) what the soul was. He did so by commentating on Aristotle’s treatise on the soul. Sassi explained to the students who attended his lessons that there was not a single soul for all men, but that every man had a soul destined to remain individual and distinct from the others, even after its separation from the body.2 The generations that lived in Bologna, governing the city, administering justice in it, and submitting to its laws, therefore, received an idea of the world and the human race which had been formed in Ancient Greece and which was based on the notion of the individual. 2  ‘Anima non est eadem numero in omnibus hominibus, quia omnium hominum unicus non est intellectus ex Arist. […], sed numeratur ad hominum numerationem […] eandemque retinet individuationem post sui seperationem a corpore, cum adhuc retineat tale esse terminatum acquisitum in corpore’ see Vernazza, ‘La crisi barocca nei programmi didattici dello studio bolognese’, pp. 128–29.

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This idea reached them apparently similar to its ancient form, but polished and fashioned like a pebble by the ebb and flow of the tide, adapted to the needs of a world that had changed. In this change, some of its original characteristics had remained the same: above all that of individuality as the characteristic of man. The soul was, so to speak, the guarantee of the irreparable dif­­­ference between one individual and another, functioning as the very expression, the strongest and most immediate, of this sense of individuality. The soul had gradually become the philosophical reason, the religious doctrine, and the indisputable and insurmountable protective barrier for this sense of individuality. But at the root lay and continued to lie the question of the life of the individual, the relationship between the body and the life that inhabited it, the mystery of the origins of that life, and the mystery of death. Hence the individual as a single and unmistakable being was immediately split into two different beings: the body and the soul. Their association might appear to be so strong and necessary that the lack of one of them was perceived as the disintegration of the individual, its end. Aristotle had modelled his theory of the soul in this sense: the body was matter and the soul form. Matter and form: for many centuries this was the conceptual framework for thinking and defining each individual life. On one hand the building material which isolates and indicates an individual being in space and time; on the other that which gives that material a specific characteristic, differentiating, for example, an animal from a human being. The soul was the form thanks to which the body lived, grew, and was enriched with functions and knowledge; a fundamental and lasting distinction, whose effectiveness through history was fuelled and strengthened by the evidence of the natural processes which began when life ceased: physical disintegration as the visible loss of form. By breaking the bond between form and matter, death decreed the decomposition of the body and left the doubt remaining as to the subsequent fate of the soul. This was not so for Plato, for whom the body (soma) was a veritable tomb (sema) for the soul, a limit to its potentiality and aspirations. When the bond between the two was broken, the soul returned to the world of pure, eternal and incorruptible ideas, whence it had come. This first, fundamental alternative prompted further interpretation, integration, and hypothesis. If we retrace the major steps in the intense Western speculation on the soul, one fact becomes clear: death has always been the fundamental observatory for studying the composition of the individual. With death, the living unity is destroyed and the fate of the body is sealed. But what happens to that life that had given the body form and now abandons it? If the soul separates from the body, what other destiny awaits it? The problem was

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whether human beings were subject to the same rule as all other living beings or whether they were exceptions to it. The idea of a great chain of being which also included the human race was to establish itself in European culture in the eighteenth century; in the age in which Lucia lived, the process of generation and corruption described by Aristotle inspired the most restless minds to argue that everything that has a beginning must have an end, human beings like all other worldly realities, religions included.3 Those who have concentrated on the long prehistory of the concept of ‘soul’ have isolated a set of terms and practices which had in common the identification of a ‘double’ — a dream figure, an elusive shadow, but also an image which could be summarily represented in stone (kolossòs).4 Images of every kind made with the most diverse materials, from bronze to wax, have functioned as a form of mediation between the living and the dead, representing the dead, and doing so in the proper sense of the term: making present those who are irredeemably and forever absent. When we speak of presences, we must think of a whole range of concepts and practices, from masks and ancestors exposed in their Roman patrician residences, to the wax figures of the European sovereigns of the Middle Ages, signs of the reality of a power which was based on continuity and which looked beyond the death of its temporary representatives. And it is here that we find the first linguistic trace of a fundamental concept, that of ‘person’, understood in the Roman world in the sense of ‘mask’, a role, a socially recognized identity; a concept that implied a dignity and a legal status which distinguished, for example, a slave from a free man (servus non habet personam). Mask, figure, image: it is in the field of representation that the fragility and uncertainty of the physical life of the individual looked to find some form of compensation. Ancient representations, the subject of Erwin Rhode’s fascinating historical reconstruction of the idea of the soul in the Greek world, revolved around the visualization of the soul separated from the body like an inconsistent shade, which it was vain to try and embrace. It preserved the form it once possessed as a living being, but it was nothing but an empty figure. ‘Pulvis et umbra’: Horace’s disconsolate wisdom was a point of arrival for the ancient 3  On recourse to the theory of the ‘perfection of the universe’ whereby everything that has a beginning must also have an end, see Gregory, Theophrastus redivivus, p. 144. For an outline of the spread of the idea of the mortality of the soul in the history of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century culture see Ricuperati, ‘Il problema della corporeità dell’anima’. On the idea of the chain of being, see Gusdorf, Dieu, la nature, l’homme au siècle des Lumières; see in particular p. 283 on the notion of ‘histoire naturelle’ in Leibniz. For an overview of the most innovative critical tendencies in Italian and European culture see Israel, Radical Enlightenment. 4  See Vernant, ‘Figuration de l’invisible et catégorie psychologique du double’.

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world. The shade eludes contact with the living, while the body loses its form and becomes matter, dissolving into the formless substance of the earth. Thus a definition was created of the human being considered from the viewpoint of death, and this definition held together the body in dissolution and the inconsistent image of the person who was alive. It was a dual concept in constant, dynamic opposition: that part of the body which lasted longest, the skeleton (‘der Tod’, the dead man) had the function of representing death as a general abstract entity in the danse macabre of the Middle Ages; the shade which preserved the appearance of the living being, on the other hand, was the protagonist of the world of images in memories of the dead. From the shades of Achilles and Anchises to those of Dante’s other world and the Western pictorial tradition (with images of saints and scenes from the Universal Judgement), the form of the body was continually used to represent the soul: a body of another kind, a body so to speak without weight or consistency, like those seen in dreams. What dreams were and what they meant was not only a question which fascinated the Ancients, but a constant theme in the relationship between the living and the dead: Lucretius defined them as ‘simulacra’ (images), but still realities endowed with some degree of consistency, light membranes which detached themselves from their bodies and whirled through the air.5 It was certainly not by chance that Tertullian turned to visions seen in dreams as a basis for his doctrine of the soul. By Christianizing Platonic and Stoic doctrines, he maintained that the inspired dream was a means used by God to reveal his will, and proof of the immortality of the soul.6 Dreams, visions, relations between the living and thoughts of the dead, the evocation of the dead, the shamanistic journey of the soul outside the body: it is enough to evoke these themes to have an idea of the vast and complicated world that stood at the meeting point between ancient Christianity and the pagan world in an age marked by anxiety, as Eric R. Dodds has defined it,7 and above all by the particular anxiety of those who looked out into the dark region beyond death and attempted to define the characteristics and the powers of 5 

Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe, ed. by Bailey, iv, 35–36: ‘Simulacra […] quae, quasi membranae summo de corpore rerum | dereptae, volitant ultroque citroque per auras’ (‘“images” of things, a sort of outer skin perpetually peeled off the surface of objects and flying about this way and that through the air’, Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe, trans. by Latham, p. 131). 6  For Jacqueline Amat, Tertullian’s point of view is resolutely stoic and his principal source is Cicero, On Divination. See Amat, Songes et visions, ch. i: ‘Oniromancie et révélation à la fin du Ie siècle: d’Apulée à Tertullien’, pp. 25–50. 7  Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety.

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the soul. All this attention paid to the soul derived from a reversal of the terms of the question: death removed value from human life to such a point that it rendered the reality we are part of and in which we live a shadow, projecting the indefectible substance of life into a distant, higher realm, from which the soul came and to which it must return. For centuries to come Plato established the terms and concepts which rendered the soul thinkable as a being superior to the body, a temporary inhabitant of the world of shadows where mortals wandered, but destined for eternal survival in the world of ideas. He did this by starting from the meditation of the dying Socrates on his own death. In the Platonic tradition and the mystery religions, the body, in contrast to the soul, took on the negative characteristics of the tomb or prison of the soul, its incapable, disobedient, and rebellious servant; and these characteristics of radical division were inherited by primitive Christianity.8 In the world of Late Antiquity, the soul was represented as a delicate guest, a temporary inhabitant of the body, ready to detach itself and return to a higher world. The famous lines of a poem by the emperor Hadrian, ‘Animula vagula blanda | hospes comesque corporis’, is almost an elegy to the imminent and irreparable end of the empire and the inevitable triumph of Christianity. Between the ancient legacy and the new world of ideas and practices which was to characterize the life and death of entire human communities — and that of Lucia Cremonini among innumerable others — came the revolution represented by Christianity and the idea of the soul that was at its centre. The definitions and images of the ancient tradition had to reckon with the Christian faith in the Resurrection and the Gospels’ promise of the Kingdom of Heaven. The victory over death by the Messiah who came back to life on the third day, and the promise of a Kingdom of Heaven for his followers were the arguments on which the new religion was founded, revolutionizing the very Jewish religious tradition from which it originated, like a heretical sect sprouting from the main trunk. Originally there had been no promise of life after death in the Jewish religious world, something pointed out by Baruch Spinoza. The movement that had led the Jewish religion towards a spiritualized conception of survival after death was partly independent and prior to the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and partly dependent on the influence of Christianity. But Spinoza’s discovery, if it hit at the heart of a religion which for good reason had long cohabited with Christianity, was indisputable. The relationship of the Jewish people with God as a person, unique and exclusive, was based on the fidelity of the chosen people in the name of the promise made to Abraham. The exclusive link between the 8 

See Brown, The Body and Society.

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people and God concerned a future to be realized on earth. Individuals had to act and be judged by what they did, but reward and punishment took place on earth, in the present, and in future generations. Life comes from God, it is true, and it is given to each individual and is called the ‘soul’. Genesis recounts how God infused the breath of life into the nostrils of the first man, so that man became a living soul (‘nefesh chayah’, Genesis 2. 7); and Leviticus defines the dead man as a ‘dead soul’ (‘nefesh met’, Leviticus 21. 11). 9 But God’s pact with Abraham, the foundation of the tradition of the chosen people, is a promise of prosperity and earthly power for his descendants (Genesis 22. 16–18). Several Biblical passages hint at the Christian idea of survival beyond death. Controversial hints: Genesis speaks figuratively of the dead in ‘the grave’ (‘sheol’: Genesis 42. 38); a long Christian tradition described the disappearance of Enoch and Elia as their direct assumption into heaven; and the Bible says that ‘God took’ Enoch (Genesis 5. 24). But the most important passage and the most controversial was that regarding the death of Abraham because it was the origin of the idea of a heavenly place for the chosen. Abraham was said to have given up the ghost and ‘was gathered to his people’ (Genesis 25. 8). These passages and these images, perhaps an echo of an ancient cult of the ancestors,10 were the basis for the Christian tradition of an otherworldly kingdom, where Enoch was taken without dying, while Abraham — on whose death the Bible leaves no doubts — was established as he who holds the righteous in his bosom in the next world. What is certain is that there was no room for the immortality of the soul in the Hebrew Bible, which contains the clearest expressions on death as the definitive end to life and on memory as the only form of survival.11 From observations of this kind, Spinoza received the Jewish equivalent of Christian excommunication: ‘cherem’ — expulsion from the Jewish community of Amsterdam. But his thought was to leave a profound mark on the Christian foundations of European culture. Life after death had always been a central theme of Christianity: the hope, at times the certainty, of being among the elect in the kingdom of God was a key point right from the beginning. And at the beginning was the groundwork of St Paul. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul dwells at length over the resurrection of Christ as the foundation of Christian faith, drawing from 9 

See Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy, p. 44, but the whole book is of fundamental importance. The hypothesis is in Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy, p. 45. 11  See Job 7. 21, and also Ecclesiastes 44. 14, the latter of which states: ‘Their bodies are buried in peace, and their name liveth unto generation and generation’. On the Christian tradition of ‘Abraham’s bosom’ see Baschet, Le Sein du père. 10 

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it consequences and observations for the future resurrection of human beings, with phrases which were to exercise a fascination throughout the following millennia of Christianity as a religion and in the experience of generations and generations of human beings. ‘And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain’ (i Corinthians 15. 14): an assertive rather than a hypothetical ‘if ’, a latent doubt which continually re-surfaced and was continually repeated throughout the Christian tradition. Yet it was not easy to imagine that resurrection, even though it was necessary to do so. It was necessary to give a substance to things hoped for, and in this, the work of teaching and defending the faith, illustrating and transmitting it to others, was aided by images, metaphors, visions, and revelations. No form of proof could be more convincing than the return of the dead among the living; and after the resurrection of Jesus, there were many miracles, apparitions, and visions of the dead who came back to speak of the other world and to demonstrate its existence. But how had that first transition taken place? In St Paul’s eyes, as we have seen,12 the cycle of life and death was like that of nature, shown in the process which led from the seed to the fruit. Indeed he used the evocative image of the seed, taking it from the vegetative cycle and the experience of farmers: if the seed does not die, wheat cannot grow. In the same way, if the earthly body does not die, the heavenly body cannot be born. Others introduced variants to this simple and mysterious image, turning to the metamorphoses of the animal world: the caterpillar which becomes a butterfly, the snake which discards its old skin, the chrysalis and the adult insect. All of these refer to a transformation of the entire human being, making it something profoundly different, suited to the reality of a divine Kingdom. But the fascinating problem originated precisely here: how did this metamorphosis take place? And above all, who had undergone it, and when? And the others, those who remained on this side of the transformation into a celestial substance, what would happen to them? Because in the meantime one thing was certain: not everyone was destined to receive that mysterious transformation. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, which more than any other part of the New Testament established the themes and questions of the Christian idea of resur­­rection, gave rise to an infinite number of controversies over its interpre­ tation; but the centre of interest was the passage where human beings are divided into two groups regarding their future resurrection. This passage was interpreted in different ways and was at the centre of heated discussions, thanks 12 

See above, p. 161.

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in part to the history of the tradition of the text.13 Even in Jerome’s time, different readings of the Greek text existed. Jerome translated one of these as: ‘We will all sleep, but we will not all be transformed’ (Omnes quidem dormiemus, non autem omnes immutabimur). Another reading went as follows: ‘We will not all sleep, but we will all be transformed’ (Non omnes dormiemus, omnes autem immutabimur). The different versions of the phrase then took on different meanings depending on how ‘to sleep’ was understood. For some, for example, ‘to sleep’ meant to ‘fall into sin’, or ‘to sleep in faith’. Taking ‘to transform’ in the sense of to pass from mortal to immortal life led to an interpretation which opened the way to eternal life to all human beings: all human beings, even those who had succumbed to sin, will be saved and enjoy eternal beatitude. This interpretation was favoured by Origen, who upheld the theory of the ultimate salvation of everyone, including sinners, and even the rebellious angels. Taking ‘to sleep’ as a figurative expression of ‘to die’, on the other hand, led to a reading of the passage as an announcement that at the end of the world some will receive the final judgement still alive. It was a simple observation, which did not pose any particular theological problems, and for this reason it was favoured by Jerome. Then there was a version transmitted in the Latin manuscripts, which differed from the previous two and said that ‘we will all be resurrected but we will not all be transformed’ (Omnes quidem resurgemus, non omnes autem immutabimur). Rejected by Jerome because it was not attested in the Greek tradition, it left the door open for a hypothesis which often reappeared in the history of Christian heresies, namely that only some were to see the door to eternal beatitude open, while for all the others, judgement was to mark the end of their existence. Of the two interpretations, which in one way or another removed anxiety over the fate of the individual after death, the Church was to prefer that chosen by Jerome, which left the expectation of the Last Judgement and the prospective of eternal life open for everyone. Besides this idea of the metamorphosis (immutatio) of the individual in the Kingdom of Heaven, St Paul’s writings left Christianity with the legacy of a radical opposition between the body and the soul, which could only be resolved by the disintegration of the body. Speaking of his desire to ‘dissolvi et esse cum Christo’ (depart, and to be with Christ) (Philippians 1. 23), Paul had given voice to the expectation and hope which was born from faith in the resurrection of Jesus and his promise to prepare a place in his Father’s kingdom for his followers. For St Paul, the body was merely an obstacle to a relationship with 13 

On this point, see the clear account in Erasmus, ‘Apologia de loco “Omnes quidem resurgemus”’, ed. by Asso.

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God, an exile for the soul anxious to unite itself with the Lord (‘Dum sumus in corpore peregrinamur a Domino’: whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: ii Corinthians, 5. 6). From now on, the opposition between the life of the body and the life of the soul became the fundamental theme of Christian culture. We can consider as emblematic the phrase attributed by the anonymous author of the Passio of the martyr Maximilian, who, threatened with death by the proconsul Dion, replied, ‘I will not die: and even if I do depart this world, my soul will live with my Lord Christ’.14 The hope in eternal life could be experienced by a community as the destiny which awaited members of the Church. If the saints died willingly to live the true life with Christ, the remaining Christians gathered around their tombs in search of protection, as from powerful patrons with the Lord. It was in this way that a system of symbolic values and institutions centring on the destiny of the individual after death became increasingly powerful and invasive. The Christian promise of victory over death opened up immense room for hope, and, consequently, for the anxiety and the desire to know, for oneself and for others, what the world after death was like and where it was situated. All human history was expected at Judgement Day: the image of the book opened by the angel of the Apocalypse was the most eloquent symbol of a civilization of memory.15 The bond between the living and the dead led to a strengthening of memory: in rites, monuments, and in the written tradition. If all human names and histories were to have a place in the final reckoning, this meant that the past was not erased, and that the fullness of life was preserved in the entire history of what was and what will be: God, divine Justice, was the immobile mirror in which every human being finds his or her place. This ancient legacy never ceased to be a source of discussion; but the tone of the observations and contributions made around the sixteenth century appears as unusually dramatic with respect to the previous tradition. ‘Noi habiamo l’anima’ (we have a soul), explained a preacher at the beginning of the century, ‘la quale è simile a Dio perché Dio è immortale et l’anima è immortale per tutti li sancti propheti et per tutti li doctori e con auctorità theologante e philosophante’ (which is similar to God because God is immortal and the soul is immortal for all the holy prophets and for all the doctors and with theological and philosophical authority). Those who do not believe, 14  ‘Ego non pereo; et si de saeculo exiero, vivit anima cum Christo Domino meo’: Maximilian, Passio S. Maximiliani, ed. by Siniscalco, p. 160. 15  See Lauwers, La mémoire des ancêtres.

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he added, place themselves ‘in mancho grado del bove e l’asino (at a lower level than the ox and the ass).16 The mysteries of the invisible soul were certainly great: it was best to pass over them without touching on them, ‘come passa el gatto sopra el foco’ (as a cat passes over fire). But it was necessary to fight tooth and nail against the ‘heretici christiani che dichano non essere altro vivere che questo e che morto el corpo è cassato ogni cosa’ (Christian heretics who say there is no other life than this and that once the body is dead everything perishes). It is not easy to say which denying heretics the friar had in mind, also because in his neophyte fervour he addressed himself to the illiterate, to those who did not know Latin. He might therefore have been thinking of forms of popular unbelief or materialism which had always existed and continued to exist. But by that time, denial of immortality had earned the right to be present in learned culture and the conflict was being fought in the university classrooms. The Mendicant Orders were in the front line of battle, and the works and sermons by their greatest representatives resounded with their concern. A fundamental point in this struggle came with the decree approved by the Fifth Lateran Council in 1513, which forced philosophers to bend their teaching to the apologetic requirements. This intervention by the Church into the terrain of philosophy made it clear not only that the discourse on the soul had a special function in legitimizing the social and ecclesiastical establishment, but it also marked a sudden change of scene. After centuries in which the soul had been discussed in different ways and on different occasions in a climate of relative freedom, that official document suddenly changed the rules. The decree, promulgated in the form of a papal bull, ordered philosophers in their lessons and debates on the hypothesis of the eternity of the world and the mortality of the individual soul to make sure they used all means possible to show their audience the truth of the Christian religion — which meant obliging philosophers to take on tasks which properly speaking belonged to the ecclesiastical body, and to the friars in particular. 17 The person who was affected 16 

Operetta nova spirituale composta per el venerabile et catholico doctore Maestro Gieronimo da Bologna ispirato da Dio et venuto alla sancta fede catholica. Colophon: ‘Stampato in Venetia adí xxii de marzo 1515’ (fol. 1r). The work is presented as that of a converted Jew; the copy used here is part of a collection of apologetic pamphlets from the early sixteenth century aimed at the Jews: BAV, Raccolta Rospigliosi, I, V, fol. b i v, 1763. 17  The Bull, dated 19 December, 1513, stated that philosophers, when dealing ‘de animae mortalitate aut unitate et mundi aeternitate […] teneantur eisdem (auditoribus suis) veritatem religionis christianae omni conatu manifestam facere’: Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, ed. by Alberigo and others, pp. 605–06. Gilbert, ‘Cristianesimo’, p. 978, has noted that the question concerned the relationship between Christianity, philosophy, and poetry: ‘ai preti non era con-

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most directly by this, the Mantuan philosopher Piero Pomponazzi, reacted with one of his colourful popular expressions, to say that mixing philosophy and theology was a ‘miscere diversa brodia’ (mixing of different broths), a typical product of the friars’ kitchen.18 Leonardo da Vinci was of the same idea, when, reported to the pope for his studies on embryology and seeing himself ‘impedito l’anatomia’ (forbidden from practising anatomy), he concluded in an irritated tone: ‘Il resto della definizione dell’anima lascio nella mente de’ frati, padri de popoli, li quali per ispiritata azione san tutti li segreti’ (I leave the rest of the definition of the soul in the minds of the friars, fathers of peoples, who by inspired action know all the secrets). 19 They were essentially right: in practice, as a theme of philosophical and scientific research, analysis of the soul had to reckon with theology as a science dominated by the religious orders. The results of the conflict can be seen in the new curriculum of studies which was long to characterize the universities: in the Bologna of Lucia Cremonini’s youth, as we have seen, the philosopher Carlo Sassi tackled the subject by reading Aristotle’s On the Soul, taking care as a preliminary stage to deny the existence of a universal soul. The crisis that had led to a turning point and the intervention of the ecclesiastical authorities in this field had originated in the speculation on the soul that had dominated Italian and European culture between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Here the rebirth of Antiquity had taken on the double face of the return of Plato and the discovery of Lucretius. The Platonic Academy had gathered in Florence around the figure of Marsilius Ficinus, and Aldus Manutius had produced his Greek and Latin edition of the works of Plato. The return of Plato had a precise meaning: it was his work which had been responsible for the ‘inversion of the values attributed to the body and the soul’, making the body mere appearance and the immortal soul the real being.20 On this basis, Ficino’s definition of man had been clear: man is the rational sentito di dedicarsi allo studio della filosofia e della poesia se contemporaneamente non studiavano teologia e diritto canonico’. This concern derived therefore from the ‘tendenze laicizzanti’ of humanistic studies. 18  Pomponazzi defined mixing philosophy and theology as ‘fratizare, idest miscere diversa brodia’: Nardi, Studi su Pietro Pomponazzi, p. 27. 19  Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codex Atlanticus, fol. W. 19115r, quoted in the astute study Laurenza, Leonardo nella Roma di Leone X, p. 18. The allusion to those who had ‘impedito l’anatomia col Papa’ is taken from the 1515 draft letter to Giuliano de’ Medici (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codex Atlanticus, fol. 500r), and, according to Laurenza, refers to Giovanni degli Specchi, a jealous competitor of those years in Rome. 20  Vernant, ‘“Psychè”’, p. 7.

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soul, his body merely its tool.21 One of his early sixteenth-century readers summarized this opinion by stating that man is ‘non animal sed anima’ (not an animal, but a soul).22 At the centre of the sermons that Ficino preached not as a priest and church rector and later canon of the cathedral, but as the intellectual guide for a small group of learned friends, lay precisely the Platonic doctrine of the soul as a being of non-corporeal origin, tending therefore to ascend to heaven as soon as it was free of its burden, the body.23 In his Epistola al genere umano, Ficino made a lofty and impassioned appeal to his fellow men to recognize the divine being which they were inhabited by and to make every attempt to separate their soul from their body in such a way as to be able to contemplate the eternal ray of divine sun which was concealed and depressed by its physical casing.24 The ascent of the soul which he describes in his De raptu Pauli is a true exaltation of the divine nature of the human soul, the image of God.25 Poliziano answered a critic by stating that, according to Plato, ‘L’uomo non è altro che l’anima partecipe di ragione’ (man is nothing but a soul partaking of reason).26 The influence of Neoplatonic tendencies is clear in the 1513 decree itself.27 These tendencies were part of the new cultural fashions which had spread through the Italian courts and which, ranging from the Jewish Kabbalah to Egyptian magic, all shared a tendency to exalt mental facts and to search for powers of the spirit, in reaction against the realism of medieval culture and its stress on all aspects of the human creature. But in the meantime, with the dis21 

‘Homo est anima rationalis, mentis particeps, corpore utens’: Ficinus, Argumentum in Alcibiadem primum (Hain, Repertorium bibliographicum, no. 13063 = fol. 10v). 22  Giustiniani, Trattati, lettere e frammenti, ed. by Massa, ii, p. 188. 23  Edited in Ficinus, Platonis Omnia Opera, pp. 473–93. These sermons have been the object of much research: see the study by Vasoli, ‘Le Praedicationes di Marsilio Ficino’. 24  ‘Cognoscere te ipsum, divinum genus mortali veste indutum, nuda, quaeso, te ipsum, segrega quantum potes, potes autem quantum conaris, segrega, inquam, a corpore animam, a sensuum affectibus rationem, videbis protinus purum, segregatis terrae sordibus, aurum […] vereberis tunc, crede mihi, te ipsum, tanquam divini Solis radium sempiternum […]’: Ficinus, Platonis Omnia Opera, pp. 659–60. 25  The text, together with Ficino’s own translation into the vernacular, is included in Ficinus, De raptu Pauli, ed. by Garin. 26  Letter dated 1 August 1479, in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. by Garin, p. 915. 27  Among the proponents of the 1513 decree were cardinal Egidio da Viterbo, who was hostile to Scholasticism and attracted by Plato and the mystical tendencies of Judaism, and Gian Francesco Pico della Mirandola, who was present at the eighth session of the Lateran Council and the proclamation of the decree. See Di Napoli, L’immortalità dell’anima nel Rinascimento, and Gilbert, ‘Cristianesimo’.

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covery and the immediate fortune of Lucretius’s great poem, ancient materialism, which had denied the gods, had taken an important and profoundly evocative place in representations of the world, a place which it was to maintain from then onwards. After the first edition of the On the Nature of Things (Brescia, 1473), Aldus Manutius published his own in December, 1500, inviting his readers, in the dedication to Pio da Carpi, to make a distinction between the elegance of the poem and the Epicurean doctrines which it propounded. But the attraction which Lucretius exercised over his readers was so immediate, profound, and long-lasting that it presented the problem which always presents itself in moments of great fortune of a great classic: the problem of recognizing in the presence of an ancient author in the culture of another age, not merely the automatic effect of the great value of that work, but the dominant thoughts and worries of that age itself. Using a definition by the Inquisitor of Bologna, Leandro Alberti, we could say that if the Christian Middle Ages had invented a Catholic Virgil, the new times recognized themselves in the heretic Lucretius. Thus, while the most sensitive and intellectually courageous Christian consciences, like that of Aldus Manuntius, were driven by contrast to stress the Pauline spiritualism which was latent in the foundations of official religion, the ecclesiastical authorities reacted with alarm bells and censorship: the 1517 Provincial Council of Florence prohibited the reading of Lucretius’s poem in schools, and, even though it was never included in the Index of forbidden books, in practice the poem was considered heretical, or at least to be used with care.28 The men of letters of the Italian courts singled out its erotic content and were careful to condemn the poem’s doctrinal error: ‘Non dubitemo’, wrote Mario Equicola, ‘errare Lucretio cantante l’anima nascere insieme al corpo et insiemi morire’ (We do not doubt that Lucretius was wrong when he sang that the soul is born together with the body and dies together with it).29 Niccolò Machiavelli, another reader of Lucretius, took a completely different approach, placing a story of human conception at the centre of his play La Mandragola, as the outcome of the conflict between natural forces and laws, the result of 28  ‘Nullus de caetero ludi magister audeat in scolis suis exponere adolescentibus poemata, aut quaecumque alia opera lasciva et impia: quale est Lucretii poema’: Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, xxxii, col.  270. A definition which contrasted ‘l’heretico Lucretio’ with the ‘catholico Virgilio’ is attributed to the Dominican Leandro Alberti in Achillini, Annotationi della volgar lingua, ed. by Bonardo and Marcantonio, fol. 19r. But on the extraordinary and up to now underestimated fortune of Lucretius in sixteenth-century culture, see Prosperi, ‘Di soavi licor gli orli del vaso’. 29  Equicola, La redazione manoscritta, ed. by Ricci, p. 290r; I take up the observations made by Prosperi, ‘Di soavi licor gli orli del vaso’ p. 166.

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seduction and deceit: significantly, fra Timoteo, the representative of religion, is given the task of collaborating in trickery. But the names Machiavelli and Pomponazzi bring us back to a period of pro­­found crisis in the Christian representations of the soul, which did not only depend on the rediscovery of ancient thought. We can think of what Pomponazzi wrote in his famous treatise De immortalitate animae, published in 1516, where he put forward the hypothesis that it was the politicians, true physicians of the soul, who invented the immortality of the soul to bridle a humanity which was led by nature to evil, without concerning themselves with the truth, but simply aiming at achieving correct moral behaviour (non curans de veritate, sed tantum de probitate).30 While Pietro Pomponazzi published these reflections, demonstrating notable courage, the effectiveness of religion as an ‘instrumentum regni’ was illustrated by Machiavelli in his great historical and political works (destined to remain unpublished until after his death), with a series of examples which went from Moses to Numa Pompilius and Ferdinand the Catholic. It could be said that the change which had taken place in the papacy, transforming it into an Italian principality, allowed those who were close witnesses to form a radical criticism of the foundations of the Christian religion, to a point not reached up until then. There was, it is true, the prohibition imposed by the Papacy with the bull of the Fifth Lateran Council; many scholars have underlined Pomponazzi’s ability and courage to remain faithful to own line of thinking without giving in and without being harmed by it. Nevertheless, the fact that the Church intervened with increased doctrinal rigidity and ecclesiastical policing on such a delicate subject, confirms that it saw contemporary discussion on the soul as dangerous because it weakened discipline and undermined obedience: it could be said therefore that both sides spoke the same language. But the religious re-awakening on the subject was to come from outside Italy, as it soon became obvious. Voices of criticism and reform were being heard throughout Europe at the time in increasing number, reminding people that the specific field of the Church, as an institution and as a power, was the soul. This did not mean understanding it from a scientific and philosophical point of view, but consi­dering it from a ‘pastoral’ one: to govern it in this world and to help it to achieve happiness in the next. This movement, complicated and often internally conflictual, had the fate of the individual soul after death as its supreme reference value. The 30 

I quote the Latin text from Pomponatius, Tractatus de immortalitate animae, ed. by Mojsisch, p. 198.

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body remained in the background. Concern for the fate of the body which had dominated the previous age appeared increasingly remote. All that remained were the distant echoes of that inexhaustible curiosity about the physical aspect of the resurrected individual which had fuelled the medieval tradition, with its accumulation of hypotheses and descriptions regarding the recovery in the next world of every last particle of those corpses which had been dismembered, putrefied, devoured by animals, or were in any case fragmentary. When Erasmus of Rotterdam was forced by the attacks of Nicolas Baechem, a Carmelite theologian from Leuven who accused him of denying the resurrection of the dead, to explain his translation of the Pauline passage on the transformation from the earthly body to the glorious body of eternity, he limited himself to pointing out a series of unrelated details.31 Naturally the need was still felt to imagine the face and the physical appearance of the resurrected. Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, and many others had com­­mented on the fundamental Pauline passage on resurrection as the restoration and instantaneous transformation of the body: all the most complicated hypotheses as to the form which human bodies, worn out by age and illness, dismembered by animals or by their fellow men, would take at the final Judgement had been explored. But when the question returned on the scene with the new concerns of the age of reform, the problem seemed to be rationally irresolvable: could it be possible, Lelio Sozzini wondered, for bodies to be resurrected identical in their original outward form, if we think that other bodies have fed off them, building up their own flesh with the flesh of the dead?32 Paul’s theory of the complete transformation (immutatio) which the body has to undergo in order to reach eternal life was taken to its extreme consequences by the Anabaptists. For them there was a radical difference between the natural body and the heavenly body of the resurrected, the former remaining an animal residue to be abandoned and the latter an entirely spiritual reality.33 The radical wing of the Reformation went in this direction, interpreting and developing an approach which was widespread above all in reforming cir31 

In her critical edition of Erasmus’s Apologia, Cecilia Asso points out some philologically dubious choices and a lack of clarity, besides an undeniable sympathy for Origen’s theories: Erasmus, ‘Apologia de loco “Omnes quidem resurgemus”’, ed. by Asso. 32  See Sozzini, De resurrectione, ed. by Rotondò, pp. 77–80. On the work’s context and inspiration see the exhaustive critical note on pp. 314–40. 33  As it was defined by a group of Anabaptists from the Valtellina, according to the compendium set out by Agostino Mainardi in 1547: see Sozzini, De resurrectione, ed. by Rotondò, p. 322, n. 81.

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cles: ‘carnal’ was contrasted with ‘spiritual’, and any practice and conviction which granted space to the materiality of objects and rites was branded as a relic of Judaism. It was inevitable that this conflict of interpretations should concentrate on the body of Christ. That body, absent by definition from the world of human beings, had always constituted a meeting point between theological speculation and devotion within the Christian world. A physical and totally human body, according to the doctrine elaborated and protected by the Church, it was devoid of sin, but in all other respects shared man’s common destiny of suffering and death. And after the resurrection it had become the glorious divine body, residing in heaven, as a guarantee of the fate that awaited the elect. How to come into contact with that body was the central question posed by Christian society. Unattainable in its divine remoteness, it could be reached however through all that which had touched it: the fragments of the tree of the Cross, the thorns of the Passion, the shroud in which it had been wrapped after its death. The pilgrimage to contemplate the ‘true icon’ was, as in Petrarch’s beautiful sonnet,34 a way of preparing oneself for death and fostering one’s hope in the heavenly vision. But this was not enough to satisfy the need for direct, reassuring, and re­­ deeming contact. And as there was nothing more concretely vital than blood, among the objects of cult which a number of sanctuaries boasted they possessed was the blood of Christ’s agony. Whether or not that blood still contained the substance of divinity was the object of discussion, and it was by no means a trivial question. That relic could become a talisman of unprecedented power. We can imagine the improvidence of the Franciscan preacher during an Easter cycle of sermons held in Brescia in 1463, who, when dealing with the question of the blood shed during the Passion, denied that it could be the object of devotion: the Dominican inquisitor accused him of heresy and Pope Pius II Piccolomini was obliged to hear the opinions for and against in a disputation in Rome which lasted three days. It was not a trivial question: what was at stake was the very form of the union of the two natures, human and divine, in the person of Christ. Only the imminent Crusade and the need for the work of the Franciscans allowed the deft and politically-minded, unscrupulous Piccolomeni pope to find a solution without issuing a doctrinal condemnation.35 But by this 34 

Petrarch, Canzoniere, xvi: ‘Movesi il vecchierel canuto et bianco’ (‘The old man takes his leave, white-haired and pale’, ed. and trans. by Musa, pp. 16–17). 35  See Pius II, Commentarii rerum memorabilium, ed. by Van Heck, ii, 645–73. For evidence of the echoes created by the discussion see Alberti, Descrittione di tutta Italia (1550); I quote from Alberti, Descrittione di tutta Italia (1568), fol. 140r.

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time the problem had been pushed to the margins, because the flow of divine blood had already found a safe channel in the sacrament of the Eucharist. It had thus been possible to ward off the potential conflict between the relics of the Passion and the other divine blood which the Church offered Christians in the mystical sacrifice of the Mass. The search for blood and relics could be tolerated and even encouraged as a form of devotion, a lower level of faith. In practice the doctrine of transubstantiation provided the decisive impulse for the dematerialization of the most redeeming body of all, and for all. Only the priest could make it descend onto the altar of the bloodless sacrifice of the Mass and offer it to Christians. Spiritualized in the sacrament, the suffering, human body of the Christ of the Passion presented itself to painters to be rendered visible: removed definitively from all contact, it thus inhabited a mental space. But this did not mean that the question of the special reality of that body became any less intense: was it possible for Christ to present himself physically in flesh and blood on the altar? The bitterest controversy in European Christendom broke out precisely over the problem of how to interpret the ‘hoc est corpus meum’ of the Eucharist. The realism of the identification of bread with flesh and wine with blood was the rock on which the ship of any possible alliance between Zwingli and Luther foundered on the eve of the battle of Kappel; and an agreement between Calvin and Bullinger was finally reached around the interpretation of ‘is’ in the sense of ‘it means’. But also the attempt to imagine the body of Christ and its physical location in space led to a widespread crisis in the system of heavenly spaces, organized with precise realism by medieval cosmology. Where was that body? It was said to be ‘in Heaven’ and it was expected to return from there for the Last Judgement. But, Calvin commented, this did not mean locating Christ in a precise place and imagining him there on high, sitting on a throne counting stars.36 The gap between the physical and moral misery of the human body, a slave to sin and death, and the extreme spiritualization of the idea of the soul and God was addressed in commentaries on the Biblical account of the Creation. It was only truly possible to believe that man had been created in God’s image (Genesis 1. 26–27) by looking beyond the earthly reality of his body. In this case too, it was Calvin who expressed the sensibility of the age with the great36  ‘[…] Quum dicitur Christum in coelo esse non sic accipere debemus quasi resideat inter sphaeras, ut stellas numerat’; ‘[…] Temerarium ac stultum foret, ultra coelos conscendere, et stationem in hac vel illa regione, aut sedile, aut ambulationem assegnare Christo’. I take these quotations from Tosto, Calvino punto di convergenza, p. 126; the volume contains the 1549 Consensus Tigurinus in the appendix, pp. 229–60.

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est clarity. For him, those words from the Bible could in no way refer to man’s body, which certainly did not appear to shine with the light of a divine origin.37 Theological discussions strengthened the tendency to reserve all questions relating to the soul for the men of the Church. This did not prevent protests being raised against the 1513 decree from that world of physicians which had what could be described as a ‘professional’ relationship with the soul. Reading the treatise on anatomy by Alessandro Benedetti, a teacher of anatomy in Bologna around 1490, can give us an idea of the way of reasoning of a man of science, open to a mixture of different influences: Lucretius’s theme of the links between mind and body, the Platonic idea of the body as a temporary vehicle of the soul, and Pliny’s great encyclopedia, the Natural History. Benedetti analysed the relationship between mind, brain, and soul by studying among other things the reflection of organic alterations in sensory perception and thoughts, and identifying the cause of problems of memory in damage to the cerebellum. His lively curiosity about the way in which matter could be transformed into spirit in the human body led him to look at the circulation: blood was where it was possible to find the ‘spiritus’, a term which indicated either respiration, life, or the soul. This was the terrain of the subsequent restless research by the Spanish physician Michele Serveto, an anti-Trinitarian persecuted by the Catholic Inquisition and condemned to the stake by Calvin in the capital of the reformed world. As for Benedetti, it has to be said that he felt obliged to make an explicit statement of his faith in the immortality of the soul, probably as a consequence of the decree against the Averroists issued by the bishop of Padua and the Inquisitor in 1489.38 After the decree of the Fifth Lateran Council, the protests came precisely from the world of the anatomists. Particularly significant was that by Andreas Vesalius, the famous physician, who brought a profound renewal to the theory and practice of anatomy, imposing the superiority of experience over the albeit authoritative opinions of the Ancients. In his great work on the anatomy of the human body, when speaking of the heart, he had to deal with the problem of the seat and the functions of the soul, which according to some was the heart, 37  ‘Ces paroles ne peuvent nullement être entendues du corps: auquel, combien qu’une œuvre admirable de Dieu apparaisse par-dessus tous autres corps créés, toutefois on n’y voit point reluire aucune image de Dieu’: Calvin, Opera Calvini, v, 180, p. 195. The passage is dated 1534. 38  ‘Immortalem anima esse non dubitamus, quae nihil cum corporali actione mistum habere diiudicatur’: Benedetti, Historia corporis humani, ed. by Ferrari, pp. 235–37. The connection with the Padua decree is pointed out by Ferrari, p. 28, n. 73. As for Pliny, Ferrari’s work tells us that Benedetti produced an edition of the Natural History. On the question of the immortality of the soul, Di Napoli, L’immortalità dell’anima nel Rinascimento is still valuable.

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and according to others the brain. And here he declared that he wished to abstain from passing judgement on the soul so as not to create an opportunity for the censors, ready to accuse anyone and everyone of heresy. But he did point out that physicians still had to deal with this kind of problem if they wished to exercise their art without endangering their patients.39 Vesalius’s reaction is important. It shows that if the philosophers could be silenced, it was not so easy with the physicians. A corporation on the rise thus found its voice, a corporation which the theologians and the Church had to reckon with. There could be no question of a conflict between medical and theological knowledge: the link between body and soul was essential in the field of their inquiry, but also, more generally, from the point of view of the symbolic values on which power and society rested. It was inevitable therefore that there should be an attempt to reach an agreement, not from the point of view of knowledge of the body, left to the techniques of anatomy and the physiological exploration of the organs, but on the more important level of knowledge and care of the soul. It was a significant shift which was reflected in the first place in the use of the word for soul: philosophers and theologians had up to then naturally spoken of souls in the plural, distinguishing between intellectual and vital functions, and further distinguishing them from the soul which was destined for eternal survival. Now, however, with the affirmation of the ‘pastoral’ dimension as the supreme law of the Church, the dominant concern of the Church as an ecclesiastical body concentrated on the salvation of the soul as the immortal substance of the individual, and it increasingly spoke therefore of the ‘soul’ in the singular. The physicians followed along the same road. Important differences remained: in the theological tradition and the exhortations of the moralists and the ascetics the soul was considered as an independent entity which inhabited the body but was also its prisoner, ready to leave it to rise up to the true life, while physicians identified it with the living body.

39  After setting out Galen’s opinion that the rational soul resides in the brain, the concupiscible soul in the liver, and the irascible soul in the heart, Vesalius concludes: ‘Porro ne hic forsitan […] nescio in quem haeresis censorem impingam, ab hac de animae speciebus earundemque sedibus disceptatione prorsus abstinebo, quum tot hodie, ac potissimum apud nostrates sanctissimae verissimaeque religionis censores reperias qui si aliquen aut de Platonis, aut Aristotelis, suorumve interpretum, aut Galeni de anima sententiis […] mussitare audiverunt, ilico illum de fide ambigere, ac nescio quid de animarum immortalitate haesitare astruunt, non perpendentes necesse esse medicis (si modo non temere ad artem accedere, neque inopportune aegrotanti membro rimedia applicare voluerint) de iis quae nos gubernant facultatibus considerare […] et […] quae animae substantia essentiave sit’: Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, fol. 594.

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But the tendency which can be felt in the simplification of the language and its resemblance to spoken language was clear: what was being imagined was a soul which combined within it natural life and supernatural life. And it was precisely in the direction of the origins of life that anatomists seemed determined to go in their research. An example of this was Leonardo Da Vinci who, by exploring the anatomy of the human foetus, took the first steps on a different path from that traditionally trodden by theologians and philosophers, who assigned the dominant functions in the creation of a new life to God and the natural father. For Leonardo, the soul which organized the parts of the foetus was that of its mother: it was the soul ‘d’esso corpo componitore, cioè l’anima della madre che, prima, compone nella matrice la figura dell’omo e, al tempo debito, desta l’anima di quel che debbe essere l’abitatore’ (of that composing body, that is the soul of the mother which, first, composes the figure of man in her womb and, at the due time, awakens the soul of he who is going to be the inhabitor).40 The particular attention paid by Leonardo to the figure of the mother led him onto unusual and dangerous ground: in the first edition of his Lives (1550), Giorgio Vasari had good reason to write that Leonardo had matured ‘nell’animo un concetto sì eretico che e’ non s’accostava a qualsivoglia religione stimando per avventura assai più lo esser filosofo che cristiano’ (such a heretical state of mind that he did not adhere to any religion, thinking perhaps that it was much better to be a philosopher than a Christian).41 But even though it was reined in by ecclesiastical decrees, inquiry into the soul did not stop there. If anything it took new paths, while those who had exposed themselves on the subject of human generation — such as the prelate Ferdinando Ponzetti — were quick to protect themselves.42 The profound roots of the question of what constituted a living being kept research alive, and medicine and 40 

On the importance of these notes by Leonardo (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codex Atlanticus, W, 19115r) see the study by Laurenza, Leonardo nella Roma di Leone X, pp. 19–20, which quotes the above passage by Vasari, later prudently deleted from the 1568 edition. 41  Vasari, Le vite, p. 547. 42  As he did in Ponzetti, Libellus de origine animae, in which Laurenza, Leonardo nella Roma di Leone X, p. 17, rightly notes a concern to avoid any accusations of ambiguity on the question of the immortality of the soul, a fear justified by the fact that Ponzetti had dealt with the problem of the nature of the soul in Ponzetti, Tertia pars philosophiae naturalis. Emblematic of the apologetic effort which Italian intellectuals felt called on to make is a text noted by Benedeto Croce and present in his library (Brancaleone, Breve discorso) which goes back to the ancient, but still effective, argument of the testimony of the dead. Brancaleone speaks of a friend from Romagna who, keeping a promise he had made while alive, appeared to the author after death declaring, ‘Ma de sì che [l’anima] l’è immortale’ (Yes, of course the soul is immortal).

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philosophy were not far from popular culture in their way of conceiving of the soul. There was good reason why, in common parlance, ‘soul’ was the internal, concealed part of a thing, a sense which long remained agricultural vocabulary where ‘anima’ (soul) stood for ‘il seme de’ frutti, che è rinchiuso den­­tro un nocciuolo, e dal qual nascon le piante’ (the seed of fruits, which is enclosed within a stone, and from which plants grow).43 It is not surprising therefore that Vesalius, for example, should have shown an interest in a story of infanticide which was said to have been committed in Venice by three witches searching for the bone which was the seat of the soul: a tiny, incorruptible bone in the form of a chick pea, which, once buried in the earth, would function as the seed of the man who would be reborn on the day of Judgement. Vesalius let the theologians discuss this, since they wished to be the only ones to deal with the soul;44 but in the meantime he provided a description of the smallest bones present in the human body and displayed his collection of bones of that type which he had picked up from around the gallows, thanks to his dissections of those condemned to death. It was the body which was to reveal the secrets of the human being and account for its moral inclinations: for this reason another famous anatomist of the sixteenth century, Realdo Colombo, found the body of a woman who had committed infanticide to have abnormal characteristics, such as a swelling of the veins of the uterus, which derived from the woman’s ‘demonic’ nature. 45 Research into the body evidently allowed some degree of freedom in a period in which thoughts and pronouncements on the soul were cut short or remained unexpressed for fear of falling prey to the mechanisms of ecclesiastical control. By this time the dry, cutting considerations of Machiavelli and Pomponazzi had given way to the scruples and torments of Torquato Tasso, which had ended with his own self-accusation before the Inquisitor for having been ‘dubbio ne l’immortalità de l’anima, ne la creazion del mondo, e in alcune altre cose’ (doubtful as to the immortality of the soul, the creation of the world, and some other things).46 Tommaso Campanella had good reason to deem the most 43 

Canevazzi, Vocabolario di agricoltura, i, 251. ‘Dogma autem, quo ex eiusmodi ossiculo hominem, cuius nunc immensa narramus fab­­ ricam, propagandum contendunt, theologis disceptandum relinquemus, qui sibi solis liberam de resurrectione animarumque immortalitate altercationem et sententiam vendicant […]’: Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, fol. 126. I have not been able to find any information on the Venetian trial of the witches for infanticide. 45  Colombo had found the woman’s veins to be ‘insignes […] et nigerrimae’: Columbi, De re anatomica libri xv (1562), p. 318. 46  Torquato Tasso, in a letter to Giacomo Boncompagni dated 17 May, 1580: Tasso, Disposte 44 

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urgent task to be an elaboration of a new apologetic based on natural religion and popular consensus (an argument also taken up by the Jesuits of the time), which would confront head on Machiavelli’s ‘atheism’, and the atheism of all of those who made religion a tool of power and an ‘arte di vivere trovata da gente astuta’ (art of living invented by clever people). And yet even he admitted that the philosophical arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul had barely convinced him, indeed they had led him ‘a credere ch’era l’anima mortale’ (to believe that the soul was mortal). He sought proof of immortality by Christianizing Galen and making the mind ‘innestata nello spirito animale corporeo’ (grafted onto the bodily animal spirit), the equivalent of the immortal soul infused by God which, as it was ‘involta’ (incarnated) in the body, suffered from the body’s distempers.47 But it is enough to look at the way in which the question of the soul and its relative terminology (‘spirito’, ‘forma’ etc.) appear in the works of someone like Giordano Bruno to show what free, transgressive thought could still achieve on the basis of Renaissance speculation and in the context of a Copernican vision of reality.48 If philosophers and theologians sought comfort from physicians and reasoned on the soul by means of the body, it was by thinking of the soul that the physicians examined the body. Another of those who devoted himself to the soul was the Bolognese anatomist, Giulio Cesare Aranzio, an expert in the study of aborted foetuses. In 1581, in the course of the solemn public anatomical demonstration held in Bologna during Carnival, he announced the results of his investigation: he had discovered, so he said, a small cavity in the brain which he held to be the seat of the soul.49 The fact that the question of the soul should turn up again in a treatise on anatomy is not in itself surprising. What is worth considering here is the physician’s attitude to the question of motherper ordine di tempo, ed. by Guasti, ii (1853), 133, p. 83. The question of Tasso’s religion is at the centre of an astute study by Corsaro, Percorsi dell’incredulità. 47  Thanks to research by Germana Ernst, we now have an accurate edition of the original 1607 vernacular redaction of Campanella, L’ateismo trionfato, ed. by Ernst; besides the lengthy introduction, see p. 74 and passim. 48  On the term ‘anima’ and the language of Giordano Bruno, see Ciliberto, Lessico, i,  47–55 and the editor’s observations; see in particular those on the term ‘spirito’, p. xli. In the course of his trial, interrogated on his opinions regarding the ‘creatione delle anime et la generatione degli huomini’, Giordano Bruno alludes to the theory of spontaneous generation as an ‘opinione di Lucretio’: see Firpo, Il processo di Giordano Bruno, ed. by Quaglioni, p. 187. 49  See Aranzio, De humano foetu liber, ed. by van Brecht, p. 47. On Aranzio see the entry by F. Mondella in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, iii (Roma, 1961), 720–21.

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hood. Aranzio had taken the raw material for his research from the assistance given to women in childbirth. In situations where the birth was at risk, the problem presented itself of whether to intervene, and in favour of whom — the mother or the child. It was not an easy choice, said Aranzio: if killing the woman was considered to be cruel and inhumane, saving her meant killing the child which would not be born, and condemning its soul for eternity. And so, with such a delicate decision for the physician, he had personally adopted the rule of quitting the room and leaving the decision to others, a form of cowardice which was hardly embellished by the Horatian adage, honestam fugam capere. But as for the problem, Aranzio did not have any real moral qualms. In the balance were two evils, and a moral principle which he knew well prohibited him from doing evil to do good.50 On the basis of this principle, which rested on the authority of Thomas Aquinas, an ecclesiastical textbook which had been published in this period by a famous Dominican theologian had abso­­ lutely prohibited the killing of the woman in order to baptize her child.51 For Giulio Cesare Aranzio on the other hand, the obligation to save the soul of the child was greater than safeguarding the life of the mother. This exchange of roles between physician and theologian heralded new times, and theoretically discussing whether it was possible to kill the mother to save the soul of the child was the first step along this road. The figure of the physician which emerges from the observations made by Giulio Cesare Aranzio is that of someone who sees the status of his profession changing as a consequence of the gap which was opening up between care for the body and care for the soul. The conflict between body and soul was a very concrete one, rooted as it was in the woman’s womb. The physician could not get out of it with an ‘honest escape’, also because his function was regulated by rules established by the ecclesiastical authorities, which forced him to place the care of the soul before that of bodily afflictions. Obliged to uphold the ‘professione di fede tridentina’ (profession of Tridentine faith) which he had to take before being awarded his academic qualifications, the physician had seen himself obliged by a papal bull (Pius V’s ‘Supra gregem dominicum’) to suspend any treatment of those who had not confessed. It was not a new measure: like 50 

‘Mala nunquam facienda sint, ut bona eveniant’: Aranzio, De humano foetu liber, ed. by van Brecht, pp. 106–07. 51  To kill the woman giving birth ‘nullo lodo licet, non enim sunt facienda mala ut eveniant bona’: Chaves, Summa Sacramentorum Ecclesiae, fol. 12v. It is worth noting that the textbook gave a very clear reply to the question of the eternal destiny of those souls which had not been baptized: ‘Nullo modo est dubitandum quod pueri si non baptizantur, damnantur’: fol. 17v.

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other proposals of the counter-reformation papacy it was based on a decree of the Fourth Lateran Council, which was made stronger and more decisive. But the construction of the model of the Christian physician obliged to deal with the soul first, even to the detriment of the health of the body, had gone far beyond these rules. The fundamental point of conflict between the earthly and the eternal life was precisely that which concerned the condition of the pregnant woman and the possible conflict between her life and the life of the child she was carrying. The physician was the figure in the middle, caught between requests for aid and medicine from women who wanted an abortion on one hand, and the moral and religious disciplinary measures of a society elaborated by the Church on the other. In a text which appeared in 1589, Gian Battista Codronchi, a physician from Imola, in an ideal collaboration with his brother, a priest, set out the duties of the Christian doctor by means of a series of cases of conscience.52 This was a favourite ecclesiastical genre of the Counter Reformation, to allow con­­fessors to practice responding to the perplexed consciences of the faithful, obliged by tridentine rules to confess regularly, once a year at least. According to Codronchi, the physician too had to be trained to recognize and avoid opportunities for sin typical of his profession; and together with the physician it was necessary to educate all those who were involved with him to this regard: nurses, the sick, and even those who were well. The cases examined are an expression of counter-reformation Catholicism, ranging from the obligation to make sure the patient had confessed to the prohibition against any association with Jewish physicians. But the question which was stressed the most was that relating to the problem of motherhood and birth. Could the physician help a pregnant woman to abort for reasons of health or to avoid scandal and crimes of honour? The question was anything but new. A physician could help a woman terminate her pregnancy: this was a fact which had been well-known since Antiquity and had created a moral and professional dilemma for medicine conceived of as a ‘scientia sanandi non nocendi’ (science of healing, not harming). 53 In 52  Condronchi, Casi di coscienza, pp. 395–515, written at the request of the vicar of Imola, monsignor Fabio Tempestivo, and edited by his brother don Tiberio Codronchi, a priest from Imola. 53  See Nardi, Procurato aborto nel mondo greco-romano; Riddle, Contraception and Abortion. But on the physician’s dilemma in the ancient world, now see Kapparis, ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’, pp. 53–89. The attitude of the ecclesiastical authorities is examined in Noonan, The Morality of Abortion, in particular in Noonan, ‘An Almost Absolute Value in History’. The Catholic doctrinal tradition on abortion has been examined by Noonan, Contraception. On the discussion which developed from the 18th century onwards now see Betta, Animare la vita.

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Christian culture, as we have seen, the passage from Exodus (21. 22–25) had offered a scriptural basis for tackling the question of abortion as a subspecies of homicide (Exodus 21. 22–25). Even though the passage in the Vulgate was shorter and omitted the distinction between the formed and the unformed foetus, that distinction had been accepted by the Christian tradition. With a clear awareness of the physicality of life, the presence of the soul was linked to the ‘form’ of the body. Medieval canon law had derived a series of degrees of spiritual punishment to be applied in the case of abortion: a precedent had been set by the monk mentioned above, guilty of having knowingly induced an abortion in the woman he had made pregnant, who was permitted by Innocent III in 1211 to continue to officiate at holy rites without committing an irregularity as long as the foetus had not yet been ‘vivificatus’.54 This was the rule followed by the Apostolic Penitentiary, which from this point onwards began to hear petitions from churchmen guilty of having induced an abortion.55 Jurists followed the same rule too: Albericus de Rosate (c. 1290–1360) re-elaborated the norms of Justinian law, medical knowledge, and even the lives of the saints to provide an exhaustive answer to the question of whether an abortion caused by a man beating a woman was to be considered murder; and he reached the conclusion that it was necessary to make a distinction between before and after the minimum term of forty days from conception.56 Naturally, it remains difficult to say how often abortions were carried out in medical practice, also because childbirth was dominated by the midwife and not the doctor. A female culture transmitted orally and partly contained in the Libri dei segreti provided a resource for the various needs which could arise during pregnancy and for the concomitant risks and problems, which were not only of a medical nature. But there was something new: advances were being made into this territory by a legal and medical culture which was under state control and which carried serious penalties. As noted by Vincenzo Carrari, a jurist from Ravenna who must have been known to Codronchi, abortion was not only a mortal sin but also a crime equal to murder, even considering the

54 

See above, Chapter 5 (‘A Young Priest’), p. 102, note 16. A petition presented by a Polish priest on 10 September, 1461, specified that the abortion of his maidservant Elena, induced by him involuntarily, concerned a ‘fetum iam vivificatum’: Repertorium Poenitentiariae Germanicum, ed. by Schmugge and others, iv, n. 1803, pp. 146–47. It is worth noting that the servant was imprisoned for the abortion caused by her argument with the priest. 56  See Conetti, ‘Quando inizia la vita’. 55 

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traditional periods of time for the development of the foetus.57 Medicine, law, and theology were united in the creation of a system of punishment and control: the post-Tridentine decrees issued in Ravenna, modelled on the views of Carlo Borromeo, had good reason to impose strict rules on the times for baptism and on the duties of the doctors.58 This was the background against which Gian Battista Codronchi addressed the issue of medical intervention to induce therapeutic abortions. The question was: Quando pecchi il medico consigliano, over ordinando a far disperdere una donna gravida, e come non si può licitamente provocar l’aborto. (When a physician sins in advising or helping a pregnant woman to have an abortion, and in which cases it is not possible licitly to induce an abortion.)

As an epigraph to the work, he quoted the passage from Exodus (21. 22–25) in the Septuagint version, and added a passage on a completely different subject, whose meaning, however, was clear: Amos 1. 13–15, where the prophet threatens the most remorseless of divine punishments for the people of Ammon ‘because they have ripped up the women with child’. The two passages put together had the dramatic flavour of a divine punishment weighing on anyone who induced an abortion, even inadvertently. Thus Gian Battista Codronchi formulated — and resolved, right from the title — the problem which was to dominate the Catholic culture of the modern age. And yet, despite the fact that it had already been answered in the negative on a general level, the analytical arguments which mixed theology and medicine left the door open for abortion under direct medical supervision. There were a number of reasons which brought women to the doctor in search of an abortion: honour, fear of scandal and vendetta, or finally, her health. The doctor could carry out the request as long as he was reasonably convinced that the foetus had not yet been ensouled: Il medico, che ordina rimedii a una donna gravida, o che li fa cavar sangue, o li dà conseglio, acciò disperda, ancorché questo lo facci, o per l’honor di quella donna, o per evitar il scandalo o homicidii quali potessero succeder venendo in luce il parto, o scoprendosi la gravidanza, o vero essendo la donna inferma, lo faccia per 57 

‘Ultra peccatum mortale, et irregularitatem quam incurrit, tenetur de homicidio, quia masculus in hembryone quadraginta dierum curricolo, faemina autem octoginta perficitur’: Carrari, De medico et illius erga aegros officio opusculum, p. 199. 58  See della Rovere, Decreta provincialis synodi Ravennatis, fols 33r, 36r (on the obligatory time limits fixed for the baptism of babies and on the doctor’s duty to cure only those who had taken the required Catholic sacraments).

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liber­arla dalle infirmità, o morte, o si persuada di liberarla, se sa di certo che la creatura sia animata, e di anima intellettiva, commette omicidio, et per conseguenza il peccato mortale, et diviene irregolare […] perché è causa della morte corporale e sprituale. Parimenti s’il medico sia in dubbio, se la creatura sia animata o no, procurando l’aborto, pecca mortalmente, perché si espone al pericolo del mortale, cioè dell’homicidio ... Ma se probabilmente crede non essere ancora infusa l’anima nella creatura, potrà licitamente procurar l’aborto per conservar la vita della madre, perché se bene impedisse l’infusione dell’anima in quel feto, o non sarà per questo causa della morte d’alcun huomo e potrà liberar la donna dalla morte, e perciò devesi sapere, come il maschio nell’embrione in spatio di quaranta giorni si fa perfetto, e le femina in ottanta […] e questo sia detto secondo l’opinione de tutti li dottori e sommisti. (The physician who prescribes medicine for a pregnant woman, who makes her have her blood let, or who advises her so that she has an abortion, even if he does this for the sake of this woman’s honour or to avoid the scandal or murder which might arise if the birth of the child or the pregnancy were to be discovered, or even if the woman is infirm and he does it to free her from infirmity or death, or if he is convinced he will free her in this way, if he knows for certain that the creature is ensouled and indeed with an intellective soul, he commits murder, and consequently mortal sin, and he can no longer receive the sacraments, […] because he is the cause of both bodily and spiritual death. In the same way, if the doctor is in doubt as to whether the creature is ensouled or not, by performing an abortion he sins mortally, because he exposes himself to the danger of mortal sin, namely murder […]. But if he believes in all probability that the soul has not yet been infused into the creature, he can licitly perform an abortion to save the life of the mother, because although by doing this he prevents the infusion of the soul into that foetus, he will not cause the death of any man and he will be able to free the woman from death. And hence it is necessary to know that the embryo of the male becomes perfect in the space of forty days and that of the female in eighty […] and this is said according to the opinion of all the doctors and authors of summae.)59

The doctor who ‘frees’ the woman from infirmity and death — or ‘is convinced he is freeing her’ — and helps her to have an abortion to save her honour or to avoid scandal is a fundamental social figure in the history of unwanted pregnancies. Codronchi’s words give us a profile of the doctor at the very moment in which this figure was attempting to deal with the advance of a new and threatening interlocutor: an ecclesiastical and state power which accused him of carrying out a mortal sin and a capital offence. That power had spoken just as Codronchi’s work was going to press. On 29 October, 1588, Sixtus V, sovereign of the Papal State (of which Imola was a part) and head of the Catholic 59 

Condronchi, Casi di coscienza, pp. 464–65.

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Church, promulgated the bull Effraenatam, a testimony to the will to moralize behaviour, which in its harshness expressed all the intransigence of the friar and the inquisitor who was its author. It stipulated the greatest form of excommunication reserved to the pope for a series of practices. In particular it hit out at all those who were in some way responsible for carrying out abortions, either personally or through other people, by means of potions, medicines or poisons, beatings or excessive hardships imposed on the pregnant woman. Foreseeing the objections and distinctions which could block the effectiveness of the prohibition, the bull specified that the excommunication was valid in any case, whether the foetus was considered immature, unformed, unanimated, and so on. 60 Cardinal Santori, in charge of the machinery of the Roman Inquisition, the insti­­tution which could — and perhaps in the inquisitor pope’s intentions had to — extend its jurisdiction to the crime of abortion, attempted in vain to reduce is aggressive intent by suggesting a series of cautious legal distinctions. The pope even wanted in some cases that ‘s’apponesse la pena della morte, e s’esprimesse la voce “ultimi supplicii”’ (capital punishment be applied, and the term ‘execution’ be expressed)61 It was an important novelty. The concentra­­ tion of pastoral care and the definition of orthodox doctrine in the hands of the pope was supplemented by the exercise of criminal justice in its most extreme and arbitrary form, which did not even pass through that congregation of the Inquisition which functioned both as a ministry of truth and propaganda and a criminal and penitentiary court, in charge as it was of the external and the internal forum. In the meantime, the ministry of censorship, the Congregation of the Index, showed no mercy even for the most authoritative philosophical works, and while it blocked the advance of the suspicious doctrine of Plato, father of all utopias, it also re-wrote Aristotle, with commentaries on the fundamental On the Soul. Here, as noted by Alfonso Soto, who was in charge of revising the commentaries by Jacopo Zabarella for print, it was necessary to invert the commentator’s arguments and language and ‘dove esso cava la mortalità ch’io ne cavi l’immortalità’ (where he derives proof of mortality, I have to derive immortality).62 60 

The Bull was published on 16 November 1588. See Bullarium sive nova collectio […] a Pio Quarto, pp. 643–44. 61  ‘Vita del card’, ed. by Cugnoni, p. 174. On Giulio Antonio Santori see Ricci, Il sommo inquisitore. 62  Letter by A. Soto to cardinal Agostino Valzer, dated 25 August, 1601, quoted by Fragnito, ‘“In questo vasto mare de libri’”, p. 26.

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Sixtus V’s violent moralizing offensive seemed excessive to his successors, who changed many of its directives, including that on abortion. Pope Gregory XIV re-established the distinction between before and after the ensoulment of the foetus.63 But in the meantime the papacy had signalled a turning point, and it was by now determined to use excommunication to lay down the law in the field of sexual morality and medical practice: indeed excommunication for ‘pro­­ curantes abortum’ was later to re-emerge and establish itself definitively.64 This return of excommunication in different times and contexts was to be aided by the the usual strategy in which, even though the ecclesiastical authorities aban­ doned Sixtus’s rigour and aggressive will to prevaricate, they did not formally revoke his bull, and above all they did not halt their advance into the field of abortion. Where the threatening face of the Inquisition was untenable, there was always the soft voice of the confessor. Those physicians who had carried out abortions could be benignly absolved, but in the meantime confessors were ordered ‘che voglino usare ogni diligentia, et mettere ogni loro studio per l’estirpatione di così grave peccato’ (to work with all diligence, and make every effort to uproot such a serious sin).65 The presence of the Church’s power in this field, however, was by this time limited to a marginal zone, now that the state had taken control over human gen­­eration and the crime of infanticide. This can be documented by the way in which confessors were trained to deal with abortions: in eighteenth-century Bologna there were training exercises based on cases of conscience which repeatedly examined the question. What to do in the hypothetical case of Berta, who unwittingly drinks an abortive potion given to her by her lover, and then, once she had realized, neglects to go to a doctor to prevent the abortion of an ensouled foetus which then occurs? And what to say about Tizio who makes a widow drink a potion of the same kind, inducing not the abortion of an unensouled foetus created by their recent relationship, but the ensouled four-month foetus which was the fruit of a previous relationship? In both cases the reply was simple absolution by the confessor. Theologians were well aware of Sixtus’s 63 

The constitution Apostolicae Sedis, 1591: see Sardi, L’aborto ieri e oggi, pp. 180 ff, which is also referred to by Betta, Animare la vita, who also quotes the less well-documented Noonan, ‘An Almost Absolute Value in History’. 64  Excommunication without distinction for all those ‘procurantes abortum effectu sequuto’ was taken up again by Pius IX on 12 October, 1869, in the constitution Apostolicae Sedis, and thus it remained in the canon law code of 1917, canon 2350: see Betta, Animare la vita. 65  Instructions by the Roman Inquisition, dated 18 June, 1591, to the Archbishop of Trani, quoted by Lavenia, ‘“D’animal fante”’, p. 498–99, n. 42.

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bull in the form moderated by Gregory XIV, which was quoted in resolving the cases; but it was not so much the distinction between ensouled and unensouled which counted for confessors as the internal dimension of the person’s intention, applied with the subtle spirit of the casuist. Since there was no deliberate intention to abort an ensouled foetus, the conditions did not exist for refering the above cases to the authority of the bishop or the pope.66 It is a sign of the extent to which the ecclesiastical authority’s power of moral governance had receded before the invasive presence of the state in the question of abortion and infanticide; the fact that in Bologna the two powers coincided in figure of the prelates and pope is only one of the irrational turns of history, and Italian history in particular. In Catholic Italy, the pronouncements of the ecclesiastical authorities influenced scientific culture. Sixtus V’s Bull, for example, had the effect of intimidating physicians. When treating the subject of human generation in one of his treatises, Girolamo Mercuriale from Forlì, a famous teacher of medicine at the University of Pisa at the time, demonstrated his deference to orthodoxy by quoting the miraculous conception of the Virgin with due respect, and expressing all his scorn for those heretics who cast doubt on it. As for the fundamental problem, namely whether the foetus possessed a rational soul, and consequently whether abortion was to be considered murder, Mercuriale chose to limit himself to general remarks, quoting arguments for both theories and describing the slow process of development which turned that miniscule humour in the uterus into a living being capable of raising itself up to contemplate heaven. But it was still necessary to choose, and so, by putting together Aristotle and Tertullian, he ended up by cautiously hypothesizing that if there was only one soul and it was to be identified with the very life of the organism, it could be held to be infused as from the point when the organs were formed.67 It is an example of 66 

Casus conscientiae Bononiensis diocesis, i, ‘ab anno 1732 ad annum 1753’, pp. 62–63, 142–43. 67  ‘Ex una parte non videtur esse anima rationalis in utero, quia nullus ibi eius usus esse potest […] Ex altera parte cum motrix facultas sit veluti germen animae rationalis, videtur consentaneum cum hac quoque reperiri facultatem rationalem. Ad haec ut dicebat Tertullianus, procurare ne foetus nascatur non solum habetur pro homicidio, verum etiam pro homicidii properatione. Accedit quod cum anima sit una et quemadmodum scribit Aristoteles sit actus corporis physici organici, credendum est ipsam ingredi corpus statum ac genita sunt organa’: Mercuriale da Forlì, De Hominis generatione, ch. xxvi, p. 33: ‘Utrum anima rationalis acquiratur ab infante in utero, an extra’. Mercuriale da Forlì, De Hominis generatione, ch. xxvi, p. 21; the allusion is to Butzer and other ‘haeretici’ who denied that the Madonna conceived as a virgin. The same prudence was shown by the Portuguese Rodrigo de Castro who, when dealing

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the services that Aristotelianism was able to render to post-Tridentine orthodoxy: the soul as vital breath supplanted the rational soul (absent from life in the womb according to Mercuriale), and became the Christian soul. More remarkable is the case of Codronchi. Author of one of the first attempts to express the new need for ecclesiastical control over medical practice, he involuntarily upheld the reasons for traditional practice just as the pope declared this practice to be no longer valid. And immediately afterwards, while the successor to the papal throne softened the tones of the attack, Codronchi re-elaborated his Casi di conscientia in a larger and more ambitious format, in which he set himself the task of providing a new medical deontology in conformity with Sixtus’s Bull. In his De christiana ac tuta medendi ratione, he quoted the bull Effraenatam and clearly stated that abortion was forbidden in any case and that the embryo, since it possessed sensitive and vegetative life (the necessary premises for the intellective soul), was subject to this prohibition.68 Attention to medical practice remained increasingly alert in the ecclesiastical world as the importance of doctors as a category grew; and doctors in the meantime, almost in parallel, increasingly tended to enter the field of theology. Codronchi’s behaviour is exemplary here, offering priests on one hand a vernacular work analysing the moral casuistry of the medical profession, and on the other teaching doctors the Christian way of curing the sick in a treatise in Latin. It is clear however from the passage from his treatise quoted above that medical culture, even that of physicians more deferential to the ecclesiastical authorities and Tridentine discipline, still maintained a firm distinction between the ensouled and the unensouled foetus which allowed recourse to the practice of abortion. How many abortions, and of what kind, it is impossible to establish, but there is doubt they took place. This is demonstrated by clues that crop up here and there in the records of the ecclesiastical structure, which received requests for absolution for a crime which was a mortal sin and a capital offence.69 On the other hand, the theoretical case illustrated by Codronchi in his early works is testimony to the great interest in the shadowy world of women who asked doctors for potions to induce abortions. The doctor who makes a preg­ nant woman undergo bloodletting to terminate pregnancy is a figure who, as with the question ‘quo tempore rationalis anima corpori infundatur’ in de Castro, De universa muliebrium morborum medicina, pp. 164–67, concluded: ‘Theologis discutienda relinquamus’. 68  Condronchi, De christiana ac tuta medendi ratione, pp. 69–71. 69  Documents relating to confessions of induced abortions have been recently pointed out from the records of the Congregation of bishops and the regular clergy, by Lavenia, ‘“D’animal fante”’.

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we have seen, appears in the documents of the trial of Lucia Cremonini: in the statement dated 23 December, 1709, Lucia’s mother stated she had taken her daughter to a doctor ‘to be bled’. Thus, more than a century after Sixtus V’s prohibition, doctors of the Papal State continued to carry out a practice which notoriously induced abortion to help women in need. Laws were evidently not enough to change reality. It is also likely that this practice was one of the few which were reserved for the doctor in a world in which the secrets of pregnancy were part of a science which was almost exclusively female. But the fact remained in the meantime that in the space of a few years, medical intervention to terminate unwanted pregnancies had shifted from the level of ordinary, sustainable practice to that of things that are done but not talked about. This was the outcome of a campaign by the Church against abortion and infanticide, a relentless and limitless campaign, whose activists were above all confessors, way beyond the confines of Europe. The handbooks for confessors used in the American missions suggested very precise questions to be put to the indigenous women: whether they had drunk infusions to remain sterile or to induce an abortion, whether they had pressed down on their belly or lifted heavy things. And the indigenous midwives were suspected of possessing secrets to induce abortion.70 While abortion descended into the realms of shadow and silence, other changes were taking place over the course of the century, and there was a substantial shift in the way in which ‘creatures’ were considered. Medical and theological culture had inherited the ancient distinction between the embryonic start to the existence of the foetus and the phase of relative maturity of the new life. As we have seen, in this, natural science of Aris­ to­­telian origin incorporated by Aquinas into his theological system responded to ordinary experience by providing an explanation for the human being’s transition from formless embryo to complete individual. Aquinas’s theological system, which was careful to respect the information known about the initial evolution of the human being, had distinguished between the different souls called on to govern this development. But in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the problem of the hidden development of the human being acquired a new and extraordinary relevance. Two fundamental steps in this direction were, as we have seen, the dogmatic definition of the immortality of the individual soul and the struggle against the Protestant Reformation to guarantee and impose infant baptism. Thus, standing to guarantee the existence of the individual soul and its survival after the death of the body, the Catholic 70 

According to Azoulai, Les Péchés du nouveau monde, pp. 115–16, the ecclesiastical campaign did not abolish the practice of abortion and infanticide, which are still widespread today.

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Church defended its own reason to exist by claiming the exclusive power to open the door to eternal life for these souls. All this contributed to create a particular curiosity as to the exact moment in which the soul entered the human body. Doctors and philosophers discussed the question in a dialogue whose third, and feared, interlocutor was the Church, the Roman congregations first and foremost and then the university theologians. When Cesare Cremonini tried to comment on Aristotle’s opinion from his chair in Philosophy at the University of Padua, he immediately triggered an accusation from the Roman Inquisition for teaching the mortality of the soul.71 His younger but already brilliant colleague at the time, Fortunio Liceti, avoided all danger by elaborating a learned treatise on the origin of the human soul which used the simplest of systems for harmonizing ancient wisdom and modern theology, crowning a composite edifice which had room for everyone with Christian doctrine. There were some souls which he defined as ‘irra­­tional’, such as the vegetative (vegetalis) and the ‘sensitive’ (sensualis). These were transmitted by the parents, the father above all, at the moment of inter­­course, and they had the function of organizing the parts of the body as it formed. Forty days after conception, the rational soul presented itself, created from nothing by Omnipotent God, which took possession of the formed body in a dominant position, subordinating all the other souls to it. Liceti’s curiosity roamed at length around the question of whether the relationship between the body and soul was ‘divino-morale’ or ‘divino-politica’, as he defined it, but he never strayed from the firm anchor of ecclesiastical authority. On this basis, once the moment of origin had been established, the question arose, for example, of how it was possible for the rational soul, concentrated in moments of ecstasy, to abandon control over the vegetative, sensitive, and motor soul, leaving the body without nourishment, a question of great relevance given the experiences of female sanctity in this period. Another question was whether, once it had left the body, the soul was able to reincarnate. But the individual and immortal soul, created by God from nothing as soon as the organism was forty days old, remained at the centre of Liceti’s construction.72 It is a fact that the right claimed by Vesalius for doctors to deal with the soul was put into practice by some. The question was discussed to such an extent 71 

See Kennedy, ‘Cesare Cremonini and the Immortality of the Human Soul’; and see the entry by C. B. Schmitt in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, xxx (Roma, 1984), 618–22. 72  See Liceti, De ortu animae humanae, p. 338, for the creation of the rational soul ‘ex nihilo’ on the fortieth day after conception, underlined in Liceti, De his qui diu vivunt, ii. iv, p. 132. Liceti dwelt on the question of ecstasy in Liceti, De rationalis animae, p. 7.

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that a literature of parody was created, giving rise to veritable novels of a medical and theological nature. If in the previous century the satire of the exile Francesco Negri had concentrated on creating novels on the theological controversy of free will, in seventeenth-century Italy, while the Thirty Years’ war was raging for the domination of macroscopic Europe, Francesco Pona took on the task of describing the battle and the victory of the mind over the heart for absolute control over the individual microcosm (with the farcical rebellion of the ‘Podice’, or the anus).73 But the physicians’ lively theological curiosity expressed itself above all in research into the ensoulment of the human foetus. 74 Doubt was cast on the tra­­ditional view of the life of the foetus as organized into distinct periods, and in its place came a strong desire to uncover the history of human life in its continuous development and its earliest origins, giving rise to anatomical exploration of the reproductive organs. But the curiosity of anatomists such as Aranzio regarding the soul also reveals a new type of religious and scientific interest. There had been a tendency for some time to merge the soul understood according to Aristotle as the form of the living being with the soul as a divine and immortal entity which lodged temporarily in the body. And now it was becoming urgent to ask how and when that entity descended for the first time to inhabit the body of each individual. The traditional opinion had connected the entry of the soul to the presence of a completely formed human organism, and this meant calculating an interval of time from the moment of conception. Medical science and common experience were united in recognizing that the new being matured and was perfected by progressively taking on a complete human form; but the moment at which that form assumed independent life remained the object of discussion. The experience of pregnant women, which as we have seen was voiced by Hildegard of Bingen, identified it as the moment in which, by moving, the child made its presence felt inside the mother’s body. It was that quickening which signalled that the conceived organism possessed life. The concrete experience of women met the needs of an imagination which was still not allowed to look beyond the opaque outward form of the woman’s body.75 But even the men of the Church, 73 

See Pona, La maschera iatro-politica. See Chollet, ‘Animation’. There are useful points in Noonan, Contraception. For a history of the theological side of the question, reconstructed from a Thomist point of view, see Lanza, La questione del momento. 75  Duden, Disembodying Women, trans. by Hoinacki stresses the importance of the ‘lived experience of the body’ as opposed to the theological abstraction of those who invite you ‘to see 74 

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who popularized the most authoritative medical and theological doctrines, had accepted and spread the theory of a gap between conception and ensoulment. We can take as an example the sermons preached in the fourteenth century by the Archbishop of Pisa, Federico Visconti, during his pastoral visits. For Visconti, the soul was only infused by God once the body was formed, which took place within the chronological limits of forty days from conception for a boy and eighty for a girl. It was fundamental for the Archbishop that the parts of the body be complete, and he believed that the length of the period of female impurity generally connected to childbirth concerned in reality the entire period between conception and birth because God hates all unformed things (quia informia displicent Deo).76 And this is only a small example of the way in which the relationship between body and soul appeared to a learned man of the Church in a period dominated by the great theological systematization of Scholasticism. Many traces of this systematization still remained in the culture of the Early Modern Age. The notion of the superiority and the decisive importance of male seed persisted. In Giles of Rome’s work on the formation of the human body in the uterus, which continued to enjoy considerable fortune, the male seed was attributed with a ‘virtus generativa’ with the formation of the heart of the embryo, but also with a ‘spiritus informativus’, which derived directly from the paternal soul and was capable of transmitting the disposition to receive the soul to female matter.77 In the anatomical tradition, the treatise by Mondino de’ Liuzzi of Bologna had established analogous concepts, all of which derived from the framework of female passivity and the vivifying and creative action of male sperm. But what persisted above all was the idea that to become a human being, conception was not enough: a long period of development was required. how the person in the photograph zygote is “a human being”’. 76  ‘Est dicendum quod masculus in quadraginta diebus formatur et femina in octoginta, ut dicunt physici […] Et tunc creatur a Deo anima de novo et infunditur illi corpori formato’: Visconti, F., Les sermons et la visite pastorale de Federico Visconti, ed. by Beriou and Le Masne de Chermont, pp. 510–11. 77  This work by Giles of Rome, De formatione corporis humani in utero, written between 1285 and 1290, was re-printed on numerous occasions in the sixteenth and seventeenth century; see Aegidius Romanus, De formatione humani corporis in utero, ed. by Vico. See also the entry by F. Del Punta, S. Donati, and C. Luna in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, xlii (Roma, 1993), 319–41. There is a specific study by Martorelli Vico, ‘Il “De formatione corporis humani in utero”’. For the famous Florentine physician, Dino del Garbo, another medieval author who was long consulted on the subject, it was the soul of the father which acted on the formation of the embryo through his sperm: see Dinus de Florentia, Super librum Ypocratis de natura fetus.

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‘To give the soul’ through baptism, as we have seen, was that final act which was carried out only when the being had been born and was fully human. The great Portuguese physician, Amato Rodriguez, known as Amato Lusitano, who exercised and taught his profession in Ferrara and then Ragusa, quoted Hippocrates to distinguish different periods in the development from the seed to the foetus and the infant, establishing that the formation of the limbs was completed forty-five days after conception for boys and that movement began at ninety days. Amato Lusitano kept this process distinct from that of the infusion of the soul, and he noted that, in general, theologians had established ensoulment at forty-five days, while William of Ockham dated the introduction of a rational soul as distinct from the sensitive and vegetative soul at ninety days. But he let it be clearly understood that he did not retain the question to lie within his own competence.78 A good deal of time was still to pass until it became possible to view the female ovum with a microscope and demonstrate the woman’s contribution to the formation of the new individual.79 And centuries were to pass before a magazine cover could compete successfully with Leonardo’s anatomical drawings in placing before its readers’ eyes a photograph of a foetus floating inside a woman’s body, ‘like an astronaut in his capsule’.80 But it was not by recourse to sensory perceptions or the achievements of medical science that the Catholic world formed a new and decisive idea of ensoulment. The turning point was the result of a theological imagination capable of re-elaborating popular beliefs and scientific knowledge to resolve the problems opened up by controversies within Christianity on the question of baptism and salvation.81

78 

‘Sed haec minime huic conveniunt negotio’: Amato Lusitano, Curationum medicinalium tomus secundus (1566), pp. 300–01. The opinion is number ninety-six of the sixth centuria and was written for Selim the son of Soliman, the Turkish Sultan. I would like to thank Dr Marco Cavarzere for checking the quotation in a copy of the work in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (Magl, 4.4.43). Amato Lusitano’s prudence earned him a reprint in Venice by Francesco Storti in 1653, which was not censored, Amato Lusitano, Curationum medicinalium tomus secundus (1653), pp. 268–70 79  The path leading to the discovery of the ovum by Karl Ernst von Baer in 1827 has been reconstructed by Cline Horowitz, ‘The “Science” of Embryology’. 80  Duden, Disembodying Women, trans. by Hoinacki, p. 21, identifies the scientific possibility of ‘seeing’ the embryo as the cause of the 1987 ‘Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origins’ issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. 81  The importance of this link is vigorously maintained from the point of view of science in the masterly work by Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination.

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This is the framework within which we can place the proposal by Thomas Fyens (1567–1631), professor of medicine and philosophy at the Catholic bastion of Leuven, which was put forward at the beginning of the seventeenth century in a work destined to modify the traditional approach and to establish a new theological orientation in the Catholic area. Fyens’s interest in the question of pregnancy and childbirth emerges in one of his early treatises on the force of the imagination, which appeared in 1608. It tackles the problem of how the ‘phantasia’ of a pregnant woman might modify the body of her child. Among the fears experienced by pregnant women was that of the risks incurred by a sudden fright or terrifying vision on the mental health and physical appearance of the child: the anxiety and changes in mood which accompanied pregnancy were fuelled by stories of monsters generated as a result of inauspicious meetings, excessive or irregular sexual practices, or visions of monstrous beings.82 This was a tradition theme of popular culture which had advanced into learned circles, and it was now the learned who contributed to increasing the responsibility of women as child factories. To understand the transfer mechanism from the gaze to the blood and then to the body of the infant, and how it functioned, was one of the recurrent themes in works on the force of the imagination and, more generally, on the gaze. Feyens brought his attention to this subject as a theologian of clear and simple convictions: for him, what was concealed behind the imagination was simply the force of the soul. It was the soul of the saints that cured the sick and not their relics or the imagination of the faithful, as the ‘impious’ Pomponazzi maintained.83 The soul was so independent of the body that it was able to operate on it. Proof of this could be found in the link between the soul of the mother and the body of her child. It was widely believed that the imagination of a pregnant woman could modify the body of her child as it was forming: popular culture believed that the emotions and desires of the mother could create certain physical signs found on the body of the baby, and for this reason it was thought that during pregnancy she had to avoid looking at objects or people whose ugliness or strangeness might create an impression and leave a lasting sign upon the child. Many tried to derive some natural law from the folklore traditions regarding the mother’s cravings. In the course of the century, for example, Nicolas de Malebranche maintained that in general it was the force 82 

See Roodenburg, ‘The Maternal Imagination’. Fyens, De viribus imaginationis tractatus, p. 375. The treatise had been first published in Leuven in 1608 with a dedication to the Archbishop of Cologne. It was reprinted in Amsterdam in 1658, by Johannes Janssonius. 83 

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of the ‘desires of the soul’ which, thanks to certain ‘animal spirits’, were able to modify limbs which were still unformed. 84 But Fyens concentrated his attention precisely on women and their pregnancies, and so he took the opinions of women and the ignorant seriously: ‘vox populi vox Dei’. It was enough to see a black man to give birth to a child of the same colour. And on the basis of a series of examples taken from experience and from his reading, he maintained that the force of the soul could impress signs onto the body; but only under certain conditions: it could not do this on its own body or on bodies which were external to it. It only worked with alien bodies inside one’s own body, and hence was only valid for the relationship between a pregnant woman and her child. This provided Frayens with an opportunity for stressing the great responsibility that pregnant women had for the consequences that a glance or a mental image might have on the life of their unborn child. From his academic observatory in Leuven, Fyens then took part in the discussion of the comet which had appeared in the skies between 1618 and 1619: on the basis of Aristotle and the Bible he repeated the traditional convictions on the nature of the heavens and the Ptolemaic universe, without allowing himself to be unduly influenced by the discoveries that were being made by Galileo’s telescope.85 But Galileo’s name does not appear here by chance. In a short work added to his treatise on the comet, Fyens took up a stance against the Copernican theory: appealing to the experience of the senses as well as the authority of Ptolemy and the Bible (above all the famous passage from Joshua 10. 12–14) he defended the fundamental concepts of astronomical orthodoxy.86 This was the same man who published a treatise in 1620 on the question of the ensoulment of the foetus. The book announced its new and radical theory right from the title: that the infusion of the rational soul in the unborn child took place by and not after the third day from conception.87 It was a theory which ran counter to the common opinion of doctors and philosophers, warned Fyens, and for this reason he asked for protection in his dedication to 84 

Malebranche, Traité de la nature et de la grâce, ed. by Dreyfus, pp. 73–74 (the first edition appeared in Amsterdam in 1680). The recent work by Curi, La forza dello sguardo, does not include any useful information on the question. 85  That there may be more than seven planets has been demonstrated in our century, wrote Fyens, by ‘Galilaeus Galilaeius, qui beneficio dioptrae Batavicae, adhuc tres parvos, ac novos Planetas adinvenit’: Fyens, De cometa anni 1618 dissertationes, p. 40. 86  Fyens, ‘Disputatio an coelum moveatur’, pp. 141–53. 87  Fyens, De formatrice.

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the archiater, Francesco Paz, protesting that science could only advance if it placed the rational search for the truth before respect for authority.88 An answer had to be given to the question of what the thing was that Fyens called the ‘virtus conformatrix’: in other words, the active principle which allowed the foetus to grow until its limbs were complete and it was capable of independent life. The opinions which had circulated since Antiquity (by writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Averroes, Avicenna, Trismegistus, and others) involved God himself, the celestial intelligences, the soul of the world, the influence of the stars, the father’s seed, the mother’s womb, and so on. By using deductive logic and considerations based on experience, Fyens confuted all the pre-existing hypotheses. He excluded the idea that the ‘virtus conformatrix’ of the foetus could reside in the female womb by using arguments taken from the ancient repertory of blind male pride: woman was like the earth; alone she could not produce anything; and how, for that matter, could the likeness between father and son be explained? But the opposite explanation which left everything to the male seed also carried its own difficulties: male pride could not be extended without limit. If the ‘virtus conformatrix’ was a property of the male seed, observed Fyens, it would follow that the soul would already be present in each seed; each seed, therefore, would already be a true human being, and all male ejaculation would involve human massacre.89 Fyens took the Aristotelian notion of the soul as form to the letter, transferring it to the field of Christian theology and transcendence. The next step in his argument went as follows: we know, he observed, that the soul is given by God; man only has to offer the raw material; male seed united with female seed forms the embryo. All of this might sound rather dispiriting to male pride, compared to the rich tradition which exalted man’s power, his natural heat, and even — according to some — his ability to transmit the soul. But Fyens made an act of homage to male privilege: he recognized male seed’s greater nobility and its merit in bringing with it that vital heat which distinguished it from the female contribution, which was utterly passive. The theory of the heat proper to male seed had been put forward by the famous sixteenth-century French physician, Jean Fernel, who had spoken of a divine, heavenly heat. But though he recognized this male privilege and excused himself for having given the woman’s contribution to the formation and growth of the new creature a superior role to that of the man, Fyens was moving towards a different goal from that of Fernel. The French physician had shared the traditional idea which kept the effects of 88  89 

The dedication is dated Leuven, 15 January, 1620. Fyens, De formatrice, p. 62.

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male seed separate in time from the soul: for him, the virtue of male heat animated the initial formation of the embryo, while the soul infused by God only intervened later, as from the thirtieth day after conception.90 Very different was the opinion defended by Fyens, in which the single, exclu­­ sive agent of the conformation of the foetus was the soul: once conception had taken place, the ‘virtus conformatrix’ which entered into action could only derive from the soul. It remained to be defined what kind of soul it was that promoted the conformation of the foetus: was it perhaps the vegetative soul? Many physicians maintained this, among whom the authoritative Paduan physician Fortunio Liceti, in a treatise which had just been published.91 Thomas Aquinas had maintained it too, and along with him the most important theologians. But for Fyens, this was not so. This first soul which possessed the power to give the foetus a human form was neither the vegetative nor the sensitive soul, which according to St Thomas came before the rational soul. In this the ‘Doctor Angelicus’ erred. Appealing to the principle whereby entities must not be multiplied unnecessarily, Fyens included all the functions of the various souls into the single immortal Christian soul. His concept presupposed a radical difference between plants, animals, and man, as a consequence of the incom­­mensurable superiority of the human race over all others. Fyens’s man had nothing in common with inferior forms of life. This was a conscious break with the ancient paradigm and it was set out by Fyens at length: the rational soul which distinguishes men from brutes and plants and which is destined for eternal life is the only one which possesses the ‘virtus’ adequate to conform the foetus, and it must not be preceded either by the vegetative soul, which is proper only to plants, or by the sensitive soul, which belongs to animals.92 We thus arrive at the conclusion which establishes the fundamental point that the rational soul is infused by God by the third day from conception, when the membranes appear and there is proof that the conforming virtue is active. As soon as the seed mixes and ferments thanks to the warmth of the uterus the conditions exist for the soul to be introduced. This was a revolutionary conclusion respect to the idea of human nature elaborated by the Aristotelian tradition and accepted by medieval Christendom: the soul did not need a human form, indeed it pre-existed it and created it. 90 

Fernet, Universa medicina, ii, 52. See Fortunius, De animarum, p. 55. Accordino to Liceti, who followed the prevalent opinion of the time, the vegetative and sensitive souls derived from the parents, and the rational soul was added by God. 92  Fyens, De formatrice, pp. 161–99. 91 

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That initial formation, therefore — the embryo, the foetus — was a human being. If the word ‘homo’ is used for the complete and perfect human being it is only by pure convention: the foetus is ‘essentialiter homo’.93 But is it possible for the soul, the principle of the formal organization of the limbs, to inhabit the unformed human embryo as soon as it is constituted? This would give us a man without arms or legs, a stomach, a liver, or a heart, with no motion and no sensibility.94 There is no difficulty here, replied the author: it is true that the term ‘homo’ indicates the adult being which has reached its perfect configuration, while the recently ensouled seed is called an embryo or a foetus, and so on. But here we are dealing with different names for what is substantially the same thing, just as we use the terms vapour, snow, water, and ice.95 Having said this, and having affirmed the full humanity of the conceived seed, the presence of the soul becomes the only condition for the existence of the human being, which is totally independent of the existence of a body. Thus the soul ceases to be the Aristotelian ‘form’ of the living being and becomes itself the human individual: an individual without form, ready to govern the construction of the body but also, at the right moment, capable of taking the path to eternal life, that of Paradise, if baptized. We have said that Fyens’s conclusion was revolutionary. It would be better to say that it marks a turning point that was already in the offing. It was not in this case a new discovery, since Fyens’s solid attachment to tradition and authority made him totally impermeable to any scientific novelty which others derived in this period from experimentation or mathematical abstraction. Placed in the foremost citadel of Catholic orthodoxy, on the border with the Protestant world and Holland, where scientific investigation and theological discussion advanced hand in hand and the solitary genius Spinoza elaborated profoundly innovative doctrines, Fyens decisively took the final step in a process that had long been underway: the idea of the human soul as totally independent from the body not only after death but even at the moment of birth. This required a capacity for abstraction which in some respects brought Fyens close to Descartes; or perhaps it would be more precise to say that both Fyens and 93 

Fyens, De formatrice, p. 157. Fyens replied to his adversaries’ objections (‘[…] Daretur homo fluidus et liquidus; homo, in quo neque esset cor, neque cerebrum, neque hepar, neque stomachus, neque manus, neque pedes, neque ossa, neque caro […] hoc videtur ridiculum et aenigmaticum’: Fyens, De formatrice, p. 141) as follows: ‘Dari autem talem hominem qui adhuc mollis sit et fluidus, nec brachia, nec crura, nec stomachum, nec hepar habeat […] nihil est absurdi […]’: Fyens, De formatrice, p. 157. 95  Fyens, De formatrice, p. 157. 94 

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Descartes originated from a Christian culture which had long abandoned that sense of the irremovable physicality of the human being which has led scholars to speak of a medieval materialism. What had favoured that process is a question which concerns the entire development of Western realism. One fact is indisputable: just as what has been defined as the ‘the vitalistic-dynamic triumph of the physical body’96 brought a sense of human life to maturity which was no longer characterized by affliction and the expectation of another, truer life, the investigation into the relationship between mental functions and the material reality of the body took a different turn. The authoritative theological systematization of the question of the soul elaborated in this period by the Jesuit Francisco Suarez, paid special attention to the way in which angels, purely spiritual beings, could cause the material actions of bodies, which were reduced to simple machines.97 The flourishing of the science of angels and spirits was the result of a division between spirit and matter which had reached the point of divorce. It must be said, however, that Fyens’s proposal could be read in another way, as a decisive and liberating step on the road to the acceptance of the continuity of life, without establishing degrees or barriers between the embryo and the life that animated it. Concentrating attention on the initial lump of living matter constituting the human being cleared the field of ancient distinctions and chronological divisions between what was formed and not formed, between male and female, and it did not necessitate any investigation into the moment at which a predictable and obedient God had to carry out his job of providing a soul. Fyens’s theory had a notable capacity for sticking to the facts of experience, mixed with a robust argumentative logic, which guaranteed him the consensus of the most orthodox theologians as well as that of thinkers attracted by ancient materialism and the new perspectives opened up for the natural sciences by Galileo’s discoveries. His fundamental theory of a near coincidence between ensoulment and conception could be read as an affirmation of a priority of the soul with respect to the organization of the body which was also chronological, or as the pure and simple identification of the individual soul with the living organism. It was this second aspect which attracted the interest of Pierre Gassendi. In a long letter dated 6 June, 1629, the French philosopher enthusiastically congratulated Feyens for having tackled with courage and without bending to any 96 

Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. by Trask, p. 276. The connection between Suarez’s angelology and Descartes’s theory of the soul has been pointed out by Specht, Commercium mentis et corporis, ch. 1, pp. 7–28. 97 

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philosophical authority the question which he believed to be the greatest and the most attractive of all: the search for human origins. Expressing his opinion on Fyens’s theory, Gassendi declared his total agreement as to the absurdity of the traditional theory which tried to establish that ensoulment took place at a fixed, mechanically preordained date in the development of the embryo: how could anyone imagine that the thirtieth day suddenly brought that perfection of the organism which made it capable of housing the soul, if it was clear that certain individuals never reached the point of possessing one during the entirety of their lives? Against this type of development by stages Gassendi put forward an image of life as an uninterrupted process, a continual elaboration and maturing. To wait for the completion of the body for the soul to make its entrance made no sense to him: as he pointed out, the process of the evolution of the organism was completed over years, not months. For Gassendi, at the origin lay the seminal mass made up of the parents’ seed united and amalgamated in the mother’s womb. This was the reality of the living organism which possessed a soul. The three days fixed by Fyens seemed to him like a measure of prudence, but he did not find anything wrong with a different hypothesis which brought ensoulment forward to the first instant of conception (‘ad primum usque momentum’). In a confidential and private epistolary tone, Gassendi went so far as to set out his own ideas, indicated prudently as dreams or nebulous imaginings: leaving aside the question of the immortal soul infused by God, to which he gave vague formal agreement, he compared human ensoulment with that of other natural species. Here is an example of his way of arguing: just as a tree gives its fruit not only the nourishment necessary for it to survive but also a part of its own vegetative soul in order to make it perfect, so we must think that the mother’s soul, transmitted to the embryo through the placenta and the blood ves— sels of the uterus, gives a soul to her child, until the child has grown enough to possess the impulse to claim its own soul (animulam suam sibi paulatim vindicare) and detach itself from its mother’s womb. For Gassendi, that ‘animula’ of the foetus derived from those of its parents, and he imagined the condition of the foetus to be like that of a child in a family, who, before it emancipates itself, is only part of its father’s family. For that matter, he observed, even in nature animals clearly show a resemblance linking offspring to their parents. These were dreams, repeated Gassendi, because Christian faith, he recalled, teaches us that the rational soul is individual and immaterial, produced from nothing by God. This had to be respected, therefore. But he made a final attempt to reconcile the teachings of faith with that type of representation of the soul that ancient physics had proposed by distinguishing between a sensitive or veg-

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etative soul, diffused throughout all the parts of the body, and a rational soul or mind, intellect, or reason, which is like the flower or the soul of the soul (‘quasi florem, seu animae quasi animam’), and which for some resides in the heart and for others in the brain. Adapting this representation of antiquity to the doctrine of faith naturally meant considering the soul not as the extreme and most refined form of matter, the soul of the soul, that is, but an external reality created by God and infused into the body.98 We can understand how Fyens’s intellectual freedom from tradition aroused Gassendi’s admiration, and how Gassendi saw the theory of the contemporary infusion of the soul and the formation of the human embryo as a possible theory of the material origin of the human soul, something that was very dear to him. But when writing his own theory, he was somewhat prudent in his acknowledgement of Fyens.99 But times required prudence and self-censorship, and Gassendi was well aware of this. His letter of solidarity to Galileo after the condemnation by the Inquisition is a model of communication between the lines. And in any case, unlike Gassendi’s opinions, those of Fyens also followed the prevailing logic in the way they considered women as the worthless ground predisposed for the life of the seeds scattered by man and ensouled by God. The theological foundations for the repression of infanticide were strengthened by his theory. In the light of his deductions, abortion qualified as murder, whatever the age of the foetus. Fyens dwelt on this point towards the end of his work, attempting to interpret the tortuous passage from Exodus 21. Although he quoted the two versions of the text, he refused to accept the Septuagint, which destroyed his theory with its distinction between the formed and the unformed foetus. He too found the Holy Book useful to the extent to which it was possible to say things ‘through it’ which could otherwise not be said ‘on one’s own account’, but he justified himself by appealing to the duty of obeying the ecclesiastical authorities: since Catholics considered the Vulgate as authoritative, he two would stick to that version of the passage. The Bible also contained other passages which damaged the idea of a human­­ity concentrated in the single spiritual principle of the soul. After all, the 98 

Gassendi, Opera omnia, iv, 15–17. The importance of Gassendi’s 1629 letter to Fyens has been pointed out by Gregory, Scetticismo ed empirismo, p. 51; on Gassendi’s concept of the soul, see Gassendi, Opera omnia, iv, 183. 99  Gassendi quotes Fyens in section iii of the De generatione aminalium of his Physics as one of the very few (perpauci) to place ensoulment before the seventh day after conception, the date that Gassendi himself preferred: Gassendi, Opera omnia, ii, Physicae, section iii, part one, book iv: De generatione animalium, pp. 260–95 (p. 281).

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creation of the first man as recounted by Genesis put the formation of Adam’s body first; only after having given form to the body did God breathe a soul into him. Fyens limited himself to saying that the exceptional case of the first man did not create a precedent for ordinary generation. From this series of observations it was clear that the traditional positions regarding abortion, with their distinction between the formed and unformed foetus had been overturned: if the soul existed before the formation of the body and guided this formation, then all abortion was murder. The legal consequences were clear, even if Fyens did not make them explicit: anyone who induced an abortion was a murderer, and as such deserved capital punishment.100 The question of the ensoulment of the foetus therefore had legal implications which could not be ignored. Fyens’s work aroused immediate controversy. Traditionalist Catholic physicians and theologians held firm to the traditional doctrine, whereby the formation of the body of the foetus and the organization of its limbs were held to take place before ensoulment. It was a Spanish theologian, Antònio Ponce de Santa Cruz, who in a 1622 work dedicated to the Count-Duke of Olivares tackled the question of whether capital punishment should be meted out for abortion. The author’s ambition was to translate the opinions and pronouncements of the physicians into theological terms, 101 and his point of reference was Fyens’s work. Santa Cruz referred to the passage from Exodus 21 to maintain that the Bible distinguished between different levels of seriousness for the crime of induced abortion precisely because it was possible to speak of murder only when the abortion affected the immortal soul, and this did not inhabit the organism immediately, but only when the foetus was fully formed. For him, the distinction between the formed and unformed foetus was fundamental because of the principle according to which the organization of the limbs had to precede the infusion of the rational soul. What we could define as Christian Aristotelianism, with its strong awareness of the unity of the living being, had long struggled to imagine how the body and soul could be reunited after their separation at the moment of death. Now it had to reckon with a theory which gave little importance to the body, at the beginning of life as well as at the end. It was inevitable that there would be controversy from conservative circles. It was a lively polemic but one which for the most part took place within the Catholic world.102 The problem of genera100 

Fyens, De formatrice, pp. 210–16. de Santa Cruz, Philosophia Hippocratica, a work bound together with his commentary, In Avicennam primum primi. 102  Lavenia, ‘“D’animal fante”’, has investigated this aspect, pointing out in particular the 101 

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tion lay at the centre of the scientific interest of the time throughout Christian Europe. Anyone who ventured back along the path towards the dawn of human life often did so with feelings of profound emotion, bordering on mystical experience: it was like following the divine work of creation into the most precious of places. Without bearing this in mind it is not possible to understand how William Harvey, the physician famous for discovering the circulation of the blood, could come to explain human generation not by natural causes, but by entrusting it all to the same divine power that made the stars move.103 In Catholic circles, the importance of the question, however, was due to the dominant position that the Church energetically defended on the question of the definition of theological truths, with its resulting suspicion of any scientific venturing into Biblical territory. As the Spanish philosopher Antònio Ponce de Santa Cruz was concerned to point out, the question was relevant not only for the philosophical knowledge of human generation, but also for theologians and physicians: at stake was the possibility and the lawfulness of abortion as a therapeutic measure to save the mother. In Spain, buffeted by great waves of collective devotion for the Immaculate Conception, any defence of abortion was inconceivable: Santa Cruz repeated the Christian duty to protect the life of all humans as God’s creatures and he decisively rejected both Aristotle’s opinion that abortion was lawful to limit the size of families, and that of Plato, who believed that defective babies had to be eliminated. Even the lame and the blind, wrote Santa Cruz, are made in God’s image and natural law prohibits us from adding suffering to suffering.104 But there remained a distinction between his defence of traditional notions on the subject of ensoulment and those held by Fyens: for the latter all abortion could be qualified as murder because it destroyed the life of a being which had a soul. Santa Cruz on the other hand left a small margin open for the lawful termination of pregnancy. The paradigm of ensoulment was rapidly changing in this period, partly as a consequence of Fyens’s arguments. This is clearly demonstrated by the way in which the problem was dealt with by Paolo Zacchia. Because of the offices inter­­vention by the Paracelsan physician Daniel Sennert and the Prague physician Johannes Marcus Marci ( Jan Marek-Marku). 103  Harvey, Exercitationes de generatione animalium, pp. 190–95. This is rightly stressed in a book which is rather superficial in other respects: Darmon, Le mythe de la procréation à l’âge baroque, pp. 54–57. 104  ‘Claudum et caecum fecit Dominus, Exod. 4, ad imaginem Dei facti sunt onmes mortales, Gen. 1. Si autem non alimus imbecilles, illos occidimus et adderemus afflictionem afflicto: quod tanquam iniquum detestamur lex naturalis’: de Santa Cruz, Philosophia Hippocratica, p. 95.

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he held (papal archiater under Innocent X and chief medical examiner of the Papal State) and the great importance of his Quaestiones medico-legales — a work which definitively consecrated forensic medicine as a science — Zacchia’s opinions on pregnancy and abortion were an obligatory point of reference even outside the Catholic world, and they offer a good example of the complications and uncertainties that reigned in a field open to the incursions of law, theology, and medicine. To establish whether the foetus expelled by abortion or extracted from the womb of its dying mother was a legitimate human being was extremely important for establishing who, for example, should inherit the mother’s dowry. And here the physician’s opinion weighed decisively from the legal point of view. Now, Zacchia reasoned at length on his experience in the field of pregnancy and childbirth. He compared human birth with birth in other animal species, for example, revealing a remarkable familiarity with Lucretius’s great poem. But over the long period of time in which marked its publication (the first book came out in 1621, and the last a good forty years later), the author profoundly changed his opinions on the ensoulment of the foetus: starting with a traditional concept in the first edition, he finally reached a theory which went even beyond that of Thomas Fyens: for Zacchia too, it was the soul which constituted the principle of the formation and organization of the body. Hence, by translating this vitalistic philosophy into the terms of Christian theology, it meant that the soul was present in the human foetus right from the moment of fertilization. As for the problem of baptism, Zacchia’s advice was to baptize the foetus always and anyway, whenever there were signs of life, even before the forty days from conception that had been fixed by traditional doctrine.105 That a papal archiater, a friend of Gabriel Naudé, and an admirer of Lucretius should believe in the immediate presence of the immortal soul at the moment of conception is a fact which, besides the repercussions it had on a theoretical and practical level, shows how the desire to forge a strong alliance between theology and medicine was making headway in the Catholic world of the seventeenth century. The medical discoveries into pre-natal life opened up new territory for the missionary conquest of new souls, an India which had so far remained undiscovered. Anyone who moved in this direction had the comfort of knowing that learned culture was on his side. 105 

Zacchia, Totius stati ecclesiastici proto-medici generalis, i, book i, pp. 1 ff, and, above all, book ix, tit. i: De foetus humani animatione, pp. 685–707. Zacchia tackles the question of caesarean section as a means for reaching and baptizing the child on pp. 709–16. On Zacchia’s change of mind, see Lanza, La questione del momento, pp. 155–59.

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Reflections of this type in fact were being made in a scientific and theological culture in which investigation into the origins of life was at the centre of growing interest. Those that have been defined as the ‘life sciences’106 concentrated on the moment of birth and the hidden development of the human being inside its mother. Research and discussion centred on the relationship between the seed and the individual, and attempted to answer the fundamental question which had long divided opinion as to whether the formed human being already pre-existed in the seed (preformationism), or whether its origin was the unforeseeable result of human conception (epigenesis). While Fyens and his Catholic interlocutors debated as to the moment in which the soul was infused, others turned to experimentation to reconstruct the ways in which the human being was formed. Some concentrated Galileo’s lens, which Fyens had shown such little appreciation for, on that male seed and its nature, which had long been the subject of discussion and conjecture. Correspondence between scientists and the communications they made to the Academies put a great deal of new information into circulation, particularly once the microscope began to be used. This revealed the existence of a ‘new world’ (to use the expression by the Dutch Constantijn Huygens), opening up new horizons for research.107 In Amsterdam Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) used his skill to construct microscopes for Huygens and Jan Swammerdam, who studied insects and the female reproductive organs. Using these precise instru­­ments, in 1677 Leeuwenhoek identified spermatozoa as tiny creatures (lütgen dierkens), living beings which he represented in an illustration as little ‘homunculi’.108 The existence of male sperm had thus been demonstrated, the seeds of human life which had been the subject of discussion for so long. Life was therefore pre-formed and ready to grow in the ground of the female body. Others instead investigated that terrain which had been traditionally represented as cold and neutral, the simple receptacle of male seed. The discussions which took place around the lessons held in the anatomical theatre of 106 

The definition was introduced by Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française. On the philosophical doctrines connected to the discoveries in this field the fundamental study is Bernardi, Le metafisiche dell’embrione. 107  For Huygens’s view, see Alpers, The Art of Describing. 108  In her thoughtful study of the relationship between Vermeer and Leeuwenhoek (who was the executor of Vermeer’s will), Karin Leonhard reproduces the picture of the ‘homunculi’ which Leeuwenhoek sent to the Royal Academy in 1678: Leonhard, ‘Vermeer’s Pregnant Women’, p. 299.

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Delft led to the discovery of the female ovum by Reinier de Graaf (1641–73), and research into the female reproductive organs by Jan Swammerdam. In 1672 they published the results of their investigations: Graaf ’s work, entitled De muliebrum organis included engravings bearing a clear image of the female sexual organ.109 And other images appeared in Swammerdam’s book, together with reports from his research. The spirit guiding this research can be felt in Swammerdam’s emotion as he described the ‘miracle of nature’, namely the appa­­ratus of female reproduction.110 The ancient representation collapsed which had rendered the female contribution to human reproduction inferior and utterly passive, and a turning point was reached which was similar to that induced by Copernicus, but even more difficult to accept. The earth could be removed from the centre of the universe, but to remove man from his throne at the centre of the natural history of the species was something else. Understanding the origins of human life was the challenge which was met by a culture which was strongly imbued with religious representations. All this research was weighed down with different and conflicting theological hypotheses. If the Catholic world discussed the question of anticipating the moment of baptism to bring it closer to the moment at which the soul was infused, in the Christian culture of Europe the notion of original sin survived. And the Augustinian idea of its transmission through the father’s seed stimulated research into the physiological aspect of human reproduction. The theological horizon of the different scientific tendencies is sometimes explicitly indicated by the scientists themselves: if the entire human race was present in Eve’s ovaries or Adam’s spermatozoa this meant that the protagonist of original sin was humanity in its entirety and predestination had a biological root and explanation; moreover not only the survival of the soul but also its pre-existence could be projected outside human time, Christianizing the Platonic definition. But besides the theological doctrines that constituted its more or less explicit foundations, research held its own independent fascination for a culture imbued with the Bible, because it meant exploring the mysteries of Creation and rereading the first pages of Genesis with new eyes. The origin of the species was mirrored in the origin of the individual.111 109 

This is also reproduced, Leonhard, ‘Vermeer’s Pregnant Women’, p. 302. Swammerdami, Miraculum naturae. The first edition came out in Amsterdam in 1672 and the dedication bears the date 1 May, 1672. 111  See Ruestow, ‘Piety and the Defence of Natural Order’. A good account of the relationship between theology and science is provided by Monti, ‘Origine delle forme e generazione dei 110 

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Naturally, the question of the presence of the soul and its eternal fate remained in the background to this research into human life. But one way was the anatomical exploration with the use of the microscope, and another was, in comparison, the very different theological discussion of the moment when the soul was infused into the embryo. The research by Swammerdam, Leeuwenhoek, and Graaf, though it reached different conclusions as to the female contribution to the formation of new life, brought this research into the domain of scientific observation. In this environment, attention to pregnancy as a female condition had repercussions on the pictorial representation of the theme of the pregnant woman in a realistic and everyday manner, which had previously concentrated on the pregnant Mary (now abandoned by Catholic devotional painting as irreverent). 112 It was a promising start on the journey towards a questioning of the prejudice of the centrality of the male seed, a prejudice which was to reveal itself to be more resistant than the Ptolemaic conception of the world. Astronomical anthropocentrism was in fact closely related to the centrality of the male in the transmission of life, except that in this second case the prejudice openly clashed with experience. But the real protagonist of the whole story was the ‘creature’ placed inside its mother’s womb by the act of conception. Who this was, where it came from, and how it was to be considered were questions which were becoming more and more insistent. And it was not something which only concerned scientific and theological culture. A number of clues show growing disquiet in popular culture: it is difficult to say whether this was new or whether what was new was the system of surveillance and pastoral control which recorded it and made it discernible. But it is true that popular culture, which had always tended to speculate on the transmission of life, now seemed to be particularly curious about life in the womb. Perhaps as an effect of a preaching which was centred on sin, a way of imagining the existence of the embryo and the foetus gained ground in which the new individual already made moral choices and could even stain itself with its own sins. And one sin in particular: the mother’s suffering. In 1612 the Roman Inquisition received an alarming letter from the Inqui­ sitor of Asti regarding an opinion, described as superstitious, regarding the fate of children in the next world. The Inquisitor recounted that the question had corpi’. I am grateful to Renato Mazzolini for bringing this to my attention, along with his other suggestions and ideas. 112  On this connection, Leonhard, ‘Vermeer’s Pregnant Women’ contains few concrete indications.

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arisen in the vicariate of Cherasco where the conviction had spread that children who died immediately after birth, even if they had been baptized, had to go through a period of suffering and purification in the fires of Purgatory to atone for the sin of having made their mother suffer for nine months. To deal with this, the bishop of Asti, in agreement with the Inquisitor, had decided to organize a discrete but effective propaganda campaign to eradicate such beliefs: Si prese espediente di fare intendere alli curati di quel vicariato privatamente senza publicarne editto, che qualche volta ne loro raggionamenti all’Altare si facino cascare a proposito di trattare della grandezza, et efficacia del s.to Batesimo, et dirgli, essere di tanta efficacia, che libera, et cancella ogni, et qualsivoglia sorte de peccato, originale, mortale, et veniale, talmente che chi moresse immediatamente battezato, senza sentir pena alcuna, né di Purgatorio, né altro, se ne vanno in Paradiso; et esser in grandissimo errore donne, et altri, che credessero che i figliolo morendo subito doppo il Battesimo, prima che entrare in Paradiso, sentano le pene dil Purgatorio, per i dolori, che hanno datto alla madre, nel portargli nove mesi nel ventre. (The means were found to explain to the curates of that vicariate privately and without publishing an edict about it, that in their preaching at the Altar they should sometimes find an opportunity to deal with the greatness and the effectiveness of holy Baptism, and to say to the congregation that it is so effective that it frees from and deletes every and any kind of sin, original, mortal, and venial, in such a way that anyone who should die immediately after baptism will go to Heaven, without feeling any punishment in Purgatory or any other delay. And women and others are in great error if they believe that if their children die immediately after Baptism they suffer the pains of Purgatory before entering Paradise, as a consequence of the pains that they gave their mother, who carried them in her womb for nine months.)113

Documents of this kind provide a small glimpse into the long process of elaboration of forms of behaviour and belief, in which folklore representations mixed with an ecclesiastical pedagogy imbued with various tendencies. Preaching in Vercelli in 1659, the Franciscan Giovanni Maria Piola declared himself convinced ‘che le anime dei bambini battezzati morendo non potevano andare in Paradiso senza passer le pene del Purgatorio’ (that the souls of baptized children who died could not go to Heaven without passing through the torments of Purgatory).114 This comment rapidly spread through the city where it had 113 

Letter by the Inquisitor of Asti, Girolamo Porcelli, dated 29 January, 1612: the decision was taken after having ‘conferto il negotio con Mons. R.mo Vescovo’: Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, E 2–e, fols 288r–293v; see fol. 288r. The document was pointed out to me by Vincenzo Lavenia, whom I thank. 114  Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza stor-

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‘dato occasione di varii discorsi con non poco bisbiglio’ (given rise to various talk and no small amount of rumour), in such a way that the local Inquisitor decided to open an inquiry and take statements from various witnesses.115 It was not the first time, it would appear, that comments of the kind had been heard in the churches of the Po valley.116 But more than the opinions of the preachers, it was their echo that worried the ecclesiastical authorities. As was often the case in the history of the preaching of the friars, the preachers picked up on popular representations of the fate of the souls of children after death and amplified them with their sermons. For this reason, the opinions that were spread from the pulpit might fuel concerns and fears which already existed or which only needed the slightest incentive to come out into the open. If not even baptism could guarantee freedom from the punishments of Pur­­ gatory, it is easy to imagine the continual trickle of questions which could arise from doubts as to its partial, inexact, or failed administration. The clear Catholic doctrinal confirmation of the need for infant baptism had been followed by the imposition of a single rite which was to establish the conditions for the sacrament’s validity and effectiveness for everybody. The Church believed it could avoided the labyrinth of subjective doubt by refusing to link the validity of the sacrament to individual faith and guarantee its automatic effectiveness with the sole condition that the rite was followed in the exact sequence. But it was precisely here that scruples, doubts and never-ending problems arose, which arrived in Rome from the remotest locations. As the body responsible for orthodoxy, the Inquisition had to answer questions such as the following: was an emergency baptism valid if the midwife had only poured water on the amniotic sac?117 Or if one of the words of the ritual formula had been wrong? ica, O 1-e: Censura: ‘propositiones in diversas materias’: copy of the statement made by don Fabrizio Fecia on 31 August, 1659. 115  From the letter sent about the trial by Vercelli’s inquisitor, Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, O 1-e. 116  The fact that this opinion had spread is demonstrated by the letter sent by Luca Grillenzoni, archpriest of Carpaneto in the diocese of Piacenza, dated 11 October, 1646: Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, O 1-e. 117  In 1628 the Inquisitor of Bergamo presented this problem, which had been put forward by the priest Guido Lanzi, claiming to be the author of a treatise ‘de infantibus in utero baptizandis’, which had been condemned by the Inquisition and which seems impossibile to find. The file also contains a letter by Lanzi dated 18 February, 1628. In the congregation of 8 January, 1628, the Inquisition replied that baptism was to be considered valid; if the baby died it could be buried on consecrated soil; if it was still alive it had to be re-baptized with the formula ‘sub conditione’. A number of indications for the future were sent to the bishop on 19 January, 1628:

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And what could be done about the nomadic people of the American forests, or the peoples of the Far East, since the sacramental formula took on strange meanings in their languages? And what to say to those who suddenly doubted they had not been properly baptized and trembled for their own salvation or, if they were priests, for that of the many people to whom they had administered sacraments which were perhaps not valid? These and infinite other problems came to the Roman prelates and their experts from the peripheries of Italy and the world. The safe position that was believed to have been reached by separating the value of the sacrament from the inner disposition of the believer, linking it to the external formalities of a rigid ritual, produced the opposite effect: a lack of confidence, a series of scruples, a multiplication of the cases to be considered, and systematic recourse to the repetition of the sacrament with the formula used in doubt (‘If you are not baptized […]’). Unified behind the official definition of the effectiveness of the sacrament, the Catholic world saw baptism as the necessary condition for full human identity and hence also for the orderly placement of the body and the soul after death. This was very different from the attitude of the Church of England, where the controversy against the ‘Papist’ doctrine encouraged opinions of a completely different kind: here unbaptized children were buried in any case in the parvis of the church, with the sole difference that they were deprived of a solemn funeral, and the parents were invited to hope in their eternal salvation.118 The Catholic Church, on the other hand, by adding the repeated eternal con­­demnation of unbaptized infants to the theory of the immediate ensoulment of the embryo, reached extreme conclusions, such as the obligatory baptism of all aborted foetuses. The proposal was put forward on the basis of a simple consideration: if the mother’s womb housed human beings with their own immortal soul, though minuscule and unformed, should everything possible not be done to open up the way to eternal happiness for those souls, preventing them from a destiny in which they were eternally deprived of God? This was the idea of Girolamo Fiorentini (1602–78), a priest from Lucca, who published his pro­­posal in Lyons in 1658, rendering it clear right from the very title of his work: Disputatio de ministrando Baptismo humanis foetibus abortivorum.119 It Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, M 6 n–r, Dubia de Sacramentis, i, fasc. ii, fols 95r-113v. 118  These were the terms of the teaching which the Bishop of Durham, Richard Barnes, addressed to his clergy: see Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, p. 114. But, for the rich series of cases presented, see all of chapter v, ‘Baptism as Sacrament and Drama’, pp. 97–123. 119  Fiorentini, Disputatio. The dedication to cardinal Bonvisi, bishop of Lucca, is dated 1

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was a modest proposal, in appearance at least, but one which claimed to be original and immediately useful for pastoral purposes: no theologian so far had discussed it and it was extremely important for parish priests and physicians. The author belonged to the Congregation of the Clerks Regular of the Mother of God, founded in Lucca by Giovanni Leonardi. The founder had played an important role in the battles of the Counter Reformation, first in Lucca, where he had fought Calvinist infiltrations into civic society in various ways, and then in Rome, where he had created the great plan of a centralized government of all the missions in the world, namely the first outline of the Congregation of ‘Propaganda Fide’. The name chosen for his congregation indicated a particular interest in the problems of maternity and the family: the Mother of God was called on as a protagonist to represent an ideal women, unattainable by definition, but no less important for this, as we will see. In the meantime, let us look at the contents and the outcome of Fiorentini’s proposal. The dedication at the beginning of Fiorentini’s volume put forward the ancient image of the seed. As the seed hidden under the earth awaits the rain to transform itself and grow, so the human seed enclosed in the darkness of the mother’s womb anxiously awaits the only rain that can give it life: baptism. It was a highly evocative image. Those who speculated on the mysteries of predestination and grace — and the question had become topical again in European religious culture — often used the example of natural rain to represent the random nature and the apparent injustice of the distribution of divine Grace. Several years later, in the context of the controversies with the Jansenists, it was also evoked by Nicolas de Malebranche: why, he wondered, did that child, and not another, fail to receive baptism?120 But Girolamo Fiorentini was not a man to be drawn into lengthy speculation, and his culture did not go beyond the territory of traditional devotion and the theology of the schools. He was noted, however, by the Jesuits, who were among his most enthusiastic readers. In a long letter, the Jesuit Fathers Giovanni Barbiano and Richard Lynch, teachers at Salamanca, set out the reasons for August, 1658. Fiorentini’s work became an obligatory point of reference in the controversy regarding the Catholic position on the question of abortion: see Sardi, L’aborto ieri e oggi, pp. 197 ff. and Lanza, La questione del momento, pp. 149–55. 120  ‘Il y a bien de difficultés à justifier la conduite de Dieu dans la manière dont il distribuë la pluye de la Grace, aussi bien que dans celle dont il répand la pluye ordinaire […] Pourquoi tel enfant ne reçoit-il pas le Baptême? Ou pourquoi y a-t-il tant de nations que ne connoissent point Jesus-Christ?’: Malebranche, Traité de la nature et de la grâce, ed. by Dreyfus, p. 76; and see pp. 195–96. On the way in which the Inquisition judged Malebranche’s work see the extensive study by Costa, Malebranche e Roma.

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their agreement with Fiorentini’s work and pointed out to him the opinions of Pierre Gassendi on the ensoulment of the foetus, which they believed might offer him some comfort on the road he had taken.121 The author was grateful to them and conscientiously reproduced their letter in the new edition of his work: he had nothing in common with Gassendi’s interests and opinions, but anyone capable of harmonizing the physics of atoms with the immortality of the soul had his sympathy. His ambition was to modernize sacramental practice by adapting it to the new knowledge available. The missionary spirit and Catholic activism which animated him found support in the new scientific discoveries. Just as the microscope had revealed a new, immensely small world, invisible but so close, so theological imagination, stimulated by the intellectual developments of medicine, managed to see an immense population, invisible to the naked eye, but actually there and thirsting for the water of life. In this way, Fiorentini revived the original theme that had induced Giovanni Leonardi and so many other men and women of his time to undertake missionary work, and he adapted it to the sensibility of his own time. The wild people of America were not the only form of human infancy anxiously waiting to be baptized: human foetuses were also souls to be saved. The great expanses of continents and peoples which had kindled ideas and imaginings in the new apostles of the century of Columbus were now joined — or rather replaced — by new missionary lands, new Indies: huge numbers of minuscule human beings, equal to the others in their immortal soul, but invisible and defenceless, entrusted as they were to mothers who were physically and morally inadequate. It was necessary to baptize aborted foetuses at whatever stage of formation, even within a month of conception: this was the substance of the proposal. And the Aristotelian distinction between formed and unformed did not have to be taken as granted because, as Fiorentini stated, the Roman Ritual did not establish a definitive limit in this sense, and the information provided by physicians meant that even the imperfectly formed foetus was to be considered as having a soul. Therefore the foetus had to be baptized always and in any case, using naturally the formula of doubt (‘If you are ensouled I baptize you’). Birth found a parallel in death: the formula of doubt also had to be used with the dying when the sacrament of Extreme Unction was administered without taking into account the condition of the dying and without stopping to wonder whether they were alive or not. The sacred duty of priests and physicians was to open 121 

They quote lengthy passages from it in their letter, which Fiorentini published with other documents in his favour: Fiorentini, De hominibus, fol. ++r. On the two Jesuits, see Sommervogel, Bibliothèque des ecrivains de la Compagnie de Jésus, i, 882–83; v, 218–19.

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the door of Paradise and empty Limbo of its natural candidates. One thing was obvious for the fanatical saviour of neonatal souls: the question was not easily resolved because the saving waters of baptism and the baby were separated by the obstacle of the mother. Therefore, he added a message to these mothers in his exhortations: they should remember that the eternal salvation of their children was in their hands and they should be ready to die for such a prize. In cases of difficult birth, physicians should not worry about hastening the mother’s death if this was necessary for baptizing the foetus. Besides the mothers, it was also necessary to take into account families: an old problem for the Church, which had dedicated particular attention to this aspect in the course of the previous century. The Tridentine ruling on marriage had made important progress in its long attempt to impose discipline in this field and to ensure that the procreation of children took place in a well-regulated manner. Its aim was to channel sexuality into marriage, and theologians and preachers invested great intellectual energy to reach this aim, entering the marriage bed with their tools, dictating the times and forms of intercourse, and justifying it exclusively as the means for realizing God’s command as the creator of the book of Genesis: ‘Grow and multiply’. With the obligation imposed by the Council of Trent to publish banns and to receive an ecclesiastical blessing, marriage was starting to become a well-controlled institution. But the job had to be completed by educating parents to carry out their duties towards their children: to baptize them certainly, but not only this. To make them true Christians required a complex pedagogy, in which the Church and the family had to co-operate. This was the conviction which led the blessed Giovanni Leonardi to found the Congregation of the Mother of God. Giorolamo Fiorentini, who was a member, was determined to give parents a lesson in responsibility. The year after his proposal came out, he published a set of instructions for the confessors and curates of Lucca, which concerned the question of the curses uttered by parents against their children: parents should reflect on the consequences of their curses because God listened to the voices of mothers and fathers and could therefore make something said in a moment of anger actually come true.122 In practice, the idea of the family that was cultivated in the congregation of Lucca was that of a body which had great weight and responsibility towards its children and towards God. Fiorentini’s proposal to baptize foetuses was not as daring as the author him­­ self seemed to have believed. It was rather the logical consequence of a series 122 

Avvertimento et instruttione alli curati e confessori della diocesi di Lucca.

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of previous steps along a path where medical knowledge of the natural development of the human embryo was immediately shaped according to theological deductions. But although ideas of this kind were, so to speak, in the air, something blocked its immediate success: either because of the prudence of the Roman curia, or, as Fiorentini wrote, ‘l’opera di persona all’autore poco ben affetta’ (the work of a person with little affection for the author),123 a decree by the Congregation of the Index prohibited the Disputatio in its Lyons edition. It imposed a reprint (in Lucca in 1666) with the addition of a formula which stressed the hypothetical nature of the book’s conclusions. Its author did not give up and in 1671 he made a personal petition to the pope for the work to be examined by a commission of cardinals and prelates. His insistence, Fiorentini wrote, was due to the fact that the work had received the approval of ‘many Catholic academies and a great number of theologians’.124 And indeed the ‘censure’ (judgements) from authoritative universities that Fiorentini had put together did represent a notable sign of approval for his ideas not only from the faculties of Theology (from the Sorbonne to the Universities of Prague and Vienna), but also those of Medicine (Vienna and Prague again), not to speak of individual approval, of which that argued at most length and with the greatest enthusiasm was written by Caramul.125 These were documents which were remarkable for their tone and their contents: in a document symbolically dated Christmas Eve, 1662, the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Vienna celebrated the value of Fiorentini’s proposal and its use in stimulating parish priests, parents, and midwives to save souls: on the subject of ensoulment, the quotation of Thomas Fyens’s theory was noted with approval. For its part, the Sorbonne issued a document which, besides giving its approval to the work, strongly criticized the frivolous objections of the indignant (perditissimae) mothers who practised murder under the pretext of saving their own honour.126 In this period, the Hospital of the Passion in Madrid 123 

From the petition quoted in note 124 below. From the 1671 petition, which is preserved with all the documents regarding the case in Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, M 6 n, Dubia de Sacramentis, i, fasc. xv, fols 377r–381v. 125  Fiorentini included an extract of the texts published in the 1666 Lucca edition in his petition, which can be found in Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Index xix, Miscellanea rerum ad Congregationem spectantium, i, fols 207r–214v. 126  ‘In procurando aborto perpetrant perditissimae illae mulieres, falsa quadam servandi honoris specie […]’. The document is dated 7 December, 1663, and is signed by Étienne Le Boulenger, Jean du Moulin, and Jean Hamel. 124 

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regularly carried out Caesarian section to extract the foetus and baptize it; and the physician Diego Mateo Zapata who attested to this practice in one of his dissertations, defined by him significantly as ‘medico-teològica, shows the care with which doctors discussed the most suitable instruments to use to extract the foetus and reach it with the waters of baptism, without waiting for it to be fully out of the mother’s body.127 Fiorentini’s work presented the Inquisition with the task of legitimizing these procedures. Yet it did not do so. We do not know much about the work of the Roman commission which was appointed by the Congregation of the Holy Office on 12 August, 1671. But the fact that it contained someone like Caramuel, besides authoritative cardinals (Brancaccio, Borromeo, Albizzi) and other high-ranking prelates, theologians, and physicians, who were undoubtedly enthusiastic about Fiorentini’s proposal, gives us an idea of the favourable climate in which the examination took place.128 The papers left by cardinal Brancaccio include the opinion expressed by the Jesuit Alberto Alberti, which shows how the casuistry of the Company of Jesus accompanied by the fundamental principle of the Tridentine Church — the salvation of souls — could lead them to accept with enthusiasm the idea of systematically baptizing aborted foetuses. All the Jesuit required was not the scientific certainty of the immediate ensoulment of the foetus, but only its probability, to conclude the need for the obligatory baptism of the foetus. Silence was the argument used to overcome the fundamental difficulty of the fact that Paul V’s Roman Ritual had strictly indicated birth as the moment after which baptism could be administered. Alberti turned obliquely to the same Ritual, however, to find an argument in favour of baptizing aborted foetuses. If the confession of the dying was valid even when they were no longer able to speak — as the Ritual stipulated — then the baptism ‘sub conditione’ of an aborted embryo only a few days old was equally valid. Nothing therefore prevented Pope Alexander VII from modifying the norms of the Ritual in this sense.129 Once again, the connection between birth and death touched a profound chord in the religion of the time. 127 

See the rich and thoughtful biography by Pardo Tomás, El médico en la palestra, in particular pp. 239–45, 271–75. Zapata’s testimony can be found in Zapata, Disertaciòn medicoteològica. 128  The physicians were Salvatori, the Pope’s doctor, Naldi, and Rita. The secretary of the commission was Girolamo Casanate. 129  The undated opinion is signed ‘Albertus de Albertis Soc. Iesu’ and is entitled, ‘Utrum opinio censens Baptismum abortivis administrandum esse sub conditione sit legitime probabilis, vel e contrario reijcienda et notanda velut saltem improbabilis videatur’: Napoli, Bib.

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The commission’s opinion could not have been negative: this is demonstra­ ted by the fact that shortly afterwards Girolamo Fiorentini published a new and enlarged edition of his treatise with a title in which the words ‘aborted foetuses’ were replaced by ‘homines dubii’. The doubt concerned human identity itself, which had to be looked for in the uncertain zone which divided the human from the non-human (including monsters).130 This is how the question of the so-called ‘mola’ or ‘mass in the womb’, traditionally connected to baptism, was tackled. The Roman Ritual had provided summary instructions to decide whether what came out of the pregnant woman’s belly belonged to the human race or not and whether it was to be baptized or not. Forensic medicine had elaborated a series of proposals which were all based on the visible appearance of the thing that had been born and its greater or lesser resemblance to the human body: it took account of the number of heads or hearts, for example, to decide on the number of individuals. But the problem now presented itself again under different conditions in the light of the theory of preventative ensoulment. If the body’s human form had traditionally served as proof of the fact that a soul was present in it, once the sequence of body and soul had been reversed and the priority of the soul had been established with respect to any stage in the formation of the body, the human nature or the lack of it in the being which had been born had to be established without any reference to its form. The humanity of monsters and whether they should be baptized or not was discussed with renewed vigour. Paolo Zacchia had contributed to the question with his wide experience and great intellectual curiosity, obviously not with the same missionary goals as those of Girolamo Fiorentini, whose aim remained a systematic sacramental campaign of baptism to be carried out at every possible opportunity, declaring war on Limbo and filling Paradise. The time seemed ripe. So he was led to believe by the pope’s recent favour for an ancient form of devotion, linked to a totally exceptional example of conception: the doctrine of the ‘Immaculate Conception’, in which the Madonna had become a being exempt from the transmission of original sin right from the moment of her conception. Once again, the Mother of God became the centre of discussion of theological questions, and this had important consequences on the way in which motherhood and human gestation were treated: the object of this was the Madonna, not as a mother — indeed the image of the Nazionale, MS Brancacciano I E 8, fols 9r–30v; I would like to thank Pierroberto Scaramella for his help in finding and reproducing this document. 130  Fiorentini, De hominibus.

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pregnant Mary had fallen into disuse by now and Piero della Francesca’s work of art remained in the margins of sacred iconography131 — but the Madonna as a daughter, indeed as an embryo. The theological doctrine of the Immaculate Conception as a miraculous fact concerning a single human being was closely linked to that of the immediate ensoulment of any and every individual of the species, right from the moment of conception. After centuries of theological conflict on the subject, devotion to the Immaculate Conception had taken a great leap forward in the early seventeenth century, when the Habsburg monarchy had chosen it as the seal for its Spanish version of sacred royalty and the unifying symbol of national identity. And it was in Spain, precisely, that people were found who seized on the oppor­­tunity offered by Fyens’s theory to resolve the problems posed by the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception by using medical science. The Jesuit Juan Bautista Poza put forward the theory of the immediate sanctification of the Madonna, which the Jesuits had maintained up to then with great propaganda work, on so-to speak scientific bases: if the rational soul was infused at the moment of conception or anyway not after the third day, there was no need for a miraculous distortion of nature to maintain that the Madonna had received the gift of exemption from original sin in the instant in which she had been conceived.132 And it was in the field of the theological doctrine of the Immaculate Conception that the battle was being fought to establish that every human being received a soul at the moment of conception or immediately afterwards. This was understood by Caramuel among others, who, in his letter of approval to Fiorentini, reminded him that Aquinas’s opinions could be subjected to discussion when they were not correct: in the case of the Immaculate Conception, for example, St Thomas had held an opinion which was not pious. Fiorentini referred to this argument in the second edition of his book, when he appealed to the position taken by Pope Alexander VII, who, with his 1661 bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum forbade any opinion contrary to the doctrine of Immaculate Conception, and expressed an official position which was favourable, without however taking the final step of definitively ratifying it as a new truth of faith. Fiorentini claimed that it had been his own theory of immediate ensoulment which had had a decisive influence in this direction: according to 131 

On the history of the Madonna of Monterchi and devotion to the Madonna protecting childbirth see Walter, Piero della Francesca: Madonna del Parto. 132  Poza, Elucidarium Deiparae, book iii. I would like to thank Vincenzo Lavenia for bringing this work to my attention. On the Spanish controversies over the Immaculate Conception see Cortés Peña, ‘Andalucìa y la Inmaculada Conceptiòn’.

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his account, there had been an attempt by those against this form of devotion to move the feast of the Immaculate Conception from the eighth of December to another date towards the end of February. But an accurate count of the days between the feast of the nativity of the Madonna (8 September) and that of her conception had shown that the liturgical tradition had an accurate memory and had intended precisely to celebrate the conception of the immaculate Virgin as the date on which her soul had been infused into the embryo.133 The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception proceeded hand in hand therefore with the advance of theologians into the terrain of conception and pregnancy, in alliance with physicians. And yet the ecclesiastical authorities seemed little inclined rigidly to define and doctrinally to formalize questions which had been so heatedly discussed by the various sciences. The Inquisition, the authentic ministry responsible for the definition of the doctrine of the faith, pursued a policy of caution. Not only was Fiorentini’s book subjected to censorship and a modified edition was requested and obtained, but even when his proposal met with authoritative backing, Rome still did not change its attitude. It was Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany, particularly concerned to control illegitimate pregnancies, who suggested proceeding to the systematic baptism of aborted foetuses to save the souls which might be present in those which were not yet dead. It was necessary to provide for ‘the eternal salvation of those souls’, maintained the Grand Duke’s spokesman in a document which was submitted to the Inquisition. This document observed that, although the measure was providential and also widely practised, ‘molti se ne astengono perché suppongono che la Santa Sede abbia proibito battezzare feto che ne’ maschi non sia almeno di trenta giorni, e nelle femmine almeno di quaranta, quasi prima certamente non animato’ (many abstain from it because they suppose that the Holy See has prohibited baptism of the foetus which is not at least thirty days old for the male and at least forty for the female, as before it is certainly not ensouled).134 It was an indirect and ingratiating way to remove ambiguity and proceed with confidence along a path which had already been trodden under the rule of that exemplary Christian prince. But Giovanni Damasceno Brigaldi, advisor to the Inquisition, replied by reminding the Duke of the censorship meted out to Fiorentini’s book and showing how the prudence of the Holy 133 

Fiorentini, De hominibus, pp. 156–62. Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, M 6–O, Dubia de Sacramentis, ii, fasc. xiv, fols 267r–273v; see fol. 268r. The document bears no date; those called on to give advice submitted their considerations to the Inquisition on 3 April, 1713. On the episode see Prosperi, ‘Scienza e immaginazione teologica nel Seicento’. 134 

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See on the subject derived from the fact that a lively debate on ensoulment was under way, which involved scientists and theologians: La S. Sede fin’ora, e li Sagri Canoni hanno creduto di non entrare in questa materia per le gravi difficoltà che s’incontrano nel definirla, o stabilire regola certa circa il battesimo de’ feti abortivi, dipendendo ciò dal sapere quando il feto venga animato dall’anima ragionevole, il che è ancor disputa tra’ filosofi, quantunque la più commune sentenza de’ teologi sii, che ne’ maschi ciò succeede doppo li trenta o quaranta, e nelle femine settanta, o ottanta giorni doppo la concettione, come puol vedersi presso li teologi, o canonisti, che trattano sopra quelli, che procurano gl’aborti, e si procede diversamente tra quelli, che procurano aborto del feto animato, e gl’altri, che lo procurano non pur anco animato, conforme è noto a’teologi, e canonisti della Sagr. Penitenziaria. (Up to now the Holy See and the Holy Canons have not held it appropriate to enter into this subject because of the serious difficulties that we come up against in settling it or in establishing a fixed rule regarding the baptism of aborted foetuses, as this depends on knowing when the foetus is ensouled by the rational soul. This question is also disputed by philosophers, although the most common opinion of theologians is that in males this occurs after thirty or forty days, and in females seventy or eighty days after conception, as can be read in the works of theologians or canon lawyers when they discuss the cases of those who induce abortions: indeed they treat differently those who induce the abortion of an ensouled foetus from those who induce the abortion of a foetus which is not yet ensouled, as is well known to the theologians and canon lawyers of the Holy Penitentiary.)

The ‘holy zeal’ of the prince for the salvation of souls was indisputable, but for the moment there was nothing to do but to proceed case by case. If someone held reasonable doubt that the aborted foetus before him was ensouled, he could in any case proceed to baptize it ‘sub conditione’. 135 Prudence was thus required, for the time being at least, pending an agreement between theologians and ‘philosophers’. In the meantime the desire to save could be put into practice without pretence of being totally covered by the papacy. But nothing of all this was to be forgotten, and the future held great things for Fiorentini’s theory and Cosimo’s plans: in the nineteenth century, in a different phase in 135 

Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, M 6–O, Dubia de Sacramentis, ii, fasc. xiv, fols 269r-270r. The opinion (votum) is signed by fra Giovanni Damasceno, advisor to the Inquisition, to whom the question had been submitted. The Inquisition made its decision on 5 April and it consisted of the suggestion that where reasonable doubt existed that the foetus might be ensouled, baptism could take place, but to decide this it was necessary to consult ‘medici et theologi in facti contingentia’ every time.

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the relationship between ecclesiastical teaching and medicine, the problems posed by a Catholic Ireland were to make their proposals relevant again.136 For the moment they chose to abstain from deciding theological and scientific questions in an authoritative manner, not least because the Papacy was facing competition in this field from political powers ready to take any opportunity to acquire legitimacy. Sacred royalty directly challenged the power of the papacy, the only power that could boast of having ‘a body and two souls’.137 In the course of the seventeenth century, Spain had seen the devout offensive by the Jesuits to affirm the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception by popular demand: the Spanish monarchy had decisively backed that devout campaign, claiming a sort of right to priority in its devotion to the ‘purissima’ Madonna and even threatening to break with Rome, provoking fear of another English schism.138 Now, nothing that concerned the Madonna was without its implications for Christian women. Holy motherhood projected its light on earthly motherhood and passages from the Gospels offered pointers for medical and theological doctrine. Even if Roberto Bellarmino had prudently advised against deducing general rules from the episode in which John the Baptism leaped in his mother’s womb at the approach of Jesus, it was normal to look to the holy nativity as described by Scripture to derive a series consequences for the birth of ordinary human beings. And this was not only and not principally in the theological schools of the great churches but also within more restless and radical groups. It is enough to think of the discussion which arose in Amsterdam around 1670 between Christoph Sandius and Daniel Zwicker, two important members of the group of Socinians over the question of the pre-existence of Jesus Christ before his incarnation, a discussion which evoked the Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of all human souls. Sandius regretted the fact that the Catholic Church had not adopted Plato’s doctrine because it would have indirectly strengthened faith in the divinity of Jesus.139 Catholic apologists however followed Bellarmino’s general rule and made an effort to distance the conception of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ from that of common humanity. The question of the Immaculate Conception provided an important opportunity for this. 136 

See Betta, ‘Anime salve e feti abortivi’. Prodi, Il sovrano pontefice. 138  On the ‘voto de sangre’ renewed in Seville in 1615 see the articles contained in the volume de la Banda y Vargas, Immaculada. 139  This was the concern expressed by Sandius, Tractatus de origine animae, written against the Socinians: see Bietenholz, Daniel Zwicker, pp. 48, 177. As for Bellarmino’s opinion on St John the Baptist, see Bellarmino, Disputationum, ed. by Giuliano and Marghieri, iii, 182. 137 

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Besides its significance for the history of ecclesiastical doctrine, the question had an important place in the history of earthly pregnancy and the way in which it was viewed and treated. The stranglehold in which unmarried women were placed by the harsh system of control created a series of problems for moralists who were faced with the task of resolving the doubts and difficulties of the faithful on the spiritual level of confession. The confessions they heard from women in the course of their missions gave the specialists in penitence the pos­­sibility of experiencing the desperate condition of those who found themselves pregnant and out of wedlock. Something emerged from all this talk and debate over the mass of hopeless situations and took form in theoretical propositions of a general nature which were dealt with and judged by the Inquisition. During the session of 4 March, 1679, Pope Innocent XI condemned a series of propositions which also involved the question of motherhood and abortion. The outcome of this congregation has generally been considered as a revival of rigorous moralism and a reckoning with the probabilistic doctrines professed above all by the Jesuits. Those who defended the legality of abortion induced before the ensoulment of the foetus to save the honour or even the life of the mother were condemned, as was the hypothesis that the foetus had no rational soul as long as it remained in the womb, and hence that abortion could not be considered as murder.140 The two points were clearly linked to one another. The question of therapeutic abortion was connected to the protection of a woman’s honour, a highly topical question, which was debated above all by the Company of Jesus, the great Order which had invested much of its energy in the exercise of spiritual direction and the elaboration of a moral casuistry. The great ‘summa’ on marriage by the Jesuit Thomas Sanchez had expressed the theory that as a part of the maternal organism (pars viscerum matris), the foetus could behave as an internal aggressor and threaten the mother’s health and life. He envisaged a situation of a defensive war, by definition a just war, where the party under attack had the right to defend herself, as long as the foetus was not yet 140 

Prop. 34: ‘Licet procurare abortum ante animationem foetus, ne puella deprehensa gravida occidatur, aut infametur’. Prop. 35: ‘Videtur probabile omnen foetum, quandiu in utero est, carere anima rationali, et tunc primum incidere eandem habere, cum paritur, ac consequenter dicendum erit, in nullo abortu homicidium committi’: from the list of ‘propositiones damnatae’ by Pope Innocent XI in the congregation of 2 March, 1679, quoted with the others contained in Bullarium Romanum, ed. by de Sanctis, pp. 80–82; and Ferraris, Prompta bibliotheca, ed. by Storti, vii, 217. On the background to the condemnation see von Pastor, The History of the Popes, xiv.1, and the lengthy entry devoted to Pope Innocent XI by Antonio Menniti Ippolito, in Enciclopedia dei Papi (Roma, 2000), pp. 368–89.

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ensouled. These were not abstract discussions. We find proof of the profound root of this theory in the suffering of real women in a memoir by the Spanish Dominican Diego Collado, written in Madrid on 26 November, 1633. It set out twelve doubts or moral perplexities from those which emerged most frequently among the Christians in Japan. The sixth doubt presented two cases in which it seemed morally possible to accept abortion: the first was that of a pregnant young woman who was in danger of losing the possibility of a marriage which had already been arranged, and even of being killed by her relatives for reasons of honour; the second concerned the condition of those families who already had many children and could not support another mouth to feed. In both cases, it was asked whether abortion could be allowed in the period before the ensoulment of the foetus.141 The question had attracted the attention of the Jesuits, who had an important mission in Japan and carefully registered the number of babies baptized there in their archives.142 The opening up of missionary horizons in the Far East, where infanticide and abortion were widely practised, made it inevitable that the problem would arise. But it is likely that questions of this kind often presented themselves in Christian Europe and that the solutions to these doubts allowed priests to offer consolation in confession, where these women went to reveal their sins and their tragic situations. If things had been different, perhaps Lucia might have found a confessor to whom she could have revealed her situation. But the decision in Rome had removed any glimmer of hope, and pushing in that direction had perhaps been the need to stem the growing presence of physicians in the sphere of pregnancy and childbirth. Ever since the time of Codronchi’s treatise the problem had been growing of how to control the medicalization of pregnancy and abortion: it was necessary to prevent the doctor from deciding whether to terminate pregnancy in its initial phase for reasons of public morality, to protect the mother’s honour. Hence the decision to erect an absolute theological barrier and to consider the foetus as possessing a soul, always and in any case. On a general level this led to a conclusion which was contradictory, in appear­­ ance at least: for the Church, the baby killed by Lucia Cremonini possessed a rational soul, while in the popular language used by St Bernardino it could be defined as being without a soul because it had not been baptized. 141  ‘Copia delli primi dodici dubbi del Giappone’, in Roma, Arch. Romanum Societatis Iesu, Japonica-Sinica, 18–I, fols 162r–164v. 142  See Schütte, Introductio ad historiam Societatis Jesu in Japonia.

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It was a problem of words, but this did not mean that it was not an important problem. One word alone can give us an indication of what was at stake: ‘person’. Medeival canon lawyers had established that only with baptism — after birth, that is — could a human being become a person.143 Now the ban on abortion at any stage of pregnancy had its medical and theological basis in the immediate ensoulment of the embryo. With the decision taken by the Inqui­ sition under Innocent XI, the conceptus had to be considered a person right from the beginning. Something had evidently changed in the time that had elapsed between the two definitions.

143 

‘Baptismate homo constituitur in ecclesia Christi persona’: canon 87, quoted by Le Bras, ‘La personne dans le droit classique de l’Eglise’, p. 193.

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The Person Wir führen die Wörter von ihrer metaphysischen, wieder auf ihre alltägliche Verwendung zurück. What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, i.116, pp. 41–41e Abortire vuol dire sopprimere non già una persona, ma il disegno remoto e pallido di una persona Abortion does not mean suppressing a complete person, but the pale, remote design of a person Natalia Ginzburg, Non possiamo saperlo, pp. 26–30

O

n the back of a portrait by Ridolfo Bigordi (Ghirlandaio), which now hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, we can read the following words: ‘sua cuique persona’ (to each his own mask).1 The words basically mean that everyone is given a mask, a character to represent in the theatre of life.2 And the mask which each of us has, and which differs from individual 1 

On the cover of the ‘Ritratto femminile’ (‘La Monaca’) (‘Portrait of a Woman’, [‘The Nun’]) by Ridolfo di Ghirlandaio, Uffizi Gallery, Florence. 2  It is a proverbial phrase which has entered common parlance, and hence the source is not important. However, as pointed out to me by Gian Biagio Conte and Rolando Ferri, the phrase echoes the words of Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. by Russell, v. 12–13 (ii, 460–61): ‘Illae firmiores ex sua cuique persona probationes quae credibilem rationem subiectam habent’; and Seneca the Younger, De beneficiis, trans. by Basore, ii. 7. 13 (iii, 82–83):

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to individual, is what we present at the highest part of our bodies, our face. The portrait is a reproduction of this. Deceptive mask or portrait of the soul? This is the question that comes to mind when we look at the outward appearance of the face. An unattractive or decidedly ugly face can hide great inner beauty. This is a contrast analyzed by Erasmus in one of his famous Adagia, the ‘Sileni Alcibiadis’. The statuettes of Silenus were little figures of carved wood which could be opened, and inside contained the image of a deity. Let us take Socrates, observed Erasmus, and judge him by his physical appearance. 3 Painters, who were tied to what they could see, had to depict the face, but in doing so they had various ways of expressing a sense of the relationship between external appearance and the authentic reality of the individual. The portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi Tornabuoni, by Domenico Bigordi, Ghirlandaio, bears a quotation from Martial (probably suggested by Poliziano): Ars utinam mores animumque effingere posset pulchrior in terries nulla tabella foret. (Art, if only you were able to represent the costumes, character, and soul, There would be no more beautiful painting on earth)

The beautiful Giovanna would be even more beautiful if the artist were able to depict her soul. It is worth remembering that in 1488, the date on the painting, the beautiful Giovanna was already dead, having died young, in childbirth. In practice, the painter resolves the hypothetical contrast between her face and her soul by representing her face as the point of access to the profound reality of her as an individual and as a means of keeping her memory alive. The contrast between the deceptive appearance and the hidden truth of the individual was felt at the time with particular intensity, producing different effects on culture; and this is was what attracted its greatest historian, Jacob Burckhardt. Its highest, most creative moment had a special characteristic: the quest for the soul, a journey which was bound to encounter and clash with the physical reality of the body. In his research into the individual features of the human face, Leonardo da Vinci ascribed them to the relationship between ‘Adspicienda ergo non minus sua cuique persona est quam eius, de quo iuvando quis cogitat’. 3  ‘Anyone who had valued him [Socrates] skin-deep (as they say) would not have given twopence for him. With his peasant face, glaring like a bull, and his snub nose always sniffling [...] Yet, had you opened this absurd Silenus, you would have found, you may be sure, a divine being rather than a man, a great and lofty spirit’, Erasmus, The Sileni of Alcibiades, ed. and trans. by Wootton, p. 71.

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the bone structure, the permanent architecture of the body, and the changing forms of the tissues which covered it. His portraits of toothless old men, with their wrinkled skin sagging on their bony features, juxtaposed with those of boys and young men, tell us that what changes in time is the, so to speak, sculptural part of soft tissue, while the architectural structure constituted by that which lasts longest, the skeleton and the skull, gradually emerges.4 The attention of artists to facial features reflected a wider problem, however, one which was also the subject of humanist reflection at the time. Let us go back to the words which can be read on the cover of the portrait by Ghirlandaio, ‘sua cuique persona’. This learned quotation points to the presence of an expert philologist, Poliziano to be precise, who was known to have worked with Ghirlandaio’s workshop. Poliziano was responsible for the translation from Greek into Latin of a fundamental work for the new culture, a culture which looked towards the ancients in its search for a pre-Christian morality: Epictetus’s Enchiridion. A handbook which aimed precisely at establishing the fundamental rules for the wise man’s behaviour, Epictetus’s work put forward an entirely individual, internalized morality, devoid of any external legitimization in so far as it was indifferent to social conventions and rejected any connection with religious beliefs. The gods were remote and inscrutable, and man’s task was to remain totally free and calm in the face of life’s accidents, dismissing all the passions and worries which relationships and external things bring to those who are not able to distance themselves from them. The Gods exist and it is right for them to be the object of a cult; but they must not be pestered with complaints and requests. We must take what we have received and act out our part by accepting the role we have been assigned: Sovvegnati che tu non sei qui altro che un attore di un drama, il quale sarà o breve o lungo, secondo la volontà del poeta. E se a costui piace che tu rappresenti la persona di un mendico, studia di rappresentarla acconciamente. Il simile se ti è assegnata la persona di uno zoppo, di un magistrato, di un uomo comune. Atteso che a te si aspetta solamente di rappresentare bene quella qual si sia persona che ti è destinata: lo eleggerla si appartiene a un altro’ (Remember that here you are none other than an actor in a drama, which may be long or short, as it pleases the author. And if it is his pleasure you should act a poor beggar see that you act it naturally, and the same if you are assigned the role of a

4 

Laurenza, De figura umana.

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cripple, a governor, or a private person. For this is your business, merely to act well the character assigned you; to choose it is another’s.)5

The Christian West thus saw the reappearance of terms and images which had originated in the context of a completely different concept of morality and the individual. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in an old but still fundamental work, the German scholar Siegmund Schlossmann described the history of the Greek word ‘prosopon’ and the Latin word ‘persona’.6 It is a peculiar history because, as Schlossmann shows, these two words were associated with the two meanings, ‘mask’ and ‘man or human being’, two meanings which are as different in appearance as they have been extraordinarily capable of juxtaposing themselves and intertwining with each other throughout the course of the centuries. The Roman ritual described by Suetonius, in which wax masks of an ancestor (‘persona’, ‘imago’) were worn on certain solemn occasions, is an indication of the interplay between memory, mask, and the ritual survival of the dead.7 At the centre is the face of the human being, that part of the individual where the sense of identity is summed up and concentrated. An astute Jesuit was able to observe that, ‘sì come la mascara ha l’esteriore apparenza di faccia humana, ma è priva con tutto ciò di senso, così li cadaveri de’ defonti abbandonati dall’anima non ritengono altro di huomo che quella figura esteriore’ (just as a mask has the external appearance of the human face, but it lacks all understanding, so the corpses of the dead abandoned by their soul retain nothing that is human except the external form).8 This was the first step on a road which was to lead a long way: ‘[t]o cover the face seems — but is not — a natural act’, wrote Carlo Ginzburg, noting ‘the well-nigh universal association between masks and the spirits of the dead’.9 The witch, as she who communicates with the world of the dead, was also known as a ‘masca’.10 It is in the Christian conception of the eternal survival of the 5 

Epictetus, Manuale, ed. by de Ruggiero, pp. 37, 39. Leopardi takes up the term ‘persona’ used by Poliziano to translate the original ‘prosopon’: ‘Memento te actorem te esse fabulae […] ad te enim pertinet datam tibi personam bene agree; eligere, ad alium’. 6  Schlossmann, Persona und πρόσωπον im Recht und im christlichen Dogma. Scholssmann aimed to counter von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, and its theory that the notion of ‘persona’ was introduced by the legal culture of Tertullian. 7  Attested in Suet. Ves. 19. 8  Menochio, Stuore, iii, 238. Menochio refers to Baronio, Annales Ecclesiastici, a.d. 31, as the source of his interpretation. 9  Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes, trans. by Ryle and Soper, p. 265. 10  See the fundamental study by Meuli, ‘Die deutschen Masken’, quoted by Ginzburg, Storia

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individual soul that we find the roots of a profound change in the notion of ‘persona’: the dead, those who are absent from the world of the living are not only an image, a mask, but a living reality. And all the more so because Christ is a living reality, God and man. When St Bernard wrote that the pope represents the person of Christ, he put forward a very intense ‘bodily image’, describing a relationship in which the pope is made of ‘the bones of his [Christ’s] bone, and flesh of his flesh’.11 As it has been observed, in Christian Patristic culture, ‘every reduction, deformation, or variation in the way of conceiving Christ’s per­­son and his human nature (Arianism, Apollinarism, Nestorianism, or Monophysim) was inevitably reflected in the person and the nature of man, marked by the seal of God’s image’.12 And yet in the Christian world the practice survived of representing the dead by means of masks, where the masks took on a new type of ritual and reli­gi­­ous meaning. As for the presence of the dead individual through an image of them, Schlossmann was unaware of the study which had been published a few years earlier by Aby Warburg on the art of the portrait in fifteenth-century Florence;13 but he would certainly have been struck by one of the stories it recounts: that of the votive wax figures in the Florentine church of the Santissima Annunziata, a prac­tice which Francesco Sacchetti had deemed to be pagan idolatry, but which revealed much about the environment in which the portrait as a realistic rep­­re­­sentation of the individual was to reach its highest peak. As John PopeHennessy has written, ‘the role of Renaissance portraits was commemorative: it was consciously directed to a future where the living would no longer be alive’.14 As a fixing of the memory of the real, unmistakable physiognomy of the individual, the portrait was also a mask, which aimed at the same time to show the individual’s moral quality, to dig into their character and suggest the features of their personality. Indeed the memory of a face, of that particular face, could be transmitted by a mask: the wax mask modelled on the face of the dead person. In this period, it was part of the ordinary activity of artists’ workshops, such notturna. Caprini, ‘La strega mascherata’ also refers to Meuli. See also Schmitt, ‘Le maschere, il diavolo, i morti’, pp. 206–38. 11  A. Paravicini Bagliani defines it as ‘a bodily image of tremendous christological power’, in Paravicini Bagliani, The Pope’s Body, trans. by Peterson, p. 59. As Paravicini Bagliani points out, Pope Innocent III further distorted St Bernard’s image to define the pope as he who ‘brings’ or ‘represents [‘gerit’] the person of Christ. 12  Siniscalco, ‘I diritti umani nella storia della cultura’, pp. 99–102. 13  Warburg, ‘Bildkunst und florentinisches Bürgertum’, pp. 184–262. 14  Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance, pp. 7–8.

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as that of Verrocchio or Ghirlandaio, to produce death masks in plaster; and some time later Giorgio Vasari spoke of the display of images of ancestors in Florentine houses as a habitual fact.15 In tracing the evolution of the term’s semantic value, Schlossmann identified law and Christian doctrine as the fundamental fields for following the transition from the notion of mask to that of individual. The vocabulary of Aristotelian logic, with its distinction between ‘substance’ and ‘accident’ offered a tool which made it possible to reify the notion of ‘persona’, so to speak, to make it coincide with the soul, or more precisely, with one of the vari­­ous souls or properties that the ancient world had identified in the human being, from the vegetative and the animal, up to the final, exclusive, rational soul of man. For every man, being a ‘person’ consisted of the rational soul as an individual substance, and this definition by Boethius was handed down to medieval Chris­ tian theology.16 Yet this definition did not derive from philosophical reflection into the nature of man, but rather from the need to define the nature of God. It was by discussing the divine nature of Jesus that Christians had elaborated the notion of ‘person’. Jesus the man had declared himself to be the son of God; but what was the relationship between the Son and the Father? The Jewish religious tradition had affirmed and rigidly defended the idea of a single God, invisible, eternal, inscrutable, and omnipotent. And indeed according to the Hebrew Bible, God had created man in his own image, as can be read in the most famous passage from Genesis. Christianity defined the nature of God by starting from this basis and profoundly modifying it; but in doing so, since the essential event was now constituted by God made man in the Incarnation, it was necessary to redefine the notions of human nature. In this way a theory of the essence of man was elaborated. Every operation in the field of the religious representation of the superhuman world implied and re-elaborated human self15 

Warburg, ‘The Art of Portraiture’, pp. 185–222. On the wax votive statues of the church of the Santissima Annunziata see Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance, pp. 137–41. On the diffusion of the wax portrait in Florence, after the studies by Warburg and Julius von Schlosser, now see Pommier, Thèories du portrait, pp. 80–83. 16  Boethius’s famous definition, ‘Persona est naturae rationalis individua substantia’: Boethius, De persona, col. 1343, and the analogous definition by Cassiodorus; ‘Persona vero hominis est substantia rationalis individua’: Cassiodorus, Expositio in Psalterium, lxvi, are also stressed by Schlossmann, Persona und πρόσωπον im Recht und im christlichen Dogma, p. 111. Rheinfelder, Das Wort ‘Persona’, pp. 169–70, also believes that Boethius is to be considered the first to have given the term a philosophical meaning and to have introduced it into theological and philosophical language.

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consciousness, and this in a much more direct and demanding way than was normally the case in religious representation. It was in this way that the Christian notion of ‘person’ came to be defined in the doctrine of the Trinity. By looking at God man saw himself, or rather he saw his most exalted quality, a divine model concealed behind the natural being which grows and reproduces: Dante, the pilgrim in paradise, set his eyes on the Trinity and saw it ‘dentro da sé, del suo colore stesso […] pinta della nostra effigie’ (depicted with our image within itself and in its own color).17 The procedure could be reversed: those who attempted to produce a visual representation of the Trinity ended up by portraying it as a body with three faces, three identical masks.18 In the elaboration of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity a definition took shape of what it was in the human being that appeared to be the essential quality of man, the very trace of divinity. The long debate over the Trinity, caught between the opposite perils of a return to ancient polytheism and a denial of the divine nature of Jesus, led the Latin world to the notion of the three ‘persons’ in a single God, through a theological interpretation and defi­­nition of the term person which stressed one fact above the others, the ‘substantia rationalis’. An attribute which up to then had referred to human beings was now conferred on an entirely spiritual divine being, with the result of reflecting the metaphysical value and supreme nobility of this attribute back onto the human being. By re-elaborating the meaning of the term with reference to the human being, the notion of ‘person’ was understood as referring not to the individual in general, but to his greatest and most spiritual component, the rational soul. This original fact therefore was the starting point for the history of the term ‘person’ in the world of Christian Europe. Research by a scholar of the Romance languages has led to significant confirmation of this by showing among other things that the theological use of the term ‘person’ for the three persons of the Trinity and its divulgation by means of preaching was at the origin of the popular use of the term which spread from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century.19 It was the humanist philologist Lorenzo Valla who noted the modern turning point in the use of the term. For Valla, ‘person’ did not indicate substance, 17 

Dante, Paradiso, xxxiii. 130–31. Destroyed during the age of the Reformation and the Council of Trent because they were considered superstitious or liable to encourage polytheism, these images survive in a small number of copies: see for example, Dupreux, Jezler, and J. Wirth, Iconoclasme, p. 282. 19  Rheinfelder, Das Wort ‘Persona’, pp. 180–81. 18 

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but quality or characteristic, and as such it designated the differences between one being of the same species and another, and was thus valid for animals, human beings, and divinities; the qualities that define an individual, as fearful, irascible, generous, and so on, are those which distinguish him from others. Only a barbarous use of language could transform qualities into substance.20 It was a simple linguistic observation, but it had important consequences. Valla’s work, which for this reason ended up on the Index of prohibited books, was to incite criticism of the doctrine of the Trinity by Lelio Sozzini and the antTrinitarians of sixteenth century Italy. His observation contains the seed of the modern turning point in which the individual I was increasingly to appear as a term called on to cover a plurality of persons. There is more than one person in the same individual: Michel de Montaigne’s self-reflection revealed a state of changing sentiments, states of mind, convictions, and dispositions, in a word, of persons, which were concealed behind an individual subject. Thus, even if the words with which we describe reality are still those of antiquity, between the medieval definition of person as a substance and our definition lay a new consciousness and a different graduation of the linguistic tool. And not only of the linguistic tool: the ancient Stoic morality of the individual who accepts the mask he has been designated without complaint and who acts out his part in the theatre of the world was to become the strict morality of the modern man in the reply that Epictetus’s handbook received from Erasmus of Rotterdam. His Enchiridion militis christiani (or Handbook of a Christian Knight, 1504), proposed a purified religion, free from ceremonial practices and the system of exchange between man the client and God the patron. In its place, referring back to the Christian notion of the immortal soul, Erasmus made the higher morality of the wise man coincide with the spiritual part of man, struggling with his body: the finite nature of human life which Epictetus’s morality took as a measure of its authentic value and proof of the lack of value of material goods, became here the point of departure for an earthly life oriented towards the final union of the individual soul with God. The soul was what counted in man. If Bartolomeo Scala had accused Epictetus of being too obscure and had 20 

‘Persona […] non est in Deo magis quam in bruto, sicut humanitas, sicut alia plura’. In man, person indicates the quality ‘qua alius ab alio differimus […] vel uti in me est persona humani, liberalis, timidi, iracundi’. In every individual there is a ‘multiplex persona, ac diversa’, but only one substance […] ‘in Deo triplex est qualitas’: Valla, Elegantiarum Latinae Linguae, vi. 23, pp. 420–22. The passage, in the interpretation given to it by Lelio Sozzini, is quoted by Cantimori, D., Eretici italiani del Cinquecento e altri scritti, pp. 240–41: see also on pp 240–41 its condemnation in the Indexes, from the Spanish one of 1583 up to that of Benedict XIV, with the indication ‘donec corrigatur’.

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objected ‘che in noi c’è anche il corpo’ (that we also have a body), Poliziano, called on for having been the first to translate Epictetus’s Enchiridion into Latin — replied by quoting Plato: ‘man is nothing but the soul characterized by reason’; man uses his body just as the shoemaker his awl.21 Plato’s philosophy and Stoic morality thus came together in Florentine humanistic culture. As we have already seen, it was around the nature and the fate of the soul, in a context profoundly imbued with theology, that the debate was to centre in the years that followed. But the terms of the problem were substantially established over a short period of time between the introduction of Epictetus’s handbook and Erasmus’s reply to it. The strict morality of he who strips himself of every egoistic impulse towards the things of this world, breaking down the boundaries between the monk and the ordinary Christian, marked the birth of the modern version of Christianity with which the official Churches had to come to terms. And the process of the affirmation of individual values which was emblematic of the period contributed to this result: the conviction, often repeated today, that life ‘comes from the future, that it is the future which opens itself up unexpectedly’22 — as a philosopher of our time has written — can be taken as a measure of the distance which divides us from a culture which was weighed down by the past, on a legal and a symbolic level: it is enough to think of the doctrine of original sin (whose results we have seen) or the community constituted by the living and the dead, in which the individual was placed.23 Many threads lead off from this moment of crisis and it would be difficult to follow them all, even summarily. Some scholars have reconstructed the origins of the doctrine of natural rights by showing how it was grafted onto the Christian concept of ‘person’, making the duties of the individual and the attitude of society towards him derive from the spiritual component of the human being. There is a thread that runs from medieval theological literature — which isolated the spiritual and rational component as something common to God the person and man — up to the modern turning point which defined the individual as a moral being in possession of freedom and led to the solemn eighteenth-century definitions of natural rights which later passed into common 21 

Letter by Angeli Poliziani dated 1 August 1479, in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. by Garin, p. 915. 22  ‘La vida es un futuro que se abre inesperado, la vida del futuro’: Zambrano, Persona y democracìa, p. 146. 23  This aspect is stressed by Schmid and Wollasch, ‘Die Gemeinschaft der Lebenden und Verstorbenen’.

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use.24 It was in the Enlightenment indeed that the attention to words inaugurated by the humanists was to reach a decisive point: a way of understand the notion of ‘person’ spread as the thread of consciousness which links individual identity through different times and places. It was surely not by chance that the decisive impulse provided by John Lock to the abandoning of the medieval notion of substance, replaced by a subjective idea of identity, was clearly rejected by the censors of the Roman Congregation of the Index. A first sign of attention registered in the acts of the congregation of 18 November, 1709, was the prelude to the condemnation which was to follow years later. 25 It is difficult to say what was felt of these changes in the common perception of personal identity in the Bologna where Lucia Cremonini awaited her destiny in prison. And yet Bologna was at the origin of reflection which slowly developed over the course of the century, and which also invested the system of individual rights and punishments, including the way in which the condition of women was viewed. The importance of the eighteenth-century turning point in the conception of human rights is beyond doubt. And yet the theological origin and metaphysical basis still transpire from the indefinable but clear difference that remains between the ‘rights of the individual’ and the ‘rights of the person’: it could be defined as a difference of substance, strictly speaking. Nor can we forget the way in which lawyers attempted to distinguish between the simple human individual and the ‘person’ as a man in possession of a certain condition or civic status.26 The legacy of the ancient notion of ‘person’ as a mask to wear or an institution (a legal entity) can be found in the course of the Middle Ages in the expression ‘gerere personam alicuius’, in the sense of representing someone, wearing their mask. Thus the pope could present himself as ‘he who represents Christ’ (‘gerere personam Christi’).27 And in this field of the importance of representation, Ernst Kantorowicz’s masterly work has shown how at a sovereign’s 24  See Tierney, ‘Origins of Natural Rights Language’. On the development of theological and philosophical doctrines regarding the notion of person as a moral subject and the ‘metaphysics of freedom’, see Kobusch, Die Entdeckung of Person. 25  The documents have been lucidly analysed by Costa, ‘La Santa Sede di fronte a Locke’. Locke’s definition of ‘person’ is given in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Nidditch, ii. xxvii, pp. 328–48. I thank Dr Pasqualino Masciarelli for help he gave me in this and other matters in a field with which he is very familiar. 26  ‘Persona est homo statu quodam veluti indutus’: the definition by Heineccius is quoted by Schlossmann, Persona und πρόσωπον im Recht und im christlichen Dogma, p. 4. 27  See above, n. **.

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funeral the effigy (the death mask) of the dead king, publicly displayed, stood as a guarantee of the permanency of the monarchy.28 The interlacing within the concept and the use of ‘person’, therefore — on one hand of ‘substance’ and on the other ‘mask’, on one hand unmistakable individuality and on the other the interchangeability of an attribute which can be transmitted to others — worked profoundly within the history of European civilization up until recent times. It remains in the background to guarantee the inexhaustible vitality of a true question of great moment, that of the consistency and the dignity that the individual can set against the threats from the great forces that tend to conform it and use it as a tool, when not destroying it altogether. The attempt to found certain fundamental rights on nature, to be guaranteed to every human being, has left its mark in the history of the solemn declarations which have followed on from one another from the eighteenth century up until our present time. When the prevailing conditions have become particularly threatening, however, the metaphysical foundation identified by Christianity as the individual possession of a soul as a substance created by God and destined for eternal life, has become relevant again. The dates speak for themselves: it was in 1938 that Marcel Mauss, in a brief but important essay on the notion of ‘person’, called attention to the religious implications of a Christian nature and the theological weight of the term: ‘It is Christians who have made a metaphysical entity of the “moral person”’.29 By creating a summary historical outline of the notion of ‘person’ as the idea that men have had of the self (‘moi’) as a category, Mauss observed that the decisive transition to the modern concept took place with the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the individual soul and the condemnation (in 1513 by the Fifth Lateran Council) of the philosophical doctrines which denied it. ‘The Christian faith in the immortality of the individual soul had laid the foundation of the modern idea of ‘“person”’.30 It was on the foundations of this concept, Mauss observed, that Kant and Fichte had constructed the category of the self (‘moi’). Hence it could be said that ‘our own notion of the human person is still basically the Christian one’.31 28 

Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. Mauss, ‘A Category of the Human Mind’, trans. by Halls, p. 19 (translation of Mauss, ‘Une catégorie de l’esprit humain’). Mauss’s theory has been verified and developed by means of a comparison between the Western Christian concept of person and that of other religions and cultures in Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes, The Category of the Person. 30  Mauss, ‘A Category of the Human Mind’, trans. by Halls, p. 19. 31  Mauss, ‘A Category of the Human Mind’, trans. by Halls, p. 19. 29 

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Summary and simplified though it was, Mauss’s conclusion implicitly signalled a reversal of the presuppositions on which has master, Émile Durkheim, had constructed the new and revolutionary common discipline of sociology. The possibility of elaborating a science of social behaviour with its own laws depended substantially on the collective nature of mental representations, or, as Durkheim literally said, of the spiritual principle, that is to say, the soul. For Durkheim the principle of individuation resided in the body, while the soul constituted a principle of collective identity: the notion of person is the product of two sorts of factors. One of these is essentially impersonal: it is the spiritual principle serving as the soul of the group. In fact, it is this which constitutes the very substance of individual souls. Now this is not the possession of any one in particular: it is part of the collective patrimony.32

It was precisely the collective and impersonal nature of the ‘spiritual principle’ which guaranteed the possibility of studying its laws on one hand, and of dominating it and guiding its development on the other. Historians, even those most willing to recognize the value of renewal brought by Durkheim’s ideas, replied by vigorously re-affirming the unity and the inner development of the individual I, refusing to dissolve it in collective representations.33 But Marcel Mauss’s brusque return to the Christian foundations of the notion of ‘person’ can be understood by taking into account its context, against which it takes on a prophetic value. The danger which lurked on the European horizon in 1938 was the most radical denial ever of the sacred nature of the human person. The Holocaust was to place the world before the urgent need to re- elaborate the past in a new way but also to reformulate the question of what constitutes that added value of individual identity which is summed up in the term ‘person’. It is by no means chance that in 1945 the Preamble to the Charter of the United Nations reaffirmed ‘faith in fundamental human rights’, adding ‘in the dignity and worth of the human person’; and from this point onwards the term has become a ritual presence in the solemn declarations of international authorities. Besides any analogy in the contents, there is undoubtedly a different nuance and a different tone in those who speak of the rights of man and those who prefer to speak of the rights of the person. A certain sacred, 32 

Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. by Swain, p. 270. See also Durkheim’s chapter ‘The Idea of the Soul’: book ii, chapter viii, pp. 240–72. 33  Significant is the position of Marc Bloch, who, in his last work, evoked ‘the deep-seated unity of the ego and the constant intermingling of its various attitudes’, though recognizing that ‘our minds have interior partitions’: Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. by Putnam, p. 125.

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civic, or explicitly religious solemnity generally denotes those contexts in which the term ‘person’ appears. And a rich historical, legal, and philosophical literature has accompanied these professions of faith and solemn declarations. Those historians who have dealt with the question have done so by analysing the theological and legal developments which took place in Christian Europe in the period between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Scholars from other disciplines — working independently of Mauss — have also contributed to the problem of the identity and the sacredness of the person, the way in which these values have been elaborated in the history of culture, and the meaning they have today.34 This is not simply a return to the values of traditional Christianity and the metaphysics of the soul: for the religion of our time the sacred value to be protected is human life: not the life which was once projected into the Kingdom of Heaven, but earthly life. The recent contribution made by genetic engineering to the demolition of the traditional categories of identity has taken a step in this direction. If it is necessary to defend every human being’s right to life, it is also necessary to clarify from what point onwards it is possible to speak of the existence of this being, and the ways in which its rights can be accommodated with those of others. The progress made by the sciences ‘of life’ has pushed the beginning of human existence back to the moment of conception and the earliest formation of the embryo. And here the ancient question has resurfaced of the relationship between the woman who conceives and bears the new human being and that which lives inside her. The notion of ‘person’ and the possibility of applying it to the embryo have been discussed and elaborated from various points of view.35 The question of the rights of the human embryo has raised and the notion of ‘person’ has been scrutinized again by re-enacting what Habermas has defined as ‘the dispute over heritage between philosophy and religion’.36 There are many differences between our present and that of Lucia Cremonini: differences regarding technical knowledge, social relations, and culture. And 34 

See, for example, the recent work Kobusch, Die Entdeckung of Person, whose lengthy bibliography, however, does not include Mauss’s work. 35  We can indicate among the most recent works the extensive study by Bertrand-Mirkovic, La notion de persone. Though written from the point of view of French legislation on abortion, it provides an exhaustive panorama of the state of research. On the subject of bioethics, we must remember the ‘Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights’ approved by UNESCO in 1997, which is discussed in the acts of a recent conference: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Bioetica e tutela della persona. 36  Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, trans. by Rehg, Pensky, and Beister, p. 111.

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above all, death: no one now demands a certificate of baptism at the gates of the cemetery. But it is still difficult for those who have not been born to die. It has been possible to regulate the burial of stillborn babies and foetuses under 180 days, and this represents a degree of progress with respect to the treatment of that baby killed by the young woman of Bologna, which was not buried and shared the fate of the restless spirits of folklore. It also represents progress with respect to those problems which in the Papal State of the nineteenth century prevented the burial of a baby who had been baptized with an imprecise formula.37 But in order to achieve this limited success it has been necessary to distinguish between ‘legal entity’ and ‘person’:38 those who are not yet born and die are not entitled to any rights, yet their body cannot be degraded to the status of a thing. It is therefore necessary to distinguish it as a non person, a non thing, but still a human being. This conclusion was reached by considering the historical precedent of the African slave trade, where human beings were sold as things. It is one of the many examples of the difficult, faltering nature of the historical process of balancing the relationship between power and social rules, the concept of human nature and the way in which real human beings are treated. Lucia Cremonini’s son was, as we have seen, a ‘creature’ without a name, a non-­­person. He was made this by the fact that he had not been baptized. He did not benefit, therefore, from the revolution brought by Christianity, which (according to Marcel Mauss) consisted precisely of attributing every human being with the dignity of being a ‘person’ in so far as they possess an immortal soul. If modern lawyers have difficulty in finding the right balance between the rights of the mother and those of the child, then so too did those of the premodern age. Christian theology had shown itself to be incapable of resolving the fundamental problem of giving the soul of unbaptized babies a proper place in the other world which was both just and definitive. It was a being without name, a body denied the peace of the Christian graveyard, a spirit destined to wander restlessly in the world of the living. There was no justice, no compensation possible in this case. The murdering mother was left to face judgement.

37  Cases of this kind were presented to the Inquisition between 1853 and 1856 from Viterbo and Bagnorea: see Congregazione Vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede, Arch. del Sant’Uffizio, Stanza storica, M 6, n-r, Dubia de Sacramentis, 1853–56, fasc. 3 and 7. 38  Bertrand-Mirkovic, La notion de persone, p. 376.

Chapter 17

The Sentence

Ut moriatur et anima ab

eius corpore separetur (That she Die and her Soul be Separated from her Body)

O

n 16 January, 1710, as we have seen, the criminal Congregation met: Lucia’s case, which had by now reached its conclusion, was presented with others before the cardinal legate, the vice-legate, the auditor of the court of the Torrone, and the other members of the Congregation, which was the body responsible for criminal cases. According to the rules, the sentence was to be recorded and carried out by the auditor of the Torrone. On the following Tuesday, 21 January, the auditor had the summons drawn up for Lucia to appear on the first working day immediately following — hence the 22nd — for the sentence to be read and executed. She was handed the summons by the public notifying officer of the court, a certain Carlo Zucchini. The sentence was written in solemn, bombastic Latin, full of rhetorical formulas and reiterations — ‘Dicimus, pronunciamus, decernimus, declaramus et diffinitive sentiamus’ — expressing a serious and irrevocable decision; the very sound of it must have been terrifying, and perhaps there was no need for anyone to provide Lucia with a translation to explain its meaning. Having begun by invoking more than once the name of God and Christ, doctor Marco Antonio Venturini, a Roman and auditor of the Torrore of Bologna, in the name of the most Holy Father in Christ, Pope Clement XI, charged with investigating and deciding the cases brought before him, summarized the events that concerned Lucia up to the birth of the child and its murder, stressing the deliberate attempt to hide

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the pregnancy; he reminded the court that the pregnancy had been noticed by many; he described using details which had been provided during the trial the moment in which the baby had been killed, the way in which the killing had taken place, and the subsequent intention to get rid of the little body; finally he condemned Lucia Cremonini, the daughter of the late (‘quondam’) Nicola da Manzolino, to death, to be carried out by means of hanging. The large loops of the notary’s handwriting, with its complacent elegance and humanistic serenity, embellished a text which left nothing to the imagination as regards the terrifying moment of execution: the condemned woman was to be taken as soon as possible to the usual place of justice and there, under the high scaffolds already erected by the ministry of Justice, she was to be hanged until she was dead and her soul separated from her body (‘ita ut moriatur et anima ab eius corpore seperetur’). The auditor’s signature sealed this last point, which marked the limit of his authority. As for Lucia, she was to be convoked at dawn the next day to hear the sentence (‘ad audiendam sententiam’) and to submit to its immediate execution. Capital punishment was meted out for a capital crime and to provide an example for everyone (‘ut ei sit condigna poena delicti et in aliorum transeat exemplum’). The punishment was not aggravated, in the way that was indicated by Charles V’s imperial constitution, the terrible ‘Carolina’. The document was drawn up on 22 January. Then little posters (‘polizzini’) were affixed at the corners of Piazza Maggiore, bearing the following words: Questa mattina s’impicca LUCIA CREMONINI dal Commune di Manzolino, habitante in Bologna nel Borgo di S. Pietro, per infanticidio commesso con cortello nella persona del proprio figlio all’ora nato vivo. In fede, & c. Questo dì 22 Gennaro 1710.1 (This morning LUCIA CREMONINI from the Comune of Manzolino, inhabitant of Bologna, in Borgo di S. Pietro, will be hanged for infanticide committed with a knife against the person of her own son, who was born alive. In faith, etc. This day, 22 January, 1710).

Lucia Cremonini was hanged. Her body was not buried but was given over for the purposes of public anatomy lessons, a great public spectacle which filled the square during the Bologna carnival.2 1 

An exemplar is preserved in Bologna, Biblioteca Arcivescovile, fondo ‘Scuola de’ Confortatori’, Polizzotti de’ condannati a morte in Bologna dall’anno 1643 al 1714 […] raccolta […] fatta da Carlo Antonio Macchiavelli, b. 8, fasc. 12. 2  ‘Lucia Cremonini da Manzolino […] fu impiccata per infanticidio commesso con cortello nella persona del proprio figlio allora nato e poi fu dato il cadavere alla Pubblica Anatomia’:

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In the space of a year, Lucia had gone from a festive carnival to the carnival of the gallows. The crowd in Piazza Maggiore, which she had been part of during the 1709 carnival, had the special opportunity the following year of participating in the spectacle of seeing her body cut up. The file ends by recording a final judicial practice: captain Giovan Francesco Brunetti, ‘bargello’ (chief police officer) of Bologna, presented a petition re­­ questing that he be given the usual reward for those who captured a criminal guilty of a capital crime, namely, the possibility of freeing a ‘bandito capitale per simile o minor delitto’ (a bandit condemned to capital punishment for a similar or lesser crime): his request was granted. It was undoubtedly a good result for a police force which was well-known for its corruption.3 The death of Lucia was the passport which allowed some murderer or bandit to return to Bolognese civic life. We do not know his name. This is the bare description of the events as they appear in the legal documents; but it does not contain the whole story of Lucia’s death. The preparation and implementation of an execution as a legal procedure has always been something quite different from a private killing. Here we must remember the considerations made by a great scholar regarding the death penalty in ancient Greece: If the act of putting a criminal to death were only a practical solution to the problem of legal responsibility, and nothing more than the brutal manifestation of a quasi-instinctive passion, then our tour through the garden of punishments would hardly merit any interest, even the interest of the curious. But such is not the case; and now it is quite legitimate for us to emphasize a contrast between two types of capital punishment.4

And the fact that it is not so can be demonstrated by the extraordinary attention which has always been lavished on descriptions and analysis of capital punishment: stories of the condemned, their crimes and their punishments, descriptions of the rites and mechanisms of punishment; but also, increasingly, investigations into systems of justice and power structures in order to understand, by means of and beyond the individual cases, the power relationships and the Bologna, Bib. comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Libro dei giustiziati di Bologna, Fondo Ospedali, MS 66, ii, 1674–796, unnumbered fols. On public dissections see Ferrari, ‘Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival’. 3  This is what emerges from the information gathered by Hughes, ‘Fear and Loathing in Bologna and Rome’. 4  Gernet, The Anthropology of Ancient Greece, trans. by Hamilton and Nagy, see ch. 10, ‘Capital Punishment’, pp. 252–76, 265.

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social dynamics of justice. It remains difficult, however, to understand the meaning of public executions in societies of the ancien régime if we stop at the most immediately obvious aspects of the public theatre of horror, the spectacle of suffering based on the exhibition of what Michel Foucault has called the ‘l’éclat des supplices’ (the splendour of suffering by torture).5 An important turning point lies between us and the criminal justice system that condemned Lucia Cremonini: the battle fought in the enlightened eighteenth-century by those — Cesare Beccaria and Pietro Verri in the first place — who opposed the use of capital punishment and discussed its legitimacy with arguments that forced enlightened governments of abolish it, and which are still used today to support new battles for reform. These critics saw the death penalty and the practice of criminal justice as a form of unjustified, useless, and unproductive suffering. Yet it is still necessary to try to understand what it was that supported this practice throughout the history of that Christian culture which had invested so much in the exploration of human nature. The edifice created by culture on the foundations of the legal taking of life was a building that boasted great arcades, which had truly been created by heaven and earth. By considering its ancient forms from a distance in time we run the risk of failing to perceive its persuasive force and its capacity to support the profound structures of collective life. This does not mean going to the opposite extremes, like those who have taken the ritual aspects and the religious content of executions to derive a general theory of culture based on the deciphering of a hypothetical secret concealed in killing as human sacrifice. 6 Robert Hertz has written that the death of every individual présent pour la conscience sociale une signification determine, elle fait l’objet d’une representation collective. Cette representation n’est ni simple ni immutable: il y a lieu d’en analyser les elements, et d’en rechercher la genèse. (presents a precise meaning for the social conscience, it becomes the object of collective representation. This representation is neither simple nor unchanging: it is necessary to analyse its elements and to search for its genesis)7 5 

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. by Sheridan, chapter 2, pp. 32–69. See on one hand the theory by Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. by Gregory and other subsequent articles; and on the other the abundant historical literature devoted to the rites of pre-Enlightenment justice, among which Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering; and van Dülmen, Theater des Schreckens. The wide-ranging monograph by Evans, Rituals of Retribution refers to rituals from its title page onwards. 7  Hertz, ‘A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death’. 6 

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This is particularly true for judicial death, a form of death which ultimately has nothing to do with nature and is by definition the exclusive product of culture. The idea of justice which held this society together was called on by to give proof of itself.

Part Four: Justice Because, and this is the awful privilege of our generation and of my people, no one better than us has ever been able to grasp the incurable nature of the offence, that spreads like a contagion. It is foolish to think that human justice can eradicate it. Primo Levi, The Reawakening, p. 2 He has left us splendid metaphors and a doctrine of pardon that can annul the past. Borges, ‘Christ on the Cross’, p. 22

Her son had been deprived of life on earth without the possibility of retribution in the next world. The only resource that God’s justice — the touchstone of human justice — had for him was Limbo, a non place and a non life. That destination, which appeared to many as cruel and inexplicable, was sustained on a theoretical level in the Catholic world by the need to justify obligatory infant baptism. But the theologians’ arguments concealed a deeply-rooted cultural malaise regarding the problem of how to place among the dead those who had not lived. That malaise expressed itself in numerous details, and above all in the impossibility of giving a name and a burial to the being that had lost its life as soon as it had been born. Ultimately, it had not been recognized as possessing the right to an individual identity. Now justice had to pass sentence on the mother who had committed infanticide. The sources have so far provided us with a faint image of her, interchangeable with that of so many other women who were tried for the same crime, before and after her. Initially confined to silence by the unspeakable crime she had committed, then forced to lie to save herself, and finally abandoned and defenceless in confession as a form of unconditional surrender, we never come across an individual characteristic that describes her, never find any sign of a personality which is unmistakably hers and no one else’s.

Chapter 18

Accolta e Consolata (Received and Consoled)

A

fter her arrest, Lucia had been held in the prison of the criminal court of the Torrone. She had left it only to be interrogated. The prison doors opened for her for the last time on the evening of 21 January, when the sentence was read out to her. She knew therefore that she only had one last night to live and that at dawn the next day she would be led to the gallows. But immediately after the voice of the tribunal, other voices and other people crowded into prison: those of three men in particular. We know their names: Antonio Francesco Codrone Argeli, Carlo Antonio Bedori, and don Nicolò Maria Bernardi. They had come to the prison from nearby, from the palace of the senator Pietramellara, and they wore the cloaks of the Confraternity of Santa Maria della Morte: the knight Codrone Argeli was the prior of the Confraternity, Carlo Antonio Bedori held the title of ‘maestro’, and don Nicolò Maria Bernardi was the ‘discepolo’. The ‘discepolo’ held a piece of paper in his hand where he wrote down everything that took place in the space provided. 1 The form was set out in the form of a printed questionnaire and was used to guide the confraternity’s reflection to make its work more effective. The questions followed the sequence of events as they took place on that final night, from the reading of the sentence to its execution: sad, melancholy nights, as 1 

The file on the case of Lucia Cremonini is preserved in Bologna, Archivio arcivescovile, fondo Scuola dei confortatori, b. 8, fasc. 12. I quoted it some time ago in Prosperi, ‘Esecuzioni capitali e controllo sociale’, p. 100. I have presented the results of my analysis of the file in Prosperi, ‘Il controllo della paura di morire’.

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they had been described by the members of the confraternity.2 The condemned prisoner was assailed by the saddest of thoughts and these were transmitted to those he or she had chosen to be nearby. The comforters, however, did not speak of the condemned, but of the ‘afflicted’ or the ‘patient’. The questionnaire used for the ‘patient’ Lucia allows us to follow what happened to her hour by hour on that last night between Tuesday 21 January, 1710, and the morning of the following day. And since the comforters had the task of investigating her feelings and preparing her to face death, they recorded above all clues to and expressions of her state of mind. The gates of the prison were opened for the small, solemn procession of mem­­bers of the confraternity dressed in the cloak which distinguished them in the most important holy events of the city, and the incarcerated woman was entrusted to their hands. She stood free, without irons or handcuffs, something unu­­sual, because irons were normally considered indispensable to avoid the excesses of desperation or any attempts at escape; they were only removed at a cer­­tain point in the night, when the thoughts of death had been elaborated into forms of devotion, and the condemned prisoner had been transformed from a dangerous being into a meek victim. Lucia had evidently given sufficient proof of that meekness. Freed from her irons, it is easy to imagine that she, like Socrates all those centuries earlier, felt that transient happiness which derives from the suspension of pain. They did not remain in the prison to carry out the work of comfort which was the prerogative of their confraternity, as was usually the case. The small procession headed back towards the palace of the senator Pietramellara. This was done, as Carlo Antonio Bedori recounted, to avoid the ‘tumulto che altre volte è seguito in caso simile di donna condannata’ (the turmoil which ensued on other occasions in similar cases in which a woman was condemned). The convocation of the members of the confraternity in the Chiesa della Morte, not far from the prison, and the departure of the procession to receive the condemned woman had sparked the curiosity of noisy crowds, all the more liable to displays of emotion in the rare case when a woman was condemned to death. So it was the palace of the senatorial aristocracy of Bologna which provided hospitality for the condemned woman during her last night. At the top of the staircase, Lucia could read the words ‘ricevuta et accolta con tutta carità, e compatimento’ (received and welcomed with the greatest charity and compassion). Bedori recounts: 2 

See Manara, Notti malinconiche (1658) and Manara, Notti malinconiche (1688).

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si buttò genuflessa a’ miei piedi col dimandar a Dio perdono de’ suoi peccati. Alzata, lacrimevole, la introdussi al fuoco [il che fu frequentemente praticato per essere malvestita]3 (she threw herself on her knees at my feet, asking God to forgive her sins. Once she had got up, in tears, I led her to the fireplace, [which was frequently done because she was not properly dressed].)

Around the raggedly dressed, tearful young woman important people gathered in that great room heated by a fire, authoritative members of the city’s institutions: government magistrates and university doctors. A humble woman in tears, she did not appear however to be terrified by her fate. The most fundamental question of all which the comforters had to answer concerned precisely the condemned prisoner’s state of mind: the comforter had to describe ‘le sue maggiori tentationi’ (his or her greatest temptations). These could be many: desperation over their imminent death, shame because of the crowd that would take part in the derision of their exposed body, regret for their loved ones, or the desire for revenge against those who had collaborated in their capture and condemnation. These were violent sentiments, continually experienced by the confraternity and extensively documented in their records.4 Their work consisted entirely of detaching the condemned prisoner’s mind from these thoughts and making them appear like the temptations of the devil to prevent the salvation of their souls. But even in their theological culture the idea was gaining ground that these were natural feelings, the tempests of the soul which were to be expected, even without the need for the devil to intervene; and their questionnaires were shortly to bear the words ‘passioni’ in the place of ‘tentationi’. But the reality remained of an extremely difficult transition to govern. Such was the terror of the final trial that awaited the condemned prisoner at dawn that cases of suicide were not infrequent. But Lucia ‘non hebbe alcuna tentatione, ma tutta rassegnata nel volere di Dio con attentione ascoltava quanto le veniva suggerito per la salute dell’anima sua’ (did not have any temptations, but was utterly resigned to God’s will, and listened with attention to what was suggested to her for the salvation of her soul). She gave one sign of her state of mind in her readiness to receive the sacraments of confession and communion. The dialogue with the comforter had been underway for barely an hour when she confessed for the first time; further dialogues with the confessor followed, and there were more moments of sacramental penance. 3  4 

Bologna, Archivio arcivescovile, fondo Scuola dei confortatori, b. 8, fasc. 12. See Prosperi, ‘Il sangue e l’anima’.

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Then came communion which she accepted ‘con gran tenerezza di divozione’ (with great tenderness of devotion). A woman was present who continually took care of her and her needs. The fact that the condemned woman was entrusted to the cares of someone who could approach her without the barrier of the difference in sex is not proof so much of an exceptional delicacy as a show of the effectiveness of that barrier in automatically determining the ways in which institutions functioned. The warm, welcoming context did not limit itself to this, and physical comforts were not its fundamental offering. Lucia was given spiritual comfort. The two members of the Bolognese company, Carlo Antonio Bedori and don Nicolò Maria Bernardi, were at her side continually. The former — the master — invited her to prepare herself for death as a passage to the true life. Lucia not only ‘si rassegnò al volere di Dio’ (resigned herself to God’s will), but ‘di propria volontà si raccomandò alla carità dei’ circostanti’ (she commended herself of her own accord to the charity of those present). The request which Lucia whispered was transmitted to those present by the comforter ‘con voce alta’ (out loud). What followed allows us to understand what was meant by charity: little boxes were made to circulate for offerings, and this money was immediately transformed into spiritual coinage, namely into masses to be celebrated for her soul. It was a tangible sign of the link which the living promised to maintain with Lucia after her death. Her exclusion from this life thus passed into the background, a simple means of saving her true life, and the condemnation lost its meaning as an exclusion from the human community. All her present suffering therefore became a guarantee of an increase in her future happiness. Lucia showed she was fully aware of this Christian reversal of values, and demonstrated a great willingness to suffer. One example of this was her thirst, which she decided to bear ‘con sentimento di patire o di negare la propria volontà’ (with the spirit of suffering or denying her own will). After thirst came hunger: the final meal was a fundamental moment in the rites of justice. Food and drink were usually offered in abundance; Lucia however wished to suffer her thirst and accepted to eat her final meal only with difficulty. It was a light meal, as the word used to describe it leads us to understand (‘refettione’). It was at this point that Bedori decided to tackle the subject of the execution and to explain to her delicately ‘quanto doveva succedere’ (what would happen). Lucia received the information ‘con coraggio’ (with courage). She asked the woman who had remained beside her all night ‘se sonava l’Aringo per le donne’ (if the Aringo bell of the Palazzo Comunale rang for women). The woman said she thought so, and Lucia

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tutta lieta, disse che quando si fece morire il Malcontenti, all’udir la campana recitò per esso alcuni Pater nostri, e perciò voleva ella dirli ancora per sè medesima. (greatly pleased, said that when Malcontenti had been put to death, at the sound of the bell she had recited some Pater nosters for him, and so she wanted to say some for herself too.)

Benedetto Malcontenti had been executed on 7 May, 1707, when Lucia was twenty years old: he had died showing himself to be ‘paziente e costante’ (patient and constant) even when he was being tortured on the rack, and he had gone to the place of execution keeping his eyes fixed on the image of a crucifix, show­­ing only feelings of pain for ‘le sue creature che lasciava bisognose e prive d’assis­­ tenza per essere sostenute e dirette nel santo timor di Dio’ (his children, whom he had left in need and without any assistance for their sustenance and their upbringing in the holy fear of God).5 Perhaps it was precisely because of these feelings of a father who left helpless orphans behind him that the memory of this execution had remained particularly strong in Lucia’s mind. After Malcontenti and before Lucia, the acts of the Confraternita della Morte record another three cases and all with the same characteristics of edifying and devote exemplarity. But Lucia only remembered one. She had been moved in this case and she had done something for the dying man which she now desired for herself. The time had come. The tolling of the bell could be heard. It was the morning of 22 January. All those present recited a prayer. Lucia ‘udì intrepida, benché con tenerezza, l’hora di andar al patibolo’ (heard the striking of the hour to go to the scaffold without fear, though with emotion). She was moved, therefore. But she gave proof of her courage in the journey from Palazzo Pietramellare to Piazza San Petronio. ‘Tutta rassegnata nel volere di Dio’ (completely resigned to God’s will) she listened to what the comforter was telling her ‘per la salute dell’anima sua’ (for the salvation of her soul). She had confessed and received com­­munion; she had been questioned on matters of faith and she had shown herself to be ‘assai informata del necessario per la confessione, comunione et altro concernente alla salute dell’anima, come chiaramente si espresse nel ris­­ pondere alle interrogazione che sopra di esse le furono fatte’ (very well-informed about what was necessary for confession, communion, and other things concerning the salvation of her soul, as she clearly showed in answering the questions which were put to her regarding them). We do not have the exact words of the dialogue, and the words were perhaps secondary. The questionnaire, as 5 

As can be read on his form: Bologna Archivio arcivescovile, fondo Scuola dei confortatori, b. 8, fasc. 12, unnumbered fols.

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it was completed by the ‘discepolo’, does not contain the dialogue which took place, but a description of the passages in a precise ritual made up of prayers, sacraments, and states of mind. What is sure is that the candidate who offered herself up to the tools of comfort was well-prepared and collaborated fully. This is how she showed herself and she was familiar with and grateful for what she was offered. The comforter encouraged this spontaneity ‘con atti di fede, speranza, carità e d’amore di Dio, espositioni di scritture sacre, evangelio, vite de’ santi martiri’ (with acts of faith, hope, and charity, and the love of God, and explanations of holy scripture, the Gospel, and the lives of the holy martyrs). A special place was reserved for the saint of the day, St Agnes, the heroic Christian martyr in pagan Rome: she was put forward as a model to the young woman convicted of infanticide who was being put to death by the authorities of the pope of Catholic Rome. Lucia revealed a unexpected experience in devotional matters: she recited her Rosary and added a special devotion: seven Our Fathers and seven Hail Marys for the pains of the holy Virgin Mary and St Joseph, and it was discovered that she was a member of the Compagnia del Carmine and the Compagnia del Rosario. This murdering mother chose the Madonna as ‘sua Avocata’ (her lawyer) and invoked St Joseph and St Anthony of Padua as additional lawyers at the court of God. Educated in the rites of the Church ever since she was a girl, she knew its prayers and its sacraments well, and she was enrolled in the confraternities reserved for those of her age and her condition. She knew of the existence of heavenly protectors, the Madonna and the saints, and she invoked those to whom she was particularly devoted. All this was listened to and recorded by the two comforters who remained at her side in the journey to the scaffold, which had been erected during the night. Printed posters had been pinned up on the sides of the square with the news of the execution, inviting the population to be present. The Arengo bell had reached all the citizens with its message. As usual, the authorities wanted the execution to achieve its effect of educating and terrorizing the people, and for this reason they used all means to urge the populace to come in their masses to the square, dominated by the basilica of San Petronio and the palaces of power. But there was no need for any special invitation. The execution of a woman was an exceptional event. Thus Lucia made her journey by pushing through a huge crowd; but she was not distracted by it. Utterly concentrated on her devotions, she perhaps managed not to see the scene of the square and to fix her gaze entirely on the images of martyrs held up by the comforters on these occasions. Thus she reached the table where the hangman came to meet her, asked her forgiveness for what he had to do, and tied her hands. Lucia ‘diede volontaria

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le mani alle ligature, perdonò al maestro di giusticia e sempre accompagnò la mia voce’, wrote the comforter, ‘con gran spirito tenendo sempre gl’occhi su la tavoletta, come mi promise nel donare a Dio i sentimenti del corpo’ (volunteered her hands to be tied, forgave the master of justice, and always followed my words, with great courage, always fixing her eyes on the little picture, as she promised me in giving to God the sufferings of her body). And here the last part of her journey began. Lucia made it listening to the prayers and advice of the comforter and replying ‘col solito spirito’ (with her usual courage). At the foot of the scaffold ‘si racconciliò’ (obtained forgiveness), the final act of penitence administered by the priest. She ascended the steps to the platform where the nooses were hanging. Here she turned spontaneously to the people of the square. We do not know exactly what she said. The comforter noted that ‘si raccomandò di proprio moto al popolo’ (she commended herself to the people of her own accord). It was not part of the Italian tradition for the condemned prisoner to make a speech, unlike other countries (such as England at that time, for example), where it was an obligatory part of the execution. But Lucia felt the need to do so and demonstrated here too that ‘gran spirito’ (great courage) which animated her. Once she had ascended the scaffold, she offered her head to the two ropes of the noose for the hanging. At this point something happened: the hangman, who, it appears, had been rather verbose in his request for forgiveness, came up to her and unsheathed a knife. It later emerged that he had wanted to cut the ribbon of the crucifix that Lucia wore round her neck, but a great murmur went through the crowd, which was following the scene with intense emotion. It was not unusual for the hangman to finish off the condemned prisoner personally if the hanging had not been effective. And this was Lucia’s fear: according to the account given in a chronicle, ‘vedendo il coltello intimorì e cominciò a tremare e gridare: “povera me, mi vuole scannare, o Dio, o Dio”’ (seeing the knife she became afraid and started to tremble and cry out, ‘poor me, poor me, he wants to kill me, O God, O God’).6 The comforter gave a more elaborate interpretation, whereby the people were afraid that on seeing the knife, Lucia would remember the kitchen knife she had used to kill her son. It was in reality his own fear: all the work undertaken to detach the condemned woman’s thoughts from memories of her life risked coming to nought. But that murmur of the crowd in the meantime demonstrated the emotion and compassion it felt for the victim. The rite of reciprocal pardon had removed all abhorrence for the 6 

Bologna, Bib. comunale dell’Archiginnasio, MS Gozzadini 10, unnumbered fols (Giustiziati in Bologna (1540–1791)).

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criminal. At this point it would have been enough for one of those incidents to take place which sometimes interrupted an execution and which seemed to be a miraculous sign of a higher divine mercy, for the collective emotion to transform itself into the will to save the life of the condemned woman. But this did not happen. Among the cries of the crowd and the laments of the condemned woman, the hangman did his job. He did it in a particularly clumsy way: Il carnefice l’assassinò tenendola un pezzo in tormento, togliendoli da collo un crocifisso solito mettersi al collo ai moribondi per la indulgenza plenaria in articulo mortis. Quando vide il coltello diede una gran voce raccomandandosi però a Dio; la buttò giù finalmente a grido di popolo e poi non la trovò mai con li piedi, sì che la fece stentare. Onde egli fu posto in prigione. (The hangman killed her, keeping her in agony for a while, removing the crucifix from around her neck, which it is customary to place around the neck of the dying for the plenary indulgence ‘in articolo mortis’. When she saw the knife she cried out loudly, commending herself to God. He finally threw her down to shouts from the crowd, and then he was unable to find her feet, in such a way that she had difficulty in dying. For this he was put in prison.)

This was the scene, then, of the final moments of Lucia’s life: a hangman with a knife, perched on the victim’s shoulders, in the middle of a square teeming with a noisy crowd. In the middle of the turmoil, there was, according to the comforter, an island of intense devotion: Lucia died with a final word on her lips: ‘Jesus’. When we have finished reading this account, we note something that clearly stands out: this Lucia is nothing like the protagonist of the trial for infanticide. She is not the same person we met in the trial records. Something has intervened to transform the murderess enveloped in silence into a sweet, fearless candidate for her own sacrifice. Lucia had changed. The members of the confraternity had an ancient word for this change: conversion. This is what they sought to obtain. With Lucia they fully succeeded. It was possible to learn how to die on the scaffold, and Lucia had done it, just as she had learnt how to pray to the Madonna and St Anthony in the confraternities of which she was a member, and just as she had learnt her duties as a ‘putta onorata’ (honourable girl) in the parish of Santa Maria della Mascarella. Once she had recognised the function she had been assigned, the appropriate words and behaviour came to her naturally; there was nothing left of the girl murderess, ‘simple’ to the point of stupidity in her silence and the shreds of clearly implausible explanation she gave to the court notary. Now that there was no longer any question of being awarded a dowry and a marriage, now forever out of her reach, but of accepting to die in that way ‘for the salvation of

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her soul’, everything had become easier: we suddenly see ‘courage’, ‘sentimento di patire’ (strength of soul in suffering), ‘great spirit’; she showed herself to be ‘very well-informed about what was necessary’, ‘fearless’, able to take the initiative and to speak eloquently, as when ‘she commended herself to the people of her own accord’. An extraordinary metamorphosis: Lucia with her eyes glued to the ‘tavoletta’ (the image of the crucified Christ held by the comforter), made her way to the scaffold, giving an example of Christian death, no longer a woman abhorred and condemned for infanticide. She is now a courageous woman who makes a display of her repentance and accepts her own death, and she does this in such an intimately convinced way as to make her appear to her ‘comforters’ as a saint on her way to martyrdom, tied to the community of believers by common prayers, and ready to face the journey to Paradise. If Lucia appears transformed, then the others no longer seem the same either. The poor young orphan had been the object of an efficient and remote insti­­tutional attention during her trial and imprisonment, almost an unimportant thing in the eyes of a court which had its job to do and which got it done it in the shortest time possible. Once the sentence had been pronounced, everything had changed: she was treated with every care by important members of society, her words were heard and recorded with shared devotion, and her actions received the attention of an emotional crowd. The abhorrence which had aroused words of condemnation, even from her own mother, had now been replaced by compassion and solidarity. The execution, which was to be the culminating moment of the her punishment, her death which was to be retribution for the unspeakable crime, had been transformed into a collective ritual of reciprocal forgiveness, requested and granted by all. If in Palazzo Pietramellara, the confraternity of Santa Maria della Morte had demonstrated affectionate devotion and participation in the sufferings of the young woman who was about to meet her death, in the crowded Piazza Maggiore the whole crowd took part in the rite of death, forging a bond of fraternity with the condemned woman based on reciprocal forgiveness. The execution was the price to pay for Grace, the death of the body became the necessary offering for the eternal salvation of the soul. Forgiveness is the other face of punishment. At the end of the rite of justice, Lucia Cremonini is no longer the infanticide rejected by human society as guilty of an unspeakable crime, and worthy of being cast off from the human race: the crowd is reconciled with her, a woman who has repented and is ready to die. The person who kills her does so by asking for her forgiveness and her protection in the next world, as if she were a saint who is still alive. And she, condemned for the crime, but absolved from the sin, faces death accompanied by the repentance and forgiveness of the city.

Chapter 19

Repentance and Forgiveness But pray God that he absolves us all François Villon, ‘Ballade des pendus’, trans. by Kinnell, pp. 208–09 … I forgive you … forgive my body no … has nothing more to fear, but spare my soul Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, trans. by Esolen xii. 66, p. 244

R

epentance and forgiveness’, wrote Natalia Ginzburg, ‘are human sentiments. Like all human sentiments, they originate in internal conflicts, and like all human sentiments they continually change and transform them­­selves’.1 They change, with greater reason, from one historical period to another. The scene we have witnessed does not belong to the history of the sentiments of our age, which is as conscious of the transience of the individual as it is dedicated to consolidating the walls around that individual. In the age we are speaking about here, repentance and forgiveness were much more than an individual sentiment: they were more like the constitutional principles that were meant to inspire the functioning of institutions. Repentance also lay at the basis of a fundamental sacrament which, according to the rules established by the Fourth Lateran Council and repeated by the Council of Trent, all Catholics had to take: the annual confession of sins. With time, the obligation fixed by

‘

1 

Ginzburg, ‘Il pentimento e il perdono’, and Ginzburg, ‘Il pentimento e il perdono’ (2001), p. 123.

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these rules had been easily surpassed by the spontaneous behaviour of a population which willingly submitted itself to be periodically washed of its sins and took the greatest advantage of the ecclesiastical offer to forgive its trespasses. Forgiveness, to be requested and received, lay for that matter at the centre of the Pater noster, the prayer that anyone who wanted to take the sacraments had to learn by heart; and if not everyone dared to recite it all, this was because, just as they felt themselves unable to forgive others, so they were afraid that pronouncing the words of the prayer would bring God’s condemnation on themselves. But the sense of guilt and personal injustice and the desire to obtain the tranquilizing peace of God’s forgiveness were often so strong as to generate a mortal sickness of scruples, an anguish at not being able to be forgiven. To repent was truly difficult, and for this reason too the crowds gathered round the confessional, the place where sacramental forgiveness was guaranteed, even when repentance was imperfect. Thus the priest became God’s ear and could act as judge or physician, forgiving sins and curing the maladies of the soul. Lucia’s sin had been discovered, judged, and punished, not by the confessor, but rather by a judicial system which controlled and repressed crime. The fact that the judging power was ecclesiastical did nothing to lessen the difference between the religious system of the remission of sins and the worldly system of punishment in the name of an earthly power. The distinction between moral sin and crime was fundamental in the system of relations between religion and politics; but its boundaries changed with time, as we have seen in the case of infanticide. In the period of Lucia’s trial, the field had been divided up definitively: even in the Papal State, where the two powers were united in the same person and where a churchmen decided upon criminal cases, women convicted of infanticide could still be absolved by their confessor, who would impose a greater or lesser penitence, but they were punished with death by the law of the state.2 The confessor also appeared in the rite of justice, charged with the salvation of the condemned prisoner’s soul, and he had to take care not to foster any hopes of an earthly pardon. The sacrament of confession was a fundamental stage in the execution of the sentence which would separate Lucia’s soul from her body. Lucia took confession as soon as she had been received in palazzo Pietramellara. And from this moment onwards a climate was created of friendship and warm solidarity which was to characterize the entire rite. The confessor remained discreetly by her side, ready to receive and remove any late 2 

In Foligno in 1560, two women found guilty of infanticide were given a penance which consisted of fasting on bread and water: see Metelli and Metelli, Criminalità a Foligno nella seconda metà, p. 132.

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remorse or forgotten sin throughout her last night and during her public journey to the scaffold. Immediately before ascending the scaffold, the condemned woman ‘si racconciliò’, she sought and obtained forgiveness for her sins. She thus reached a state of peace with God and through him with the city which had been offended by her crime. That peace made of repentance and forgiveness contained the profound sense of an ancient way of conceiving and seeking justice, and what it retained of that ancient way prevented the criminal justice system which sent Lucia to her death from being merely a machine for punishing criminals. The rite of justice took place in a substantially different way in Catholic and Protestant countries. In the Protestant world, the act of repentance and the request for forgiveness had partly or completely disappeared, while they still lay at the heart of the rite in the Catholic system. Here the punishment of the body and the salvation of the soul, the hangman and the comforters, human and divine justice, earthly death and heavenly life, had reached a total symbolical complementarity.3 Here there is no need to remind ourselves of the fact that the need for justice is the profound root of religion, of the Christian religion, as it is of all religions dominated by the figure of God the judge. In the society of Christian Europe, many links of a theoretical nature — juridical and theological in particular — had been forged between justice as a public system of crime and punishment and justice as the private liberation from sin.4 The problem of how man could appear just before God had fractured the unity of Western Christendom in the age of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter Reformation. But for the Christian Churches which were divided by contrasting theological doctrines on the justification of the sinner, what remained firm and unchallenged was the postulate that supported both heaven and earth, theological systems and forms of political life: the fact that God’s judgement decided the fate of the immortal soul and was the final, inscrutable court of appeal, something that accommodated the human need for justice based on a perfect knowledge of each and every human life and for precisely this reason was also capable of absolute pity. In the long tradition of treatises devoted to the human soul and the faith in its survival in the next life we continually find, in a more or less explicit form, 3 

There is a brief comparison in Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering, pp. 45–44. On England see Linebaugh, ‘The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons’. 4  On this see Prodi, Una storia della giustizia. The question of divine judgement as the foundation and postulate for the immortality of the soul is usually present in the sources: beside those indicated here, see Vanni Rovighi, L’immortalità dell’anima nei maestri francescani, pp. 15–16.

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the question of the need for justice. The daily experience of the injustices of this world, the violence of the powerful, the infringements on innocence, were the same questions of the hope which had to exist in some form of compensation. This was expressed particularly clearly by a humanist reformer, Philip Melanchthon, in a treatise on the soul dated 1553: ‘In this life we see that many honest men are killed by thieves and tyrants and in this life these thieves and tyrants often remain unpunished’. It was necessary therefore to admit the existence of another life where there could be a proper reckoning, where God would reward according to merit and compensate those who had received injustice. If this were not so, we would be forced to think that ‘the best part of the human race has been created in order to suffer violence’.5 It was an argument that had long been used and which continued to be used on both sides of the confessional barrier: people were well aware that this was the fundamental ingredient for transforming that faith in things hoped for, which was the hope for justice and mercy, into a solid substance. We find confirmation of this in the apologetic literature of the missionaries who had to deal with interlocutors who were difficult to convince, such as the atheists of Europe or the followers of Oriental religions who had no notion of a personal God and an individual soul. In these cases they made use of precisely this kind of reasoning: there must be a supreme judge who guarantees that the good are rewarded and the wicked punished. Thus wrote the Jesuit Martino Martini in a work destined for the Chinese; and this was also the path taken by Daniello Bartoli, another Jesuit, who could find nothing better to counter the challenge of the atheism of his time than the prospect of a life with no redemption after death: Hor se l’anima perisce una col corpo, gli scelerati occulti e quei tanti altri che dal­ l’umana giustitia resistendo, fuggendo, ingannando, sottragonsi, dove havrebbono il supplicio dovuto ai loro meriti? E come non sarebbono di peggior conditione i migliori, e ‘l vitio più fortunato che la virtù? (Now, if the soul perishes together with the body, where would the hidden criminals, and all those many others who avoid human justice by their resistance, flight, or trickery, receive the punishment they deserve? And how would the best not be in a worse condition, and vice not fare better than virtue?)6 5 

‘Videmus in hac vita multos honestos homines iniuste a latronibus et tyranis interfici et saepe in hac vita latrones et tyrannos non puniri. Cum igitur sit providentia necesse est sequi in aliam vitam […] Impossibile est enim optimam generis humani partem tantum ad exitium esse conditam’: Melanchthon, Liber de anima, ed. by Stupperich, p. 369. 6  Bartoli, L’huomo al punto, ed. by Recaldini, pp. 423–24. Father Martino Martini (1614–61)

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Bitterness for the unpunished sufferings of the honest on one hand, and outrage for those who avoid punishment on the other: the Lutheran and the Jesuit laid the stress in different places; but the order of the universe which necessarily resulted from the need for justice was the same for both, and it was being undermined by Copernicus’s theory. This is clearly stated by the Jesuit: the condition of man in the universe was for him the most obvious proof of God’s providence, which had placed ‘il ciel di sopra, e l’inferno di sotto, e noi nel mezzo fra la misericordia che ci sollieva e la giustitia che ci profonda’ (the heavens above, and hell below, and us in the middle between God’s mercy which raises us up and God’s justice which pulls us down).7 It took a radical distancing from traditional opinions to suggest to a reader of Lucretius and Newton the idea of placing Hell not in the depths of the earth, but in the sun.8 To prepare oneself for death, to foresee it, and not to let oneself be taken by surprise were traditionally considered to be fundamental tasks for the Christian. In ancient wisdom the invitation to think of one’s own mortality held a central place: ‘Know thyself ’ we read in Greek, under the image of a human skeleton in a mosaic in the Museo Nazionale in Rome. Not to fear death had been the sign of the wise man’s superiority and a demonstration of the hero’s noble scorn for life. In Christian culture death had changed its value: it was no longer an immutable fact, but an end to be aimed at with desire as the transition from earthy existence to eternal life, the only true life. But a fundamental point had remained: it was possible to learn how to die. The final stage of life was the part which had to be properly acted out after having been meditated on at length. For Christian culture too, the thought of death had to act by relativizing immediate experience and projecting it onto the screen of eternity. Inner combat was needed to dominate the senses. It was a battle of the soul against the body, and the battle had to last until the end. Now, it is true that it was God, the judge who could not be deceived, who had to be witness to this battle, and not other people, not the community. Nevertheless, to prevent any possible confusion between the stoic ideal of the wise man and the Christian ideal of the saint there remained not only the hope of survival offered by religion, but also the nature of the society of believers, the Church as a community. It was was the author of a treatise entitled Divinitas et animae rationalis demonstratio, preserved in the Roman Archive of the Company of Jesus, whose contents has been thus summarized: ‘It argues that there must be a ruler in the world, if there are to be rewards for the good and punishments for the wicked’: Chan, Chinese Books and Documents, pp. 151–52, n. 100. 7  Bartoli, L’huomo al punto, ed. by Recaldini, p. 391. 8  As done by Swinden, Recherches sur la nature du feu de l’enfer.

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also necessary to learn how to die in order to leave others with an exemplary model of Christian death, the death of the saint. The community guaranteed it would protect the dying man and intercede for his soul. To dominate the fear of death constantly required hope, a universal, primaeval sentiment, which was expressed in the most widespread form of devotion: the prayer commending our soul before that remote relative of death, the night’s sleep. In the evening prayer, wrote father Giovanni Pozzi, ‘gli stati d’animo dell’orante […] sono la paura e l’incertezza della sopravvivenza’ (the states of mind of he who prays […] are fear and the uncertainty of survival).9 Christian death could represent the truth of life in two opposing ways, by revelation and revolution: revelation of a profound fact, marked from the begin­­ning by the immobile decree of predestination; and revolution as the possibility of change right up to the final moment. The idea of the conversion of the sinner marked a discontinuity in the ancient notion of an authentic life as consisting of a coherence in behaviour. A distinctive feature underlying these historical and social differences in the Christian way of dying was the notion of a final truth as something that could contradict the entire previous life. Partly as a reaction against the Augustinian idea of immutable predestination, the expectation of an unpredictable, saving, turning point was extended to the extreme, final moment, the last ‘lagrimetta’ (little tear).10 For the Christian, the possibility of choosing the right path, of entrusting oneself to God and enjoying the effects of Redemption lasted right up until the end. Even for those who believed in divine predestination as an original and immutable decree the duty remained to devote oneself to preaching the Gospel and converting sinners, with the single aim of exalting the glory of God. This is why the moment of death became the moment of truth in a completely different way from that of ancient wisdom; and it is thus that the preparation for death progressively occupied increasingly vaster areas of experience. The Christian religious tradition, with its fundamental distinction between the soul (to be saved) and the body (to be punished) gave the ritual of capital punishment characteristics which can be found identical, centuries apart, in contexts which are so radically different as the squares of the cities of medieval Europe and the technological death meted out in modern American prisons.11 9 

Pozzi, ‘Come pregava la gente’, p. 225. Dante, Purgatorio, v. 107. 11  See the disturbing testimony gathered on death row by sister Préjean, Dead Man Walking. Note that the author seems to be unaware of the European historical precedents to her work in bringing comfort to the condemned prisoners. 10 

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But behind the same theological framework and the similarity in the rites, profound changes can be seen in the function of the Christian comfort brought to those condemned. Lucia’s comforters willingly referred to the ancient origins of their confraternity as a reason for celebrating the nobility of the institution. Their seat, in the heart of the city, preserved centuries-old memories and a well-stocked library of works all devoted to the study of the best way for what was defined as its ‘function’ par excellence: to comfort the ‘afflicted’. Reference to its origins was an integral part of the awareness that the members of the confraternity had of their work: the statutes of the comforters began by reminding them that their task of aiding the ‘più tribolate e meste’ (most suffering and melancholy) souls had been practised by their confraternity for ‘three hundred years’.12 In that early eighteenth century, the institution’s viceChancellor, Carlo Antonio Macchiavelli, took advantage of his position to invent titles of nobility for himself with rather clumsy forgeries: when re-classifying the manuscripts and printed books of the comforters’ library, he placed the name of an imagined ancestor, Luigi di Leonardo di Antonio Macchiavelli, on the frontispiece of the copies of a fifteenth-century manuscript.13 It is one example among others of that tendency to invent traditions that historians well know, and which consisted on an individual level of inventing a genealogy. But it is also proof of how revered and important that institution was which alone was enough to confer a sort of retrospective nobility. As for the value of the work they carried out, the numerous handbooks and treatises in their well-stocked library illustrate its reciprocal usefulness, for those who received comfort as well as for those who give it: ‘del ben utile che si riceve dal sovenire et aiutare costoro acciò si salvino […] cosa tanto chiara che non fa mestiero di prova alcuna’ (the great use which comes from supporting and helping these people in such a way that they are saved […] [is] so clear that there is no need for any proof ) wrote the Capuchin Carlo Verri from Cremona towards the end of the seventeenth century. It was enough to reflect on the value of the souls saved in the eyes of God and, even more, on the effectiveness of the ‘orationi dell’anime che col nostro aiuto volano al Cielo, ove intercedono per le nostre necessità’ (prayers of the souls which, with out help, fly 12 

Congregazione dei Confortatori, Constitutioni (1640), p. 3. In the subsequent edition of 1667, the date has been correctly emended to ‘trecento e più anni sono’. 13  On Machiavelli, the information provided by Fantuzzi, Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi, v, 95–101, can be complemented by Fanti, La confraternita di S. Maria della morte, pp. 61–65. As Fanti notes, Machiavelli completed his act of forgery when he published his, albeit extremely useful work, the Catalogo delli autori e delle materie spettanti alla Conforteria, which he attributed to his fictitious ancestor.

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up to Heaven, where they intercede for our needs): closer to God, they would have had no difficulty in obtaining just reward for those who had helped them to convert and hence to save themselves. The least that the comforters could gain was the guarantee of a ‘felice passaggio nell’ultime hore della nostra vita’ (safe passage in the final hours of our life).14 But there were also precise reasons maintaining and guaranteeing the importance of the confraternity in civic society, reasons which were rooted in the function which their members carried out supporting and integrating the existing social and political establishment and legitimizing the political powers. It had not always been like this. Two different ways of conceiving and representing the relationship between religion and power, God’s justice and human justice, had been interwoven in the longlasting continuity of an exercise which rested on the Christian code of charity. Those two ways were inscribed in the history of the institution which Lucia’s comforters belonged to. We can schematize them as follows: on one hand was the religion that felt itself called on to console and recompense those who suffered violence and injustice, and on the other was the religion that legitimized the use of force and power against those who broke its laws in the name of God. It is not difficult to follow the institution as it threads through history: it left conspicuous traces over the course of the centuries, corresponding to the increasing importance the confraternity was granted in the life of the city. The nucleus of the comforters as a group with its own constitution, dates back to the mid sixteenth century; around a century earlier, in 1436, the oratory of Santa Maria della Morte was created for those who wanted to ‘essercitarsi sotto il soave giogo di Giesù Christo’ (exercise themselves under the sweet yoke of Jesus Christ), or, in other words, attempt to reach a higher level of perfection ‘con orationi et altre opere spirituali’ (with prayers and other spiritual works).15 If we go back further in time we find a lay confraternity, the ‘societas battutorum de morte et misericordia’, whose presence in the city had been signalled by the work of a hospital, which cared for the poor, the sick, and pilgrims, and carried out other forms of charity which were specific to it: going ‘ad iustitiam’, and ‘associare homines ad iustitiam’, namely accompanying the condemned to execution. Any more remote traces are uncertain and indistinct, a sign that the journey from the estuary to the source is reaching its conclusion. There are no more sol14 

Verri, Ricordi per essercitar il caritativo officio, p. 6. Proemio sopra le ordinationi dell’Oratorio di S. Maria della Morte, preamble to the manuscript Ordinazioni of 1613: Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. dell’Ospedale Maggiore, 309/4. But see the reformed version of 1526: Bologna, Bib. comunale dell’Archiginnasio, MS Gozzadini 213, fols 122–73, quoted by Fanti, La confraternita di S. Maria della morte’, p. 50, n. 130. 15 

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emn statutes or conspicuous written accounts: a legacy here and there — that of a notary in 1365, a merchant in 1348, and a woman in 1347 — the name of a prior of the ‘societas’ which shows it to have existed in 1340, and, finally, part of a will from 1338 which mentions ‘going to justice’ as a distinctive feature.16 The origins of the confraternity are linked to one of the collective movements guided by improvised preachers and spiritual leaders which gave voice to widespread dissatisfaction and concern. The way had been opened up by the Flagellants a century earlier: in Bologna, as in other cities, confraternities had formed whose characteristics were ‘disciplina’, namely the habit of scourging oneself as a sign of penitence, and the practising the charitable virtues towards one’s ‘neighbour’. The establishment of the hospital of Santa Maria della Vita was the most significant concrete form of this thirteenth-century ‘devotion’ in the city of Bologna. As we have seen, the Confraternita della Morte also had its own hospital, and in this case too, its members’ desire to do penitence was characterized by flagellation; but this time, its distinctive feature was the practice of accompanying condemned prisoners to the gallows. The initiator of this devotional movement can perhaps help us to understand why this was felt to be a specific, important problem among all the others which existed in the society of the time. He was a Dominican Friar, Venturino of Bergamo, the protagonist of an adventurous form of preaching in the third decade of the fourteenth century.17 Fra Venturino was around thirty years old when he became known as a preacher; in Venice he had already tried to embark for the East to evangelize the Muslims, and the idea of a crusade dominated all of his brief and restless existence, which ended in Smirne in 1346. But his was a particular kind of crusade. Before setting off for the East he had crossed Italy from Bergamo to Rome at the head of a growing band of followers: ‘more than ten thousand Lombards’ recounted Giovanni Villani, who described them as being dressed in a white habit like that of the Dominicans ‘con mantello cilestro o perso’ (a light blue or purply-black cloak) and ‘una colomba Bianca intagliata con tre foglie d’ulivo in becco’ (a white dove emblem with three olive leaves in its beak).18 This movement of the dove was noted in other cities of central and northern Italy around 1335. It was said then that while Venturino preached people saw a dove descend from the sky, and the friar later recognized that he had been 16 

Fanti, M., La confraternita di S. Maria della morte, pp. 30–32. Besides the monograph Altaner, Venturino von Bergamo, see the brief account by Meersseman, Ordo fraternitatis, ii, 603 - 10 and passim. 18  Vilanni, Istorie fiorentine, Libro xi, ch. xxiii, pp. 407–08: ‘Come frate Venturino commosse molti Lombardi e Toscani a penitenza’. 17 

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aware on more than one occasion that during his sermons people looked at him with amazement and started whispering because, as he had subsequently been told, they saw a dove descend from the sky with a flame issuing from its mouth. This, in any case, was the movement’s symbol, indicating the Holy Spirit which spoke through the mouth of Venturino, but also signifying a message of peace, as suggested by the olive leaves. Indeed, as Villani recounted, his followers ‘venieno per le città di Lombardia e di Toscana a schiera per venticinque o trenta, e ogni brigata con sua croce innanti, gridando “pace e misericordia”’ (they came through the cities of Lombardy and Tuscany in groups of twenty-five or thirty, and each brigade with its cross before it crying ‘peace and mercy’). To cry out for peace was nothing unusual at the time in the Italian cities which Venturino passed through. So customary was it in fact that Ambrogio Lorenzetti chose to crown his ‘Good Government’ precisely with that famous female image of peace, dressed in a white robe with an olive branch in her hand, and this only three years after fra Venturino had passed through Siena. That image of peaceful and orderly city life was an ideal which was felt stronger the more daily life was filled with violent factional hatred and scenes of bloody vendetta. The contemporary chroniclers have left ample and heartfelt testimony of the violence and revenge, but above all they voiced the amazement that the tide of events provoked in those who tried to understand its sense and to find some remedy. Even fra Venturino’s itinerant preaching was marked by that discovery of violence, but, unlike those who were demanding a stiffening of the punishments, complaining that ‘il male per legge non si punisce’ (evil is not punished by law), as Dino Compagni wrote,19 he was convinced he had a quick and easy recipe. This recipe was the crusade. Venturino told his judges in Avignon how he had received inspiration after three weeks of meditation and silence. Throughout that time he had reflected on the problem of the conversion of sinners: ‘homicidas, sacrilegos, incendiarios et incestuosos’ (those who had committed murder, sacrilege, arson, or incest)20 and all the others who made the conditions of life in Christian cities 19  Compagni, Dino Compagni’s Chronicle of Florence, ed. and trans. by Bornstein iii, ch. 42, p. 101. 20  Henceforth the quotations are taken from the Legenda which is the principal source for this history of fra Venturino’s preaching and which also contains the text of the questions put to him during his trial in Avignon, with his replies; there is a date for the composition of the Legend (1347), which according to Altaner, corresponds to a first version which was substantially re-elaborated around 1347. For P. A. Grion, who has also published the text of the Legend according to the oldest manuscript, the 1347 date is reliable: Grion, ‘La “Legenda” del b. Venturino da Bergamo’.

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so difficult. It was not difficult to convert them, thought Venturino, but it was difficult to make them persevere and to prevent them from returning to their evil ways. Every day he experienced with the success of his preaching how easy it was to call sinners to repent: after some initial mistrust and hostility, ‘iuvenes lascivi et pomposi, aliique peccatores horrendi’ (lascivious and arrogant young men and other terrible sinners) came running to declare themselves repentant and ready to atone for their sins. So fra Venturino had the idea of organizing a great pilgrimage to Rome, at the head of all those repentant sinners. The choice of Rome was justified, according to what he later stated before his judges in Avignon, as it was a place of pilgrimage, like Santiago de Compostela; but there was also another, more confused, reason relating to the presence of the seat of the papacy and the possibility of finding there a penitentiary who had the power to forgive particularly serious sins. In reality, the papal seat had been transferred to Avignon, but Rome evidently still had a particular charm for those who, like fra Venturino, dreamed of a sort of general renewal of Italy under the banner of peace (totius Italie pacis reformationem). Thus the pilgrimage got underway. As a symbol, Fra Venturino gave them, besides their pilgrim’s habit, a red and white cross to carry in their hands and the emblem of the dove with the olive branch as a sign of clemency and peace; moreover, on their pilgrim’s hat, they bore the cross in the form of a tau that had appeared in collective movements of pilgrimage and crusade for more than a century as a ‘segno di elezione, ma più ancora di protezione’ (sign of election, but even more of protection). 21 But that collective pilgrimage was received with distrust: the cities closed their gates before the dove movement ‘propter timorem’ (for fear). Venturino was forced to give up his plan of taking those thousand followers to Rome united: he divided them up therefore into groups of twelve, remaining himself at the head of a larger group. Nevertheless, many cities refused to receive them: Milan, Mantua, and Ferrara were among those which did not want to welcome the pilgrims. In some cases, Venturino used a stratagem to get in and gained such spectacular success, he claimed, that he had to hide and leave the city secretly, ‘de nocte per muras cum scalis’ (by night over the walls with ladders). According to Giovanni Villani, these were ‘non […] di sottili sermoni né di profonda scienza, ma […] molto efficaci e d’una buona loquela e di sante parole’ (not subtle sermons containing profound knowledge, but […] very effective and eloquent, filled with holy words). There were three key words to the movement: penitence, peace, and mercy. Penitence was not a new word, while peace and mercy, traditional aspirations 21 

Miccoli, ‘La “crociata dei fanciulli” del 1212’, p. 423.

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of the medieval Christian world, took on a new flavour when they referred specifically to those who had disturbed civic life and been outlawed. This was the problem that dominated Venturino’s thoughts even before his pilgrimage to Rome. It was not enough to pacify the ferocious conflicts within the community with the temporary reformation of the violent if they later succumbed again to the same violent inclinations. And here came the idea of the crusade, in a period in which everything that was not right seemed to be resolvable at this price: to take the aggression outside, remove in one stroke the enemy of the faith who was pressing in at the borders of Christian Europe, and the internal enemies, violent wrongdoers who were transformed into crusaders; to restore the model of sanctity based on martyrdom, to wash away your sins with blood and destroy the enemy of faith with God’s blessed sword. Venturino perfected the idea: his was a crusade of criminals. He could put together an expedition of fifty thousand men ‘de peioribus totius Italie’ (from among the worst of all Italy), whom fra Venturino thought he could convince to follow him without any difficulty, and take them to the Holy Land to die for Christ. And so, by removing those responsible for crime and disorder, the life of the Italian cities would return to peace. Fra Venturino added his own personal plan for a crusade to the tradition of the devoted ‘re-awakenings’ which had animated and moved the Italian cities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a reverse crusade, so to speak, undertaken in such a way as not to limit the advance of the infidel but to remove those infidels from inside the body of Christianity who could not be made to conform to the plan of a Christian peace. The idea of removing fifty thousand criminals from Italy originated in an assiduous concern for the problems of public order together with anxiety for the salvation of the souls of the criminals themselves. The punishments suffered on this earth were presented by Venturino as a pos­­sible compensation for the sins that were borne before divine justice. This cancelling out of punishment and reversal of sin and merit had been made pos­­sible by the nucleus around which all the more general theological system revolved: Christ’s humanity, or rather the Incarnation and the Passion of the Son of God. The theology that Anselm had set out in his Cur Deus homo had voiced that way of conceiving the relationship between man and God which also served as a model for the relationships within human society: the offence which Adam had committed with original sin had been inherited by the entire human family, just as was the case for the relationship between the conflicting kinship groups in the medieval cities. A member of human family, Christ could be the necessary victim for God’s revenge; the blood He shed was a much more convincing offering for those who saw blood shed for ancient offences

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and factional divisions on a daily basis.22 Like Christ, in the place of Christ, those who were condemned to death were offered the possibility of transforming their shameful and painful death into a voluntary sacrifice for themselves and for others. Like Christ and in the place of Christ, it was said. Fra Venturino’s invitation to the condemned to remember Christ’s Passion rested on the firm basis of one of the fundamental and constitutive principles of Christianity: the memory of an execution, the crucifixion. The God of the Christians had been a man condemned to death: the rites of religion did nothing but return continually to this original fact. Besides Christ, there was an endless array of Christian martyrs, condemned to death by the state and by the hand of man. The historical nature of the Christian religion continually referred back to moments, aspects, and tools of bloody execution. Christ’s example, therefore, was a model which could be adapted to those who were executed. But in order to do so it was necessary to forget the fact that in Christian Europe the death sentence was issued by a power that was itself Christian and which referred to that crucifixion as the foundation of its legitimacy. Hence the need to dedicate the confraternities of justice to interceding figures who could temper justice with mercy: the Madonna or St John the Baptist (St John the Beheaded). But the idea that the blood of the condemned person had some relation to the blood of Christ hung over the rite of justice. The blood of Christ had generated the Church and regenerated it daily through the rite of the Mass, the real repetition of the events of Calvary. For Innocent III, it was the task of the ‘sacrosanct mystery of the Altar’ to restore peace between God and men, but also to bring peace among men: this meant that it was necessary not only to open up the gates of the heavenly kingdom to men, but also to allow them to live in peace in their own cities. As for the powers of the blood of Christ understood as powers attributed to the sacrament of the Eucharist, it would be necessary to repeat, multiplying it a hundredfold, what was said regarding the human blood of the martyrs: nothing could equal it, for good or for bad. It can easily be understood why, just as all ecclesiastical legislation imposed the Eucharist in social practice, an unprecedented effort was made to rigorously control the most jealous custody not only of the host, but also of those ritual forms of consecration. Rendering all use and knowledge of the Eucharist secret and reserved for the clergy protected a set of powers whose extension left few doubts. These were powers of life and death, not only in the widespread versions of popular magic and necromancy, but also in the legitimate uses of the Mass. The Mass 22 

See Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700, pp. 3–13.

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was said not only to protect oneself, one’s friends, and one’s parents, alive or dead, but also to strike at enemies, to bring about their ruin and death. 23 The powers of the blood of Christ stretched over all that vast territory which went from legitimate devotion and religious practice to magic and heresy, from the liturgical year to the lives of individuals and the history of the world. He who was condemned to death was an enemy of that peace which was invoked by the priest before he proceeded to the ‘fractio panis’ (breaking of the bread) during Mass: the condemnation had expelled him from the community, and the blood that he was preparing to shed was the visible price of that rupture of communion and peace which had to be mended at the cost of his life. Thus an association existed between the blood of Christ and that of the condemned man which was possible by contrast at least: it is not surprising that, right from the start, an attempt was made to heal that contrast and thoroughly resolve that fracture in unity and peace which the death penalty on its own simply sanctioned. To make the condemned man convert and lead him to a Christian, holy, exemplary death was the only way to make sure that there was no opposition between the human blood shed on the scaffold and the pacifying and saving blood of Christ, transforming the exercise of revenge into a ritual of concord and forgiveness. Thoughts of this kind probably animated the first members of the Bolognese confraternity; and they undoubtedly animated a woman whose thoughts became exemplary for others in fourteenth-century Italy and throughout Wes­­tern Christendom: St Catherine of Siena. Like Venturino of Bergamo, St Catherine also attempted to resolve the problem of the lacerations in the social and politi­­ cal fabric of Italy at the time with the recipe of the crusade. Her spiritual father and biographer, Raymond of Capua, writes of how he found himself at the meeting between Catherine and Pope Gregory XI, which dealt precisely with the crusade. The arguments used by Catherine were very similar to those put forward by fra Venturino: the crusade as a means of bringing about peace between Christians and saving the souls of its violent members on the verge of damnation, who would participate and sacrifice their lives.24 To shed blood on a crusade could resolve the problem of human violence. The damned blood of the violent had an intrinsic force which could transform it into blessed blood: violence was only one side of human energy, which could destroy but also create. 23 

See Bossy, ‘Essai de sociographie de la Messe’. I quote from the Italian translation Raimondo da Capua, S. Caterina da Siena, trans. by Tinagli, para. 291. The Latin text is Raimondo da Capua, Vita S. Catharinae Senensis, pp. 910–11. 24 

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To shed blood destroyed peace, and peace was the greatest good of the community; but that very same blood could save the community and bring it peace. It is a set of intuitions and thoughts that revolved around the idea of the Eucharist as divine blood ritually shed, associated with the rite of the promise of reciprocal peace. Applied to the problems of society and the presence of violence as a form of evil practised by man, that thought became a plan to create a link between the salvation of the souls of the wicked and the peace of the community, as goals which could be attained through the Christian death of the former; indeed, the criminals’ crusade took the form of a sort of collective death sentence with the addition of forgiveness for every kind of sin. In this way the death sentence lost its characteristic as revenge and took on that of an exceptional opportunity for the sinner to receive a total pardon for his sins. It is not hard to understand why recourse to a measure so clearly in contrast with the Christian commandment not to kill should have aroused so few objections in the consciences of its contemporaries: if we exclude small groups of heretics like the Waldensians and their intransigent defence of the literal sense of the Gospel, there were hardly any other challenges to the lawfulness of the death penalty for the entire period under examination here.25 Catherine of Siena was responsible for the idea of interpreting the condition of those who were condemned to death in a different way. Her contribution to the creation of a form of devotion for the condemned bears the special sign of a female mysticism which consisted of intense personal participation in the drama of the victim of justice. Men organized and guided the crusade; it remained for the women to pray and assist the dying. Among her miracles, Raymond of Capua particularly stresses the conversion of two men condemned to death: Catherine had seen them in Siena from the house of one of her spiritual daughters while they were being born through the city on the executioner’s cart. The two had obstinately refused to repent or to confess, and they set a bad example for the people who had come to see them. The torturers went at them with red-hot pincers and hooks; but Catherine was not disturbed so much by the physical suffering of the two condemned men as by the idea of their eternal damnation and the vision of a horde of demons surrounding them. Her prayers, recounts Raymond, revolved around the Gospel character of the good thief on the cross, and like the good thief, the two condemned men from Siena were brought to repentance by the vision of the wounded and bleeding Christ. They 25 

Alan of Lille, De fide catholica, pp. 271 ff., sets out and contests the Waldensians’ arguments against the death penalty. Papini, Valdo di Lione e i ‘poveri nello spirito’, p. 187, maintains convincingly that ‘su questo tema il primato temporale deve essere riconosciuto ai valdesi’.

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publicly acknowledged themselves to be guilty and deserving of greater punishment, and they died praizing God and thanking Him for having given them the opportunity to repent. Finally — thanks to Catherine’s intercession — like the good thief, the two passed rapidly from worldly torments to the glory of paradise and from the condition of abhorred criminals to that of blessed spirits. It is a metamorphosis which was continually to reappear in the relationship between Christian culture and the gallows: it almost seems as if, given the lack of martyrs for the faith, new ones were continually created with the materials available, even if they were not of the highest quality. The victim led out to die saw himself offered the possibility of passing in a instant from the dust to the altar, from scorn and abhorrence to the glory of paradise. This meant that the dreaded transition of real death ended up by fading into the background as the risk of the death of the soul came to the fore. But it is in Catherine’s famous letter on the case of Niccolò di Toldo that we find the most profound trace she left in the history of Christian comfort for the condemned.26 Catherine brought ‘conforto e consolatione’ to this young nobleman of Perugia, condemned to death in Siena for political reasons: thanks to her, the condemned man’s desperation was transformed into a ‘grande mansuetudine’ (great meekness), and for love of Catherine, Niccolò came to the place of execution ‘gioioso e forte’ (joyfyul and strong), as if to a wedding: Vedendomi, cominciò a ridare e volse che io gli facesse el segno della croce; e, ricevuto el segno, dissi: Giuso alle nozze, fratello mio dolce, ché testé sarai alla vita durabile! Posesi giù con grande mansuetudine, e io gli distesi el collo, e chinami giù e ramentàli el sangue dell’agnello: la bocca sua non diceva se non ‘Gesù’ e ‘Catarina’ e così dicendo recevetti el capo nelle mani mie, fermando l’occhio nella divina bonta, dicendo: Io voglio! Allora si vedeva Dio e Uomo, some si vedesse la chiarità del sole, e stava aperto e riceveva sangue nel sangue suo: uno fuoco di desiderio santo, dato e nascosto nell’anima sua per gratia, riceveva nel fuoco della divina sua carità. Poi che ebbe ricevuto el sangue e ‘l desiderio suo, ed egli ricevette l’anima sua e la misse nella bottiga aperta del costato suo, pieno di misericordia, manifestando la prima verità che per sola gratia e misericordia egli el riceveva, e non per veruna altra operatione […]

26  There is an enormous bibliography on the episode, for a summary of which see Galletti, ‘“Uno capo nelle mani mie”’. Against the doubts raised by Fawtier, Sainte Catherine de Sienne, i, 169–71, as to the authenticity of Catherine’s letter, convincing arguments have been put forward by Dondaine, ‘Sainte Catherine de Sienne et Niccolò Toldo’, which have been accepted by the editor of the letters, Dupré Theseider, ‘La duplice esperienza di Santa Caterina da Siena’.

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Riposto che fu, l’anima mia si riposò in pace e in quiete, in tanto odore di sangue che io non potei sostenere di levarmi el sangue, che m’era venuto adosso, di lui.27 (Seeing me, he started to laugh and wanted me to make him the sign of the cross; and when he had received the sign, I said, ‘Go down to the wedding, my sweet brother, and soon you will be in the everlasting life! He lay down with great meekness, and I prepared his neck, and I bent down and reminded him of the blood of the lamb. His mouth said nothing by ‘Jesus’ and ‘Catherine’, and as he said this I received his head in my hands, while his eye was fixed on divine goodness, saying ‘I desire it!’ Then the God and the Man could be seen, just as you can see the light of the sun, and he was open and received the blood in his blood, and he received in the fire of his divine charity a fire of holy desire, given and hidden in his soul by grace. When he had received his blood and his desire, and he received his soul and placed it in the store of the open wound in his side, full of mercy, showing the most important truth that he only received him by grace and mercy, and not by any other deed […] Once his soul had been received, my soul rested in peace and quiet, with such a smell of blood that I could not but remove his blood which had been shed on me.)

These extraordinary words are not merely testimony to an isolated and exceptional mystical experience. A key for understanding them can be found in the ordinary characteristics of one aspect of the social life of Christian Europe. It is necessary first of all to take into account the fact that Niccolò di Toldo, probably condemned for political reasons, was made a scapegoat for a situation of tension in the city. His was an unjust condemnation, therefore, which he totally rejected: before Catherine’s intervention rendered him a meek ‘lamb’, Niccolò had been a ‘lion’ in his desperate rejection of an dishonourable death. It is equally likely that this attitude of desperation and rebellion had led to the failure of the normal attempts at comfort made by the Siena confraternity whose task it was, and which had been established in Siena a few years earlier, after the arrival of fra Venturino. Catherine’s intervention had been of a different kind: there is no trace of the condemned man accepting the death sentence, but rather there is a daring identification between the blood of the executed man and the blood of Christ, condemned innocence by definition. There is no longer any distinction between the blood of Niccolò and the blood of Christ, and it is for this reason that Niccolò accepts his death, because at that moment he wears the person of Christ, he becomes Christ. The ritual of love and death is consummated in an atmosphere of passionate concentration and rarefied sacredness: ‘essendo la moltitudine del popolo, non potevo vedere creatura’ 27 

Caterina da Siena, Epistolario, ed. by Dupré Theseider, pp. 130–31.

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(as there was such a crowd of people I could not see anybody individually). Consequently the victim is Christ himself, ‘bagnato nel sangue suo, che valeva per lo sangue del Figliuolo di Dio’ (bathed in his blood, which stood for the blood of the Son of God). His blood spreads peace and removes the dishonour of the scaffold: for Catherine, ‘peace’ and ‘quiet’ follow on from the execution, and are an effect of it; as for the place, the instruments, and everything connected with the administration of capital punishment — a job which lay on the lowest rung of the ladder among the most ignominious in the medieval system of honour — that blood produced a total reversal of values: ‘il luogo santo della giustitia’ (the holy place of justice). The mystical exaltation of the condemned man’s transfiguration into the figure of Christ involved the risk of a Christian reversal of the earthly reality. The political authorities could not tolerate a threat of that kind. The potential contrast between a legal condemnation and a sacramental absolution already provoked resistance. There is the famous case of Charles VI, the King of France’s refusal to allow condemned prisoners to confess their sins to a priest: a ‘dure et déraisonnable et injuste’ law, according to the Chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson, who recalled the sacramental nature of ecclesiastical confession as a renewed baptism and denounced the cruelty of transforming it into a judicial confession (the condemned man could make a final declaration of the sins and the crimes that he had not revealed up to then at the foot of the scaffold).28 Two fundamental questions in the relationship between power and justice came together in this law: the problem of which power had the right to know a person’s innermost secrets was intertwined with the fear that the sacramental absolution might sound like a negation of the sovereign’s condemnation. The king’s justice required the sanction of God’s justice. As for a knowledge of secrets, it was a fundamental objective of power to guarantee itself access to people’s innermost knowledge and thoughts: there was good reason why the sanctification of John of Nepomuk, who died because he had refused to reveal the secrets of sacramental confession, was celebrated in particular by the Turin Confraternita della Misericordia which concerned itself with those condemned to death.29 Questions of the kind were to accompany those forms of charity which dealt with the world of the prison and the gallows throughout their tormented his28 

See Vincent-Cassis, ‘La confession des condamnés à mort’. This is pointed out by Giacomo Brachet Contol in his contribution to the miscellaneous volume Arte, pietà e morte nella Confraternita della Misericordia di Torino, Quaderni dell’Arciconfraternita di Torino (Torino, 1978), pp. 11–38; see p. 25. 29 

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tory. Only in the forms of civic religion rooted in the urban realities of Italy did the groups comforting those condemned to death manage to remain alive, with the support of the lasting and strengthened presence of the sacred power of the papacy.30 But the conflict between the two powers remained latent, as did the conflict between their respective opposite needs which led to the abhorrence of the condemned prisoner on one hand and to his spiritual redemption and his promotion to potential martyr and saint on the other. This resulted in a lasting fault line running through the relative spheres of knowledge, with internal divisions in the world of the criminal lawyers and in that of the theologians. If the former were divided over whether the penal system was purely punitive or whether it included rehabilitation, the latter discussed at length whether it was really possible to gain salvation on the point of death when worthy deeds could no longer be carried out; and the doctrine of justification by faith alone put forward by the Protestant Reformation played its part in fostering the doubts of Catholic theologians to this regard. In practice, one thing was clear: the division of powers and their collaboration was obliged to take account of the dichotomy between body and soul. The condemned man’s confession and repentance could make him recognize ‘une force expiatrice et un mérit de grâce’, in the words of a nineteenth-century apologetic reactionary; but in the modern regime of punishment that grace exclusively concerned the eternal life of the soul, and not the early life.31 People offered themselves as comforters, indeed, to share the merits of that ‘virtù espiatrice’, or rather to take advantage of an important opportunity to refine their own preparation for death: this is a clear aspect of the new sensibility with regard to the problem of death which can be felt after the Black Death and in general in the course of what Johan Huizinga has defined as the ‘waning of the Middle Ages’. It gave rise to the transformation of the ‘broad’ confraternities of a popular type, with a mixture of men and women, into ‘schools’ or ‘restricted’ companies, small associations devoted to the practise of charity towards the dying and in particular towards the condemned as a work of spiritual elevation and mystical perfection. It is not by chance that, behind the 30 

Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion, speaks of ‘civic religion’ in the case of the Bolognese confraternities. 31  ‘Mais lorsque de la confidence nous passons à la confession, et que l’aveu est fait à l’autorité, la conscience universelle reconnôit dans cette confession spontanée une force expiatrice et un mérit de grâce […] Souvent le coupable, pressé par sa conscience, refuse l’impunité que lui promettoit le silence. Je ne sais quel instinct mystérieux, plus fort même que celui de la conservation, lui fait chercher la peine qu’il pourroit éviter’: de Maistre, Du Pape, ii, 440–41.

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example of saint Catherine of Siena, other women animated those associations, albeit in a more or less visible way. In civic society it was women who took care of the dead in the private sphere, as part of that specialization in the care of the body — birth, nutrition, illness, and death — that was their prerogative. In the public sphere their ritual presence was that of the silent onlooker. The statutes of the medieval cities even limited female mourning at funerals, decreeing that it should not disturb the composure of the rites in a well-regulated city. 32 For women, the salvation of the soul of those condemned to death became an exemplary type of miracle which could also be carried out in secret, in the closed space of the convent, as the exclusive fruit of ardent charity. In the fifteenth century, while assistance for the condemned became the favoured exercise of perfection for the members of the city Oratory, in the Bolognese monastery of Corpus Domini, suor Caterina de’ Vigri worked one of these miracles. Here is the account given by her fellow sister, suor Illuminata: there was a man who ‘dovea esser iusticiato e brusato lo quale per qualunque conforto de homo humano non potea esser renduto a confessione ma per suo adiutorio chiamava il diavolo’ (was to be executed and burnt, who could not be convinced to confess by any charitable man’s comforting, but instead called on the devil as his aid). For that soul ‘posta in desperatione’ (in a state of desperation) Catarina ‘fu ripiena di inestimabile dolore’ (was full of inestimable pain), and spent days and nights in prayer, weeping ‘con le brace cancellate dinanci al sacramento’ (with her arms outstretched before the sacrament), requesting the soul of the condemned man as a gift, until she heard ‘la voce de Christo uscire dal sacramento e dire: “A te più non posso dinegare, voglio te sia donate e per te salvata”’ (the voice of Christ issue from the sacrament and say, ‘I can no longer deny you this; I want that soul to be given to you and to be saved through you’). At that very instant a messenger arrived saying ‘como quello cativello si mandava grandemente a ricomandare alle oratione sue, ed era reduto a grande penitentia e dimandava de gratia li mandasseno lo confessore nostro’ (how that evil man was asking insistently to be commended in her prayers, and had come back to great repentance and asked for grace that our confessor be sent to him). Led on an ignominious journey to his death on the back of a donkey and then burnt alive, the condemned man ‘fu più volte audito cridare e chiamare lo nome de Ihesu’ (was heard more than once to cry out and call the name of Jesus) as the saint had told him to do in a letter.33 32  33 

See Fumagalli, ‘Il paesaggio dei morti’, p. 421. I quote from suor Illuminata’s words as they appear in Belvederi, La vita della ‘Santa’

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As episodes of this kind demonstrate, the pacifying effect of the Christian death of the guilty party was the experience which was sought. In the course of time everything became increasingly studied, planned, and organized by a group of men (increasingly rarely women) who gathered spontaneously to exercise a religion of charity which found its ideal training ground in the city. Lay society, to which official religion conceded a secondary role and an imperfect and defective space in the sacred legitimization of social differences, claimed a new freedom for itself and the possibility for its members to achieve spiritual betterment. The mediation of new intermediary bodies which had formed into religious orders served to spread and govern the impulse towards an active form of participation, critical of the official ecclesiastical body. The fraternity which was at the centre of the ideal religion of charity became an institution: the members of the religious orders (friars and nuns) were known as brothers and sisters. In their churches, under the guidance of some of their members, the exercise of charity solidified into institutions which innervated the body of society and provided at outlet for the energies of those who volunteered for the new forms of devotion. The merchant of the Italian cities, an expert in the art of buying and selling, felt himself called on to become a ‘mercadante del cielo’ (merchant of heaven).34 Gaining souls for the love of God was the most important and lucrative business. Another Catherine, in Genoa, inspired the secret charity of Ettore Vernazza, the founder and propagator of the Compagnie del Divino Amore, which reserved a special place for assistance to those who had been condemned to death.35 The love in question was a sentiment which attempted to reproduce God’s love for man in the fraternal relationship between men. The God which the confraternity’s documents speak of is a being pieno de tanta carità, de tanta benegnitate, de tanto amore e dilettione, de tanta dolcezza e suavitade, de tanta clementia e pietade, che mai mai dico mai non despre-

illustrata da Giulio Morina, pp. 26–27; p. 28 bears the engraving by Giulio Morina which depicts the execution of the condemned man. 34  Questa è la regula et modo et forma de quello che deno usare a consolare et confortare le per­ sone che sono iudicate a morte, Bologna, Bib. Univ. di Bologna, MS 157, fol. 122v (fifteenth century). On this work, copied by other confraternities of the period (exemplars are preserved in Ferrara, Ravenna, Padua, and the Pierpoint Library of New York) see Fanti, M., La confraternita di S. Maria della morte, pp. 55–101. 35  On the spread of the Genoa group through Italy and the devotional themes which it propagated, see the fundamental study by Solfaroli Camillocci, I devoti della carità.

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zia né refiuta né caccia da sì qualunque pecatore se sia, se bene fosse sceleratissimo e maculato de tutte le iniquitade.36 (full of such charity, such benignity, such love and affection, such sweetness and softness, such clemency and pity, that never, never, I repeat, never, would he despise or reject or chase away from him any sinner, even if he were most wicked and stained with all forms of iniquity.)

The religion of forgiveness, therefore, was turning its back on all forms of control over behaviour through canonical sanctions, just as justice as a tool of state control was advancing into this territory. In practice the model of fraternal assistance to the condemned offered by the confraternities was to carve out its own space in precisely that context of justice as state repression of crime. That model was copied, exported, and reproduced, and local and individual variants were introduced. A famous example is that of the Compagnia di San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, which found fertile ground for its extraordinary expansion in Rome. In this way the rite adapted itself to the needs and the culture of the times as they continually changed. But this did not mean trusting to chance or some spontaneous capacity to imagine and perceive. It was necessary to control the outcome of the great rite which basically had to obtain retribution for the crime, repentance by the guilty party, and reconciliation: three objectives which we find variously combined in the more general history of the Christian culture of justice.37 The peace brought to the community by the removal of those who had disturbed it could be completed by the reconciliation of the rebellious member. In bringing this about, the problem which presented itself was the relationship between earthly and heavenly justice. Despite the attempts made to keep the office of the comforter distinct from that of the judge and the executioner, the necessary overlapping between one and the other constantly exposed the members of the confraternity to the risk of becoming figures guaranteeing the justice of the sentences which were carried out with their assistance. This had the effect of legitimizing the worldly mechanisms of justice thanks to the connection between this world, a place of imperfection and error, and the other world governed by God the judge. The link between justice and grace, which had been at the centre of theological speculation right from the start of Christian 36 

Libro devotissimo, ed. by Faelli, fol. 2r. Cooper and Gregory, Retribution, Repentance, and Reconciliation, aims to bring together a range of themes under this title, from early Christianity to the problem of reconciliation in contemporary South Africa. 37 

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thought, could test and prove its validity in the exercise of charity as the fraternal desire for forgiveness and assistance among men. Those who witnessed and guaranteed the relationship between the two orders of human life were the dead. The invention of Purgatory projected the structure of prison as a place of correction and regeneration into the next world; the utopian vision of punishment in the Enlightenment brought it back to earth. But in the meantime the idea and practice of an exchange of fraternal and charitable services between the living and the dead took place through the condition of the dying. And of all of these, the special condition of those condemned to death — human beings in the fullness of life whose close hour to death was known — was an opportunity for experimentation. The aim of the new form of charity was to transform the condemned criminal into a saint: the detested human being whose life was being taken had to become a lamb ready to shed its own blood for the salvation of its own soul and for the good of the community. All this resulted in the strengthening of the civic order and in an increase in the prestige of its institutions.38 The ancient and deep roots of the link between the saint and the criminal favoured the establishment of this form of devotion.39 If this was the model which vigorously rooted itself in the Italian cities, much of Christian Europe followed quite a different path. And it is possible to identify the turning point precisely. In Nuremburg in 1521, a jurist called on to give an opinion as to the punishment to be inflicted on the body of a suicide, wrote that in his opinion all earthly power ceased with death, and the man had to face God’s judgement alone.40 He quoted Luther as the basis for his opinion; and in one of his ninety-five theses Luther had expressed himself very clearly on the point which was of interest to the Nuremberg jurist, writing that, with death, man was freed from canon law and had the right not to be persecuted on the basis of it. From this, the jurist had derived the conviction that human and divine justice had to separate after death. The consequences of a theory of 38 

Of the vast literature on this subject, note in particular the study devoted to the Roman Confraternita di San Giovanni Decollato, also known as the Fiorentini, by Paglia, La morte confortata. 39  See the lucid summary by Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body’. 40  ‘[…] Nach dem Tod der Mensch von aller menschen Gewallt erledigt sei, und allein im Gottes Urtel steet’. The document, published in Dieselhorst, ‘Die Bestrafung der Selbstmörder im Territorium der Reichsstadt Nürnberg’, p. 125, is quoted by Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead, pp. 38, 174. According to MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, in England, after an initial stiffening of the laws against suicide, the point was reached where suicide was substantially decriminalized.

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this kind were soon to make themselves felt, not in the punishment of suicide, which was actually made harsher, but in the organization of burial: the body abandoned by the soul had to be buried without ceremony.41 The soul went to an unknown and irrevocable destiny, entrusted as it was to God’s judgement alone, a destiny beyond human intervention. The living and the dead parted ways: with death the individual definitively loosened all ties with society. For this reason the fate of his body ceased to be a concern of the community and men of the church were prohibited from attending funerals. In Geneva, Calvin himself wished to be buried without honours or distinction. But this is what happened in one part of Christian Europe. In that part which recognized the Roman Catholic system, the churches were filled with baroque triumphs of the remembrance of the dead, it became a rule to leave a legacy for masses for the dead, daily life was dominated by the souls of Purgatory, and the institutions of intercession grew until they enveloped the whole of society in a thick web. The cult of relics returned with vigour, coordinated and fuelled by Rome, where the discovery of early Christian cemeteries gave life to new forms of devotion and intensified the flow of pilgrims. The Catholic care over burial developed in the opposite direction from that of the Protestant world: the permanence of memory, continually evoked by masses for the dead, gave renewed impulse to burial in churches and within towns and cities. If the aristocratic families and the ruling dynasties made their tombs a tool to project the social hierarchy and the power they enjoyed in this world into the eternity of the next one, the cult of remembrance as a moment of collective life was generally associated with a concern for one’s own salvation, fostered by forms of preaching which strengthened the fear of death and divine judgement. Meditation on the torments of Hell and Purgatory translated itself into obsessive images, while forms of spiritual association grew to enjoy the indulgences issued by the Church collectively. This resulted in a widespread sociability thanks to a sense of collective responsibility towards all souls, not only those of one’s own family; and here it is difficult to distinguish traditional elements of the social life of the Mediterranean world from the aims pursued by the ecclesiastical and political authorities. As a consequence, perhaps, it has been hypothesized that the anguish and sense of guilt towards the dead in those who were left behind were allayed: the bonds between living and dead remained strong even after death, and it was possible 41 

According to Knox, The First Book of Discipline, pp. 87–114, the corpse had to be buried ‘without any ceremony’, and a measure of this kind was issued in England in 1644: see Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual, p. 48; on ignominious burials for suicides see pp. 72–74.

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to do for the soul what it had not been possible to do for the living individual. And in Protestant countries this unsatisfied memory arguably strengthened the agnatic conscience and forced heirs to behave in a particular way to maintain and continue a legacy of memories and duties which weighed on them alone.42 That this contributed to the development of a sprit of enlarged solidarity in Catholic societies, compelling people to foster a concern for the fate of the unborn too, is an attractive hypothesis.43 These are profound changes in any case, which differ from one context to another and can only be partly intuited from the sources; they are changes which also affected those areas which were apparently the strongest in their defence of tradition. For centuries, remembrance of the dead as an essential part of the community had been the very foundation of social life, and it had characterized medieval society without religious distinction: a famous example is of mem­­ory as the living substance of faith which kept the dispersed Jewish people united. If ‘memory’ is the term which identifies the fundamental characteristic of European Christianity, its Hebrew equivalent, ‘zakhor’ offers a strong unifying thread for anyone trying to grasp the nature of medieval Judaism. And so it was until the central place of memory was taken by something profoundly different: history as a statement of truth. The crisis that the advent of historiography provoked in the transmission of Jewish identity has been illustrated in a famous study, which according to its author is ‘part history, part confession and credo’. Nothing less could suffice to create and awareness of the existence of a connection between the birth of modern Jewish historiography and the decline of collective memory.44 Even though no Christian historian has attempted to verify it, something analo­­gous undoubtedly took place in the relationship between memory and history in the vaster area of European culture. Here, to quote a well-known exam­­ple, the irruption of the ancient forms of pathos into figurative art revealed itself to be the very substance of that which we define as the Renaissance; and we discovered this thanks to the work of a Hamburg Jew, Aby Warburg. But the processes of dislocation and control of memory in the age of the rebirth of ancient historiography and the classical idea of the fame reserved for great men profoundly moulded the power structure and legitimized its founda42 

According to the hypothesis mentioned above by Davis, ‘Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny’. ‘The cutting of the Catholic connection with the dead freed energies and resources for uses for the living and the unborn’: Davis, ‘Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion’, p. 329. 44  Yerushalmi, Zakhor, Prologue, p. xiii. 43 

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tion: a significant clue is offered by the metamorphosis of the notion of the ‘saint’. The memory of the saints, preserved by the community and transmitted through the liturgy, was criticized by humanists and Protestant reformers, who contested its historical truth. Only those hagiographical memories which passed the test of documentary proof could be accepted and ratified in the new Catholic calendar: the exemplary construction of a collective memory guaranteed from above, thanks to the teamwork carried out by the Bollandists, the liturgical calendar thus offered an ancient structure into which it was possible to pour a modern content.45 It could be said, using a famous expression, that things had to change for them to remain as they were. Underneath the superfi­ cial crust of ancient religion, drenched in memory, philology quietly came to lodge: research into uncertain traces in documents took the place of the living certainties of the Christian people. The division between myth and history was hidden by the work of a powerful institution, the Catholic Church, ruled by canon law and determined to foster the sense of uninterrupted continuity which was the source of its very identity. But the past reconstructed by modern historiography is something quite different from that of collective memory: as Yerushalmi has observed it is ‘en réalité un passé perdu, mais ce n’est pas celui don’t nous ressentons la perte’.46 For traditional Christianity, it was divine memory which was indelible; and this memory was expected to provide compensation for those who suffered injustice and punishment for the wicked. But a fundamental characteristic of the Hebrew Bible which passed into the Christian tradition was also the request to God to forget man’s sins. Forgiveness as the erasure of memory is an insistent request which runs throughout the holy books of Judaism and Christianity.47 An analogous union of justice and mercy was sought in the rite of comforted execution: the guarantee of God’s forgiveness given to the soul of the executed prisoner offered the community the possibility of ritually burying his body and cooperating in the salvation of his soul. This removed the fear that surrounded the figure of the condemned man because of the threat posed by his vengeful spirit. The mediation offered by collective prayer guaranteed God’s forgiveness 45 

See Maiello, Storia del calendario; and on the reform of canonization trials, see Gotor, I beati del papa. 46  Yerushalmi, ‘Réflexions sur l’oubli’, p. 17. 47  ‘I verbi nasa e sakah, che significano “dimenticare”, nei passi esaminati hanno il senso di “perdonare”. Lo stesso significato ha zakar preceduto da una negazione’: Luciani, ‘“Dimenticare” = “perdonare” nell’Antico Testamento ebraico’, p. 28.

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and made sure that the shade of the condemned man no longer persecuted the living with the unsatisfied hatred of a violent life which had been cut short. To achieve this result it was necessary to convert the condemned prisoner. This is the word which is continually repeated: convert, transform into another person. If we bear this point firmly in mind then the infinite series of arguments and advice which are articulated in the literature of comfort, from the earliest manuscripts of the simple devoted to the increasingly elaborate work of theologians and doctors, becomes clear. It was necessary to avoid any reference to the past, prevent all contact with relatives and family members, replace the ordinary confessor by a new one, and forbid all those things and people which could remind the condemned prisoner of his previous identity. Projected towards the future life in the next world, the condemned had to see himself as a martyr — if unjustly punished — or as the lucky sinner to whom God had given the chance to suffer for his sins in such a way as to be forgiven. ‘Hard’ was the word used to describe those who resisted conversion: it was necessary to explain to them that their resistance was the temptation of the devil and that only by removing themselves from temptations could their death become wor­­thy. Among all forms of temptation, that which always recurred and which was the most difficult to overcome was attachment to life and rebellion against the sentence, either because it was unjust and wrongly motivated, or because it was unfair by condemning one person and acquitting another who was equally guilty, or in any case because it was contrary to God’s commandment not to kill. In the meetings of the devout laymen of the late Middle Ages, compassion for the condemned prevailed and the arguments for comforting them were taken from the Gospels: Christ remained the model of the man condemned by an unjust sentence, so the ‘afflicted’ were offered the moral of the Sermon on the Mount, and in particular the blessing destined for those persecuted ‘propter iustitiam’.48 In practice, in the great majority of cases, the work of the comforters managed to transform the reciprocal hatred between the condemned and society into a consoling reciprocal absolution, or at least into the reciprocal provision of services: the living offered to say masses for the dead and in exchange expected the dead to change their attitude from one of revenge into one of protection. The past was annulled, the crime erased. Just as the blood shed by the martyrs had taken the place of baptism for them, so the blood shed on the 48 

‘[…] Stiano forti alla iustitia. Beati qui persecutiones patiuntur propter iustitiam’: statutes of the Compagnia della Pietà of Viterbo, in Testi viterbesi dei secoli xiv, xv e xvi, ed. by Sgrilli, p. 171.

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scaffold opened the gates of Paradise. While the body found protection in the tomb of the confraternity, the collective devotion stimulated by the masses for the dead had their memory received into the cult of the ‘beheaded’ saints that left important traces in Italy.49 Naturally, all this required the meaning of the rite to be shared by those who took part in it, and the behaviour of the condemned was decisive for the way in which the event would be perceived by the crowd that filled the square. This is what the authorities aimed at, well aware as they were of the legitimizing purpose of the public rite of justice. But the condemned man might not let himself be ‘converted’, and we can see the consequences in one of the few cases of this type. On 3 August, 1495, a certain Piero of Codigoro, condemned to death for theft and murder, was hanged at the windows of the Palazzo Comunale in Ferrara. He refused to take confession, and to the priests who invited him to do so he replied, ‘Che volite che io dica, io non ho peccatto’ (what do you want me to say, I have not sinned). Then ‘cenò molto bene’ (he enjoyed a good meal: large meals were not advised by the confraternities of ascetic inspiration), and he slept or pretended to sleep all night, without paying any attention to the comforters. He was, that is, ‘ne le forze del diavolo’ (in the power of the devil). And for this reason, once he had been hanged, ‘el corpo suo fu getatto nel Po per escha de animali, come lui meritava’ (his body was thrown into the river Po as food for animals, as he deserved).50 The episode clearly shows what the original nucleus of the comforters’ work was, what it was that constituted the essence of their charitable offering: the burial of the bodies of the condemned in consecrated ground. If death on the gallows was ignominious, the way of showing this infamy was to expose the bodies, dismember them, and not to bury them.51 The threat of submitting to shame of this kind was felt with anxiety. We have to imagine the pity for one’s own body hanging from the scaffold, which François Villon expressed in his ‘Ballade des pendus’, as the necessary complement to the precise rules over where and how one’s body was to be buried, and which took up a good deal of space in peoples’ wills. The peace of the grave had its reverse side in the fear of 49  On the devotion to the ‘anime dei corpi decollati’ studied in Sicily by the great folklore scholar, Giuseppe Pitrè, now see Carroll, Veiled Threats, pp. 142–46; see Prosperi, ‘Le fonti’. 50  Libro dei giustiziati dal 1441 al 1577, Ferrara, Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, ms. Cl. I, 404, fol. 13r. 51  On this, Filippo Fineschi rightly insists in Fineschi, Cristo e Giuda, pp. 178–80. A curious census of the historical forms of ignominious death and the defamation of the body has been carried out by Stahl, Histoire de la decapitation, pp. 85–90.

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the restless wandering of the spirit in the places of the unburied body. The need for reassurance here was such that the canon of works on mercy was modified: still absent from Honorius of Autun’s Speculum Ecclesiae, the burial of bodies, as Ariès has noted, was so important to the men of the fourteenth century that Giotto included it in one of his bas-reliefs on the Campanile in Florence.52 This gave rise to the collective spirit of groups of laymen who met to ensure they received a suitable burial. In the Italian area increasing quantities of energy and means were employed in the elaboration of burial rituals. To go ‘collegialmente colle veste negre et colla candela in mano et colli torci della compangnia [sic]’ (as a college, with black gowns and a candle in our hands and with the torches of the company)53 to accompany one of their deceased members on his final journey was a duty set out in the statutes of the confraternities with tough penalties for failure to comply. If baptism was the initial rite of passage, necessary for one to be received into the society of ‘persons’ possessing a soul and destined for eternal life, then burial in consecrated ground under the protective wings of the Church was the final and conclusive rite of existence. Here we can clearly see the emergence of the terribly punitive nature of a traditional aspect of the death sentence, the exclusion from burial. It was here that the charitable offering of the confraternities came in, towards all the poor who risked remaining without a Christian funeral, and the offer was extended to the extreme limit, to those executed by the law. The condemned man who accepted death with the sentiments of Christian forgiveness was associated with the confraternity and guaranteed that he would be removed from the scaffold and buried under the protection of the cross: this was a feature common to the charitable associations working in the towns and cities of many parts of Europe.54 And the work of bringing comfort to the condemned, like that of proceeding immediately to the burial of their body, was not without its frictions and contrasts with the divergent will of the ruling powers: in this way a conflict was revived throughout Christian Europe which was symbolized by the tragic figure of Antigone. 52 

Ariès, L’homme devant la mort, p. 184. Statutes of the Compagnia della Pietà, 1479: Testi viterbesi dei secoli xiv, xv e xvi, ed. by Sgrilli, p. 157. 54  See for Spain, Flynn, Sacred Charity, p. 66. In Florence the ground for burying those who had been condemned to death, given to the Compagnia di Santa Maria della Croce in 1361, was ‘il primo esplicito riconoscimento del ruolo pubblico svolto’: Fineschi, ‘La rappresentazione della morte’, p. 808. 53 

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But with the growth of the state apparatus and the institutionalization of the companies of justice, the opposition between the Biblical and evangelical commandment and the practice of state power became unbearable and started to smell of heresy. The justice of the prince required and obtained religious sanction: the sentence of the judges on earth was just because God had foreseen and desired it. It became the norm to reply to those who protested because they believed themselves to be innocent that the justice of the prince was guided directly by the justice of God. In this way the original inspiration behind the confraternities was profoundly distorted: here, as we have said on the more general level of the so-called ‘ideology of death’ — ‘the Christian doctrine of the freedom and equality of man as man had merged with the continuing institutions of unfreedom and injustice’.55 The outcome of this change was also felt in what had been the confraternities’ fundamental offer: a burial devoid of infamy for those tortured bodies which were otherwise destined to hang on the scaffold at length or to remain exposed on spikes in the squares and at the gates of the city. It had an easy tradition to maintain. The rites of Christian burial had long waged war on the ways of treating the body which did not respect the need for them to remain intact and to rest in the grave and await resurrection. There was an initial clash with folklore culture, where the conviction that bodies which had been violently deprived of life had extraordinary powers and magic potential led to particular attention being paid to the bodies of those condemned to death and to all the instruments of execution, and to the growth of a pharmacopoeia of a magic nature around the human remains of the scaffold. 56 Much more decisive was the clash with the needs of the ruling power for a terrifying form of justice based on the ‘éclat des supplices’ (splendour of death by torture). On the eve of the rapid executions by the Jacobins, Goethe could still see the heads of the condemned stuck up on the gates of the city of Frankfurt. The fact is that a conflict remained between earthly condemnation and Christian salvation which manifested itself in the way in which the body of the condemned prisoner was treated. In the ritual described by a Tuscan Dominican of the seventeenth cen55 

Marcuse, ‘The Ideology of Death’, p. 70. On this see Cumont, Lux perpetua, pp. 335 and passim. There was a thesis discussed at the University of Jena on the punishments for those who appropriated the bodies of the condemned ‘ad magicos usus’: Landsberg, Disputatio iuridica, ed. by Beier, pp. 22–23. See Prosperi, ‘Le fonti’. There is no satisfactory study on the practice of burial: for Rome we know, for example, that the condemned who did not repent were buried together with heretics: see a remark in Krogel, The Protestant Cemetery in Rome; and Menniti Ippolito and Vian, All’ombra della piramide. 56 

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tury we can see that those condemned men who died a Christian death were worthy of a Church burial; but it was suggested that the prince’s permission be sought to remove the body from the scaffold, and it was added that the bodies could be offered to physicians for anatomy. The medieval tradition of charity was released from its embrace with political power emptied of any consistency.57 The case of Lucia Cremonini demonstrates that the pact of comforted death had almost exhausted its effectiveness: while she willingly and spontaneously adhered to the model of forgiveness and Christian hope, her body, like that of the little baby she had killed, knew the shame of exclusion from burial, the extreme act of denying her status as a ‘person’. The fate of bodies donated to anatomy was to be exposed to the sadistic curiosity of the collective gaze, which was especially attracted by female bodies. The limbs and the organs were transformed into objects which could be used in various ways, while the skeleton could remain among the objects of study for the teachers.58 The Scuola dei Confortatori was no longer the ancient confraternity of the people: women were not allowed to join and it only accepted city patricians and professors of the University. It was dominated by questions of precedence and ambitions of prestige.59 The needs of the political powers and the academic body increasingly dominated by physicians were therefore immediately and unfailingly satisfied. The physicians needed corpses for their anatomical studies, and in Bologna they received a free supply with ecclesiastical approval. Their source was the poor, those who died in their houses or on the street corners. Two episodes from this period give us an idea of what normally happened. In 1697 the parish priest of San Michele managed with difficulty to get back the body of a beggar who had died on the steps of a church after being seriously wounded in an attempt to escape from the mendicant hospital: the students of the university had got hold of his body for the purposes of anatomy 57  ‘Suspensi furca, vel alio modo mortui ob sua scelera, si impenitentes decesserint, carent sepultura; si vero hi suspensi, vel alias, iussu iudicis necati, si ante mortem sacramenta susceperint, vel saltem fuerint confessi, humandi sunt in sepultura ecclesiastica, cum solemnitate Missae, et aliorum […] Prefati suspensi mortui contriti, minime gentium in patibolo teneri debent […] Horum autem corpora, absque Principis venia, minime sunt accipienda de cuius iussu supensa reperiuntur […] Suspensi cadaver, cum Principis licentia, licite dari potest medicis pro anatomia: Samuellius, Praxis nova observanda, pp. 340–41. 58  After having revealed its secrets, the body of the woman from Pisa condemned for infanticide and dissected by Realdo Colombo in the early sixteenth century, was donated to a collaborator: Columbi, De re anatomica libri xv (1562), p. 111. 59  A key moment of conflict and a test of prestige was the procession of San Luca: see Gottarelli, I viaggi della Madonna di San Luca.

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and it took all the determination of the parish priest to get it released for a church burial.60 A few years later, on 22 January, 1712, to be precise, the following dialogue took place in a miserable dwelling in Bologna, in via Castiglione, between Caterina, the widow of Carlo Antonio Pini, and a group of seven or eight students, who were trying to have the body of her husband, who had just died, taken away by some porters in order to ‘farne l’anatomia’ (to dissect it for the purposes of anatomy): Dimandandoli io, cosa volevano fare e chi erano, questi mi risposero che erano scolari, e che erano venuti per volere il cadavere di mio marito, mentre se ne volevano servire per fare l’Anatomia, e che gli havrebbero fatto dir del bene. When I asked them what they wanted to do and who they were they replied to me that they were students, and that they had come because they wanted the corpse of my husband, which they wanted to use to practise Anatomy, and that they would have a mass said for him.

A Mass and away: this was the payment for the corpse. The widow’s opposition was in vain: ‘li medesimi scolari comandorno alli detti facchini che pigliassero il sudetto cadavere e lo portassero via, sì come fecero […] ancorch’io non volessi e cominciassi a piangere’ (the same students ordered the said porters to take the above mentioned corpse and to take it away, which they did […] even though I did not want them to and I started to cry’).61 As these examples show, the rites of death were by now reduced to a minimum, and ritual burial was annulled by the need to make the body a function of the power of science and the science of power. The bodies of the poor paid the price, including those who died on the scaffold (apart from noblemen). Thus in the destiny of her body, Lucia followed the fate of the child she had killed, and this fate shows that the sacraments of birth and death had been transformed from cultural processes modulated by rites of passage into events linked to a precise point in time, of a time dominated by the need for precision. If masses for the soul freed the hangmen and anatomists from any duty of Christian solidarity towards the person before them, then baptism had been transformed into a social and political boundary marking out the enjoyment of civil rights.62 60 

Bologna, Bib. Univ. di Bologna, MS 1071, xxiii, n. 34: De cadaveribus pro anatome inservientibus. 61  Bologna, Arch. di Stato, Arch. criminale del Torrone, reg. 7679/2, fasc. 40 (1712, ‘contra scolares artistas’). I have quoted the document in my preface to Carlino, La fabbrica del corpo, pp. xviii-xix. 62  See the important study by Brambilla, ‘Battesimo e diritti civili dalla Riforma protestante’.

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The words written on the comforters’ questionnaire, which passed from there into the city chronicles, were selected to legitimate the powers that had dominated the life and ordered the death of the condemned woman. And here the historian has to recognize that the sources we have inherited carry with them the risk of complicity with the judges in perpetuating the memory of a name chosen at the time to be made into an example of infamy. But the question remains of whether we have moved on from the woman con­­demned for infanticide as a ‘type’ elaborated by an entire legal and religious system to any knowledge of the authentic face of a person. One fact is certain: that form of behaviour which Lucia adopted in the final fragment of her life was one of the most carefully arranged and elaborated possibilities presented by the society of her age. It expressed an idea of justice which associated the harshness of justice with the promise of eternal salvation and offered the rite of repentance and forgiveness as a guarantee, a rite capable of extinguishing the memory of the crime and healing the wound it had provoked. Lucia seized on it with particular spontaneity and conviction, conforming to a model of individual identity which had profound roots in her education and in the society which surrounded her. That model took possession of her and transformed her: there was no need to insist with her, to prompt her, or to intimidate her. It was enough to offer her a friendly environment, a fraternal presence, and she did the rest by accepting without resistance the suggestions that her comforter gave, minute by minute. And one thing is certain here: behind Lucia’s every devout utterance and every movement there was a voice which dictated them to her. The handbooks studied in the confraternities concentrated precisely on what to suggest and how to suggest it. The arguments used with Lucia are summarized in the comforters’ report as follows: ‘Col più vivo del mio spirito le mostrai conosciuta necessaria tal strada da Dio per la salvezza dell’anima sua’ (with all my powers of persuasion I showed her that this road was recognized as necessary by God for the salvation of her soul). Everything that happened, therefore, was the fruit of divine Providence: the earthly judge’s condemnation became the benign intervention of God, who had found no other way to save her soul. Now that salvation was at hand she only had to repent and recognize the hand of the executioner raised up against her as the opportunity created by God to open the door of eternal life for her. Death was not the end of life but only the transition from a condition of unbearable misery and suffering to one of inexpressible eternal happiness. Lucia was guilty of a crime, and human justice had punished her for this. But behind human justice was the will of a paternal and omniscient God who used the death sentence to offer the sinner the opportunity to turn death

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into true life. Little was required for this: repentance and the acceptance of the sentence, to offer to submit willingly to suffering and death on the scaffold in exchange for God’s forgiveness. On the scales where God’s perfect and constant justice would weigh her sins, the blood shed and the suffering undergone would balance each other out and allow Lucia’s soul immediately to reach the heavens of eternal glory. These were the comforters’ habitual arguments. They learnt them in laborious exercises in the course of their meetings: they were trained to foresee the reactions of the condemned prisoners, to use expedients of all kinds to deal with the crises of desperation of those who heard their imminent death announced. The ‘Scuola dei confortatori’ had its own well-stocked library, consisting of around a hundred books devoted exclusively to what they defined as their ‘function’ par excellence. With Lucia there was no need for any special arguments. The conversation with her took place near the fire: it was cold, and as we have seen, Lucia was not sufficiently dressed. It was necessary to bring her near the fire to warm her up more than once. But there was no need to terrify her and make her repent with the threat of the fires of Hell, as was sometimes the case with the most obstinate prisoners. Her reactions showed that same remissive willingness to do what was expected of her that she had already shown in the course of her interrogation in prison. And the art of the comforters consisted precisely of suggesting appropriate words and forms of behaviour at the right moment. We can easily imagine the suggestions whispered in the middle of the crowd, in the most dramatic phase of the rite. The literature which they used in their preparation presents them as obligatory. When ‘il ministro della giustizia gli domanda perdono, gli lega le mani e pone il capestro al collo’ (the executioner asks them for forgiveness, ties their hands, and places the noose around their neck) the comforter has to suggest the following: Questo vostro fratello usa con voi quest’azione d’umiltà domandandovi perdono […] Voi all’incontro ditegli di buon cuore, quale rassignato veramente alla maestà divina: ‘Come, fratello? E cosa ragionevole ch’io vi perdoni, volendo che il Signor Dio perdoni a me […] e pregate per me peccatore’. (This brother of yours offers you this act of humility, asking for your forgiveness […] And for your part, say to him from your heart, truly resigned to God’s majesty, ‘Why, brother? It is reasonable for me to forgive you, as I want the Lord God to forgive me […] and pray for me as a sinner’.)

When he places the noose around their neck:

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Adesso è tempo di voltar e ‘mpiegar l’animo vostro nella considerazione della prontezza con che il Figliuol di Dio prese sovra le sue spalle afflittissime il legno della sua Croce e di rinovar il proposito di imitarlo. (Now it is time to turn your soul and make it consider the readiness with which the Son of God bore the wood of his Cross on his most afflicted shoulders, and to renew your resolution to imitate him.)

Once they had reached the place of justice, the comforter invited the prisoner to say the following words with their heart, and if possible, with their mouth: Perdonate, Signore, a tutti quelli che in qualunque modo m’avessero offeso, o aves­ sero parte o colpa in questa mia morte e che dal mondo fussero giudicati per miei nemici, imperocché io non conosco altri nemici che il demonio e il peccato. (O Lord, forgive all those who have in some way offended me, or had some part or responsibility in my death and who could be judged as my enemies by the world, because I know no other enemies than the devil and sin.)

And when the end arrived, the comforter suggested the following invocation: Domine Iesu Christe, fili Dei vivi, Sancta Maria Mater Christi, miseremini mei.63 (O Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, Holy Mary Mother of Christ, have mercy on me.)

The rite of execution has an obligatory theatricality: what the crowd sees and hears as spontaneous is choreographed; the words of the protagonist are anticipated by a prompter. Thus the dialogue is complete and what appears to be Lucia’s spontaneous action is in fact the result of a lack of resistance, a sweet and remissive adherence to what she was prompted to do and say. Yet this did nothing to detract from the great success that her case represented for the confraternity. The woman guilty of an atrocious crime had been transformed into a consoling model of repentance and forgiveness, who accepted to expiate her crime with her blood. That blood shed on the scaffold, with the right inner disposition, had a value similar to that of the water of baptism. For this reason, the mother convicted of infanticide was able to obtain the recognition of full and exemplary humanity which it was not possible to grant to her unbaptized child. An institution which administered a patrimony of knowledge and attitudes elaborated over the centuries invested this entire patrimony to bring about something that religious tradition called ‘conversion’: the attain63 

Mansi, Documenti per confortare i condannati a morte, pp. 355–56, 379, 387.

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ment of the true aim of life by changing oneself. The confraternity was used to such success: the comforters’ records contain very few cases of failure. And after Lucia they had analogous success with Sabatina Bruni, the woman who confessed to infanticide and who was executed on 18 June, 1723. Unlike Lucia, Sabatina was initially held back by the thought of the children she was leaving behind her and by the weight of the memory of the murder. But when she received a guarantee that ‘i suoi figlioli sarebbero stati assistiti’ (her children would receive assistance), she calmed down and showed herself to be ‘rassegnata’ and ‘ubbidiente’ (resigned and obedient), ‘mostrando di morire volontieri dando colla sua morte un esempio all’altre donne di guardarsi da simili delitti’ (showing that she died willingly, giving an example with her death to other women to avoid similar crimes).64 In this case too, therefore, the salvation of the soul was in harmony with the terrifying example required by justice and with the need to mend the fracture created by the crime. The confraternity could be proud of its successes. But Lucia’s success was also undoubtedly great. She was born in society’s shadow, destined at most to an obscure life and a death which would not normally have received the privilege of being a ‘morte scritta’ (written death).65 A crime committed in a moment of terror and madness had catapulted her beyond the boundaries of what culture had established for the notion of humanity. Now, faced with death, she could lose herself completely. The chronicles of the professional comforters were full of cases of the loss of presence. When, on news of their condemnation, the future suddenly disappeared from their horizons, many of the condemned gave those present a spectacle of their total loss: emblematic is the case of a nineteen-year-old boy from Bologna, hanged in 1677 for a ‘leggierissimo furto’ (small theft), who ‘pativa d’una sonnolenza gravissima, che lo faceva apparire insensibile da principio a qualunque discorso, a’ quali non dava alcuna risposta’ (who suffered a very great drowsiness, which made him appear insensible right from the start to any form of discourse, to which he gave no reply).66 The chaos that took hold of reality for those who no longer had any place in it became the untimely disintegration of their mental lucidity and bodily functions. It was the unspeakable experience of the end of the world.67 As a remedy, the comforters countered this by offering the soul the 64 

Bologna, Archivio Arcivescovile, fondo Scuola dei confortatori, b. 8, fasc. 12, fol. 144. Petrucci, Le scritture ultime, p. 144. 66  See Prosperi, ‘Il controllo della paura di morire’. 67  On the problem of ‘presence’, see the studies by Ernesto de Martino and the cases he collected in De Martino, La fine del mondo, ed. by Gallini. 65 

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hope of survival beyond the execution. Those who had lost everything could re-conquer themselves, save themselves by accepting to die. That death could ‘give the soul’, just as baptism could. It was an ancient offer, which was becoming increasingly feeble in European culture with respect to other ways of giving a meaning to one’s own death, such as the experience of the virile, heroic death for one’s country, for example. Lucia was a woman, and had had a religious education. The announcement of her death did not find her unprepared. All that was required was the comforters’ invitation and the offer of dialogue. She did the rest herself, with such spontaneity as to give her behaviour an aura of freedom. Lucia freed herself from anguish and a sense of guilt and discovered an unexpected ability to offer herself as a loved and imitable model: for one day she managed to make the mask which others had chosen for her very substance. The question we asked the documents of her life and death comes back to us at the end of our journey. It is a question which we could all ask ourselves, in considering the inextricable intertwining of opportunities and responses to them, constrictions and freedom, which our lives are made up of. The unformed creature and the person are separated by the work of the time and context. And only in this way can we perhaps resolve the contradiction between the absolute peculiarity of the life of every person, which by definition cannot be confused with that of anyone else, and the extreme conformability of individuals in the play of adaptation and resistance to the opportunities of their time and their environment.

Afterword

T

wenty years have passed since I first came across the document which is at the heart of this book. I was immediately struck by it. At the time, I was gathering material for a history of the Christian comfort given to prisoners condemned to death. The history of the rituals and the concepts elaborated to reconcile the biblical commandment ‘thou shall not kill’ with the use of the gallows has left enormous traces in the history of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period in Europe, but above all in Italy. The historical sources describe an extraordinarily rich reality, still largely unexplored, a sacrificial rite with victims in flesh and blood, where the emotions aroused by a death administered in the name of justice were knowingly controlled and guided towards an obligatory outcome. That history has remained in draft form. My contact with the archives of repression resulted instead in the emergence of the, perhaps inevitable, problem of the extent to which it is possible to gain any real knowledge, not of those who condemn, but of those who are condemned. These are two categories whose difference in power and consequent ability to leave a trace of themselves in history reaches its greatest point of distance. Criminals — in the sense of those who were condemned in the name of the law they broke — can be considered generally and in most cases as a special vanguard of the lower classes, almost a negative mirror reflection of those great men whose biographies have for centuries fuelled the celebratory history of human progress. We ask ourselves whether these obscure inhabitants of the criminal archives are truly knowable in their concrete reality, and it is a problem which is rarely resolved successfully. In their case, the desire to know lives and histories which animates those who explore the memories of the past, has almost always been frustrated: in the violent contrast between the dense shadow of an ordinary life and the blinding light projected by the crime and its punishment, what gets lost are precisely the

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characteristics of those at stake: in place of the true physiognomy of the individual we see monstrous masks or colourless social types. During my research I also grew increasingly aware of my desire to gain a better knowledge not of the script writers and the directors of the tragedy, but of one of their victims: a woman, the woman at the heart of this book. I often went back and re-read the documents of her trial, and I often made the young people who attended my courses read them; and every time I found a strong emotional reaction on their part. To grasp the convergence of historical forces towards a given outcome in the fate of a human being — one alone — allows us to experience the need to understand and the limits of our understanding of someone who, because of the passage of time, is placed in a condition of the greatest alterity with respect to us, but who, because of the destiny of a life which has ended, still arouses our feelings of human pity. But this was not the only reaction on the part of my students: the fact is that this story presents a morally concerning problem, preventing anyone who considers it from enjoying that distance in time, unlike those watch a distant shipwreck from the safety of the shore. Here the life of a woman is linked to the child she conceived, gave birth to, and killed. She was the source of the life and the death of that child, and that life and death are linked to her in an inextricable bond, whose essential part is the violence which was committed and suffered. The need to know cannot therefore be limited to the individual subject, but has to take into account both the mother and the child: the pregnant mother and the child who did not live, the single and double being of mother and child. It is not simply a question of adapting the question to the realty: if historical reality itself were capable of imposing itself on those who study it, our knowledge would not have progressed in the way it has. And indeed today, questions of this type are emerging with increasing frequency on the quiet in historians’ laboratories, as a result of research and discoveries made by other sciences, sciences which are required by our times to provide means of intervening in and resolving problems of the most varied nature, but all problems to do with administering the knowledge which allows us to control the production and reproduction of human life. Now, the biological bond of motherhood is the original point of unity and separation, solidarity and conflict, between human beings. Myths and forms of representation, the desire to know and dominate nature, have long concentrated on this point. To control the production of life has increasingly become the aim and the measure of power — religious, political, or scientific — and the point where these powers come into conflict with the freedom not only of individuals who are able to generate, but increasingly with that of individuals who are not yet born. Today, now that we have entered

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an age in which we can technically reproduce life, we find ourselves facing for the first time the question of the limits to be placed on the life that can be born. At the limits of existence, where culture has long remained standing before the pillars of Hercules of nature, it is not only the meting out of death but also that of life which now submits itself docilely to the intervention of technology. ‘Biotechnology is subtly undermining our identity as members of the species’ and outside intentions are taking possession ‘of the life history of the programmed person’.1 Hence the uncertainties and the discussions on human nature, the return to relevance of ancient definitions of ‘person’, and the general need to stop and examine the experience of the past — as always, when the wind of history suddenly blows us away from our habitual horizon. And it is in moments of extreme danger, as Walter Benjamin has compellingly observed,2 that the angel of history turns its gaze back on the landscape laid out behind it. To define the identity of the human being is a task that belongs especially to the horizon of a society like ours, a society in which the potentially limitless ability of the individual to undergo change is accompanied by a celebration of individualism as a supreme value; the unrepeatable authenticity of the single person is continually transformed in the play of life’s masks as representation; and the annulling of individual differences to the point of the dream of serial reproduction and cloning clashes with the sense of the value of a single life and the defence of individual differences as the condition and substance of existence. Nor can we forget that the antecedent of our modernity was the planning and the partial realization of an insanely rational design to systematically eliminate entire human groups and societies. Just as that design was realized in its clearest form in the Nazi concentration camps, so the initial step was the preliminary destruction of the consciousness of being an individual and of belonging to the human race. ‘If this is a man’:3 Primo Levi’s question is still with us in an age which has crossed unimagined scientific frontiers and is moving towards the scientific deconstruction and reconstruction of living beings by working on DNA. What is and what distinguishes a human being is a question which keeps coming back, but which receives different answers in different times. It is a question, therefore, which concerns historical knowledge. To tell the stories of human beings — the exceptional or the normal, the powerful or the victims 1 

Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, trans. by Rehg, Pensky, and Beister, pp. 72–73. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History’, trans. by Zohn, pp. 253–64, especially thesis ix, pp. 257–58. 3  Levi, If This is a Man, trans. by Woolf. 2 

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of others’ power, but always distinguished by their unrepeatable individuality — is the lowest common denominator of all history, true or invented. And it is again the historians who, by raising their eyes to take in vaster panoramas, have often disseminated the past centuries with the dates of birth of individualism as a concept or a value. Here we have tried to follow a different path, not the main highway but a barely marked track, where the surrounding landscape hardly appears. We have analyzed a fact of the past, attempting to obtain some form of reply from the historical sources to questions such as, what can we see that is original and what is repetitive in individuals, in their historical experiences, in the facts of nature and in those of culture? What thresholds have we had to cross to be defined as belonging to a species and to be approved of to enter the social body? How has the problem of personal identity been resolved? To what extent has individual behaviour been determined by the rules imposed or superimposed from the outside? These were the question which were in my mind when I went back to Lucia Cremonini’s court case again. The problem was to understand, and to attempt to understand the story of a mother who committed infanticide it was necessary to go back to the way in which a society of the past conceived of human nature. The documents left by a trial, used to formulate a judgement, have been used in an attempt to understand. Questions were put to a particular moment of experience, from which it is only possible to receive partial and indirect replies. But only in this was has it been possible for us to proceed to what Marc Bloch has defined as ‘a science of man in time’.

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Europa Sacra

All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field. Titles in Series Religious and Laity in Western Europe 1000-1400: Interaction, Negotiation, and Power, ed. by Emilia Jamroziak and Janet Burton (2007) Anna Ysabel d’Abrera, The Tribunal of Zaragoza and Crypto-Judaism: 1484–1515 (2008) Cecilia Hewlett, Rural Communities in Renaissance Tuscany: Religious Identities and Lo­cal Loyalties (2009) Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Preaching 1200–1500, ed. by Katherine L. Jansen and Miri Rubin (2010) Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe, 1100–1500, ed. by Constant J. Mews and John N. Crossley (2011) Alison Brown, Medicean and Savonarolan Florence: The Interplay of Politics, Humanism, and Religion (2012) Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore (2013)

Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture, ed. by Samuel Cohn Jr., Marcello Fantoni, Franco Franceschi, and Fabrizio Ricciardelli (2013) Thomas A. Fudge, The Memory and Motivation of Jan Hus, Medieval Priest and Martyr (2013) Clare Monagle, Orthodoxy and Controversy in Twelfth-Century Religious Discourse: Peter Lombard’s ‘Sentences’ and the Development of Theology (2013) Mulieres Religiosae: Shaping Female Spiritual Authority in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. by Veerle Fraeters and Imke de Gier (2014) Tomas Zahora, Nature, Virtue, and the Boundaries of Encyclopedic Knowledge: The Tropo­ logical Universe of Alexander Neckam (1157–1217) (2014) Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński, Poland, Holy War, and the Piast Monarchy, 1100–1230 (2014) Line Cecilia Engh, Gendered Identities in Bernard of Clairvaux’s ‘Sermons on the Song of Songs’ (2014) Bruno the Carthusian and his Mortuary Roll: Studies, Text, and Translation, ed. by Hartmut Beyer, Gabriela Signori, and Sita Steckel (2014) David Rosenthal, Kings of the Street: Power, Community, and Ritual in Renaissance Flo­ rence (2014) Fabrizio Conti, Witchcraft, Superstition, and Observant Franciscan Preachers: Pastoral Approach and Intellectual Debate in Renaissance Milan (2015) Mendicant Cultures in the Medieval and Early Modern World: Word, Deed, and Image, ed. by Sally J. Cornelison, Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, and Peter Howard (2016)

In Preparation Relics, Identity, and Memory in Medieval Europe, ed. by Marika Räsänen, Gritje Hartmann, and Earl Jeffrey Richards