Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice

Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice PDF Author: Joanne M. Ferraro
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421429071
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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

Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice

Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice PDF Author: Joanne M. Ferraro
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421429071
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book Here

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

Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice

Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice PDF Author: Joanne Marie Ferraro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781421427843
Category : Criminal justice, Administration of
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description


Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice

Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice PDF Author: Joanne M. Ferraro
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801889871
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice also traces shifting attitudes toward illegitimacy and paternity from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Both the Catholic Church and the Republic of Venice tried to enforce moral discipline and regulate sex and reproduction. Unmarried pregnant women were increasingly stigmatized for engaging in sex. Their claims for damages because of seduction or rape were largely unproven, and the priests and laymen that they were involved with were often acquitted of any wrongdoing. The lack of institutional support for single motherhood and the exculpation of fathers frequently led to abortion, infant abandonment, or even infant death.

Sex in an Old Regime City

Sex in an Old Regime City PDF Author: Julie Hardwick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190945192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Our ideas about the long histories of young couples' relationships and women's efforts to manage their reproductive health are often premised on the notion of a powerful sexual double standard. In Sex in an Old Regime City, Julie Hardwick offers a major reframing of the history of young people's intimacy. Based on legal records from the city of Lyon, Hardwick uncovers the relationships of young workers before marriage and after pregnancy occurred, even if marriage did not follow, and finds that communities treated these occurrences without stigmatizing or moralizing. She finds a hidden world of strategies young couples enacted when they faced an untimely pregnancy. If they could not or would not marry, they sometimes tried to terminate pregnancies, to make the newborn go away by a variety of measures, or to charge the infant to local welfare institutions. Far from being isolated, couples drew on the resources of local communities and networks. Clerics, midwives, wet nurses, landladies, lawyers, parents, and male partners in and outside the city offered pragmatic, sympathetic ways to help young, unmarried pregnant women deal with their situations and hold young men responsible for the reproductive consequences of their sexual activity. This was not merely emotional work; those involved were financially compensated. These support systems ensured that the women could resume their jobs and usually marry later, without long-term costs. In doing so, communities managed and minimized the disruptions and consequences even of cases of abandonment and unprosecuted infanticide. This richly textured study re-thinks the ways in which fundamental issues of intimacy and gendered power were entwined with families, communities, and religious and secular institutions at all levels from households to neighborhoods to the state.

Infanticide and Abortion in Early Modern Germany

Infanticide and Abortion in Early Modern Germany PDF Author: Margaret Brannan Lewis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317221508
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This book is the first work to look at the full range of three centuries of the early modern period in regards to infanticide and abortion, a period in which both practices were regarded equally as criminal acts. Faced with dire consequences if they were found pregnant or if they bore illegitimate children, many unmarried women were left with little choice. Some of these unfortunate women turned to infanticide and abortion as the way out of their difficult situation. This book explores the legal, social, cultural, and religious causes of infanticide and abortion in the early modern period, as well as the societal reactions to them. It examines how perceptions of these actions taken by desperate women changed over three hundred years and as early modern society became obsessed with a supposed plague of murderous mothers, resulting in heated debates, elaborate public executions, and a media frenzy. Finally, this book explores how the prosecution of infanticide and abortion eventually helped lead to major social and legal reformations during the age of the Enlightenment.

Informal Marriages in Early Modern Venice

Informal Marriages in Early Modern Venice PDF Author: Jana Byars
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429675615
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Conditions of the marriage market and sexual culture, and the needs of wealthy families and their members created social tensions in the late sixteenth and early-seventeenth century Venice. This study details these tensions and discusses concubinage– a long-term, sexual, non-marital union - as an alternate family model that soothed them by meeting the needs of families and individuals in a manner that did not offend the sensibilities of the authorities or other Venetians. Concubinage was quite common, and the Venetian community regularly accepted concubinaries, concubinal relationships, and the offspring concubinage produced.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe

The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Jane Couchman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317041046
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 728

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Book Description
Over the past three decades scholars have transformed the study of women and gender in early modern Europe. This Ashgate Research Companion presents an authoritative review of the current research on women and gender in early modern Europe from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The authors examine women’s lives, ideologies of gender, and the differences between ideology and reality through the recent research across many disciplines, including history, literary studies, art history, musicology, history of science and medicine, and religious studies. The book is intended as a resource for scholars and students of Europe in the early modern period, for those who are just beginning to explore these issues and this time period, as well as for scholars learning about aspects of the field in which they are not yet an expert. The companion offers not only a comprehensive examination of the current research on women in early modern Europe, but will act as a spark for new research in the field.

A Cultural History of Marriage in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age

A Cultural History of Marriage in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age PDF Author: Joanne M. Ferraro
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350103195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
Why marry? The personal question is timeless. Yet the highly emotional desires of men and women during the period between 1450 and 1650 were also circumscribed by external forces that operated within a complex arena of sweeping economic, demographic, political, and religious changes. The period witnessed dramatic religious reforms in the Catholic confession and the introduction of multiple Protestant denominations; the advent of the printing press; European encounters and exchange with the Americas, North Africa, and southwestern and eastern Asia; the growth of state bureaucracies; and a resurgence of ecclesiastical authority in private life. These developments, together with social, religious, and cultural attitudes, including the constructed norms of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, impinged upon the possibility of marrying. The nine scholars in this volume aim to provide a comprehensive picture of current research on the cultural history of marriage for the years between 1450 and 1650 by identifying both the ideal templates for nuptial unions in prescriptive writings and artistic representation and actual practices in the spheres of courtship and marriage rites, sexual relationships, the formation of family networks, marital dissolution, and the overriding choices of individuals over the structural and cultural constraints of the time. A Cultural History of Marriage in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on Courtship and Ritual; Religion, State and Law; Kinship and Social Networks; the Family Economy; Love and Sex; the Breaking of Vows; and Representations of Marriage.

Singing the News of Death

Singing the News of Death PDF Author: Una McIlvenna
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197551858
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
Across Europe, from the dawn of print until the early twentieth century, the news of crime and criminals' public executions was printed in song form on cheap broadsides and pamphlets to be sold in streets and marketplaces by ballad-singers. Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 looks at how and why song was employed across Europe for centuries as a vehicle for broadcasting news about crime and executions, exploring how this performative medium could frame and mediate the message of punishment and repentance. Examining ballads in English, French, Dutch, German, and Italian across four centuries, author Una McIlvenna offers the first multilingual and longue durée study of the complex and fascinating phenomenon of popular songs about brutal public death. Ballads were frequently written in the first-person voice, and often purported to be the last words, confession or 'dying speech' of the condemned criminal, yet were ironically on sale the day of the execution itself. Musical notation was generally not required as ballads were set to well-known tunes. Execution ballads were therefore a medium accessible to all, regardless of literacy, social class, age, gender or location. A genre that retained extraordinary continuities in form and content across time, space, and language, the execution ballad grew in popularity in the nineteenth century, and only began to fade as executions themselves were removed from the public eye. With an accompanying database of recordings, Singing the News of Death brings these centuries-old songs of death back to life.

Death and a Maiden

Death and a Maiden PDF Author: William David Myers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1609090144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
On the feast of St. Michael, September 1659, a thirteen-year-old peasant girl left her family's rural home to work as a maid in the nearby city of Braunschweig. Just two years later, Grethe Schmidt found herself imprisoned and accused of murdering her bastard child, even though the fact of her pregnancy was inconclusive and no infant's body was found to justify the severe measures used against her. The tale spiraled outward to set a defense lawyer and legal theorist against powerful city magistrates and then upward to a legal contest between that city and its overlord, the Duchy of Brunswick, with the city's independence and ancient liberties hanging in the balance. Death and a Maiden tells a fascinating story that begins in the bedchamber of a house in Brunswick and ends at the court of Duke Augustus in the city of Wolfenbettel, with political intrigue along the way. After thousands of pages of testimony and rancorous legal exchange, it is still not clear that any murder happened. Myers infuses the story of Grethe's arrest, torture, trial, and sentence for "suspected infanticide" with a detailed account of the workings of the criminal system in continental Europe, including the nature of interrogations, the process of torture, and the creation of a "criminal" identity over time. He presents an in-depth examination of a criminal system in which torture was both legal and an important part of criminal investigations. This story serves as a captivating slice of European history as well as a highly informative look at the condition of poor women and the legal system in mid-seventeeth century Germany. General readers and scholars alike will be riveted by Grethe's ordeal.