Awards

• Nominated for Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies 2024
• Nominated for Rene Wellek Prize 2023

Overview

On October 24, 1588, Paolo Barbieri murdered his wife, Isabella Caccianemici, stabbing her to death with his sword. Later, Paolo would claim to have acted in a fit of madness—but was he criminally insane or merely pretending to be? In this riveting book, Mònica Calabritto addresses this controversy by reconstructing Paolo’s life, prosecution, and medical diagnoses. Skillfully combining archival documents unearthed throughout Italy, Calabritto brings to light the case of one person and his family as insanity ravaged their financial security, honor, and reputation. The very notion of insanity is as much on trial in Paolo’s case as the defendant himself. A case study in the diagnosis of insanity in the early modern era, Barbieri’s story reveals discrepancies between medical and legal definitions of a person’s mental state at the time of a crime. Murder and Madness on Trial bridges the micro-historical dimensions of Paolo’s murder case and the macro-historical perspectives on medical and legal evidence used to identify intermittent madness. A tragic and gripping tale, Murder and Madness on Trial allows readers to look “through a glass darkly” at early modern violence, madness, criminal justice, medical and legal expertise, and the construction and circulation of news. This erudite and engaging book will appeal to early modern historians and true crime fans alike.

Full Product Details

9780271095097

Table of Contents

Reviews

“Murder and Madness on Trial, in dialogue with both historians of medicine and social and legal historians, paints a complex and rich picture of early modern madness. Thanks to the unusual abundance of the documentation of the case—legal, medical, literary—Calabritto describes in detail a nuanced case of murder, illness, and conflict of expertise, interpretation, and political cultures.” —Paolo Savoia,author of Gaspare Tagliacozzi and Early Modern Surgery: Faces, Men, and Pain “By discussing jurists’ and physicians’ expertise, the social and cultural expectations of lay witnesses and contemporary accounts of the events, Murder and Madness on Trial creates an original and multiperspectival history that adds to current work on early modern perceptions of insanity.” —Silvia De Renzi,author of Instruments in Print: Books from the Whipple Collection “When a young Bolognese nobleman prone to delusion and rage slaughtered his well-born wife in 1588, the shocking crime set off a drama that drew in men of law and medicine, stirred up the city’s chronicles, and subverted the host family’s authority for decades to come. Murder and Madness on Trial ties everything together in a literary, medical, legal, and social history that traces discordant understandings of crime and mental illness and tracks the crime’s lasting repercussions within the wider family.” —Thomas V. Cohen,York University “When a Bolognese nobleman kills his teenage wife with a sword and flees into the night, is he insane? What might that even mean? In Calabritto’s brisk retelling chaos descends as judges fight with doctors over how to define madness and guilt, local authorities resist papal overlords’ push to prosecute, and a family dissolves in animosity, grief, and vengeance. A brilliant and sobering reconstruction of the emotional cost of mental illness in the late Renaissance.” —Nicholas Terpstra,University of Toronto

“Murder and Madness on Trial, in dialogue with both historians of medicine and social and legal historians, paints a complex and rich picture of early modern madness. Thanks to the unusual abundance of the documentation of the case—legal, medical, literary—Calabritto describes in detail a nuanced case of murder, illness, and conflict of expertise, interpretation, and political cultures.” —Paolo Savoia, author of Gaspare Tagliacozzi and Early Modern Surgery: Faces, Men, and Pain “By discussing jurists’ and physicians’ expertise, the social and cultural expectations of lay witnesses and contemporary accounts of the events, Murder and Madness on Trial creates an original and multiperspectival history that adds to current work on early modern perceptions of insanity.” —Silvia De Renzi, author of Instruments in Print: Books from the Whipple Collection “When a Bolognese nobleman kills his teenage wife with a sword and flees into the night, is he insane? What might that even mean? In Calabritto’s brisk retelling chaos descends as judges fight with doctors over how to define madness and guilt, local authorities resist papal overlords’ push to prosecute, and a family dissolves in animosity, grief, and vengeance. A brilliant and sobering reconstruction of the emotional cost of mental illness in the late Renaissance.” —Nicholas Terpstra, University of Toronto

“Murder and Madness on Trial, in dialogue with both historians of medicine and social and legal historians, paints a complex and rich picture of early modern madness. Thanks to the unusual abundance of the documentation of the case—legal, medical, literary—Calabritto describes in detail a nuanced case of murder, illness, and conflict of expertise, interpretation, and political cultures.” —Paolo Savoia, author of Gaspare Tagliacozzi and Early Modern Surgery: Faces, Men, and Pain “By discussing jurists’ and physicians’ expertise, the social and cultural expectations of lay witnesses and contemporary accounts of the events, Murder and Madness on Trial creates an original and multiperspectival history that adds to current work on early modern perceptions of insanity.” —Silvia De Renzi, author of Instruments in Print: Books from the Whipple Collection “When a young Bolognese nobleman prone to delusion and rage slaughtered his well-born wife in 1588, the shocking crime set off a drama that drew in men of law and medicine, stirred up the city’s chronicles, and subverted the host family’s authority for decades to come. Murder and Madness on Trial ties everything together in a literary, medical, legal, and social history that traces discordant understandings of crime and mental illness and tracks the crime’s lasting repercussions within the wider family.” —Thomas V. Cohen, York University “When a Bolognese nobleman kills his teenage wife with a sword and flees into the night, is he insane? What might that even mean? In Calabritto’s brisk retelling chaos descends as judges fight with doctors over how to define madness and guilt, local authorities resist papal overlords’ push to prosecute, and a family dissolves in animosity, grief, and vengeance. A brilliant and sobering reconstruction of the emotional cost of mental illness in the late Renaissance.” —Nicholas Terpstra, University of Toronto

Murder and Madness on Trial, in dialogue with both historians of medicine and social and legal historians, paints a complex and rich picture of early modern madness. Thanks to the unusual abundance of the documentation of the case-legal, medical, literary-Calabritto describes in detail a nuanced case of murder, illness, and conflict of expertise, interpretation, and political cultures. -Paolo Savoia, author of Gaspare Tagliacozzi and Early Modern Surgery: Faces, Men, and Pain By discussing jurists' and physicians' expertise, the social and cultural expectations of lay witnesses and contemporary accounts of the events, Murder and Madness on Trial creates an original and multiperspectival history that adds to current work on early modern perceptions of insanity. -Silvia De Renzi, author of Instruments in Print: Books from the Whipple Collection

Author Information

Mònica Calabritto is Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

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