Product 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...read more

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Product Description: This book brings to life the lost voices of ordinary Venetians during the age of Catholic revival. Looking at scripts that were brought to the city's ecclesiastical courts by spouses seeking to annul their marriage vows, this book opens up the emotional world of intimacy and conflict, sexuality, and living arrangments that did not fit normative models of marriage...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)