This book, with a title that could have been snatched from any scandal sheet, modern or historical, might seem frivolous or sensational, rather than helpful to folklorists. Folklore covers the world, but from the specific point of view of its arts, culture, and traditional practices. The author’s meticulous archival documentation, however, reveals the intricate real life of the times, complete with bunglers, semi-innocent victims, common soldiers, shopkeepers, petty nobles, nuns, prostitutes, and priests, as well as members of the high nobility and church officials. But who are the heroes and who are the villains?
This messy-seeming tale of the disappearance and murder of two nuns, both former prostitutes, in the early modern Bologna of the 1600s, roughly parallel with the Elizabethan age in England, reveals networks of power and the movers and shakers out front and behind the scenes. People spoke a Bolognese version of Italian, but a nation of Italy was only a dream then.
Networks of powerful, influential individuals supported official entities, such as the church, civic authorities, and the military, and received support in return. Like all other networks, these networks favored some people, causes, and institutions, and disadvantaged others. The book’s content might interest folklorists researching street culture, youth gangs, criminal organizations, fascist or other mushrooming political movements, evangelists, behind-the-scenes power mongers, and military or factional conflict of any kind.
Networking practices in Bologna of the 1600s may seem familiar. Social and political movers and shakers, then as now, for example, demonstrated identity and belonging by virtue of physical proximity (78). Another networking practice protected sons of high-ranking families from public execution for their serious crimes; instead they went into the forefront of battle and could be, once handily among the war dead, hailed as heroes, thus enhancing the family’s prestige rather than besmirching it (220).
The two nuns, their activities, and their abduction are the subject of about one third of
the book, the other two thirds being devoted to the mystery of their disappearance, the
process of identifying their abductors and killers, and the meticulously documented
legal proceedings that followed, including detective work and the interrogation of one
suspect by an enhanced interrogation procedure known then as the
Networks, political, military, and dynastic, drive the action, almost in the style of a thriller. Yet the victims, although washed clean of previous sins to a certain extent at the time of entering the convent, were not typical nuns, the abduction was not a typical abduction, and the legal proceedings, although thorough and bound by rules, deviated at points from common practice.
The Bolognese region of what is now Italy was then embroiled in factional disputes, some violent. There were also officially sanctioned mini-wars, such as the War of Castro (1641-1644). City archives and papal records include the names of prosecutors, judges, servants, nuns, and housewives.
Official efforts to resolve the abduction of two nuns, repentant prostitutes, cut a wide swath through society. They were neither ordinary prostitutes nor ordinary nuns. Their lives as prostitutes bore middle-class trappings; they had managed their enterprise like a business, with the tacit consent of city authorities who thought that giving young men a heterosexual outlet for their urges might prevent them from becoming homosexuals. Bologna issued licenses to prostitutes and taxed their earnings.
One must assume that the women lived in harmony with neighbors and clients; in a city hall that registered many complaints there were none about them. They surpassed many bourgeois women in their accomplishments—they could read and write and do fine needlework. One played the harpsichord. They entered the convent with a rich collection of gowns, linens, and furniture of their own, and after paying dowries from their own funds. In many ways they surpassed the norm for Bolognese women at the time; neither husband, father, nor brothel keeper owned them. Once received in the convent designated for repentant prostitutes, they became popular with noble patrons who brought fine linens for delicate laundering. They expanded the convent’s business and social standing by their painstaking work, and started new income streams, repairing fine linens, as well as washing them, and sewing fine new shirts rich with lace for the convent’s rapidly increasing clientele.
Visiting hours at the convent brought handsome young men, well aware that the two nuns were off limits, but wanting to exchange banter with them anyhow. The convent accepted the women’s final vows in 1632 and 1633 respectively, and gave them new names, although their former street names persisted.
Those convicted of complicity in their abduction and murder received sentences, but archives reveal that even the enhanced interrogation techniques of the time failed to provide the whole story.
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[Review length: 775 words • Review posted on June 22, 2017]