^{Research interests}

Micro-Macrohistory
History Of Madness And Psychiatry
Memory
Physician-Patient Communication
Early modern Bologna
Violence and Crime in Early Modern Europe
Early Modern Chronicles
History Of Emotions
Law and Emotions
History of Science and Medicine In Medieval and Renaissance Europe
Literature and Visual Arts
Women’s Studies
Reception Studies
Emblem studies
The historical novel

^Books

Murder and Madness on Trial: A Tale of True Crime from Early Modern Bologna.

Pennsylvania State University Press, June 2023

In this book, I investigate a man’s life, trial, and medical diagnosis connected to his alleged insanity by skillfully combing archival documents she unearthed throughout Italy. The documents reveal an image of the social life of early modern Italy and the medico-legal frameworks that dominated the age and led to the ruin of a family following the verdict of Paolo Barbieri’s trial. In this story, the notion of criminal insanity is as much on trial as the criminally insane. My study argues that the increased importance of individual observation and experience in early modern medicine and law went hand in hand with the increasing concern for the dangers of deception in these fields. Paolo’s trial exposes the tension between legal and medical theory and their respective practices in the courtroom. It also illustrates how the administration of early modern justice in the Papal States moved slowly but inexorably towards a form of hegemonic justice at the expense of older forms of negotiated justice.

I analyze macro-topics like early modern insanity, criminal justice, the interaction between medicine and law in the courtroom, the coexistence of oral and written communication in legal documents and vernacular narrative, and the expression of emotions through legal actions focusing on a single case. Concentrating on one story of insanity from beginning to end allows her a close-up of this event’s legal, social, and medical dimensions while highlighting the shame, anger, and fear accompanying the family’s economic debacle and emotional implosion following the murder.

Reputation or fama was an essential factor in the early modern legal and social sphere. It was connected to the rumor circulating in the urban community of Bologna. Rumor had it that Paolo Barbieri killed his wife Isabella in a fit of madness, but was it true? Four chroniclers, all citizens in good standing of Bologna, mixed in their report of the homicide what they heard on the street and in their social circles with news from actors involved in the trial and eyewitness accounts of the immediate aftermath. Witnesses’ depositions and chronicles made up the vernacular narrative of this tragic event. In and out of the court, hospitals, and Bologna, the vernacular narrative revealed a binary view of insanity when discussing violent acts like homicide. In court depositions and chronicles, issues of morality, honor, shame, and fear intersected with the notions of rumor and fama.

In this book, I reveal how medical and legal experts tried to pigeonhole the illness into categories that fit their theoretical frameworks. I exemplify how rumor spread by word of mouth and created one’s reputation and how difficult it was to disassociate a person from what family members, kin, neighbors, and fellow citizens thought of them. She represents how emotions manifested themselves through apparently unexciting and emotionless documents like testaments, civil disputes, debits and credits, and dowries. I insightfully portray how insanity and its devastating effects marked a man and his family for life in the early modern period.

Emblems of Death in the Early Moder Period. Co-editor, with P.M. Daly. Genève: Droz, 2014, 441 pp.

Within the burgeoning business of emblem books printed in Europe between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, emblems of death constitute a pervasive subject that this fine collection of essays written by an international group of scholars explores exhaustively for the first time in a pan-European way, elaborating and reappraising the study by Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani’s Emblèmes de la mort. Le dialogue de l’image et du texte (Paris, A.-G. Nizet, 1988), which focuses mainly on emblems produced in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. If emblems of death created in this period are unlikely to present the reader and viewer with new ideas on the subject, it is also true that they, along with Italian imprese, elaborate and express the philosophy and theology that their authors grew up with, converted to, or studied. Within the general categorization that divides emblems of death into those that are inspired by Christian—Catholic and Protestant—notions and beliefs, and those that use humanistic ideals of survival after death through fame, authors of emblems interweaved in their elaborations of this age-old subject politico-ideological, spiritual and historical factors that the contributors of the essays in this collection describe and interpret masterfully for the readers.

My two major publications—the forthcoming book Murder and Madness on Trial: A Tale of True Crime from Early Modern Bologna and the collection of essays co-edited with Peter Daly Emblems of Death in the Early Modern Period, which Droz printed in 2014—illustrate my deep involvement in these fields of research. My forthcoming monograph concerns a matter I have investigated since my graduate studies: early modern insanity. However, what started as a topic to be examined from a literary viewpoint—my training is in Comparative Literature–has become a multidisciplinary endeavor. My book analyzes macro-topics such as insanity, early modern criminal justice, the interaction between medicine and law in the courtroom, the coexistence of oral and written communication in legal documents and vernacular narrative, and the expression of emotions couched in legal actions through a micro-historical account of murder and insanity found in archival records. In early modern Bologna, the nobleman Paolo Barbieri killed his wife Isabella Caccianemici, then escaped. The book investigates the murderer’s life before and after the killing of his wife and its traumatic effects on family members, kin, and the city at large, including its political implications with the Papal State. A peer-reviewed article that I published in 2010–“Furore melanconico tra teoria e pratica legale,” published in the Italian journal Studi Storici: rivista trimestrale dell’Istituto Gramsci— laid the foundation for the monograph, while the chapter “Violence in Early Modern Bologna: A Provisional Appraisal” in Innovations in the Counter-Reformation (https://udpress.udel.edu/book-title/innovation-in-the-italian-counter-reformation/), edited in 2020 by Shannon McHugh and Anna Wainwright, helped fine-tune my interpretive skills of early modern chroniclers reporting on violence in Bologna. Talks as an invited speaker at the Department of History of Medicine at the School of Medicine in 2013 and at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures in 2019, both at Johns Hopkins University and as the keynote speaker of the third Elizabeth Mazzocco lecture at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2018, pushed me to rethink some long-held assumptions on the topic.

The hefty volume of thirteen essays on emblems of death, plus an introduction that I co-wrote, also built on research interests I have been cultivating since my dissertation. Emblems can be defined as illustrated forms of miniature allegory. For example, the emblematic picture of a ship can signify the ship of state, the ship of the Church, or the ship of life. Similarly, the image of a skull or a skeleton may be a caveat to the ephemeral nature of life, an invitation to be ready to die, a warning to the inexorable passing of time, and so on. The image, or pictura, is generally accompanied by a short motto (inscriptio) and a longer explanatory text in prose or verse (subscriptio), even if sometimes the third part is not present. Emblems were very popular in the early modern period and found their place in clothes, jewels, and buildings, besides being printed in lay and religious texts and pamphlets across Europe. In the co-edited volume, we presented the reader with a series of interpretations from a pan-European and transatlantic perspective on early modern translation and adaptation of words into visual allegories and symbols from one cultural, religious, and social milieu to another. We also intended to underline the implications of early modern representations of death for understanding contemporary Western attitudes toward mortality.