The recent historiography of early modern Venice has been greatly enriched by scholarship documenting the daily lives of Venetians from such perspectives as the family, marriage, convents, small claims litigation courts, and the lives of working women. Joanne Ferraro has already made a significant contribution to the field with her study of the role of patrician families within the Venetian state, Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580–1650, and her compelling analysis of marital breakdown, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice. However, although her last book showed married women using the legal system to their advantage to escape their marriages, there are no happy endings to the trials in her latest book. This time she draws on cases brought before the Venetian criminal courts to bring us beautifully crafted narratives of infelicitous sexual alliances, but this time consummated out of wedlock. Far from showing empowerment, Ferraro finds that when it came to bringing accusations of incest, abuse, or rape, the legal system was stacked against women and their chances of redress were minimal.

Chapter 1 summarizes with clarity and precision how the Venetian criminal justice system functioned, the assumptions upon which it was based, the legal position of women, and the social and cultural background to the crimes in question. Chapters 2 and 3 focus primarily on incest, a rarely reported crime, which was “cloaked in secrecy” (20). The author effectively explodes the “myth” that the domestic hearth was a safe haven for women (201). We see how they could be trapped into abuse not just by the walls and doors that shut out observers, but by the silence and connivance of relatives and neighbors and by a deeply skewed balance of power between the sexes, which made it virtually impossible for women to prove male culpability.

Illicit sex all too often resulted in attempts to dispose of the resulting illegitimate progeny, triggering allegations of abortion and infanticide. In her discussion of several infanticide cases in chapter 4, Ferraro makes an important contribution to our understanding of the impact and limits of Counter Reformation social disciplining. She draws our attention to the crucial role accorded by the courts to the community and to the importance of gossip in regulating conduct. In some cases she finds a wide gap between the sexual norms laid down by church and state and people's tolerance of these transgressions, as revealed by the discreet support networks available to some pregnant women and the reluctance of neighbors to “collaborate” with the state.

Throughout the book our attention is drawn to the role played by men in what have historically been constructed as “female” crimes of infanticide, abortion, and abandonment. In chapter 5 the focus is particularly on cases involving attempts by priests to hide the traces of their sexual activities. These reveal the extent of men's access to poisons, abortifacients, medical knowledge, and the networks involved in spiriting babies away. Ferraro weaves a discussion of foundling homes into her analyses, challenging traditional interpretations of the charitable impulse that led to their creation, and focuses on the circumstances that led to the abandonment of so many babies rather than the foundlings themselves.

Ferraro's use of court records is masterly. The book is structured around a series of carefully presented microhistories, which are always contextualized within the broader social and historiographical framework. Long sections of trial documents are transcribed, giving the reader a sense of character, time, and place. Great attention is paid to the judicial process itself, as the reader is guided through each phase of the trial, as if we are the jury, following the interplay of accusation, defence, and witnesses. Ferraro explains why certain people were summoned, analyzes the rhetorical strategies they employed, discusses the validity and limits of the evidence given, and, when possible, explains the legal and social implications of both accusations and sentences.

Ferraro acknowledges that there are comparatively few cases of “nefarious crimes” in the court records and that we do not know how representative they are. Without making extravagant claims for a microhistorical approach, she argues persuasively (and demonstrates through her analysis) that these crimes must have been more common than statistics reveal. Women would have tended not to denounce men, whether out of fear for the physical, economic, and affective consequences, out of shame, or merely because of the impossibility of substantiating their claims.

Throughout the author keeps a judicious balance between close reading and the broader context, between providing specialist knowledge of the legal system and guiding us at a lively pace through the courtroom narratives that bring the past alive. This is an elegantly written, concise, and clear book that will be a fascinating read for scholars and students alike.