Coniugi nemici: La separazione in Italia dal XII al XVIII secolo.

ed. Silvana Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglioni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000; pp. 570. L 64,000).

`Can't a husband beat his wife?' So asked a Sienese man when upbraided for breaking his wife's arm during an argument. The normality of marital violence against women is starkly revealed in this excellent collection of essays on matrimonial conflicts and petitions for separation. The papers range in date from Lucca in the early fifteenth century to Florence in the late eighteenth, by way of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice and seventeenth-century Genoa and Trent. In a superb introduction, Seidel Menchi outlines the usefulness of matrimonial litigation records for a …