Black Widows of the Eternal City: The True Story of Rome's Most Infamous Poisoners

The Black Widows of The Eternal City offers a book-length study of an infamous cause célèbre in seventeenth-century Rome, the 1659 investigation and prosecution of Gironima Spana and dozens of Roman widows who shared a poison to murder their husbands. It challenges earlier accounts and reveals the truth about the case, including the fates of the other alleged perpetrators. The book is written in a style that avoids arcane idioms and specialist jargon and can potentially speak to students and general readers interested in seventeenth-century social history and gender issues.

Format: Hardback
Length: 258 pages
Publication date: 30 September 2020
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press

The Black Widows of The Eternal City offers, for the first time, a book-length study of an infamous cause célèbre in seventeenth-century Rome, how it resonated then and has continued to resonate: the 1659 investigation and prosecution of Gironima Spana and dozens of Roman widows, who shared a particularly effective poison to murder their husbands. This notorious case has been frequently discussed over 350 years, but the earliest writers concentrated more on fortifying their reading constituencys shared attitudes than accurately narrating facts. Subsequent authors remained largely content to follow their predecessors or keen to improve upon them. Most recent writers and bloggers were unaware that their earlier sources were generally unconcerned with a correct portrayal of real events. In the present study, Craig A. Monson takes advantage of a recent discovery—the 1,450-page notarys transcript of the 1659 investigation. It is supplemented here by many ancillary archival sources, unknown to all previous writers. Since the story of Gironima Spana and the would-be widows is partially about what people believed to be true, however, this investigation also juxtaposes some of the alternative facts from earlier, sensational accounts with what the notarys transcript and other, more reliable archival documents reveal. Written in a style that avoids arcane idioms and specialist jargon, the book can potentially speak to students and general readers interested in seventeenth-century social history and gender issues. It rewrites the life story of Gironima Spana (largely unknown until now), who has dominated all earlier accounts, usually in caricatures that reiterate the tropes of witchcraft. It also concentrates on the dozen other widows whose stories could be the most re.

Weight: 482g
Dimension: 158 x 235 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780472132041