Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance.

This work is a collection of five tales of illicit loves and relationships in the late Renaissance. Drawn from documents in the archives of the Venetian Inquisition, they tell the very personal stories of an unusual cast of characters, from small town peasant healers to city courtesans, from irrepressible noblemen to renegade clerics. In narrating this microhistory, Guido Ruggiero highlights the rich variety and multiple layers of "the history of the everyday" (223). As he reverses the usual direction of his discipline, the author finds that "there is a great deal more to know about power and the poetics of the everyday at the local and individual level" (224).

Among the most significant observations to emerge from the narratives is the theme of marriage as "a crucial moment of binding, underlining the evident fact that marriage was a central institution of late Renaissance life" (224). Another is the constant presence of magic, both Christian and diabolical, as "the central discourse of binding" (224). This discourse reveals that "the poetics of the everyday," as Ruggiero calls the presence of this magical substratum in late Renaissance society, "empowered women and was empowered by them" (226).

Ruggiero's stories develop smoothly one from the other to illustrate a thematic that is, at the same time, both simple and complex. The role of women wise in the ways of human nature and women wise in the ways of the world has often been examined under the rubrics of witches and courtesans. Ruggiero, however, overcomes these stereotypical categories to bring to life a world that operates in the grey areas or, better still, in the full array of colors that constitutes early modern Venice. It is no surprise, therefore, that conclusions, like verdicts, are difficult to reach. Truth, as always, is elusive. And, as Natalie Davis has illustrated, fiction exists in the archives as well.

Ruggiero is aware of the difficulties in trying to accommodate both history and aesthetics (18-20). So is this reviewer, who was unable to accept Ruggiero's working etymology for Carnevale (Lat., came vale) in the introduction and conclusion. By calling upon the word's fortuitous Italian pun of "flesh matters" (6 et passim) rather than on the generally accepted Latin meaning "to take away the meat" or "good-by to meat" (in reference to the period immediately preceding Lent), Ruggiero has tied his solid scholarly observations to a recurrent image that is more ben trovata than vera. In a brief endnote the author does acknowledge that "most scholars" follow the Latin etymology (230), but then continues to use the fortuituous Italian pun in ways which a native Italian would simply never have considered, not even in 1571 (the date of the incident he describes). His insistence on the pun suggests that, in the introduction at least, aesthetics may have temporarily won out over history.

Such poetic license aside, the volume offers an informative and fascinating insight into the role of wise women (be they witches or courtesans or other) in the daily life of late Cinquecento Veneto. It also points to the concerns that kept the Venetian Inquisition working even after the immediate threat of heresy and apostasy had been met and overcome. And it focuses our attention more clearly on the importance of marriage, family, and honor in Venetian society in the first few decades after Trent.

Konrad Eisenbichler VICTORIA COLLEGE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO