Matrimonio e Sessualita a Roma nell'Ottocento.

With only a slight delay, Italy too has seen an explosion of works on the history of women in general, and the history of sexuality in particular. The development of this historiography, though, has not been easy. Symptomatic of these difficulties was the fate of Memoria, a well regarded journal of women's history, which recently died, due partly to lack of institutional support. More importantly, few of the practitioners of the new history of sexuality and gender have senior faculty positions in Italy.

Margherita Pelaja, one of the founders of Memoria, has here made a major contribution to the development of both the history of sexuality and the history of gender in modem Italy. Her focus is on the working and lower classes of Rome in the early and mid-nineteenth century, when Rome was still under Vatican rule. As she notes, this is not a period that has attracted a great deal of attention in the history of Rome. Following others in the area of history of sexuality, Pelaja's work relies heavily on court records, in this case the pontifical criminal court for Rome. This permits her to bring the past to life through dramatic accounts of individuals who became ensnared in the court system.

Pelaja also uses a variety of demographic sources, from baptismal registers to the status animarum (annual parish census), to provide both fuller evidence for cases in the criminal records and broader social context for the cases she discusses.

We are presented here with a compelling picture of young women in often desperate circumstances, living in a population in which people were continually in movement: in and out of Rome and from house to house and parish to parish. It was a society in which, according to Pelaja, extended kin relations counted for little among the poor. An unmarried woman without living parents (and particularly a living father) and perhaps older brothers was extremely vulnerable. If family ties were weak, though, a variety of community institutions - tied to the Church - to some extent took their place in looking out for these women's welfare.

The Church served as the protector of the deserving poor and weak, but was also the stem enforcer of sexual morality. Indeed, Pelaja describes the Church as obsessed with sex, and notes that 30% of all criminal trials in early nineteenth century Rome were for sexual assault on women. Central to this system were the parish priests, who were charged with continual surveillance of their parishioners for unauthorized sexual activity.

This is not a book that will please all women's historians, for it makes a strong argument against viewing women simply as victims of male sexuality and power. Pelaja reads case after case of illicit sex charges as evidence of women using their sexuality to put pressure on men to marry them. Women who were otherwise in a weak position to induce men into marriage (e.g., those too poor to afford a dowry) could, by getting pregnant, hope to bring pressure to bear on the man to marry them. Indeed, when an unmarried woman got pregnant, it was the parish priest's job to bring about a marriage. If the woman could prove her virginity before the relationship that led to the pregnancy, and especially if she could credibly claim that she only consented to sexual relations following a promise of marriage, she could also hope for the support of the pontifical court.

In eighteenth and nineteenth century Italy, Church records teem with admonitory references to the threat of "public scandal," and the necessity to avoid it. This referred not to illicit sex per se, but to the public manifestation of unauthorized sexuality, of which there were two principal types: illegitimate children and unmarried cohabitation. The Church, as Pelaja shows us, worked ceaselessly against both. In the first case, women who hoped to marry some day and to maintain their own and their family's honor were compelled to leave their illegitimate children at the Rome foundling home. Unwed pregnancy was a stain on the family honor which could, to a considerable extent, be rectified by thus doing away with the public evidence of the woman's shame.

Among Pelaja's most original contributions is her chapter on illicit cohabitation, and her analysis of how the authorities dealt with it. Such cohabitation was seen by Church authorities as intolerable, and parish priests were charged with unearthing and reporting any such cases. Cohabitors, meanwhile, moved continuously to avoid detection. Police raids were conducted in the middle of the night, with the offending parties arrested and jailed. In cases where both woman and man were marriageable, the authorities threatened to hold the offenders in jail until they agreed to marry. Where marriage was not possible (most commonly when the man had abandoned a previous wife, since there was no divorce), the authorities tried to ensure that the couple would end their relationship.

We get only a glimmer in the book of an exception to this pattern, the practice by upper class men of keeping mistresses. The book focuses almost exclusively on the poorer classes, and suffers a little from this, especially insofar as relations between upper status men and lower status women are concerned. This is a well written, highly readable book, and one which raises many important questions about the nature of life for the classi popolari of nineteenth-century Rome. Moreover, it raises larger questions about sexuality, gender, social control, and marriage in the European past.

David I. Kertzer Brown University