While demographic and anthropological studies on infanticide abound, few historians have addressed the subject. Adriano Prosperi, through the analysis of an infanticide in Bologna in 1709, where the accused, Lucia Cremonini, was condemned to death, crosses with great mastery the study of a judicial source with the history of ways of thinking, religion, and rituals in the context of the Italian Counter-Reformation. The first part, “The Story” (chapters 1–3), is the one most closely related to the judicial documents from the Bologna archives, the Archivio del Torrone. We learn that Lucia has lost her honor to an unnamed priest. A forensic examination of the newborn’s body reveals that his throat was cut and this injury caused death. Lucia finally confesses to infanticide. Prosperi exploits this crime as familiar territory. Uppermost is the Counter-Reformation, and the impossibility, for Prosperi, of writing the history of infanticide only as a social practice or an offense. He explores the link with abortion and the death of the newborn without baptism—considered a nonperson—and shows the passage of the prosecution of infanticide as a fault by the church to its being an offense punishable by laws. The woman is the only protagonist, until the mitigation of the death penalty in the eighteenth century, when she becomes the poor abandoned woman forced to murder by the need to save her honor.

In the second part, “The Mother” (chapters 4–9), Prosperi tries to understand the reasons for Lucia’s actions and feelings, and traces the few existing biographical details. In the third part, “The Son: The Seed and the Soul” (chapters 10–17), unquestionably the core of his analysis, Prosperi dwells at length on the administration of baptism to the newborn, the fate of innocent children destined for limbo, and the question of the soul of the newborn, who is not a person if unbaptized. Hence the relentlessness in pursuing justice against the mother. The fourth part, “Justice” (chapters 18 and 19), returns to the end of Lucia’s judicial story, as she is condemned to the gallows. Comforted the day before by the confreres of Santa Maria della Morte, she can, thanks to confession, repent. Death, like baptism, can give salvation. Hanged so that her soul is separated from her body, her body is destined for public dissection.

This book, written in a fluid narrative rhythm despite the sometimes complex analysis of sources, is constructed around an enlightened questioning of the soul, not only of the newborn, but also, ultimately, of the infanticidal mother. The English translation of the title is slightly misleading: the study addresses the beliefs and practices around the soul only in early modern Italy and in a sui generis Counter-Reformation framework. Prosperi is not interested in forensic analysis of the crime, but what Lucia did, thought, and manifested, which is not, however, easy to demonstrate with these sources.

Finally, it is unfortunate that there have been no updates to the text, originally published in 2005, and to the bibliography—though it is still very comprehensive and not limited to Italy. But the translation of this work is rigorous and a pleasure to read, and reflects, one hopes, a sign of the growing, though delayed, interest by historians in infanticide, a subject that, as Prosperi demonstrates, allows reflections beyond simply criminological analysis.