Between 1391 and 1425, three women from prominent Northern Italian families—Agnese Visconti (1363–91), Beatrice Cane (ca. 1370–1418), and Parisina Malatesta (1404–25)—were decapitated on orders of their husbands. This intriguing fact-finding book sets out to explain why. None of these women are well known. They left no great cultural legacy, as, for instance, Eleonora of Aragon (1450–93), Duchess of Ferrara, nor did they exercise the artistic patronage of an Isabella d'Este (1474–1539), Marchioness of Mantua. This study attempts to reconstruct their lives and to understand what could have legitimized their deaths by decapitation in a period when death on the scaffold for adultery in Italy was nonexistent.

The first three chapters trace the dramatic events that led to an accusation of adultery, unproven for Beatrice, followed by only one extant court case, for Agnese, and a summary execution for all three. The chapters detail the weddings of Agnese to the condottiero Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua, Beatrice to Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan, and Parisina to Niccolò III d'Este of Ferrara. Agnese was executed with her lover following a brief court case commandeered by her husband. Beatrice, twenty-two years older than her husband, appears to have been killed for reasons other than adultery, such as her difference in age, her inability to produce an heir, and her social ascension and power in retaining authority over the territories inherited from her second husband; her then current husband simply turned to a judge who easily expedited her death. Finally, Parisina was executed with her stepson, of the same age—Niccolò’s favorite illegitimate son, Ugo d'Este—without a trial. The authors of this study make the case that the arbitrary power of their husbands was a consequence of the transition at the time from a communal to a signorial form of government in Italy's city-states, which granted increased political ascendancy to a few ruling lords and their families. The signorial versus the republican debate, particularly in relation to the Medici rule of Florence, has taken on new vigor recently, with Robert Black and John Law's edited collection The Medici: Citizens and Masters (2015) (see RQ 70.1 [2017]: 297–98). The system of checks and balances in fifteenth-century Florence lost ground in the aforementioned city-states.

The rest of Décapitées ably reconstitutes from archival sources the childhoods and young adulthoods of these women, before and during their marriages. It evokes the qualities and comforts of their parental homes; their conservative pedagogy and books guiding their preceptors, such as, for instance, Francesco da Barberino's Reggimento e costumi di donna (1320) and, notably for Parisina, the start of a humanist emphasis on the rudiments of Latin for girls; the marriage negotiations and the betrothal, which only the mature Beatrice could handle on her own terms; and the cohabitation and palatial environment of the newlyweds (Beatrice, again an exception, lived separately from her husband). The discovery of Parisina's expense accounts for the years 1422–24 allows for a substantive discussion of her household and personal purchases of books, jewels, works of art, and luxury items. These indicate a strikingly wide margin of financial independence. Did these women also exercise their agency politically? It seems that Beatrice's experience in ruling the cities and territories of her late husband led her to want to continue doing so. Both Agnese and Parisina had models of politically strong women in their birth families that enabled them to affirm their own personal desires and agency. This study thus argues that in the historical transition from communal to signorial government, women from ruling families who had been largely invisible by law and custom took on more and more visibility as they assumed the functions of the consort in a signorial—or, in other countries, monarchical—regime. Rather than simply divorce them, their husbands, to symbolically reestablish their power and honor, resorted to what the authors call a “coup de souveraineté” (337) in executing them and publicizing their deaths. Deeply researched, Décapitées contributes richly to historical, familial, social, cultural, and gender studies of late Trecento and Quattrocento Italy.