Women, Sin, Crime and Guilt in Canaday

A leading microhistorian — a scholar who studies an era through the lives of ordinary people — will speak at the opening of the Library's fall exhibition, Pointing Fingers: Women, Sin, Crime and Guilt, on Tuesday, Sept. 19, at 4:30 p.m. in Carpenter B21. Speaker Guido Ruggiero of the University of Miami has published books and articles on the history of gender, sex, crime and magic, focusing on Renaissance Italy. His books include The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (1985), and Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power from the End of the Renaissance (1993). His new book, Machiavelli in Love, will be published this winter. Ruggiero's talk, titled "Women, Crime, Fear and Pleasure: The Case of the Renaissance Courtesan or Who's Afraid of Giuliana Napolitana?" will draw on his recent research. A reception and the opening of the exhibition will follow his talk.

Pointing Fingers looks at female criminals and their offenses through trial reports and popular accounts from the early 16th century through the beginning of the 20th. The exhibition also considers disgrace and scandal, and how those categories of notoriety interact with actual crime in popular versions of women's biographies. Although women commit all sorts of offenses, the exhibition shows how the cases that most interest the general public are usually those where sexual transgression is an important facet of the crime — adultery, incest, prostitution. Other prominent cases involve women who were led into other criminal acts because of previous sexual transgression.

Many of these crimes fascinated the public so much that multiple books and pamphlets appeared — often arguing both sides of the case. The exhibition includes four accounts of the last witchcraft trial in England — two of them report the terrible crimes of the "witch" Jane Wenham, and the other two argue that witchcraft does not exist at all. There are also the contradictory accounts of the legal case between Mary Catherine Cadière and her spiritual adviser, Father John Baptist Girard, whom she accused of using witchcraft to seduce her; and Mary Blandy's own story about how she came to kill her father as well as an official report of her trial. An unusual light is cast on America's religious and social history by a large, heavily illustrated newspaper special on the Beecher-Tilton adultery scandal, in which Theodore Tilton, the newspaper editor and abolitionist, brought suit against the famous preacher and reformer Henry Ward Beecher for adultery with Tilton's wife. Other famous cases include the affair of the Diamond Necklace, which contributed to the downfall of the French monarchy during the Revolution, and the "Meal-Tub Plot," a sham assassination attempt against James II that was exposed as a fraud meant to discredit the Catholic cause.

Pointing Fingers: Women, Sin, Crime and Guilt was curated by Marianne Hansen, Special Collections Librarian, with the assistance of Amanda Young '07. The exhibition and Ruggiero's talk are supported by the Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Library. Future exhibition events include a talk by popular mystery writer Laura Lippman, who will speak on Nov. 7.

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