Download or read book Habitual Offenders written by Craig A. Monson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In April 1644, two nuns fled Bologna's convent for reformed prostitutes. An investigation went nowhere, and the nuns were forgotten. By June of the next year, however, an overwhelming stench drew a woman to the wine cellar of her Bolognese townhouse, reopened after a two-year absence, where to her horror she discovered the eerily intact, garroted corpses of the two missing women. Drawing on primary sources, Monson reconstructs the history of crime and punishment in seventeenth-century Italy.