8 - Potions and poisons
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 July 2009
Summary
In March 1385, Nanna, a widow of Bologna, and Barbarina, a priest's daughter, were prosecuted by the Podestà through ex officio inquisition for concerting together to make ‘incantations and spells (facturas)’. Nanna had allegedly said to Barberina:
If you want Simon the son of Fra Silvestro, whom you love, to love you and not to be able to love another woman, and to marry you, you will have to do the following incantations and spells: feed him some of your menstrual blood, by putting it in a pie (pastrino); take some of your pubic hair, burn it, grind it to a powder, and put it in his food; and, at the third hour of night, enter our garden, your hair dishevelled, and say this incantation: ‘I get up in the east with Simone and with all his family, with breeches on my head and hair on my feet. O demon, where are you going, where do you come from? I am going to Barbarina…’.
Barbarina, according to the indictment, at once set about following these instructions. She made the pie with some of her blood, though when Simone did not come to dinner as expected, she had to throw it away when it became rotten. She burned some of her hairs, and put them in food that Simone ate. She performed the nocturnal incantation. In response to the prosecution, the two women appeared and denied the charge.
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- Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy , pp. 155 - 167Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007