"Love and Death in Renaissance Italy retells six piquant episodes from the Italian court just after 1550, as the Renaissance gave way to an era of Catholic reformation." "Each of the chapters in this history chronicles a domestic drama around which the lives of ordinary Romans are suddenly and violently altered. You might read the gruesome murder that opens the book - when an Italian noble takes revenge on his wife and her bastard lover as he catches them in delicto flagrante - as straight from the pages of Boccaccio. But this tale, like the other stories Cohen recalls here, is true, and its recounting in this work is based on assiduous research in court proceedings kept in the state archives of Rome."--BOOK JACKET.