Times told: Women narrating the everyday in early modern Rome

In the criminal court records of Rome c. 1600, ordinary women show themselves to be canny and adept tellers of time. As elsewhere in early modern Europe, criminal courts took active part in government campaigns to corral and correct the behavior of the broad population. To that end, Roman tribunals, needing to reconstruct and verify offenses that the culprits wished to obscure, interrogated witnesses and asked them to narrate from memory events in the less and more distant past. In generating these accounts, in which magistrates and witnesses collaborated, rhetorics of time became an important dimension of ordering evidence convincingly.