The author of The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara examines a nineteenth-century court case in which an ambitious crusading attorney, Augusto Barbieri, took on the case of Amalia Bagnacavalli, an impoverished, illiterate young peasant woman from the mountains near Bologna, Italy, who contracted syphilis from the sickly baby she had been forced to wet nurse.
David I. Kertzer is the author of, among other books, Prisoner of the Vatican, The Popes Against the Jews, and The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. He is provost of Brown University and professor of anthropology and Italian studies.