Sinners

by Elizabeth Fremantle

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Rome, 1599. Beatrice Cenci waits in the Corte Savella for judgement on the murder of her father, Francesco. Born into a wealthy noble family, she has been confined, controlled and brutalised by a man whose rank protects him from challenge. Fremantle’s Beatrice is neither a passive saint nor a simple villain: anger, desire and the need to escape shape the choices that carry her from a remote family stronghold to a conspiracy against her father.

The investigation and trial turn a private history of abuse into a public spectacle. Papal justice is concerned not only with who killed Francesco Cenci, but with preserving patriarchal and aristocratic authority. Moving between Beatrice’s imprisonment and the events leading to the murder, the novel reimagines a celebrated Roman case as a study of resistance, complicity and the narrow meanings of innocence available to women in late Renaissance Italy.