Craig A. Monson's Blog: Habitual Offenders Named as Finalist for The Bridge Book Award 2017

Rita asked about Martha Grinder. I’m no expert on her: just interested because she included antimony as well as arsenic in her decoction, as did one 17th-century woman poisoner. There was a flurry of publication about Grinder at the time of her execution, some of it accessible online. I suspect many of the newspaper accounts simply quote each other. There was also a “book,” which may be more like a pamphlet; a few copies appear still to be extant. One of them is an electronic resource. Here’s what OCLC has to say on the “book”:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/grinder...

You can also find several pages on Grinder in The Penalty is Death: U.S. Newspaper Coverage of Women’s Executions by Marlin Shipman, at least some of which can be read on Google Books (or you can purchase the ebook).

I’m sure Martha also turns up in the various “Great Big Book of Women Serial Killers”-type books, but I doubt they’ll shed fresh light on her (more likely just a paragraph or two rehashed from other secondary sources).

Rita, I hope this helps!

Habitual Offenders: A True Tale of Nuns, Prostitutes, and Murderers in 17th-century Italy has been named as one of five finalists in the non-fiction category for The Bridge Book Award, Third Edition 2017.
http://www.aific.org/9348-2/
The award is sponsored by the Casa delle Letterature of Rome, the American Initiative for Italian Culture (AIFIC), and the US Embassy in Rome, to foster cross-cultural connections between the two countries.
Winners for 2017 will be announced in the autumn.

Craig Monson discusses Habitual Offenders with Mark Lynch on WICN's "Inquiry":
http://www.wicn.org/podcasts/audio/cr...

Just a heads up that University of Chicago Press is offering Nuns Behaving Badly as their free e book of the month of October:
http://press.uchicago.edu/books/freeE...