The Nuns of Sant' Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal - Tapa dura

a masterly telling of a 19th-century scandalanalysed in a consummate way by Hubert Wolf (Metro, Iain Pears)

Wolf's absorbing unravelling of the Inquisition trial convincingly recovers a lost world of rancidly overheated religiosity, rendered toxic by the force of a monstrous ego. It also opens a disturbing window on a closed ecclesiastical establishment in which unquestioning support for authority might excuse almost anything. To that extent, it can stand as a salutary tract for the times. (Guardian)

astonishing story (History Today)

an extraordinary and fascinating book (New Shiny Books)

microhistory at its best (Tablet)

It has taken Hubert Wolf's... skill as a historian to retell their story and let his readers contemplate a moving case study of the crimes, follies and tragedies of humankind. (Literary Review)

Wolf has not only provided us with a fascinating narrative that is compulsive reading, but also with an illuminating insight into the high politics of the papacy in one of the most crucial periods in its history. (English Historical Review)

Makes for fairly amazing reading ... Wolf has not held anything back. The result is an account that reads a bit like a crime novel. (Chris Clark, University of Cambridge)

an extremely intriguing retelling of events, and Wolf's highly structured narrative unpicks the trial in meticulous detail. He assesses the characters with unbiased opinion and does not stray into speculation or theory, using direct transcriptions from the trial to leave it up to the reader to form their own judgement ... the story is told expertly, and Wolf deals with the diverse layers of intrigue in a systematic yet compelling style. (Ms Sara Charles, Reviews in History)

Discovered in a secret Vatican archive, this is the true, never-before-told story of poison, murder, and lesbian initiation rites in a nineteenth century convent.

In 1858, Katherina von Hohenzollern, a German princess recently inducted into the convent of Sant'Ambrogio in Rome, wrote a frantic letter to her cousin, a confidant of the Pope, claiming that she was being abused and feared for her life. The subsequent investigation by the Church's Inquisition uncovered the extraordinary secrets of Sant'Ambrogio and the illicit behavior of the convent's beautiful young mistress, Maria Luissa.

What emerges through the fog of centuries is a sex scandal of ecclesiastical proportions, skillfully brought to light and vividly reconstructed in scholarly detail by one of the world's leading papal historians. Offering a broad historical background on female mystics and the cult of the Virgin Mary, and drawing upon written testimony and original documents, Hubert Wolf tells an incredible story of deception, heresy, seduction, and murder in the heart of the Catholic Church.