If, as L.P. Hartley had it, the past is another country, the converse is also true: to understand other countries today, it helps to look at our own Western past. Nothing produces more outraged bafflement among Americans than the phenomenon of “honor killings” in the Islamic world, where women are murdered by their husbands or relatives in order to preserve a grotesque notion of family honor. In one widely publicized case in 1999, a mentally retarded 16-year-old Pakistani girl was stoned to death by village elders for having dishonored her family – by being raped. According to the United Nations, such honor killings account for two-thirds of all murders in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Any Westerner who feels his indignation at such crimes turning into complacent superiority, however, ought to turn immediately to “Love and Death in Renaissance Italy” (University of Chicago Press, 288 pages, $27.50), the fascinating if flawed new study by Thomas V. Cohen. There he can read six cases drawn directly from Renaissance legal records that make 16th-century Rome – the Rome, let it be remembered, of Michelangelo and Raphael – look like 21st-century Riyadh or Lahore.

Take the story of Vittoria Sapelli, which leads off Mr. Cohen’s book. Vittoria’s husband, Giovanni Battista, caught her in bed with his bastard half-brother, Troiano. Turning over Troiano to his servants to be executed, Giovanni Battista shouted at his young wife, “Ah, traitress, this is the honor that you do the Savelli house!” and then cut her throat so deeply that her head came half off. (“Slicing the neck, scannare,” Mr. Cohen notes, “typically was the method used to dispatch livestock.”) What happened next is just as telling. Giovanni Battista sealed the death chamber and sent for Vittoria’s brother Ludovico. When he arrived and saw the butchered corpse, Ludovico told his brother-in-law, “You did the right thing, and you have honored the Casa Savelli, and if you had not done it, I would have done it.”

Another country, indeed. Each of the stories Mr. Cohen has unearthed from the tangled, fragmentary records of the Roman courts shows some deeply foreign, and usually appalling, aspect of what our forebears meant by love, justice, and honor. Of course, court records are not the place to look for happy endings; by definition, only the exceptionally unfortunate end up before a judge, and thereby get the chance to tell their tales for posterity. And, as Mr. Cohen makes clear, even to unearth a coherent story from 400-year-old documents is a difficult feat. “A single trial,” he writes, “often meanders across several separate records”; you have to look in different places for “denunciations, suspects’ initial testimony, surgeons’ reports on victims’ wounds, logbooks of court transactions, backers’ oaths … [and] sentences.” One trial he discusses, that of the corrupt chief prosecutor Alessandro Pallantieri, filled 6,000 folio volumes.

More difficult than finding the story, however, is knowing what to make of it, and here Mr. Cohen is generally less successful. An exuberantly awkward writer, and a joshing, overbearing narrator, he justifies his approach by appealing to that cherished principle of current academic discourse, the inevitably constructed nature of the past. By writing one of his stories as a theatrical script, complete with stage directions, Cohen “alerts the reader to history’s limitations.” But his insight seldom goes much further than this truism, or the similar bromide that Renaissance women, despite their obvious legal disadvantages, had “moral, emotional, rhetorical and political … resources” in dealing with men. Any fine-grained insight, any surprising intuition or sympathy, seldom appears. Instead, Mr. Cohen approaches his subjects with an oddly flippant relish: “Alessandro Pallantieri is a delicious malefacto,” he writes. “Utterly appalling as he is, I hope you still enjoy him.”

This is an opportunity lost, for the stories that Mr. Cohen has to tell demand a Burckhardt of the bedroom – a historian who could allow us to breathe the Renaissance’s explosive atmosphere of ambition and power, impulsiveness and calculation, lust and greed. Take, for instance, the exceptionally hard to parse story of Pallantieri’s seduction of his 14-year-old neighbor, Lucretia Gramar. Was this, as we would now call it, an instance of rape and child abuse? So it would appear from Lucretia’s own testimony: “So, with my mother crying and trying to pull him off me, Messer Alessandro … had sex with me, and he made me hurt and made me bleed…. I told him to leave me alone, but he held me in such a way that I could not move and he did what he wanted.” But why, then, did Lucretia’s own parents not only continue to let her rapist into the house, but even hand over another daughter for his enjoyment? The answer, it seems, is that their daughter’s virginity was a commodity, which they were content to bargain to their powerful neighbor in exchange for patronage – Lucretia’s father later went to work in the household of his daughter’s rapist.

This equation makes it hard to judge whether the real offense, in several of Mr. Cohen’s cases, was rape or the rapist’s failure to pay for his pleasure. When Isabella Bucchi accuses her onetime suitor Vespasiano of rape, it seems likely that she is trying to get him to keep the promise of marriage that he used to get her into bed. Especially in a courtroom setting, it always made sense for an unmarried girl to claim that sex was rape; by the same token, it always paid for a rapist to claim that he was simply jumping the gun with his betrothed. It remains unclear where, in these calculations of honor and profit, we can find anything we would recognize as love, fear, or guilt. But then, perhaps that is the most valuable lesson to be drawn from “Love and Death in Renaissance Italy.” Despite the bleak prospects for women in large parts of the world, human relations and social institutions do change – sometimes even for the better.