The documentation of an infanticide trial, which took place in 1889 in Modena, allowed the reconstruction of the social setting for the judicial proceedings of a young woman accused of a crime that throughout the 19th century underwent a radical legal transformation. The pattern shown by most of the European Criminal Codes is, in fact, the progressive decriminalization of infanticide, whose definition since then has been linked to the illegitimate status of the murdered infant and the resulting motivation coming from the mother acting in defence of her honour.