The Renaissance in Italy
SUBJECT READER 
 COMPILED BY CATHERINE KOVESI
WEEK 8
Masculinities, Feminities, and Social Personhood 9.1_Barbaro Barbaro, Francesco. ‘On Wifely Duties’. In The Civilisation of the Italian Renaissance: A Sourcebook, edited by Kenneth R. Bartlett, 140-160. Lexington: D. C. Heath and Company, 1992. 9.2_Marriage.Sources ‘Marriage and the Family in Renaissance Florence’. In The Civilisation of the Italian Renaissance: A Sourcebook, edited by Kenneth R. Bartlett, 174-185. Lexington: D. C. Heath and Company, 1992. 9.3_Cereta Cereta, Laura. ‘Letter to Augustinus Aemilius, Curse Against the Ornamentation of Women’. In The Civilisation of the Italian Renaissance: A Sourcebook, edited by Kenneth R. Bartlett, 192-193. Lexington: D. C. Heath and Company, 1992. 9.4_Kent Kent, D. ‘Women in Renaissance Florence’. In Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women, edited by D. A. Brown, 25-47. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. 9.5_Chojnacki Chojnacki, S. ‘Patrician Women in Early Renaissance Venice’. Studies in the Renaissance 21 (1974): 176-203.
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9.6_Rocke Rocke, Michael. ‘Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy’. In The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad, edited by John Jeffries Martin, 139-158. London: Routledge, 2003.
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SECTION 1
Francesco Barbaro, On Wifely Duties Francesco Barbaro was born in Venice in 1390 into one of the great patrician families that governed the republic. He studied the classics and was a student at the celebrated University of Padua, the school within the Venetian dominions to which the noble families sent their sons for advanced education. In 1412, Barbaro received his doctorate at the university, and it was there that he came into contact with Greek studies and broader humanist ideals. Returning to Venice in 1414, Barbaro began to study Greek seriously with the great schoolmaster Guarino of Verona, who, in fact, entered his household. Barbaro also began his own literary activities, translating important Greek texts into Latin. In 1415, Barbaro visited Florence, staying in the house of Cosimo de' Medici, where he met the humanist leaders of Florence, such as Leonardo Bruni and Nicolo Nicoli. Also, he became close friends with Cosimo's brother, Lorenzo de' Medici, the great uncle of the Magnificent Lorenzo, and wrote for him his De re uxoria (On Wifely Duties) as a wedding gift to be dedicated to the newly wed Lorenzo and his wife. In 1419, Barbaro himself married and began the career of a Venetian statesman, a role determined for him by his birth and education. He was elected to the Senate in 1419; he subsequently held office as governor in several Venetian cities, including Verona and Vicenza; and he served as Venetian ambassador to the pope. Near the end of his career he attained the highest offices of the republic: President of the Venetian Senate in 1449 and Procurator of St. Mark in 1452. Barbaro died in 1454. Barbaro's treatise on marriage was very popular in Italy and abroad, especially in humanist circles, where it was admired as much for its learning and style as for its content. De re uxoria is a standard humanist treatise inasmuch as it is heavily dependent on ancient Latin and Greek sources. Nevertheless, there is much of the Renaissance Venetian aristocratic perspective in the message. Marriage is a Christian state, and a dignified one worthy of a good man. Still, it is also the vehicle for the maintenance of noble lineages and through them the vitality of the republic. Marriage, then, is not just the union of two people but of two families to produce heil"s who will serve the state, and in this important function, both father and mother had central roles to play. SELECTIONS FROM ON WIFELY DUTIES On the Faculty of Obedience
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This is now the remaining part to be done here, in which if wives follow me, either of their own free will or by the commands of their husbands, no one will be so unfair as to think that I have not so established the duties of the wife that youth can enjoy peace and quiet the whole life long. Therefore, there are three things that, if they are diligently observed by a wife, will make a marriage praiseworthy and admirable: love for her husband, modesty of life, and diligent and complete care in domestic matters. We shall discuss the first of these, but before this I want to say something about the faculty of obedience, which is her master and companion, because nothing more important, nothing greater can be demanded of a wife than this. The importance of this faculty did not escape the ancient wise men who instituted the custom that when a sacrifice was made to Juno, who was called by the name Camelia because of her governance of marriage, the gall was removed from the victim. They were wisely warning by this custom that it was proper to banish all gall and rancor from married life. For this reason the Spartan woman's response has usually been approved by many learned men. When she was provoked by the slanderous reproaches of some mad old woman against her husband, she said: "Get out of here with such slanderous talk! When I was still a girl, I learned to obey the dictates of my parents, and now I realize that it is best to follow the wishes of my husband if I want to be what I ought to be." Therefore, let the husband give the orders, and let the wife carry them out with an even temper. For this reason that woman called Gorgo is surely not to be censured when she gave this reply to the question of whether she made advances to the husband: "No, I have not, but he comes to me." Cyrus, that great man and emperor, used to tell his troops that if the enemy advanced making a great noise, they should withstand the assault in silence, but if the enemy approached silently, then his men should go into battle with great noise and clamor. I would give the same advice to wives. If a husband, excited to anger, should scold you more than your ears are accustomed to hear, tolerate his wrath silently. But if he has been struck silent by a fit of depression, you should address him with sweet and suitable words, encourage, console, amuse, and humor him. Those who work with elephants do not wear white clothes, and those who work with wild bulls are right not to wear red; for those beasts are made ever more ferocious by those colors. Many authors report that tigers are angered by drums and made violent by them. Wives ought to observe the same thing; if, indeed, a particular dress is offensive to a husband, then we advise them not to wear it, so that they do not give affront to their husbands, with whom they ought to live peacefully and pleasantly. I think that ear guards (for so they are called because they protect the ear) are far more necessary for wives than for wrestlers, for the ears of the latter are only subject to blows, but indeed the former are subject to bills of repudiation accompanied by deep humiliation. Hence, wives must take great care that they do not entertain suspicions, jealousy, or anger on account of what they hear with their ears. Indeed, wives can often prevent such errors if they will only follow 735
the prudent example of King Alexander, who, when someone was accused and brought before him for trial, would always stop up one of his ears so that he might later open it to the accused who might want to defend himself. Indeed, it seems that Hermione was speaking the truth when she testified that she was brought to ruin by wicked women with whom she had been on familiar terms. Therefore, if wives should at some time become suspicious, let them stay away from slanderous women, stop up their ears, and suppress their mutterings, so that (as the proverb has it) fire is not added to fire. Let wives learn to follow that saying of Philip, that most outstanding king. This man was urged once by his courtiers to be harsher toward the Greeks who, though they had received many benefits from him, still criticized and slandered him. But he said: "What would they do if they were ever to receive bad treatment from us?" In the same way, when troublesome women say, "Your husband esteems you, who are so obedient and affectionate, only very little," then wives should answer, "What if I willingly and actively lost my modesty with my shame and my great desire for him along with my love?" A certain master found his runaway slave in a workhouse, and because the slave had been punished enough the master said: "Would that I had found you somewhere else than in this place." The wife who is angry with her husband because of jealousy and is considering a separation should ask herself this question: If I put myself in a workhouse because I hate a whore, what could make her far happier and more fortunate than this? She would see me almost shipwrecked, while at the same time she was sailing with favorable winds and securely casting her anchor into my marriage bed? Euripides, in his usual manner, greatly criticized those who were accustomed to listening to the harp while they were at dinner, for such music was better fitted to soothing anger or sadness than to relaxing those already immersed in pleasure. In similar fashion I would criticize wives who when they are happy and contented sleep with their husbands but when they are angry sleep apart and reject their husbands' affections, which through pleasantness and pleasure easily bring about reconciliation. The word Juno in Homer means "overseer of the nuptial ties," and if I remember correctly, when she spoke of Tethys and Oceanus, she declared that she would compose their differences and bring them together in lovemaking and nocturnal embraces. At Rome when there arose any differences between husband and wife, they entered the temple of the appeasing goddess where, after the spectators had been ushered out, they discussed everything frankly, and, finally, they returned home reconciled. It was considered very good for domestic peace and harmony if a wife kept her husband's love with total diligence. At the olympic games that were dedicated to the great god Jupiter and attended by all of Greece, Gorgias used his eloquence to urge a union of all the Greeks. Melanthus said: Our patron attempts to persuade us that we should all join together in a league, but he cannot bring himself and his wife and her maidwho are only three people-to a mutual agreement (for the wife was very jealous be736
cause Gorgias was wildly enamoured of her maid). Likewise, Philip was for a long time displeased with the queen Olympias and Alexander. And when Demaratus of Corinth returned from Greece, Philip eagerly and closely questioned him about the union of the Greeks. Demaratus said to him: "Philip, I consider it a very bad thing that you are spending all your energy in bringing peace and concord to all of Greece when you are not yet reconciled with your own wife and son. Therefore, if any woman wants to govern her children and servants, she should make sure that she is, first of all, at peace with her husband. Otherwise, it will seem that she wants to imitate the very things that she is trying to correct in them. In order that a wife does her duty and brings peace and harmony to her household, she must agree to the first principle that she does not disagree with her husband on any point. But of this enough has been said. On Love Now we shall speak of conjugal love, whose great power and high dignity almost always created - as we know from many great thinkers - a pattern of perfect friendship. I must omit a great many topics so that I may speak primarily about what is to be observed most. I should like a wife to love her husband with such great delight, faithfulness, and affection that he can desire nothing more in diligence, love, and goodwill. Let her be so close to him that nothing seems good or pleasant to her without her husband. Indeed, I think that true love will be of the greatest help in this matter. In all matters there is no better, no shorter path than being exactly what we seem to be. How much work, how much energy must an incompetent farmer expend if he would appear to be competent? How much learning, how much effort do unskillful physicians, or horsemen, or harp players need if they desire to seem to surpass others in fields where they are themselves completely without talent? It happens that many things generally intervene, so that the counterfeit practice of agriculture, medicine, horsemanship, and music comes to naught. If these persons take my advice, they will attain a solid and well-deserved reputation more easily, more quickly, and more surely if they suppress the spokesmen of false and overzealous praise. Since in every instance truth always overcomes imitation, the fact is that the farmer should take pains to till his fields with skill and hard work; the physician to heal men's diseases; the horseman to control unruly horses at his will; and the musician to give such delight with his song that nothing could be more pleasant or sweeter to the ears. Wherefore, if wives want to seem to love their husbands deeply, let them love them from their hearts. In the first place, let wives strive so that their husbands will clearly perceive that they are pensive or joyful according to the differing states of their husbands' fortunes. Surely congratulations are proper in times of good fortune, just as consolations are appropriate in times of adversity. Let them openly discuss whatever is bothering them, provided it is worthy of prudent people, and let them feign nothing, dissemble nothing, and con737
ceal nothing. Very often sorrow and trouble of mind are relieved by means of discussion and counsel that ought to be carried out in a friendly fashion with the husband. If a husband shares all the pressures of her anxieties, he will lighten them by participating in them and make their burden lighter; but if her troubles are very great or deeply rooted, they will be relieved as long as she is able to sigh in the embrace of her husband. I would like wives to live with their husbands in such a way that they can always be in agreement, and if this can be done, then, as Pythagoras defines friendship, the two are united in one. Now that this could be accomplished more easily, the people of Crete, who have for several centuries now lived under our dominion, used to permit their daughters to marry only those men with whom as virgins they had expressed mutual signs of love. The Cretans believe that those men would be more beloved by their wives if they were loved by them even before marriage. They recall that nature has so arranged and usage proven that all actions require time with few exceptions. It certainly happens that we may touch some thing hot and we are not immediately burned, or sometimes wood that is thrown into a fire does not always burst into flame right away. Hence, they think it is necessary for the girl to choose a husband suited to her own personality, just as one does in forming a friendship. The Cretans believe that a couple cannot properly know each other or fall passionately in love immediately. Whether the custom is a good one, I leave it to everyone to decide, but I cannot deny that it is well suited to the joy and constancy of love. I cannot pass over in silence those who seek to arouse their husbands to love by means of potions and amorous incantations. I would compare such wives to fishermen who catch fish with poison bait (as they still do in certain parts of Tuscany), and in so doing make the fish tasteless and almost inedible. Really, such women seem to be scarcely different from travelers who prefer to lead the blind than follow these who can see. Therefore, mutual love should freely and diligently be acquired, nurtured, and preserved. This principle is illustrated by the lives and actions of the most distinguished women, and if wives imitate these they themselves will successfully meet the trials of virtue, love, and constancy. For example, Panthea wonderfully loved and delighted her husband, Abradatus, prince of Susa, and even as a captive she preserved her fidelity to him and made Cyrus a friend. In providing honorably for her husband, more over, she did not squander his wealth but stored it. Abradatus fought valiantly against the Egyptians, who were the allies of Croesus, in order both to win the affection of Cyrus and to be a worthy husband to his wife Panthea. Then, performing his duty as a brave commander and stalwart soldier, he gave up his life in battle. Panthea, so that she might make him the most honorable sacrifice, desperately sought out his dead body and committed suicide upon it. Likewise, Cassandane so loved Cyrus that when she was about to die she found it was more bitter for her to leave Cyrus than to depart this life. For this reason Cyrus, who did not want to act as an ungrateful husband, lamented her 738
long after her death and ordered all those whom he governed to go into mourning in her honor. The wife of Themistocles loved him so much that it was generally acknowledged that she thought of nothing except her affection and love for her husband. For this reason it happened that the most famous leader of Greece yielded to her in all matters. Hence she was able to bring about more changes than any other Greek of her time. For whatever she wanted Themistocles also wanted, whatever Themistocles wanted the Athenians wished as well, and whatever the Athenians desired the whole of Greece desired. Thesta, the sister of the elder Dionysius, was married to Polyxenus, who, after he had been treated as an enemy by his brother-in-law, fled from Sicily. Then Dionysius called upon his sister and accused her of failing to report the flight of her husband even though she knew about it. Thesta, relying upon her reputation for constancy and outstanding virtue, responded: O Dionysius, do I seem to you to be such a vile and terrible woman that if I had known of my husband's flight I would have refused to go with him as a companion and partner in his misfortune? Indeed, it would be more acceptable to me to be called the wife of Polyxenus, the exile, than the sister of Dionysius, the tyrant. The Syracusans so admired the loftiness of her character that, after the tyrant had been expelled, they conferred royal honors on her as long as she lived. When she died men of all sorts and conditions-indeed, the entire population of Syracuse attended her funeral. Armenia, the wife of Tigranes, is another noble example to women. For when Cyrus waged a campaign against the Assyrians, she was not able to bear the absence of her husband, so she followed Tigranes very willingly everywhere as his untiring companion through thick and thin. In Homer, Andromache showed her great affection for Hector, on whom she bestowed all her love, as in this passage: You are my sole father, and indeed my venerable mother, you are my sweet brother, you are my spouse, admirable in all respects. Eventually driven insane by her husband's death, she ran through the city and wandered on the walls of Troy. At this point I should speak of the virtue of the excellent wife Camma. Although her story is a long one, still its dignity, nobility, and distinction will be pleasing both to you and to others who will read this treatise. Therefore, we shall set about telling her story in detail. Sinatus and Sinorix, who were united to each other by blood, no doubt excelled the other tetrarchs of Galatia in power, renown, and glory. Of the two, Sinatus took as his wife Camma, who was outstanding not only in her bodily beauty but in her singular virtue as well. Thus endowed with chastity, goodness, prudence, and magnanimity, she bound the hearts of everyone to her with marvelous affection. That she was a priestess of Diana, who was especially worshipped by the Galatians, made Camma even more famous, and, on account of her own great status and that of her an739
cestors, she became the chief priestess. At their sacrifices, where she was always magnificently attired, she attracted everyone's eyes. For this reason Sinorix began to be smitten with her, and soon he began to plan the death of his kinsman since he feared that while her husband was still alive he would not be able to carry out his plan of seduction. Thus this evil man, blinded by his great passion, secretly succeeded in killing the unsuspecting Sinatus. Soon thereafter he urged marriage on Camma, who, courageously bearing her husband's death, waited the chance and opportunity for revenge of the impious deed of Sinorix. He continued to urge that the fatal marriage be made and he even admitted honest motives for the murder, if we may consider honest that which has been contaminated by the worst sort of crime. At first Camma rejected his entreaties, but soon her relations, who wanted to join their line forever with that of a powerful prince, urged her even more strongly to be content with marrying him. Then, as if persuaded, she agreed to marry him, and thereafter she received the young man at home and went with him to the temple of Diana, where they were to institute their marriage with a covenant and vows in the presence of the goddess. Taking a cup in her hand, as if about to make a toast, she put her lips to the rim and then gave the rest to Sinorix to drink. The cup had been filled with mead mixed with poison, and when she saw that Sinorix had drained the cup, her pleasure shone on her face and from her eyes and countenance. Turning to the statue of Diana, she spoke the following words: "O divine mother, I witness to you that I have not wanted to survive my beloved Sinatus because of love for life (because indeed the life I have led has only afflicted me with troubles, which now ended will release me from all pain) but because I was determined to survive to carry out the events of this day. Nor would I have taken any pleasure in continuing to live after the funeral of my husband, which was sorrowful to me and a calamity to his country? Only a certain hope for revenge has comforted me from time to time. And now that this vengeance had been exacted, I go to my dear and fine husband, Sinatus. And as for you, vilest of beasts, Sinorix, instead of a wedding bed, a tomb is being prepared." In a short time after the poison had spread through all the members of their bodies, first Sinorix and then Camma died. Stratonica loved her husband Deiotarus so much that she thought she should do nothing but follow her husband's commands and interests. Therefore, she was in great grief and mourning when she saw that Deiotarus was unhappy because she had given him no heir, and that there would be no successor for his kingdom. Hence, of her own free will she provided her husband with a woman named Electra, who was handsome of face and decent in her habits, and Stratonica urged, exhorted, and persuaded her husband, who much admired the affection and constancy of his wife, to meet privately with Electra. Afterwards she cared for, educated, and instructed honorably the children born of Electra as if they had been her own.
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It would be tedious if I were to recount here the earnest affection that Tertia, daughter of Aemilius Paulus, held for P. Cornelius Scipio, or if I were to call to mind the very great love of Julia, Porcia, Artemisia, Hypsicratea, and other fine examples, which are familiar to anyone who has any familiarity at all with ancient history. There are also many things to be learned concerning the love of wives that I shall pass over intentionally. For we are confident in the great ingenuity with which wives will diligently and carefully seek out, of their own free will, ways to love and esteem their husbands. Still, we hope that those qualities which wives will develop naturally by practice will not differ too much from the precepts which have been described here. On Moderation The next part is concerning moderation, from which very often an enduring love between man and wife is begun, always nurtured and preserved. This quality is not only pleasing to the husband but also seems very noble to all those who hear about it. Moderation in a wife is believed to consist especially in controlling her demeanor, behavior, speech, dress, eating, and lovemaking. We shall discuss briefly these things that we have perceived either by our natural powers, learning, or experience; and since the first two qualities mentioned above amount to the same thing, we shall discuss them together. Now demeanor, which is above all the most certain expression of the personality and is found in no living creature except man, demonstrates signs of an honest, respectful, and abstemious character. In demeanor the habits that nature might otherwise have hidden completely are detected. One's demeanor declares and manifests many things without the use of words. From the face and its movement the disposition of an individual may be known. Even in dumb animals we discern anger, pleasure, and other such emotions from the movement of the body and from the eyes, which testify and make clear what kind of emotions there are inside. Wherefore many who trust in facial characteristics maintain that one can learn many things about an individual's nature in this way. But I digress too much. I therefore would like wives to evidence modesty at all times and in all places. They can do this if they will preserve an evenness and restraint in the movements of the eyes, in their walking, and in the movement of their bodies; for the wandering of the eyes, a hasty gait, and excessive movement of the hands and other parts of the body cannot be done without loss of dignity, and such actions are always joined to vanity and are signs of frivolity. Therefore, wives should take care that their faces, countenances, and gestures (by which we can penetrate by careful observation into the most guarded thoughts) be applied to the observance of decency. If they are observant in these matters, they will merit dignity and honor; but if they are negligent, they will not be able to avoid censure and criticism. Still, I am not asking that a wife's face be unpleasant, with a Sour expression, but, rather, it should be pleasant. And her demeanor should not be 741
clumsy but gracefully dignified. Moreover, I earnestly beg that wives observe the precept of avoiding immoderate laughter. This is a habit that is indecent in all persons, but it is especially hateful in a woman. On the other hand, women should not be censured if they laugh a little at a good joke and thus lapse somewhat from their serious demeanor. Demosthenes used to rehearse his legal speeches at home in front of a mirror so that with his own eyes he could judge what he should do and what he should avoid in delivering his speeches at court. We may well apply this practice to wifely behavior. I wish that wives would daily think and consider what the dignity, the status of being a wife requires, so that they will not be lacking in dignified comportment. We know that Spartan wives used to go about with their faces covered, while Spartan virgins went about with their faces uncovered. When the Spartan Charillus was asked about this practice he answered: Our ancestors permitted this liberty to young virgins so that they might find husbands; but they prohibited it in married Women so that they might understand that it was not their place to seek husbands but to care for and keep those they already had. Indeed, our Cretan subjects permit a similar custom. They allow their young girls to stand in their doorways and sing and joke and play games with their suitors. But when their women are married they have to stay at home, just as do those women who are dedicated to the rite of Vesta; and they can scarcely even go out, as if it would be unlawful for them even to see strange men. Who would not agree that they took this custom from Xenophon? One can easily learn from the following anecdote how much Xenophon would control the gaze of women. For when Tigranes returned home from Service under King Cyrus with his kinsmen and his beloved wife Armenia, many men praised the king's manners, the size of his body, and his gracefulness. Tigranes asked Armenia what she thought of Cyrus's beauty, but Armenia, Swearing before the immortal gods, answered: "I never turned my eyes away from you. Therefore, I am quite ignorant of what Cyrus's size or Shape may be." That story is consistent with the principles of Gorgias, who wanted women to be shut up at home so that nothing could be known about them except their reputation. But Thucydides did not think that they merited such treatment, for he declared he had the best wife, about whom there was not the least word praising or censuring her. We who follow a middle way should establish some rather liberal rules for Our wives. They should not be shut up in their bedrooms as in a prison but should be permitted to go out, and this privilege should be taken as evidence of their virtue and propriety. Still, wives should not act with their husbands as the moon does with the Sun; for when the moon is near the Sun it is never visible, but when it is distant it stands resplendent by itself. Therefore, I would have wives be seen in public with their husbands, but when their husbands are away wives should stay at home. By maintaining an honest gaze in their eyes, they can communicate most significantly as in painting, which is called silent poetry. They also should maintain dignity in the motion of their 742
heads and the other movements of their bodies. Now that I have spoken about demeanor and behaviour, I shall [speak] of speech. Â Â On Speech and Silence Isocrates warns men to speak on those matters that they know well and about which they cannot, on account of their dignity, remain silent. We commend women to concede the former as the property of men, but they should consider the latter to be appropriate to themselves as well as to men. Loquacity cannot be sufficiently reproached in women, as many very learned and wise men have stated, nor can silence be sufficiently applauded. For this reason women were prohibited by the laws of the Romans from pleading either criminal or civil law cases. And when Maesia, Afrania, and Hortensia deviated from these laws, their actions were reproved, criticized, and censured in the histories of the Romans. When Marcus Cato the Elder observed that Roman women, contrary to nature's law and the condition of the female sex, sometimes frequented the forum, sought a favorable decision, and spoke with strangers, he inveighed against, criticized, and restrained them as was required by that great citizen's honor and the dignity of his state. We know that the Pythagoreans were ordered to be silent for at least two years after beginning their studies. In this way they were not able to lie, to be deceived, or to be in error all of which are very shameful acts - and, moreover, they could not stubbornly defend those opinions that they had not yet sufficiently investigated. But we require that wives be perpetually silent whenever there is an opportunity for frivolity, dishonesty, and impudence. When addressed, wives should reply very modestly to familiar friends and return their greetings, and they should very briefly treat those matters that the time and place offer them. In this way they will always seem to be provoked into conversation rather than to provoke it. They should also take pains to be praised for the dignified brevity of their speech rather than for its glittering prolixity. When a certain young man saw the noble woman Theano stretch her arm out of her mantle that had been drawn back, he said to his companions: "How handsome is her arm." To this she replied: "It is not a public one." It is proper, however, that not only arms but indeed also the speech of women never be made public; for the speech of a noble woman can be no less dangerous than the nakedness of her limbs. For this reason women ought to avoid conversations with strangers since manners and feelings often draw notice easily in these situations. Silence is also often praised in the finest men. Pindar heaped praise on that outstanding Greek ruler Epaminondas because, though he knew much, he said little. In this matter, as in many others, Epaminondas followed the excellent teachings of nature, the mistress of life, who has clearly made known her thoughts on silence. She has with good reason furnished us with two ears but only one tongue, and this she has guarded with the double defense of lips and teeth. Now Theophrastus and many other men say 743
that nature has made us with this opening so that the virtue planted in us may enjoy the most pleasant and best results. As for the other senses that nature has bestowed upon us as scouts and messengers, they sometimes are sources of reliable knowledge but are very often only the conveyers of ignorance. Yet a certain Venetian citizen, whom I don't think it is necessary to name at present, praises silence only in those who cannot gain approval by their genius, authority by their wisdom, or renown by their well-wrought speeches. To this man I usually answer that the principal consideration in every matter refers to the person and to the place as well as to the time. Even if I were to concede, following his opinion, that it is usually appropriate for men to speak, still I consider such speechmaking to be, in the main, repugnant to the modesty, constancy, and dignity of a wife. For this reason the author Sophocles, who is certainly no worse than the Venetian I am discussing-and most men consider him better-has termed silence the most outstanding ornament of women. Therefore, women should believe they have achieved glory of eloquence if they will honor themselves with the outstanding ornament of silence. Neither the applause of a declamatory play nor the glory and adoration of an assembly is required of them, but all that is desired of them is eloquent, well-considered, and dignified silence. But what am I doing? I must be very careful, especially since I am treating silence, that I do not perhaps seem to you too talkative. On Dress and Other Adornments This is the point at which to discuss dress and other adornments of the body, which when they are not properly observed, lead not only to the ruin of a marriage but often to the squandering of a patrimony as well. All authorities who have studied these matters bear witness to this fact. If indeed one is pleased by the always praiseworthy rule of moderation, women will be recognized for modesty, and care will be taken for personal wealth and, at the same time, for the city as a whole. Here this fine precept should be followed: wives ought to care more to avoid censure than to win applause in their splendid style of dress. If they are of noble birth, they should not wear mean and despicable clothes if their wealth permits otherwise. Attention must be given, we believe, to the condition of the matter, the place, the person, and the time; for who cannot, without laughing, look upon a priest who is dressed in a soldier's mantel or some one else girdled with a statesman's purple at a literary gathering or wearing a toga at a horse race. Hence, we approve neither someone who is too finely dressed nor someone who is too negligent in her attire, but, rather, we approve someone who has preserved decency in her dress. Excessive indulgence in clothes is a good sign of great vanity. Moreover, experience and authorities have shown that such wives are apt to turn from their own husbands to other lovers. King Cyrus ought to be an example to our women that they should not strive too much to have expensive clothes, for Cyrus seems to be equal to his great name, which in the Persian tongue means "sun," both in his admira744
ble wisdom and in his splendid moderation. When ambassadors came from the king of India to make peace with the Assyrians in the city of his uncle Cyaxares, the uncle wanted the choicest part of his army to appear before them. He sent orders to his general Cyrus to appear as soon as possible with all his troops in the courtyard of the royal palace and the large market square. Cyrus carried out these orders and came with order, dignity, and unbelievable speed, wearing only a thin garment, even though Cyaxares had sent him a purple robe, a precious necklace, and other Persian ornaments to wear so that his nephew, the general of his army, might seem all the more splendid and well-dressed. But Cyrus despised all these things greatly, and it seemed to others and to himself the highest decoration to be seen arriving ready to fight with the well-trained army almost before the royal messenger had returned to Cyaxares. A similar disdain for fine apparel would bring great honor to our wives. Dionysius, the tyrant of Sicily, gave two very precious garments to Lysander so that his daughters might be more finely dressed. But Lysander refused the gifts and ordered the garments returned to Dionysius, saying that his daughters would be even more finely attired without the garments. Julia, the daughter of Caesar Augustus, imagined that her fine attire was sometimes offensive to her father, so one day she put on a plain dress and went to pay him a visit. When Caesar greatly approved of her new attire, she acknowledged that she was now wearing clothes that would please her father while before she had been dressing to please her husband Agrippa. One may believe whatever he wishes. But still I think that wives wear and esteem all those fine garments so that men other than their own husbands will be impressed and pleased. For wives always neglect such adornments at home, but in the market square "this consumer of wealth" cannot be sufficiently decked out or adorned. Indeed, a great variety of clothes is rarely useful and often harmful to husbands, while this same variety is always pleasing to paramours for whom such things were invented. I am wont to compare these men who are properly called "uxorious" to those who are so pleased with splendid exteriors on their houses while they are forced to do without necessary things inside. Hence, they present a golden facade to give pleasure to neighbors and the passers-by. Such husbands are also similar to unskilled but rich barbers whom middle aged men frequent only if they wish to have their hair arranged. Their ivory tools and elaborate mirrors are no source of wealth to them, but rather of grief, when they see the most noble young men going, to their great sorrow, to the neighboring barbershops. Moreover, sumptuous attire, magnificent clothes, and luxurious apparel give pleasure to those who frequent porticos, open courts, and sidewalks or very often promenade through the whole city. Hence, it was wisely forbidden to the women of Egypt to wear ornate shoes so that they might be prevented from wandering about too freely. Indeed, if we were to deprive most women of their sumptuous clothes, they would gladly and willingly stay at home. 745
Yet I think we ought to follow the custom-for good mores have so decayed-that our wives adorn themselves with gold, jewels, and pearls, if we can afford it. For such adornments are the sign of a wealthy, not a lascivious, woman and are taken as evidence of the wealth of the husband more than as a desire to impress wanton eyes. I will not dwell on the fact that this sort of wealth is more durable, and less likely to entail poverty than money put into rich clothing. Moreover, jewels and gold may often easily be of great use in business and public affairs. Who does not know how useful this sort of wealth was at a certain time to the ancient Romans, who in the time of peril during the Punic War raised money - which the ancients called the "sinews of war" for their city, following the Oppian Law. Still I think that wives ought to display their jewels even less than the present sumptuary laws permit. Therefore, I would like them to abstain from wearing very licentious apparel and other bodily adornments, not out of necessity but because they desire to win praise by showing that "they can do without those things that they are legally allowed." But you have heard enough about attire. On the Regulation of Lovemaking Indeed, the fact is that as food and drink are to be regulated, so in its own fashion moderation in lovemaking ought to be observed. For lovemaking itself follows the rule of life, just as a young chick follows its mother. This fact is borne out by many examples, but we cannot at this point in our treatise begin more wisely or more aptly than from the example of nature itself. So we shall discuss briefly what we have in mind. Indeed, the union of man and wife was first invented (as we said above), and ought to be esteemed especially, for the purpose of procreation. The couple must mainly use intercourse in the hope of procreating offspring. We can perceive and understand well enough that in most beasts there is a natural urge that leads them to follow certain rules of copulation, so that through the seed of mortal animals these same beasts are made immortal by a perpetual succession. Thus, in this way animals provide an example for us who possess a freer and nobler appetite, that we should indulge in sexual intercourse not for pleasure but only for the purpose of procreating offspring. Using the words of Julia, the daughter of Augustus, I admonish you that when the ship is full it should admit no more passengers. Therefore, we should certainly not consider beasts to be beasts for the very reason that they never have sexual appetites when they are pregnant but only for the sake of procreation. But if a woman should transgress these limits, I wish that she will curb herself so that she will be, or at least seem to be, chaste in that sort of temperance from which chastity is derived. It would be conducive to achieving this result if, from the very beginning, husbands would accustom themselves to serving as the helpers of necessity rather than of passion. And wives should bear themselves with decorum and modesty in their married life so that both affection and moderation will accompany their lovemaking. Lust and unseemly desire are harmful to 746
their dignity and to their husbands, even when they later say nothing about it. Herodotus writes that women lay aside their modesty together with their undergarments; if they make love with adulterers, let us acknowledge that this is true, but if wives will listen to us they will maintain their dignity with their husbands. When a Certain Woman was being forcibly taken by King Philip to satisfy his lust and desires, she declared: "Give me any woman and take away the light and you won't know one from the other." Now this can be justly said of adulterers. But wives, even though the light has been far removed, do not behave at all like these vile women. Does not Hesiod absolutely forbid that We should be uncovered at night? Because, as he says, the nights also belong to the immortal gods. For at all times a wife ought to do her duty, and although her body cannot be seen, still she ought always to observe decency so that she will justly seem decent to her husband even in the dark. Hence, when the wife of the famous Commodus attempted to entice her husband to use unusual and improper pleasures on her, he answered: "How far One can go in doing such things depends on the woman, but the term Wife is Surely a name of honor, not of pleasure." Similarly Cato the Censor expelled Manilius from the Senate because he passionately kissed his wife in the presence of his daughters. Now if it is true that it is a very base thing to kiss or passionately embrace one's wife in the presence of one's children, how much more important is it that nothing immoderate, nothing wanton should take place before the eyes that wives ought especially to please? Hiero fined Epicharmus, the comic poet, very heavily because he publicly made an indecent remark in the presence of his wife; for the dignity of marriage is so venerable that it is proper that no access should be given to the eyes and ears of strangers. The decency of the Athenians demonstrates this principle beautifully when they returned with the Seals unbroken the letters they had intercepted that King Philip had sent to his wife Olympias; indeed, they held that it was completely Wrong for a Stranger, or even an enemy, to share the Secrets exchanged between a husband and his wife. It is therefore proper that wives always be careful and thoughtful in such matters SO that they may win praise, honors, and crowns of gold. Hence, nothing should seem so pleasant and delightful that it would ever keep them from their obligation to do everything in a modest manner. In this matter wives should follow the example of many illustrious women. I do not know if Brasilla was the first among these, but surely her great deeds should not be passed over in silence in our own age. She was born of noble parents at Durazzo, as we know from the testimony of certain authors, and when she had been taken captive during a pirate raid she was in danger of being raped. But this beautiful woman, even in that great peril, preserved her sacred and uncorrupted chastity by the use of her wit, virtue, and lofty spirit; and with many words she stayed the aggression and repelled the fury of her captor, Ceric. And she struck a bargain with him that if she could preserve her chastity, she would provide him with a magic oint747
ment that would render him immune to harm from military arms. Convinced by the argument of this fine and chaste woman and the virgin's reputation for magic, he put Brasilla under guard while she went out to gather herbs, and he eagerly awaited the concoction of the ointment. Then, with great courage, she approached Ceric and promised that she would render him safe from harm not with mere words but with herbs. After she had anointed her own neck with the ointment, she offered her throat to him. Indeed, Ceric, who rashly believed that she was quite immune, cut off her head with his sword and was amazed at such a display of chastity. What more need be said? If wives would want to be as they ought to be, there would be no need of further examples and exhortations. So that we do not further delay the discussion of those matters that we ought to treat next, we shall end our treatment of modesty here. On the Education of Children It remains to speak about the education of children, which is surely a rewarding and certainly the most serious of a wife's duties. Diligence in accumulation of money for the family is really worth nothing (as ancient Crates used to say) unless a great deal of care and really extraordinary amount of energy is expended on the upbringing and instruction of the children to whom the wealth is to be left. For this care children, who owe everything to their parents, are especially obligated. But if parents do not perform the task of caring for and instructing children, the children must really and truly seem deserted and abandoned. If, indeed, we acknowledge that all things are due to the authors of our life, which all mortals naturally cherish and hold on to with good reason, and what should we do if to a noble upbringing we add training in living well? On this account, if you reflect upon all the aspects of the matter, you will find that unless mothers totally repudiate the rules of nature, the duty of educating their children is so incumbent upon them that they cannot refuse this duty without great harm. For nature assigns to them an overwhelming love for their children, which they simply cannot overlook. So that this fact may be amply demonstrated, I will speak of the procreation of children before they see the light of day; but time does not allow me to digress for long, and Nature has so hidden and secluded those parts of the body that what cannot be viewed without embarrassment can hardly be discussed by us without loss of dignity. However, we shall treat those matters that we absolutely cannot omit. In pregnancy the same blood of which women otherwise are cleansed in their monthly effusions is held back. This time, following the laws of nature, the fetus is nourished by this blood until the time of birth arrives. Then, as in all animals who give birth, the nourishment of milk is supplied. For this, Nature has made breasts, which, like bountiful fountains, nourish the young child and help it to grow gradually in all its parts. Moreover, women have been given two breasts so that if they have twins they may easily suckle and nourish them together. All these things have been thus provided 748
with great wisdom, but they still might seem to have been done in vain except that Nature has also instilled in women an incredible love and affection for their offspring. Here the special care and diligence of Nature can be observed, for while she has placed the nipples of other animals under their stomachs, in women she has affixed them on their breasts so that they may feed their children milk and fondle them with embraces at the same time, kiss them easily and comfortably, and, as they say, receive them to their bosoms. Thus Nature has assigned to women the duty of bearing and rearing children not only by necessity but also with her singular goodwill and love. Moreover, we can see a good argument in favor of a mother exercising great care for her newborn babies if women will but follow the habits of the terrible she-bear and other beasts. After bears have given birth to their unformed cub, they form and clean the cub with their tongues, as if the tongue were a kind of tool, so they can be justly called not just the mother of the cub but even its artificer. But why should we dwell on these small matters? Surely Nature has bestowed such good feeling toward newborn infants that we can see some animals who are timid become very brave on account of their offspring, others who are lazy become diligent, and others still who are slave to the stomach and gluttony become very abstemious. Did not even the Homeric bird endure hunger in order to provide for her young ones, and did she not cheat her own stomach to keep them fed? Therefore, mothers merit the severest censure if they neglect the care of their children and live carelessly. I would have them avoid no hardship in order to ensure that they make their children the best companions, comforters, and helpers in their old age. Therefore, if mothers would be free from reproach they should not neglect their offspring, but they should provide for both the bodies and souls of their children, and they should nourish and suckle them at their breasts. And the ones they nourished with their blood while still unknown mothers now will raise, since they are now born and have become human beings and are known and dear, since they require greatly not simply the care of a nurse but that of a mother as well. The wife of Marcus Cato the Censor fed her infant with her own milk, and this custom continues among Roman women down to the present age. In fact, because the fellowship of food and nourishment always increases friendship and love, in order to make the infants of her servants more loving to her own infants, a wife should sometimes feed them at her own breasts. We beg and exhort the most noble women to follow this example of feeding her infant her own milk, for it is very important that an infant should be nourished by the same mother in whose womb and by whose blood he was conceived. No nourishment seems more proper, none more wholesome than that same nourishment of body that glowed with greatest life and heat in the womb and should thus be given as known and familiar food to newborn infants. The power of the mother's food most effectively lends itself to shaping the properties of body and mind to the character of the seed. That may be dis749
cerned quite clearly in many instances; for example, when young goats are suckled with sheep's milk their hair becomes much softer, and when lambs are fed on goats' milk, it is evident that their fleeces become much coarser. In trees it is certain that they are much more dependent on the qualities of both sap and soil than on the quality of the seed; thus, if they are transplanted to other ground when flourishing and well leafed, you will find them changed enormously by the sap from the less fertile ground. Therefore, noble women should always try to feed their own offspring so that they will not degenerate from being fed on poorer, foreign milk. But if, as often happens, mothers cannot for compelling reasons suckle their own children, they ought to place them with good nurses, not with slaves, strangers, or drunken and unchaste women. They ought to give their infants to the care of those who are freeborn, well mannered, and especially those endowed with dignified speech. In this way the young infant will not imbibe corrupt habits and words and will not receive, with his milk, baseness, faults, and impure infirmities and thus be infected with a dangerous degenerative disease in mind and body. For just as the limbs of an infant can be properly and precisely formed and strengthened, so can his manners be exactly and properly shaped from birth. Therefore, mothers ought to be especially careful in their choice of nurses for infants; at this tender age a child's unformed character is very susceptible to being molded, and, as we impress a seal in soft wax, so the disposition and faults of a nurse can be sealed upon an infant. That very wise poet Vergil showed how important a nurse's inclinations and nature are when he described how Dido called Aeneas harsh and unyielding. Thus he has her say: "The Hircanian tigers fed you at their breasts." Likewise, that most pleasant poet Theocritus said that he detested cruel Cupid, not because he was born of his mother Venus "but because he suckled the breast of a lioness." Therefore, women ought to consider it best, very honorable, and commendable to suckle their own children, whom they should nourish with great love, fidelity, and diligence; or they may commit this part of their duty to well-trained nurses who will esteem and care for the infants, not with a pretended enthusiasm nor out of mercenary consideration. After their offspring have passed their infancy, mothers should use all their skill, care, and effort to ensure that their children are endowed with excellent qualities of mind and body. First they should instruct them in their duty toward Immortal God, their country, and their parents, so that they will be instilled from their earliest years with those qualities that are the foundation of all other virtues. Only those children who fear God, obey the laws, honor their parents, respect their superiors, are pleasant with their equals and courteous to their inferiors, will exhibit much hope for themselves. Children should meet all people with a civil demeanor, pleasant countenance, and friendly words. But they should be on the most familiar terms with only the best people. Thus they will learn moderation in food and drink so that they may lay, as it were, the foundation of temperance for their future lives. They should be taught to avoid these pleas750
ures that are dishonorable, and they should apply their efforts and thoughts to those matters that are the most becoming and will be useful and pleasant when they become older. If mothers are able to instruct their children in these matters, their offspring will much more easily and better receive the benefit of education. Very often we see that the commands and gifts of rulers are welcomed by their subjects, yet when these same things are bestowed by private persons they hardly even seem acceptable. Who can be unaware of what great authority the mildest and shortest reproach of a parent has on his children? Whence that wise man, Cato the Elder, instructed his offspring diligently in many subjects, including literature, so he would not be lacking in his duties as a father. Even the barbarous Eurydice ought to be judged worthy of great praise, for when she was advanced in years she applied herself to the study of literature, that monument of virtue and learning, so that, having done this, she would not only be considered the source of life to her children but could also instill in them through the bountiful condiments of the humanities the art of living well and happily. Mothers should often warn their children to abstain from excessive laughter and to avoid words that denote a rash character. That is the mark of stupidity, the evidence of passion. Moreover, children should be warned not ever to speak on those matters that are base in the act. Therefore, mothers should restrain them from vulgar or cutting words. If their children should say anything that is obscene or licentious, mothers should not greet it with a laugh or a kiss, but with a whip. Moreover, they should teach their children not to criticize anyone because of his poverty or the low birth of his lineage or other misfortunes, for they are sure to make bitter enemies from such actions or develop an attitude of arrogance. Mothers should teach their children sports in which they so willingly learn to exert themselves that, if the occasion arises, they can easily bear even more difficult hardships. I would have mothers sharply criticized for displays of anger, greed, or sexual desire in the presence of their offspring, for these vices weaken virtue. If mothers act appropriately, their children will learn from infancy to condemn, avoid, and hate these most filthy mistresses and they will take care to revere the names of God and will be afraid to take them in vain. For whoever has been taught at an early age to despise the Divinity, will they not as adults surely curse Him? Therefore, it is of great importance to train children from infancy so that they never Swear. Indeed, those who swear readily because of Some misfortune are not deserving of trust, and those who readily swear very often unwittingly betray themselves. Mothers ought to teach their children to speak the truth. This was well established among the Persians, and for that reason they decreed that there would be no market squares in their cities since they believed that such places were only fit for lying, or telling falsehoods, or for swearing falsely. Mothers should teach their children to say little at all times, and especially at banquets, unless they are ordered to speak, so that children do not become impudent or talkative-qualities that 751
ought to be especially avoided in the young. It will be an impediment to proper education if children try to explain impudently what they themselves have not yet sufficiently understood. Therefore, you should recall that saying of Cato who, when he was as a youth blamed for his silence, said: "Then I shall not harm myself at all, until I shall say those things that are not worthy of being left unsaid." If children will learn such precepts from their mothers as soon as their tender years permit, they will more happily and easily obtain the dignity and learning of their parents. There are many other matters that I shall omit at present because they are peculiar to fathers, and I do so readily because I see that Some people consider this subject of wifely duties to be so vast and infinite that the subject of fatherly duties can scarcely be sufficiently treated here. I can say nothing truer than that I never intended to discuss what might be done, but, rather, I have tried to describe what ought to be done. Therefore, who is such an unjust critic that if he will approve of a marriage done for the best reasons (just as you have done) and will, in his choice of a wife, take a woman outstanding in her morals, suitable in her age, family, beauty, and wealth, loving to her husband, and modest and very skillful in domestic matters—who, I say, would be so pessimistic in these matters that he cannot wish for all these great qualities or imagine that Wives so endowed ought not to perform all these important precepts? Therefore, my Lorenzo, your compatriots ought to be stirred by your example and follow you with great enthusiasm, for in Ginevra you have taken a wife who is a virgin well endowed with virtue, charm, a noble lineage, and great wealth. What more outstanding, more worthy model could I propose than yours? What more shining, more worthy example than yours, since in this outstanding city of Florence you are most eminently connected through your father, grandfather, and ancestors? You have taken a wife whose great wealth the entire world indeed admires but whose chastity, constancy, and prudence all men of goodwill esteem highly. They consider that you are blessed and happy to have her as a wife, as she is to have you as a husband. Since you have contracted Such an Outstanding and fine marriage, these same men ask God Immortal that you will have the best children who will become very honored citizens in your state. These matters might perhaps seem negligible since I am treating them, but indeed they are, in their own fashion, borne out in your marriage. Thus, surely young men who follow your example will profit more than only by following my precepts; just as laws are much more likely to be observed in a city when they are obeyed by its ruler, so, since your own choice of a wife is consistent with my teachings, we may hope that these precepts will be followed by the youth. But, Lorenzo, as my treatise begins with you, so shall it end. You now have, instead of a present, my opinion on wifely duties, and I hope that whatever has been said by me, not to admonish you (as I made clear from the beginning) but to declare our mutual goodwill, will in large measure be kindly accepted by many others. I am certain 752
that it will be well received by you, in whose name I undertook this endeavor. If when you are reading our little commentary you find anything that perhaps seems to be well or wisely stated, attribute it to that excellent man Zaccaria Trevisan, who is worthy of every sort of praise and whose memory I gladly cherish, and to my study of Greek literature. From the latter I have culled some things that pertain to our subject and inserted them here. Although I have been occupied with this treatise for only a few months, I still am happy to think that it will bear abundant and pleasant fruit. For I have profited so much from the learning and talent of that fine and very erudite man, Guarino da Verona, who was my tutor and my closest friend from among all my acquaintances. He was a guide to me and to several other first-rate people, in understanding and advancing our study of the humanities. And he was such a fine guide that, with his help, these divine studies, to which I have devoted myself from boyhood, have become very enjoyable and profitable to me. Therefore, please accept gladly from me this wife's necklace (as I wish to call it), given on the occasion of your marriage. I know that you will esteem it greatly both because it is the sort of necklace that cannot be broken or destroyed by use (as others can) and because it is the product of my sincere friendship and of a mind that is entirely devoted to you. SOURCE: B. Kohl and R. Witt, eds., The Earthly Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1918), pp. 192-228. Reprinted with permission of University of Pennsylvania Press.
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SECTION 2
Marriage and the Family in Renaissance Florence The Marriages of Gregorio Dati In the name of God and the Virgin Mary, of Blessed Michael the Archangel, of SS. John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, of SS. Peter and Paul, of the holy scholars, SS. Gregory and Jerome, and of St. Mary Magdalene and St. Elisabeth and all the blessed saints in heaven-may they ever intercede for us-I shall record here how I married my second wife 'Isabetta' known as Betta, the daughter of Mari di Lorenzo Vilanuzzi and of Manna Veronica, daughter of Pagolo d'Arrigo Guglielmi, and I shall also record the promises which were made to me. May God and his Saints grant by their grace that they be kept. On March 31, 1393, I was betrothed to her and on Easter Monday, April 7, I gave her a ring. On June 22, a Sunday, I became her husband in the name of God and good fortune. Her first cousins, Giovanni and Leonardo di Domenico Arrighi, promised that she should have a dowry of 900 gold florins and that, apart from the dowry, she should have the income from a farm in S. Fiore a Elsa which had been left her as a legacy by her mother, Manna Veronica. It was not stated at the time how much this amounted to but it was understood that she would receive the accounts. We arranged our Match very simply indeed and with scarcely any discussion. God grant that nothing but good may come of it. On the 26th of that same June, I received a payment of 800 gold florins from the bank of Giacomino and Company. This was the dowry. I invested in the shop of Buonaccorso Berardi and his partners. At the same time I received the trousseau which my wife's cousins valued at 106 florins, in the light of which they deducted 6 florins from another account, leaving me the equivalent of 100 florins. But from what I heard from her, and what I saw myself, they had overestimated it by 30 florins or more. However, from politeness, I said nothing about this .... Our Lord God was pleased to call to Himself the blessed soul of ... Betta, on Monday, October 2 [1402] ... and the next day, Tuesday, at three in the afternoon she was buried in our grave in S. Spirito. May God receive her soul in his glory. Amen .... I record that on May 8, 1403, I was betrothed to Ginevra, daughter of Antonio di Piero Piuvichese Brancacci, in the church of S. Maria sopra Porta. The dowry was 1,000 florins: 700 in cash and 300 in a farm at Campi. On ... May 20, we were mar754
ried, but we held no festivities or wedding celebrations as we were in mourning for Manetta Dati [Gregorio's son], who had died the week before. God grant us a good life together. Ginevra had been married before for four years to Tommaso Brancacci, by whom she had an eight-month-old son. She is now in her twenty-first year. After that [1411] it was God's will to recall to Himself the blessed soul of my wife Ginevra. She died in childbirth after lengthy suffering, which she bore with remarkable strength and patience. She was perfectly lucid at the time of her death, when she received all the sacraments: confession, communion, extreme unction, and a papal indulgence granting absolution for all her sins .... It comforted her greatly, and she returned her soul to her Creator on September 7 .... On Friday the 8th she was honorably buried and on the 9th, masses were said for her soul. Memo that on Tuesday, January 28, 1421, I made an agreement with Niccolo d'Andrea del Benino to take his niece Caterina for my lawful wife. She is the daughter of the late Dardano di Niccolo Guicciardini and of Manna Tita, Andrea del Benino's daughter. We were betrothed on the morning of Monday, February 3, the Eve of Carnival. I met Piero and Giovanni di Messer Luigi [Guicciardini] in the church of S. Maria sopra Porta, and Niccolo d'Andrea del Benino was our mediator. The dowry promised me was 600 florins, and the notary was Ser Niccolo di Ser Verdiano. I went to dine with her that evening in Piero's house and the Saturday after Easter ... I gave her the ring and then on Sunday evening, March 30, she came to live in our house simply and without ceremony .... SOURCE: Excerpts from G. Brucker, ed., Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 113-115, 123, 132-134; reprinted in G. Brucker, ed., The Society of Renaissance Florence (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 29-41, 69-70. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Two Marriages in the Valori Family, 1452 and 1476 I record this event, that on July 15, 1452, Niccolo di Piero Capponi sent for me and, after many circumlocutions, he asked me if I were still in a mood to marry. I told him that I would not diverge from his judgment in this matter or in any other, for I had great faith in him and was certain that his advice would be prudent and honest. Then he told me that Piero di Messer Andrea de'Pazzi had two nubile daughters and that he was willing to give me the girl which I preferred. He was making this offer to me on Piero's behalf. I accepted the bait willingly and asked for two days' grace to confer with several of my relatives, which I did extensively, and was advised by them to proceed. After two days, I returned to Niccolo and told him to ask Piero's consent to marry the eldest whom I knew well, for up to the age of twelve we were practically raised together. 755
[For a dowry, Bartolomeo received 14,000 florins of communal bonds, valued at 2,000 florins. His wife Caterina died on November 20, 1474, leaving two boys and six girls.] ... On this day, July 5, 1476, Lorenzo de' Medici [the Magnificent] told me that he wanted to speak to me, and I visited him immediately. He said that Averardo d'Alamanno Salviati had come to see him and told him that he had a daughter of marriageable age that he would willingly give her to my son Filippo, requesting that Lorenzo be the broker. I replied that this pleased me but that I wished first to speak to Filippo to learn his views, which I did that same evening. Finding my son disposed to follow my judgment and my will, on the next day I asked Lorenzo to conclude the business. He sent for Averardo and they agreed on the conditions. On July 7, Lorenzo came to my house and told me that the alliance was sealed, that Alessandra, the daughter of Averardo Salviati, would be the wife of my son Filippo with a dowry of 2,000 florins. And we formally sealed the agreement in the palace of the Signoria, with Lorenzo himself pronouncing the details of the settlement. Marriage Negotiations: The Del Bene, 1381 [February 20] In the name of God, yesterday I concluded the agreement with Giovanni di Luca [a marriage broker] for the marriage of Caterina [Del Bene, Giovanni's daughter] with Andrea di Castello da Quarata, with a dowry of 900 florins. I could not reduce that sum, although I tried hard to persuade Giovanni to adhere to the terms of our previous discussions. But things are very much up in the air, and Giovanni insisted upon it, alleging many reasons. So, to avoid the rupture of negotiations, I surrendered on this point. Then I requested Giovanni to maintain secrecy about this affair, as we have agreed, and he said that he would give me a reply. Last night he said that it was impossible, because they wanted to discuss the matter with their relatives, who were so numerous that they couldn't keep the affair secret. However, they are very pleased with this match, and they didn't want to displease me on this point. So, after much effort, I persuaded them to keep it secret through Sunday, and then everyone is free to publicize it as he wishes. So, on the same day, our relatives and Amerigo's friends will be informed .... The women of your household to whom I have spoken say that the girl wishes to have a satin gown, which seems too lavish to me. Write me your opinion. On Sunday, I will meet with Giovanni [di Luca] and we will settle this affair in one day, and also the church where the betrothal ceremony will take place. And I will do the same with Lemmo [Balducci] and will explain the reason to Giovanni. And that evening I will relate everything to our women, because Lapa says that Manna Giovanni di Messer Meo
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has said that Amerigo [Del Bene, Giovanni's son] has a bride and that she informed her son Niccolo. The marriage chest will be furnished in the customary manner; it will cost between 70 and 75 florins. They will provide the ring, so that everything will be ready at the proper time. In your letter, remind me of anything that, in your opinion, should be done with respect to these marriages. There is no further news concerning Antonia [Francesco's daughter] except that her mother was very unhappy about that negotiation at Bargo S. Lorenzo. It is my feeling that we shouldn't push this issue and annoy her further, and that we will find some other good prospect for her. You should advise us how we should proceed with the girls; that is, when we should go to see Amerigo's bride, and when the bridegroom should come to see Caterina. I think that Andrea [da Quarata] should come to our house first, and then Caterina, accompanied by our women, should go to see Amerigo's bride. Write me whether you think that Andrea should give the ring that day [of the betrothal ceremony] or not, so that we can arrange the matter beforehand .... [February 21] I wrote you last night and sent the letter off this morning, and so I have little to tell you save that I met Giovanni [di Luca] Mozzi today. We agreed that the betrothal would take place on the first Sunday in Lent, and we may choose the church where it will take place. I don't think that Amerigo's betrothal should be kept secret any longer, so that they won't have any excuse for complaining. I think that on Saturday, Amerigo should go to them [the Balducci] and tell them that we are arranging to marry Caterina, as well as give him a bride. He should tell them everything, and then we can settle that business, and they will learn about it a few days before it becomes public knowledge. Amerigo will write about the deliberations of the women concerning Caterina's trousseau. I have heard that Dora [Francesco's wife] is somewhat unhappy about this marriage, seeing that Antonia [her daughter] is still unwed .... I also think that Antonia may be upset when she sees Caterina's beautiful gown. I urge you to write a comforting letter to Dora, and tell her that we will find a husband for Antonia, if God wills it. Nor should Antonia be unhappy about the new gown, for I think that it will not be long before she too will have one. I shall not be pleased, if I see any discontent in a household where there should be joy. [February 24] ... Concerning Caterina, we have concluded the marriage agreement for 900 florins .... They wanted to hold the betrothal ceremony on the first Sunday of Lent, and Giovanni [Mozzi] and I agreed on that point, and also that it will take place in [the church of] S. Apollinare. We haven't yet discussed the guest list, but I think that they will want a large assembly. It is my feeling that we should hold the betrothal cere757
mony before the dinner, so there will be time afterwards to accept and to deliver the contract. I don't know whom they wish to give the ring, but tomorrow I will settle these matters of the guest list and the ring. The women have decided that Caterina's dress will be made of blue silk and that the gown will form part of the dowry; this was a wise decision. Tomorrow everything will be settled. It is true that Dora, whom I have always considered a sensible woman, has been behaving in a way that redounds neither to her nor to our dignity. She has not wished to join in any part of this affair. Her attitude is so bizarre and so melancholy that she cries all day and says that your daughter [Antonia] will never be married and that you don't care. She says the most shocking things that I have ever heard, and has made your whole family miserable. I am very annoyed by her conduct, and it would please me if you wrote to comfort and correct her, so that she will be content with this affair, and not vexed. I was with Ser Naddo [di Ser Nepa] on Saturday and told him about Caterina's marriage, and my opinions on the betrothal of the girl [Amerigo's bride] and of Caterina, and also the question of the church and the guest lists. I also informed him of the penalty [for breaking the betrothal contract] of 2,000 florins, and every other detail concerning this affair. Today Ser Naddo told me that Lemmo is content with everything, except that if Caterina's husband gives her the ring, then he wants Amerigo to give it to his daughter; otherwise not. He also says that the penalty should be no more than 1,000 florins, since the rumors of the dowry which he has provided have ruined him. Concerning the ring, he says that he wants it to be arranged in this way, to do like the others. Concerning the penalty, I told him that you had instructed me in this matter as it was agreed, and that I could not alter it without writing you .... [Letter from Naddo di Ser Nepa to Francesco di Jacopo Del Bene, February 24, 1381] After you left here, Giovanni d'Amerigo sent for me to inform me of the marriage alliance which, by the grace of God, has been arranged between you and Lemmo. We discussed certain problems, among which was the fact that in the agreement was a clause providing for a penalty of 2,000 florins. After our discussion, I spoke with Lemmo and he agreed to everything except the penalty of 2,000 florins. He argued as follows: "The rumors of this large dowry which I have given are ruining me, with respect to the taxes which I pay to the Commune. And with this matter of a 2,000 florin penalty, everyone will believe that I have given a dowry of that amount, which will destroy me, and surely they [the Del Bene] should not want this to happen. However, this business has been given by Francesco and myself to Messer Bartolomeo [Panciatichi?] for arbitration, and I will abide fully by his decision." On the 24th of this month, I met Giovanni and told him what Lemmo wanted, and that he wanted a penalty of only 1,000 florins, and the reasons for this. Giovanni told me that you had so ar758
ranged matters that he could not reply without consulting you. Speaking with all due reverence and faith, it appears to me that this issue should not disturb or impede this marriage, considering the great friendship which has always existed between you and Lemmo, and which now should be greater than ever. Moreover, you and Amerigo should desire to further his interests, and approve a penalty of 1,000 florins and no more. They entered into this marriage with a positive attitude, and so did you, and therefore I pray you as fervently as I can to be content. I am always ready to carry out your commands. Marriage Negotiations: The Strozzi, 1464-1465 [April 20, 1464] ... Concerning the matter of a wife [for Filippo], it appears to me that if Francesco di Messer Guglielmina Tanagli wishes to give his daughter, that it would be a fine marriage .... Now I will speak with Marco [Parenti, Alessandra's son-in-law], to see if there are other prospects that would be better, and if there are none, then we will learn if he wishes to give her [in marriage] .... Francesco Tanagli has a good reputation, and he has held office, not the highest, but still he has been in office. You may ask: "Why should he give her to someone in exile? " There are three reasons. First, there aren't many young men of good family who have both virtue and property. Secondly, she has only a small dowry, 1,000 florins, which is the dowry of an artisan .... Third, I believe that he will give her away, because he has a large family and he will need help to settle them .... [July 26, 1465] ... Marco Parenti came to me and told me that for some time, he has been considering how to find a wife for you .... There is the daughter of Francesco di Messer Guglielmina Tanagli, and until now there hasn't been anyone who is better suited for you than this girl. It is true that we haven't discussed this at length, for a reason which you understand. However we have made secret inquiries, and the only people who are willing to make a marriage agreement with exiles have some flaw, either a lack of money or something else. Now money is the least serious drawback, if the other factors are positive .... Francesco is a good friend of Marco and he trusts him. On S. Jacopo's day, he spoke to him discreetly and persuasively, saying that for several months he had heard that we were interested in the girl and ... that when we had made up our minds, she will come to us willingly. [He said that] you were a worthy man, and that his family had always made good marriages, but that he had only a small dowry to give her, and so he would prefer to send her outside of Florence to someone of worth, rather than to give her to someone here, from among those who were available, with little money .... He invited Marco to his house and he called the girl down .... Marco said that she was attractive and that she appeared to be suitable. We have information that she is affable and competent. She is responsible for a large family (there are twelve
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children, six boys and six girls), and the mother is always pregnant and isn't very competent .... [August 17, 1465] . . . Sunday morning I went to the first mass at S. Reparata ... to see the Adimari girl, who customarily goes to that mass, and I found the Tanagli girl there. Not knowing who she was, I stood beside her .... She is very attractive, well proportioned, as large or larger than Caterina [Alessandra's daughter] .... She has a long face, and her features are not very delicate, but they aren't like a peasant's. From her demeanor, she does not appear to me to be indolent ... ¡. I walked behind her as we left the church, and thus I realized that she was one of the Tanagli. So I am somewhat enlightened about .... [August 31, 1465] ... I have recently received some very favorable information [about the Tanagli girl] from two individuals .... They are in agreement that whoever gets her will be content .... Concerning her beauty, they told me what I had already seen, that she is attractive and well-proportioned. Her face is long, but I couldn't look directly into her face, since she appeared to be aware that I was examining her ... and so she turned away from me like the wind .... She reads quite well ... and she can dance and sing .... Her father is one of the most respected young men of Florence, very civilized in his manners. He is fond of this girl, and it appears that he has brought her up well. So yesterday I sent for Marco and told him what I had learned. And we talked about the matter for a while, and decided that he should say something to the father and give him a little hope, but not so much that we couldn't withdraw, and find out from him the amount of the dowry . . . . Marco and Francesco [Tanagli] had a discussion about this yesterday (I haven't seen him since), and Marco should inform you about it one of these days, and you will then understand more clearly what should follow. May God help us to choose what will contribute to our tranquillity and to the consolation of us all .... [September 13, 1465] .. . Marco came to me and said that he had met with Francesco Tanagli, who had spoken very coldly, so that I understand that he had changed his mind. They say that he wants to discuss the matter with his brother-in-law, Messer Antonio Ridolfi .... And he [Francesco] says that it would be a serious matter to send his daughter so far away [to Naples], and to a house that might be described as a hotel. And he spoke in such a way that it is clear that he has changed his mind. I believe that this is the result of the long delay in our replying to¡him, both yours and Marco's. Two weeks ago, he could have given him a little hope. Now this delay has angered him, and he has at hand some prospect that is more attractive .... I am very an760
noyed by this business; I can't recall when I have been so troubled. For I felt that this marriage would have satisfied our needs better than any other we could have found ... [Filippo Strozzi eventually married Fiametta di Donato Adimari, in 1466.] Illegitimacy and Marriage, 1355 Agnola, the illegitimate daughter of Piccio [Velluti's brother], was born in Trapani in Sicily, of the proprietress of a baker's shop, or rather a lasagna shop. While Piccio was alive, he did not want to bring her here [to Florence], although my wife and I urged him to do so. After his death, Leonardo Ferrucci [Velluti's brother-in-law] went to Sicily and ... found Agnola alive and her mother dead. He then asked me to bring her [to Florence]. But I had some doubt that she was really Piccio's child, seeing that he did not wish to bring her back, and also considering that in his will he left her 50 florins for her dowry, if she were truly his daughter .... But seeing that there was no other descendant in our immediate family except Fra Lottieri and myself and my son Lamberto, and my niece Tessa di Gherardo, and so that she would not fall upon evil ways, and for the love of God, I allowed her to come. She was then ten years old, and I welcomed her and I-and my family-treated her as though she were my own daughter. And truly she was the daughter of Piccio, considering her features and the fact that she resembled him in every way. When she reached the age of matrimony, I desired to arrange a match for her, and she caused me a great deal of trouble. I was willing to spend up to 300 florins [for her dowry] but could not find anyone interested in her. Finally, after much time had passed, and with her situation not improving, she began to complain about me to relatives and others, saying that I didn't know how to get her out of the house [i.e., to marry her]. In the cloth factory which my son Lamberto was operating with Ciore Pitti, there was a factor named Piero Talenti, who was earning a [yearly] salary of 64 florins and later he received 72 florins. And since I couldn't find I any better prospect, I married her to him in May, 1355 .... Later there occurred the plague of 1363 ... and first Piero's four children died, and then Piero himself, and I had to bury him. He left about 35 florins worth of household furnishings, and I had to provide mourning clothes for Agnola, and I could not get back her dowry of 160 florins .... Since her husband's death, Agnola has lived with me. I wanted to arrange another marriage for her, but since she is both a widow and illegitimate, I have not been able to find her a husband. So, to protect my honor and to assist her in her need, Fra Lottieri arranged for her to become a tertiary in his order in December, 1366 ....
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A Broken Marriage, 1377 To you, lord priors . . . of the city and Commune of Florence, with reverence and tears, this petition is presented by Monna Nicolasa, widow of Giovanni di Ventura, a mercer, of the parish of S. Reparata of Florence. It is true that Duccio di Agostino di Duccio de'Benegli of S. Martino la Palma took as his wife Monna Madelena, daughter of Giovanni [di Ventura]. And having taken her, Duccio beat her and maltreated her unmercifully, and wished to kill her without any cause. With the license of the priors then in office and with their messenger, Giovanni brought his daughter back to his house. It was then formally decreed by the priors and other good men that Duccio and Agostino had to give her a certain amount of food each year. Agostino had recently left S. Martino la Palma to stay in Florence, and last July, this hypocritical and perverse man and his son Duccio ... conspired to kill Giovanni di Ventura, an artisan and a weak man, the father-in-law of Duccio, who only a short time ago was one of the priors, and has been an official [of his guild] on several occasions. Agostino ordered Duccio to assassinate Giovanni, and also told his son Felice to help him .... Moreover, Agostino loaned his horse, saddled and ready, to Duccio at his house in Florence, on which Duccio fled to Pisa immediately after the homicide, to the house of his relatives there. Desiring to put into execution this evil plan, Duccio with his companions ... assaulted Giovanni di Ventura on a plot of land in the parish of S. Maria de Falgano di Valdisieve .... They struck and wounded Giovanni with knives, as a result of which he fell to the earth dead. And if it had not been for the outcry which arose, they would have gone to the farmhouse to burn it down and kill Giovanni's wife and children .... Agostino and Duccio all belong to a powerful clan, the house of Benegli in S. Martino la Palma, and they are among the wealthiest and most powerful members of that family, of those who live in the contado. And there are more than sixty men with arms, rich and powerful, and they continue to threaten to kill Giovanni's sons. Moreover, Duccio and Agostino have forbidden anyone to cultivate the farm which belonged to Giovanni, so that the land lies idle, and they [the members of Giovanni's family] have nothing for their sustenance. So, having killed the father, [and] retained the dowry of the daughter, they now wish to starve the family, and they will continue to persecute them into the next world .... The Children of Gregorio Dati, 1404 Glory, honor and praise be to Almighty God. Continuing from folio 5, I shall list the children which He shall in His grace bestow on me and my wife, Ginevra.
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On Sunday morning at terce, 27 April of the same year, Ginevra gave birth to our first-born son. He was baptized at the hour of vespers on Monday the 28th in the church of S. Giovanni. We named him Manetta Domenico. His sponsors in God's love were Bartolo di Giovanni di Niccola, Giovanni di Michelozzo, a belt-maker, and Domenico di Dea, a goldsmith. God make him good. At the third hour of Thursday, 19 March 1405, Ginevra gave birth to a female child of less than seven months. She had not realized she was pregnant, since for four months she had been ailing as though she were not, and in the end was unable to hold it. We baptized it at once in the church of S. Giovanni. The sponsors were Bartolo, Manna Buona, another lady, and the blind woman. Having thought at first that it was a boy, we named it Agnola Giovanni. It died at dawn on Sunday morning, 22 March, and was buried before the sermon. At terce on Tuesday morning, 8 June 1406, Ginevra had her third child, a fine fullterm baby girl whom we had baptized on Friday morning, 9 June. We christened her Elisabetta Caterina and she will be called Lisa betta in memory of my dead wife, Betta. The sponsors were Fra Lorenzo, Bartolo, and the blind woman. On 4 June 1407, a Saturday, Ginevra gave birth after a nine-month pregnancy to a little girl whom we had baptized on the evening of Tuesday the 7th. We named her Antonia Margherita and we shall call her Antonia. Her godfather was Nella di Ser Piero Nelli, a neighbor. God grant her good fortune. At terce, Sunday, 31 July 1411, Ginevra gave birth to a very attractive baby boy whom we had baptized on 4 August. The sponsors were my colleagues among the Standard-bearers of the Militia Companies with the exception of two: Giorgio and Bartolomeo Fioravanti. We called the child Niccolo. God bless him. God was pleased to call the child very shortly to Himself. He died of dysentery on 22 October at terce. May he intercede with God for us. At terce on Sunday, 1 October 1412, Ginevra had a son whom, from devotion to St. Jerome - since it was yesterday that her pains began - I called Girolamo Domenico. The sponsors were Master Bartolomeo del Carmine, Cristofano di Francesco di Ser Giovanni, and Lappuccio di Villa, and his son Bettino. God grant him and us health and make him a good man. God willed that the blessed soul of our daughter Betta should return to Him after a long illness. She passed away during the night between Tuesday and the first Wednesday of Lent at four in the morning, 21 February 1414. She was seven years and seven months, and I was sorely grieved On 1 at May her death. 1415, at God the grant hour she of terce pray on for a us.
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On 1 May 1415, at the hour of terce on Wednesday, God granted us a fine little boy, and I had him baptized at four on Saturday morning. Jacopo di Francesco di Turn and Aringhieri di Jacopo, the wool merchant, were his godfathers. May God grant that he be healthy, wise, and good. We feast named At day eleven he him was o'clock after born the and on two Friday, we holy shall 24 apostles, call April him 1416, Jacopo Filippo. Ginevra and Filippo, gave birth on whose to a baby girl after a painful and almost fatal labor. The child was baptized immediately on S. Marco's Day, the 25th. We called her Ghita in memory of our mother. Monna Mea di Franchino was her godmother. Manetta died in Pisa in January 1418. He had been very sick and was buried in S. Martino. Pippo died on 2 August 1419 in Val di Pesa in a place called Polonia. This is recorded in notebook B. At two o'clock on the night following Monday 17 July, Lisa was born. She was baptized by Master Pagolo from Montepulciano, a preaching friar, on Wednesday at seven o'clock. God console us, amen. She died later. Altogether Ginevra and I had eleven children: four boys and seven girls. Offspring, 1422 The following is a list of the children begotten by me. I was single when my first son, Maso,(1) was born on 21 December 1391-this appears on the back of page 4. Before his birth I had got Bandecca with child but she had a miscarriage in her sixth month in July 1390. After that, as I have indicated on page 5, I had eight children by my second wife, Betta: five boys and three girls. Then, as I show on page 10, I had eleven children by my third wife, Ginevra: four boys and seven girls. Altogether, not counting the one that did not live to be baptized, I have had twenty children: ten boys and ten girls. Of these, Maso, Bernardo, Girolamo, Ghita and Betta are still alive. Praise be to God for all things, amen. Caterina, my fourth wife, miscarried after four months and the child did not live long enough to receive baptism. That was in August 1421. On 4 October 1422, at one o'clock on a Sunday night, Caterina gave birth to a daughter. We had Fra Aducci and Fra Giovanni Masi baptize her on Monday the 5th and christen her Ginevra Francesca. May God bless her. At three o'clock on Friday, 7 January 1424, Caterina gave birth to a fine healthy boy whom we had baptized on the morning of Saturday the 8th. 764
The godparents were the Abbot Simone of S. Felice and Michele di Manetta. We christened the child Antonio Felice. God grant he turn out a good man. Between eight and nine o'clock on the morning of Tuesday, 20 March 1425, Caterina had another healthy and attractive child who was baptized the following day-the 21st-which was the feast of St. Benedict. Fra Cristofano, Father Provincial of the monks of S. Maria Novella, the prior, Master Alessio, Master Girolamo, and Fra Benedetto were his sponsors. We christened him Lionardo Benedetto. God make him a good man. At three in the morning of 26 July 1426, Caterina had a fine little girl whom we christened Anna Bandecca. The baptism was on the 27th and her sponsors were Antonino and Monna Lucia. God grant her His grace and that she be a comfort to us. At two o'clock in the night of Monday, 28 August 1427, Caterina gave birth to a fine little girl. She was baptized on Wednesday morning the 22nd and christened Filippa Felice. The Abbot of S. Felice, Giovanni di Messer Farese Sanviati, and Giuliano di Tommaso di Guccio, who had served in the same office with me, were her sponsors. God grant she be a source of consolation to us and fill her with His grace. Our Lord called her to Himself on 19 October 1430. This appears on page 30, notebook E. May God bless her. At about eleven o'clock on Saturday, 2 June 1431, Caterina gave birth to a girl who was baptized on Monday the 4th in S. Giovanni's and christened Bartolomea Domenica. See notebook E, page 46. Our Lord was pleased to call to Himself and to eternal life our two blessed children, Lionardo and Ginevra, on Saturday, 6 October 1431. This appears in notebook one, page 14. Lionardo had been in perfect health twenty-four hours before his death. God bless them and grant us the grace to bear this loss with fortitude. 1. Maso was the child born of the slave girl, Margherita, in Valencia. SOURCE: G. Brucker, ed., Two Memories of Renaissance Florence (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 126-128, 134-136. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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SECTION 3
Laura Cereta, Curse Against the Ornamentation of Women Laura Cereta was born into an aristocratic family of Brescia. She received her early education in a convent, but at the age of nine she returned home to be educated by her father, a learned official. She was taught Latin and Greek, as well as mathematics, in which she became particularly skilled. At 15 she was married to Pietro Serino of Brescia, but he died from the plague just 18 months later. Cereta was to remain a widow for the rest of her life. About the time of her marriage, Laura Cereta began a Latin correspondence with other humanists. Indeed, her humanist interests continued after her marriage, and her scholarly pursuits helped her recover from the loss of her husband. In 1488 she published a volume of her letters. Many of the male humanists aware of Cereta treated her with condescension or contempt. Many did not believe that a young woman could write such elegant Latin. There were, however, a few scholars who supported her. Laura Cereta wrote a wide range of Latin works, including invectives (perhaps the first woman humanist to do so), letters, and an important defense of humanist education for women. She died in 1499. Letter to Augustinus Aemilius, Curse Against the Ornamentation of Women Alone, I fled to the country, and in tranquil leisure delighted in [humane] studies. But you, meanwhile, were disturbed by my retreat, as if you seemed to consider me, a nonentity, important. I came at the end when my husband was feverish. Dying myself, I saw him half dead. I cheered him when he seemed to revive, I wept over him when he died, I fell lifeless on his dead body, and the fatal house which awaited me for marriage admitted me to lamentation. Thus one, and that an abominable year, saw me a girl, bride, widow, and pauper. These events were ordered by fate, not by you; you were mortal and died. I thank you for esteeming me so highly, and more so than I deserve, for I cannot be compared to women like Sarah, Esther, Sephora and Susanna, any more than a glowworm shining at night can be compared to the brilliant stars in heaven. I fear that your 766
lofty opinion of me may spring from some other source than a carefully balanced judgment. Conjure up in your mind an ordinary woman, drab of face and drably dressed for I care more for letters than for flashy clothes. Moreover, I have committed myself absolutely to that cultivation of virtue which can profit me not only when alive but also after death. There are those who are captivated by beauty. I myself should give the greater prize to grey-haired chastity, since in the lovely company of comely youth blaze up enticements to passion. For virtue excels the brilliance of beauty, elaborate polished artifice, and precious flowers of every tenderness. Let Mark Antony be attracted by bejeweled Cleopatra; I shall imitate the innocence of Rebecca. Let Paris seek the wandering Helen; I choose to imitate the modesty of Rachel. Wives are bewitched by rich display; more witless still are those who, to satisfy the appetite of their wives, destroy their patrimonies. Today men's love for women has made our commonwealth the imitator or rather the plunderer of the East. Luxury has thrived in this age, more than all others prodigiously vain. Let those who do not believe me attend the services of the church. Let them observe weddings packed with seated matrons. Let them gaze at these women who, with majestic pride, promenade amidst crowds through the piazzas. Among them, here and there, is one who ties a towering knot-made of someone else's hair-at the very peak of her head; another's forehead is submerged in waves of crimped curls; and another, in order to bare her neck, binds with a golden ribbon her golden hair. One suspends a necklace from her shoulder, another from her arm, another from neck to breast. Others choke themselves with pearl necklaces; born free, they boast to be held captive. And many display fingers glistening with jewels. One, lusting to walk more mincingly, loosens her girdle, while another tightens hers to make her breasts bulge. Some drag from their shoulders silken tunics. Others, sweet-scented with perfumes, cover themselves with an Arabian hood. Some boost themselves with highheeled shoes. And all think it particularly modish to swathe their legs with fine soft cotton. SOURCE: M. King and A. Rabil, Her Immaculate Hand (Binghamton, N.Y.: MARTS, 1983), pp. 78-80.
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D. Kent, Women in Renaissance Florence The modern conception of the Renaissance was shaped essentially by Jacob Burckhardt's 1860 study, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Burckhardt envisioned Renaissance men as rejecting the corporate values that had determined personal identity in the Middle Ages, and Renaissance women as enjoying a new equality with men. He characterized fifteenth-century Italy as the birthplace of modern individualism, often seen as literally represented in Renaissance portraits.1 In the last thirty years or so, feminist scholars have reappraised female experience in Renaissance Italy, as elsewhere. Gender is now generally viewed as a social construct as much as a biological given, and women as universally constricted in accordance with the male needs and ideals of the specific societies in which they lived.2 Art historians have reassessed the representation of women by male writers and artists of the Renaissance in the light of psychological insights derived from critical writing on the cinema, in which males are seen to assert power through the privileged subjective action of looking at females, the passive, powerless objects of their controlling gaze, she the eternal 'other’ to his ‘self ’.3 Social historians, studying the structure and ideology of the male lineage and of the Florentine republic, have explored the social and legal constraints on women and demonstrated that female destiny was almost entirely in the hands of men; indeed, women had very limited rights and few opportunities for any autonomous action.4 They have also shown that, in fact, neither men nor women were free, as Burckhardt imagined, to fashion an individual self,5 a personal identity independent of the values and demands of a society still structured around the communities of family, state, and an all-pervasive Church. Their values determined the very different roles of men and women in a social scenario to which both sexes were committed. Portraits, like most Renaissance images, represent a complex amalgam of real and ideal, signified by idealized features and stylized attributes, in the presentation of a self as defined by society.6 "Don't be born a woman if you want your own way."7 This dictum of Nannina de' Medici, from a letter to her brother Lorenzo the Magnificent, written after an altercation with her father-in-law, Giovanni Rucellai, shortly after her marriage to his son Bernardo, holds true of even the most privileged of Florentine upper-class women, 768
the social stratum represented in the portraits in this exhibition. Indeed, Florence was among the more unlucky places in Western Europe to be born a woman. In the princely courts a woman could inherit wealth and a measure of power with her noble blood, and her significance might then be as much dynastic as domestic, even political. In Florence, inheritance was through the male line only. The merchant republican society of that city was committed to communal, Christian, and classical values. These all prescribed that the honor of men should reside in their public image and service, and in the personal virtue of their wives; women were excluded from public life, and sequestered in the home to ensure their purity and that of the blood line through which property descended.' In their portraits women appear framed in the windows of their houses (cats. 3, 2.5, 3IB), in 1610 a French traveler commented after a visit to Florence that " ... women are more enclosed [here] than in any other part of Italy: they see the world only from the small openings in their windows."9 On more than one occasion a householder, filing his tax return that had to include the name, age, and condition of all those living under his roof, noted that a woman, in her eagerness perhaps to extend her horizons, had fallen from a window and been injured.10 Historians are often hard put to rescue the testimony of women's experience from the silence imposed on them by the limitations of evidence produced largely by men. In Florence, the best documented society of early modern times, men restricted women's lives, but as almost obsessive record keepers kept account of them. In the words of Renaissance laws, tax returns, and sermons, as well as women’s own letters and devotional writings, we may still hear something of their voices. Women's lives throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance were strongly shaped, by the ambivalent attitudes of a powerful Church whose moral prescriptions were enforced not only in the confessional, but also by the laws of the state.11 Eve was the villainess of Christian history, the cause of original sin and of man's Fall. God created her from Adam's rib, subordinate. But she was tempted by the serpent, and tempted Adam to sexual sin. Thus Everywoman dwelt in the shadow of the fallen Eve, justly sentenced to the pain of childbirth and the labor of motherhood. The stereotype of woman as Eve was that she was weak, foolish, sensual and not to be trusted.11 Women were the scapegoats for the physical impulses that warred perpetually with the spiritual in men, a conflict sometimes depicted as an allegory of marriage. Self-disgust and revulsion against women are typically mingled in an adage of the humanist scholar Marsilio Ficino: "Women should be used like chamber pots: hidden away once a man has pissed in them.�13
769
Conversely, Christian teaching held the potential for an immense respect for women and specifically female functions elevated to their highest degree in the life of the Virgin Mary. Even if, according to an early Christian writer, ''Alone of all her sex / She pleased the Lord."14 She who was ultimately pure, born of an Immaculate Conception and destined to be the virgin mother of Christ, opened the way to a more positive view of women by redeeming the sin of Eve. Contemplating the Annunciation, the influential philosopher and theologian Peter Damian reflected: "That angel who greets you with 'Ave' / Reverses sinful Eva’s name. / Lead us back, O holy Virgin / Whence the falling sinner came."15 Devotional images depicted the Virgin Mary in roles which were the common lot of womankind: the Annunciation of her pregnancy, giving birth in the stable of the Nativity, the Madonna and child, the infant cradled in his mother's arms, her grief at his death at the Crucifixion. These archetypal images framed society's views of real women, furnishing exemplars for their behavior. San Bernardino, the most popular of Tuscan preachers in the fifteenth century, enjoined his female listeners to model themselves on the Virgin as depicted in Simone Martini's Annunciation (fig. 1): ''Have you seen that [Virgin] Annunciate that is in the Cathedral, at the altar of Sant' Ansano, next to the sacristy? ... She seems to me to strike the most beautiful attitude, the most reverent and modest imaginable. Note that she does not look at the angel but is almost frightened. She knew that it was an angel. ... What would she have done had it been a man! Take this as an example, you maidens."16 Marriage and the dowry system were the major determinants of female destiny. Rather than the consensual union of two individuals, marriage was a social and economic contract between families that answered to their interest and that of the state in replenishing a population threatened by recurring episodes of plague. 17 As Francesco Barbaro stressed in his famous treatise concerning wives presented to Cosimo de' Medici's brother Lorenzo when he married Ginevra Cavalcanti, the first duty of a man was to marry and increase his family.18 A woman's primary function was to serve as the vessel by which the lineage was maintained. A woman's secondary function was as the means of attaching to the lineage by marriage allies from ¡ other Florentine families with desirable attributes-wealth, nobility, and political influence, she acted as "a sort of social glue."19 As anthropologists have observed, the exchange of women in traditional societies is a conversation between men; it is also the basis of all symbolic exchange.20 The symbolic exchanges associated with marriage were negotiated in meetings between the men of the two families. Their alliance was sealed in a series of social rituals centered on the contracts preceding it, the exchange of gifts and rings, and wedding banquets intended as a conspicuous display of the groom's social position and assets.21 770
In a spalliera panel painted for the marriage of Giannozzo Pucci and Lucrezia Bini in 1483 (private collection), expensive plate is displayed in the foreground, the coats of arms of the couple are prominently placed on the exterior columns, and Lorenzo de' Medici, who arranged the match, is represented by his family arms on the central column, by the symbolic laurel bushes and by his device of the diamond ring. Although the new couple might receive a blessing when they next attended Mass, the marriage celebration did not require a priest. And while her marriage was surely the most significant event of a young bride's life, determining the site and circumstances of the remainder of its course, her part in the wedding ceremonies was relatively minor. In the "triptych" of scenes representing the wedding, spread over a period of up to a year, the initial negotiations have been compared to the predella, and the public meeting between the two groups of male kin, at which no women were present, to the first panel. The bride’s first essential appearance was in the second panel, on "the ring day” when the nuptial band was placed on her hand at her house, gifts were exchanged, and she gave her formal consent to the union; it was often consummated at this time. In the third panel the marriage was "publicized” before the community; the bride was removed from her father's house and escorted by his male friends to the house of her husband, where she was welcomed with festivities that might last several days.22 A mid-fifteenth-century painted panel, probably to decorate a bedchamber, depicts the marriage procession in the public setting of the piazza of the Baptistery; the lily of Florence on the banners attached to the instruments of the accompanying musicians underscores the civic significance of the union. Elaborately dressed guests perform a dance1 and preparations for a banquet are also visible (fig. 2). The dowry was the major component of the marriage exchange, but in Florence it was augmented with gifts from the bride's kin and counter-gifts from her husband and his family.23 The expenses of contracting an honorable union were considerable oil both sides. Patrician men postponed marriage until their early thirties, waiting, perhaps, to accumulate a respectable fortune. Young women were usually betrothed between twelve and eighteen, to ensure that they came to the wedding bed as virgins.14 Clerics, among them San Bernardino, attributed to the dowry system a variety of social ills, including the prevalence of homosexuality among bachelors, the premature widowhood of wives, and the practice of fathers using their savings to marry off pretty daughters and consigning the ugly ones to convents without benefit of vocation.25 Most upper-class women married men almost twice their age, and there are traces in the sources of the problems this caused. One man complained that his wife called him “a doddering old fool,”26 and many popular stories and proverbs turned on the 771
temptations rife in homes where a young bride whose husband's sexual powers were failing was surrounded by his handsome young sons of her own age. Having married much older men, almost a quarter of Florentine women were widows; their lot was a miserable one, as preachers like San Bernardino and Savonarola pointed out in enjoining respect and compassion for them.27
GALLERY 9.1
“'Birds of passage’ in a no-woman's land between the two male lineages to which they half belonged,"28 women were caught between competing kinship strategies.29 At her husband's death a woman had either to return to her natal family, which was sometimes unwilling or unable to reshoulder the financial burden of her support, or to remain, often under sufferance, with her in-laws; women were considered far too dangerous and untrustworthy to be allowed to live alone, “It was of course the 772
dowry that tangled the threads of a woman's fate."30 Theoretically the dowry that a woman brought her husband was attached to her for life, to provide for their household during his lifetime and for her after his death. But since the potential loss if she left with her dowry threatened the economic equilibrium of her deceased husband's household, it was usually in the interests of his heirs to persuade her to remain with them. If she was over forty, the unlikelihood of finding her a new husband, due to the premium placed on virginity at marriage and the potential to produce heirs, and the difficulty of assembling dowries, discouraged her own family from intervening. If she were still young, however, a widow might be pressured to return to her family of birth and once again become a card to play in their matrimonial strategies. In this case she left with her dowry, but without her children. Some Florentine sons resented the “inconstancy'' of mothers who "abandoned” them as "cruel”; others expressed their gratitude to mothers who had endured personal hardship to devote themselves to their children's welfare, becoming, in effect, "both mother and father'' to them.31 The fifteenth century saw the extreme inflation of the sum of money required by a bride's family to procure a groom of suitable status. Since many fathers came to dread the birth of daughters, not only because of their intrinsic lack of worth, but also because of the financial burdens they represented, to encourage the institution of marriage the Florentine state established a dowry fund – the Monte delle Doti.32 Some historians maintain that a comparatively small investment matured in a period of between five and fifteen years to provide the dowry,33 but contemporary testimony suggests that it might still represent a major outlay for the bride's family. Complicating the financial arrangements of marriage were the subsidiary exchanges it involved.34 The money paid out by the bride's family for the dowry was accompanied by the trousseau (donora), which consisted of clothes and small personal items. This was scrupulously divided into two parts, those items "counted" or "not counted" by the officiating notary. Legally belonging to the bride, her "personal property" was nevertheless not hers to dispose of as she wished, and at the death of either spouse it was often hotly contested. Some small everyday objects like dolls, needles, and prayer books, often depicted in portraits to signify a woman's possession of the female virtues (cats. 30, 31B), might be passed on to her female descendants . The dowry reverted to the males of her lineage after her death, and there are few examples in Florence of its successful bequest according to the woman's wishes, especially as women had no power to execute legal acts, except through a male agent.35 Presentations to the bride from the bridegroom and his family functioned as a "counter-dowry," returning equilibrium co an unbalanced economy of exchange. The husband's gifts to the bride were also divided legally into two parts, including a cash gift corresponding symbolically to the dowry, addressed to the bride's kin, and 773
the mancia ("tip” in modern Italian) traditionally given to proclaim the consummation of the marriage. The groom's gifts to the bride appropriately consisted of body ornament, the sumptuous clothes and jewels – shoulder brooch, head brooch, and pendant – displayed in portraits (cats. 3, 5. 301 31B). "Marking” her with dresses and jewels, often bearing his crest, by bestowing on her a ritual wedding wardrobe the husband introduced his wife into his kin group and signalled the rights he had acquired over her. Most of these items remained the property of the husband who might later bequeath them to his wife or repossess them;36 if he needed capital, they could be sold.37 Although sumptuary laws proved perennially difficult to enforce, throughout the history of the republic officials of the state made periodic attempts to restrict extravagant private displays of wealth and honor in marriage gifts, wedding banquets, baptisms, and funerals.38 Those responsible for administering the laws were known as the Officials of the Women, since it was women against whom many laws were explicitly directed, and who were regularly bullied and intimidated by notaries sent out on patrol to observe violations and impose heavy fines. Among several possible explanations for the persistence of such laws in the face of the acknowledged importance of display in Florentine culture is this patriarchal society's negative attitude toward women.39 In 1414, in Florence to preach the Lenten sermons, San Bernardino chastised the women of the city for asking their husbands to buy them more clothes than they needed, invoking the "thousands of young men who would take wives if it were not for the fact that they had to spend the entire dowry, and sometimes even more, in order to dress the women."40 On another occasion the Sienese preacher demanded: "By what means is a virtuous woman recognized? By her appearance. In the same way one recognizes the shop of the wool-merchant by his sign. … What is outside shows what is inside. ... Concerning this I want to say of the woman who wears whorish clothing, I don’t know her interior, but what we see out· side seem to me filthy signs."41 While Bernardino with his mercantile metaphor linked the decorated female body to commerce and exchange, in a sermon of 1490 Savonarola compared women to beasts. Commenting on the then fashionable Flemish style of dresses with daring décolletage, long trains, and pointed headdresses, he pleaded with mothers not to allow their daughters to become like cows: "Let them go about with their breasts covered, and let them not wear tails like cows or have horns like cows." San Bernardino had likened long trains to the tails of serpents.42 Framed and justified in terms of this weak and bestial nature of women was the government's admission, in approving the election in 1433 of a new group of "Women's 774
Official” that women as the objects of exchange in marital commerce had a major role to play in the demographic economy of the state. The law spoke of the need to restrain the barbarous and irrepressible bestiality of women who, not mindful of the weakness of their nature, forgetting that they are subject to their husbands, and transforming their perverse sense into a reprobate and diabolical nature, force their husbands with their honeyed poison to submit to them. These women have forgotten that it is their duty to bear the children sired by their husbands and, like little sacks, to hold the natural seed which their husbands implant in them, so that children will be born. … For women were made to replenish this free city and to observe chastity in marriage; they were not made to spend money on silver, gold, clothing and gems. For did not God Himself, the master of nature, say this?43 Women were indeed ingenious in finding ways to dress fashionably while avoiding prosecution, generally observing the letter, if grossly exceeding the spirit, of the laws. Many used their privileged social position to seek special exemptions.44 Clearly, however, extravagant display was linked less to female vanity than to honor, which was mostly male. As Alessandra Strozzi wrote to her son Filippo: “Get the jewels ready, and let them be beautiful, for we have found you a wife. Being beautiful and belonging to Filippo Strozzi, she needs beautiful jewels, for just as you have honor in other things, you do not want to be lacking in this.”45 Both men and women in this society were preoccupied with personal appearance because dress was a way of displaying and distinguishing status and dignity, occupation and occasion, not simply wealth. Cosimo de' Medici pressed upon Donatello a gift of clothing appropriate to the dignity of his artistic genius, and Machiavelli, after a day spent hunting, gambling, gossiping, and whoring at the tavern, shed his everyday raiment at night when he entered his study to commune with the ancient Roman authors whom he revered, "putting on garments regal and courtly," appropriate to the weight of this occasion.46 At least one woman, although not a Florentine, but rather the learned and beautiful lover of the lord of Bologna, in 1453 made an eloquent appeal for the abolition of sumptuary laws in similar terms. Citing Roman law that limited female participation in the public world, she declared: "Magistrates are not conceded to women; nor do they strive for priesthoods, triumphs or the spoils of war, because these are considered the honors of men. Ornament and apparel, because they are our insignia of worth, we cannot suffer to be taken from us.”47 A progressive relaxation of the prescriptions of Florentine sumptuary laws from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the 1460s was followed in the 1470s and 1480s by a reaction – possibly to the failures of enforcement of the preceding half-century – and many fourteenth-century limitations were restored. In the absence of any 775
clearly explanatory evidence, one might speculate that the crack-down in the 1470s was related to a possible wish on Lorenzo’s part to curb competitive displays by his fellow oligarchs.48 In view of the claim that extravagance in female; dress cut into the groom's accession of capital, the spate of bank failures that hit many upper-class families hard in the early 1470s might also be seen as relevant.49 Much legislation insisted on the primacy of maintaining what were seen as the traditional Florentine values on which the republic had been built, thrift and austerity, at a time of rapidly expanding consumerism.50 Above all, fluctuating sumptuary law parallels the constant tension between a view of women as objects of desire, which encompasses a male wish to use female bodies to display the accumulation of wealth and power, and fear, both of women and of God's wrath at excessive ostentation. Always a theme of clerical comment, by the end of the century, in a climate of increasingly intense religious observance and awareness of sin, concern about women's appearance climaxed in Savonarola's movement for the “self reform of women" and in his “bonfires of the vanities."51 The obligations of marriage, in accordance with familial and Christian expectations, were outlined in popular literature – stories, poems, sermons, and works directed specifically toward women. Manuals on marriage, household management, and the raising of children were dedicated in the fifteenth century by the Dominicans Giovanni Dominici and Archbishop, later saint, Antoninus, to the women of the Medici, AIberti, Salviati and Tornabuoni families; in 1502 Caterina Bongianni had a copy of Fra Bartolommeo's text on marriage in her trousseau.52 From the Church's point of view, the duties of a husband were to instruct, correct, cohabit, and support; his wife was to respect, serve, obey, and if necessary admonish. Their reciprocal obligations were affection, fidelity, honor, and the marital debt.53 While wifely admonitions were to be pleasant – she might cajole him into better behavior – if she would not listen to reason, he might resort to "blows, or a real beating and thrashing."54 Once she had been removed to her new family, a stranger within its ranks, a wife's identity derived entirely from that of her husband, whose interests she was expected to put before those of father, brothers) of even children. Her movements were circumscribed by the walls of the family palace. A treatise on marriage of 1510 called "The Nuptial Forest,” evoking the medieval image of woods as dark and perilous places in which one might easily lose one’s way,55 quoted a popular saying deriding women seen in places outside the home: "Women are saints in church, demons in the house; owls at the window, magpies at the door, and goats in the garden."56 Within her home, the physical conditions of a woman's life were determined by constant childbirth. An endless cycle of pregnancies was interrupted only by periods of lactation, and for wealthy women who were· expected to employ wet nurses rather 776
than suckling children themselves, not even this offered respite (see fig. 13).57 High fertility was in the interests of the male lineage, and given the extremely high rate of mortality (approximately half of all children born died before the age of two, and half of those who survived their first two years were dead before they reached sixteen), women bore the brunt of the need to produce male heirs. As Martin Luther observed in the early sixteenth century: "Even if they bear themselves weary, or bear themselves out ... this is the purpose for which they exist.�58 Images of the pregnant Virgin reinforced the message that the greatest honor a woman could enjoy was to bring forth life. The cemetery in which Piere della Francesca's Madonna del Parto was located became an important devotional site for pregnant women to visit (fig. 3).59 The Florentine merchant Gregorio Dad recorded in his diary his marriages to four wives, with details of the dowries they brought him, the birth of twenty-six children, the deaths of all but eight by the end of the diary, and the deaths of his first three wives, one after a miscarriage another after the difficult birth of her eighth child, and the third in childbirth. It should be noted that his business like attitude to marriage and procreation did not preclude personal affection. Describing the death of his third wife, Ginevra, who bore him eleven children in fifteen years, after “lengthy suffering which she faced with remarkable strength and patience� he observed that "her loss has sorely tried me," and he chronicled the passing of the children whom God "had lent us" with expressions of love and grief.60 Another Florentine woman, Antonia Masi, who died in 1459 at age fifty-seven, gave birth to thirty-six children; nine males survived her. 51 Many artifacts of the Florentine household attest to the importance of childbearing. Just as often a child was ceremonially placed in the bride's arms during the wedding festivities, "holy dolls," usually dressed as the Christ child or a saint, formed part of the trousseau of young brides like Nannina de' Medici (fig. 4).62 Apart from the childish comfort they may have brought a twelve-year-old girl abruptly torn from the bosom of her family, they served several of society's purposes for women. They were intended to lead women and children to God through play in which they felt and relived the childhood of Jesus, acquiring at the same time an apprenticeship in maternal attitudes; they also served as fertility devices by which it was hoped the young woman might magically engender a child with the virtues of the sacred person represented by the object.63 Husbands' household inventories and diaries record extensive expenses for many objects. Some, like birthing chairs and swaddling clothes, were utilitarian. Most were intended to decorate the mother, the child, and the bedroom in honor of the event. There were special garments for the mother to wear during her lying in, and other, 777
more sumptuous ones for receiving congratulatory visits; the bed was equipped with special sheets for the labor, and then with rich coverings to celebrate a successful delivery. Silver spoons were presented to the child, and decorated maiolica dishes made to depict the event. Husbands purchased large quantities of poultry, a luxury food considered particularly good for pregnant women and nursing mothers. Sweet-meats and wine were provided to offer after the birth.64 The enduring symbolic object associated with childbirth was the painted wooden tray for the ceremonial presentation of food and drink to the mother after the delivery; these appear in most Florentine inventories of the bedchamber. Many trays depicted a scene of successful and idealized childbirth, probably to allay the anxiety of expectant mothers. On the obverse of the earliest surviving birth tray, by Bartolomeo di Fruosino,65 the mother, wearing elaborately decorated garments and sitting up in a bed dressed with luxurious sheets, receives a tray and is entertained by a female harpist, while outside a procession of visitors bearing gifts approaches the house (fig. 5). These visits were a duty of women to one another; the Tornabuoni family frescoes in Santa Maria Novella also portray women attending a confinement (see fig. 13).66 Such idealized scenes mediated between the real and ideal worlds;67 constitute some of the fullest representations of women in their domestic environment. Not medically understood, the process of birth was mysterious and dangerous. A significant proportion of the deaths of young women resulted from childbearing, and an equally large number of newborn died within days of birth. An expectant mother often wrote her will before she came to term, and her relatives insured her to cover the loss of their dowry investment if she died while giving birth.68 Florentines employed talismans and rituals designed to keep the childbearing under control. Fearing “visual contagion,” they protected pregnant women from horrific scenes and tried instead to “visually imprint” positive images, like the beautiful naked men and women depicted on the insides of cassone lids for the bride to contemplate in the hope that her child would be conceived in their likeness.69 On the reverse of the birth tray painted by Bartolomeo di Fruosino is a talismanic male: child wearing a coral amulet around his neck; he is an image of fertility, with the family arms and an inscription invoking good fortune: “May God grant health to every woman who gives birth and to the father ... May [the child] be born without fatigue or peril. I am an infant who lives on a [rock?] and I make urine of silver and gold" (fig. 6). While constant childbearing exhausted women and imperilled their lives, childlessness was a fate still worse, depriving them of worth and honor. List of household expenses include payments for various remedies for infertility; popular prescriptions for herbal concoctions or spices, fertility belts with appeals to the saints inscribed on 778
them, disbursements for special masses for pregnant women, and votive offerings, sometimes of silver, to give thanks if the remedies proved successful.70 Some birth trays bore representations of the family's aspirations for themselves and their children based on Petrarch's well-known poem, which elided classical and Christian virtue in the successive triumphs of Chastity, Love, and Fame. An image of Chastity on a birth tray underscored the importance of a wife remaining faithful to her husband and bearing children only of his blood. The Triumph of Fame, the subject of the birth tray presented by Piero di Cosimo de' Medici to his wife Lucrezia Tornabuoni at the time of their son Lorenzo's birth in 1449, imaged the ambitions of their dynasty (fig. 7). Among the other decorative and didactic images in the marital chamber were devotional paintings that served as an aid and focus for personal prayer as well as self-improvement.71 Furniture was painted with scenes blending classical, Christian, and familial imagery for the moral edification of both sexes, but particularly women. Wall panels, decorated backs for beds and couches, and the numerous chests (cassoni or forzieri) used to transport the bride's trousseau and to store most household goods illustrated the lives of exemplars drawn from Ovid and Plutarch, from novelle like Boccaccio's Decatneron,72 or from the Bible.73 Particularly popular were the Old Testament heroines Susanna, Esther, and Judith, the last a virtuous young widow content to remain chaste while heroically consenting to appear sexually available to the tyrant besieging her city in order to kill him in his chamber.74 Another favorite was the Roman matron Lucrezia, honored by Boccaccio in his treatise Concerning Famous Women, she killed herself after she was raped rather than bring dishonor to her family (fig. B).75 Botticelli's Primavera, painted as a headboard for Lorenzo de' Medici's uncle, and long understood as an allegory of love, has been recently reinterpreted as a wedding commission, its image of rape indicating that submission to the male by the female was necessary to guarantee a stable society and the perpetuation of the species. This was certainly the message of the many cassone panels depicting the story of the Sabine women, whose people had occupied the original site of Rome. Although they properly attempted to protect their chastity by plunging into the Tiber River, in the end they were raped by their conquerors in order to ensure the survival of Romulus' new settlement.76 Despite the grim, even brutal treatment of women in these moral tales, Lucrezia Tornabuoni turned them into devotional poetry; these examples showed women what they needed to be, if not actually to do. While the home was particularly the province of women, in Florence the distinction between a private, female realm and the public, male world is not so easily made as some have argued. Wealthy households could be small communities harboring several generations of the lineage and many servants and slaves. Architectural evidence 779
does not at all support a frequent assumption that men and women had separate rooms. On the contrary, apart from halls intended for dining and entertaining large numbers of people, the living quarters of the family consisted of a suite of rooms comprising bedchamber, antechamber, and some-times a study; there were no spare rooms for the exclusive use of women. In these shared spaces the possessions of men and women, and the swaddling clothes of infants, were kept together in cassoni and cupboards.77 Moreover, while women undoubtedly spent a disproportionate amount of time in them, bedrooms were by no means off-limits to visitors; indeed, men customarily entertained and consulted with relatives, allies, business associates, and even strangers in their chambers. A wellborn Florentine woman had no place in the public life of the streets and palaces of government, but the mistress of a large and wealthy patrician household was far from isolated; the world, in a sense, came to her.78 When their husbands were absent from home – temporarily away on business or exiled, or permanently, having died – women like Alessandra Strozzi showed that they were strong and shrewd enough to maintain the family's business and political interests, with the aid of these same friends, associates, and allies. Such cases proved what women were capable of, but not usually allowed to do.79 Normally, a woman left her house mainly to go to church. The sermon was almost the only sanctioned occasion for female public appearances (fig. 9). Beyond the portals of the family palace, female behavior was closely observed. Church law decreed that “a woman ought to cover her head since she is not the image of God. She aught to wear this sign in order that she may be shown to be subordinate and because error was started through woman." Saint Antoninus, archbishop of Florence in the midfifteenth century, warned against excessive churchgoing by women. Many moralists feared, in the words of one, that "A woman goes to see sermons / Often only to show herself. … Therefore, if you don’t go for God alone / It is far better to stay at home."80 And indeed, despite their segregation by a curtain, there is plenty of visual and verbal evidence that men enjoyed the opportunity to look at women in church and vice versa. Dante records in his Vita nuova how in church, “where words about the Queen of Glory were being spoken,” he was devastated by the vision of Beatrice. Their exchange of gazes was the sign of their sexual commitment. This first encounter with the beloved in church became a poetic topos adopted by Petrarch and by Boccaccio, whose stories were the model and standard for fifteenth-century men recounting their own amorous fantasies and experiences.81 Some scholars argue that women were painted in profile to disempower the erotic female gaze, liable to wound.82 No wonder Antoninus, addressing his Rules for Living Well to Lucrezia Tornabuoni, ad780
vised her to "go to the church and take good care of your sight, holding it well and mortified so as not to mar your spirit with scandal. Walk with the eyes so low that you do nor see beyond the ground upon which you must place your feet.”83 On a more pedestrian level, both men and women took the opportunity in church of admiring the latest fashions in dress. Mothers went to church to observe their sons’ prospective brides. Alessandra Strozzi spoke of “going Sunday morning to the Ave Maria in Santa Reparata (the cathedral) for the first Mass, as I had done a few mornings of the feast period in order to see the Adimari girl … I found the Tangli girl there … she seemed to me to have a beautiful body, and well made: she is big, like Caterina [her own daughter], or larger; good flesh, but not of that white type. …”84 However, many Florentine women were intensely religious, and men often delegated to them the chief responsibility for charity and other pious works to ensure the collective salvation of the lineage. Female instruction focused on moral and spiritual perfection, and although it was limited by comparison with the education given to men it equipped women quite well enough to read the books of the offices of the Virgin which they often owned, and the moral tracts with which they were presented. Women were also significant producers of devotional literature.85 For some, among them Lucrezia Tornabuonl, this was a means of self-expression acceptable to men. Conversely, men sometimes regarded women as natural conduits of divine wisdom because they were not learned; an ability to speak wisely without human instruction was seen as proof of their miraculous converse with God. This belief was buttressed by reference to biblical exemplars like the active Martha and her contemplative sister Mary, as well as the-reformed sinner Mary Magdalene. Quite a few Florentine women, and their sisters from 'elsewhere in Tuscany, were revered as religious icons, beatified, and even canonized, the most notable example being Saint Catherine of Siena.86 As we have seen, devotional images played a large part in the lives of women. Men were the chief patrons of religious art, but the order book of a workshop such as Neri di Bicci's records many more modest commissions from women, often widows. Giovannni Dominici, in his advice to Diamante Salviaci “On the Education of Children," urged her to “have pictures of saintly children or young virgins in the home, in which your child, still in swaddling clothes, may take delight and thereby be gladdened by acts and signs pleasing to childhood .... Little girls should be raised in the contemplation of the eleven thousand Virgins as they discourse, pray and suffer. … And other such representations as may give them, with their milk, love of virginity."87 For all the talk of female imbecility, vanity, and corruption in the sumptuary laws, other sources abound with stories of female asceticism. Jacopone da Todi himself an 781
author of spiritual poems, recounted how his beautiful wife dutifully wore the finery that served as a mark of family rank and status; only after her sudden death when still very young did her husband discover that her fashionably elegant attire had always concealed a hair shirt.88 Religion offered women access to power that was otherwise denied them, and since the Church and the world were inextricably intertwined, this was by no means a marginal prize.89 Boccaccio’s treatise Concerning Famous Women like portraits and Castagno's pictorial cycle of nine famous men and women far the Carducci family villa – represented society's expectations of women rather than their real lives.90 The latter are more plainly visible in the evidence relating to the well-documented Medici wives. Those who married into what became in the fifteenth century Florence's leading family were indubitably privileged, but by no means atypical examples of their sex. They conformed closely to the standard expectations of women, and their exercise of the power and influence they derived from that of their menfolk was circumscribed by society's views on the behavior appropriate to women.91 Contessina, wife of Cosimo de' Medici, was more conventional than her more famous daughter-in-law Lucrezia, to whom she was devoted. Her correspondence reveals her most clearly as the competent coordinator of her extensive household, comprising three generations of men and their wives and children, particularly as it moved, according to the rhythms of the seasons, between the urban palace and the Medici country villas where most of the family spent the summers, and the men went to hunt in fall and winter. She was the provisioner of these trips, on one occasion being importuned by Cosimo's secretary to prepare for their arrival at Cafaggiolo not pork rinds (then as today in the nearby Romagna a popular savory snack) but chestnut cake, still a Florentine favorite, which his sweet tooth preferred.92 Along with her daughters and daughters-in-law Contessina dispensed charity to the poor, visited widows and the sick, and participated in devotional activities of importance to family and city. She and her brother-in-law's widow Ginevra went to see the miracle-working image of the Black Madonna of Impruneta when it was brought to Florence so that citizens could pray for better fortune.93 Contessina's letters to husband and sons were often concerned with their clothing, sending items they requested or she thought they should have to Rome or Ferrara or Venice, where the Medici bank had offices. Once when Cosimo complained that his protective medal of Saint Elena was missing from his luggage, she investigated the matter and put him in touch with the servant who had packed it. Many of her letters comment on the fragile health of Cosimo and her sons, Piere and Giovanni, or the welfare of their wives, left behind at home, often ill or pregnant.94
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She also took an interest in her sons' first steps in the world of business and politics, enjoining them to follow the example of their elders, to be obedient, and do all they could to make themselves useful. As she wrote to her youngest son Giovanni in Ferrara: "You must be happy to be there, simply to be in the business and to learn something .... I would really like to know if you are doing anything at the bank, you or Piero, and if Cosimo is using Piero to do anything. See that you write to me about this.�95 In return for these maternal and wifely services, Contessina commanded the evident respect and affection of a husband as austere and taciturn as Cosimo de' Medici. They spent quite a lot of time together, especially in his last years, playing with their small grandson Cosimino.96 The patriarch associated her with some of his religious patronage, and after his death her male relatives allowed her to use the whole of her dowry to rebuild the convent of S. Luca in Via San Gallo, just up the road from the Medici palace.97 During Cosimo's life-time they were joint patrons of an altarpiece by Fra Filippo Lippi for the convent of Camaldoli in a mountainous area of the countryside not far from where Concessina was born. The elderly couple depicted in the Deposition of Christ on one of Donatello's pulpits, his last commission from Cosimo, bearing witness to the holy scene, has been identified as Cosimo and Contessina.98 Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici was almost certainly represented by Ghirlandaio (fig. 10); this portrait was probably the one mentioned in the 1497 inventory of her brother Giovanni Tornabuoni’s household possessions. A painted panel portrait of her is also noted in the Medici inventory made aft.er the death of her son Lorenzo in 1492. A marble bust of a woman by Mino da Fiesole, who made the first portrait busts of the Renaissance, of Lucrezia's husband Piero and his brother Giovanni, has been identified as the matching bust of Lucrezia described in the 1491 inventory as set above a doorway in the Medici palace, opposite that of her husband.99 Born in 1427 of a distinguished Florentine family already bound to the Medici by marriage and business ties, Lucrezia Tornabuoni wed Piere de' Medici in 1444. A friend's letter offers a brief glimpse of her youthful accomplishments, learning to play and sing a popular ballad to entertain house guests, 100 but by 1445 she had succumbed to the chronic illness requiting the curative baths she frequented for the rest of her life. For the next twenty years of her marriage there is limited evidence of Lucrezia's life, that of a conventional wife occupied with charity and child rearing. A letter from Rome to her husband Piere in 1467 concerning her inspection of a bride for Lorenzo is similar in tone and content to the several letters of Alessandra Strozzi on this subject. Having gone to the church of San Piere to meet with the girl and her 783
mother, Lucrezia reported: "We stood there quite a long while, talking. ... As I say, she is large in stature and white-skinned, and she has a sweet manner, though not however as nice as our own daughters; but she is very modest, and will soon adapt to our customs.”101 After her husband’s death in 1469 Lucrezia emerged as one of a small number of fortunate widows freed by wealth and the goodwill of sons and brothers to cultivate her own concerns. These included business interests in developing the site of the curative baths near Volterra as a major commercial establishment, acquiring through her charity and influence with her powerful son a patronage group of her own friends and clients, 102 and the production of a large corpus of sacred poems and songs. In various ways she fulfilled the injunction to women of Florentine clerics and educators, among them Saint Antoninus, to emulate the Virgin. Like the mother of Christ who interceded with him on behalf of the sinners who appealed to her mercy, Lucrezia intervened with her son, the most powerful citizen of Florence, to assist the objects of her patronage, On account of her extensive and imaginative charity103 and the piety of her devotional writings, she acquired a reputation as "Mother of the poor and merciful toward all the destitute,” on occasion described as "sainted Lucrezia.”104 Lucrezia was unusually well educated, ·and well connected to the leading literary figures of Florence, but the subjects of her sacred poetry were those recommended to all Florentine women and depicted in panel paintings as part of their domestic furniture: Esther; the chaste Susanna; John the Baptist, patron saint of the city of Florence, who occupied a prominent place in the altarpiece painted by Fra Filippo Lippi for the chapel in the Medici palace;105 and Judith, of whom Lucrezia appealingly wrote, "I found her story written in prose, / and I was greatly impressed by her courage; / a fearful little widow, / she had your help, and she knew what to do and to say; / Lord, you made her bold and helped her plan succeed. / Would that you could grant such favor to me, / so that I may turn her tale into rhyme, / in a manner that would please.” In the opening verses of her Life of the Baptist, she invoked the Intercession of the Virgin: "Because I want to speak of this worthy saint, / I also pray to the true Mother of God / that she help me find good matter for my writing / and enable me to succeed in my design."106 When Lucrezia died in 1482, Lorenio wrote to the duchess of Ferrara that he had lost not only a mother, “but an irreplaceable refuge from my many troubles," testimony to his respect and admiration for her wisdom and intelligence. A Florentine friend's consolation to Lorenzo suggests that these attributes served essentially co make her not so much a remarkable woman in her own right, but a better mother; 784
she “was the faithful guardian of your person, nor did she think of anything else than your protection and to remove the perils and fears and intrigues chat important people face.”107 Like the mother of God himself, Lucrezia's efficacy and identity was ancillary to that of father, husband, and son. Despite male disparagement of women as “imperfect men" or “walking wombs,”108 and frequent expressions of female frustration, women who conformed to the broad parameters of what society and their families expected of them obviously found some fulfilment in these designated roles, especially given a measure of flexibility to manipulate the rules along with the male relatives in whom they often inspired deep affection. This is particularly apparent among the coterie of influential upper-class families whose female members are represented in the portraits in this exhibition: the Medici, Tornabuoni, Albizzi, Benci, and Salviati. Marriage seems likely to have been the occasion for many of these portraits, but the limited evidence available suggests chat others were painted so that husbands, fathers, or brothers would have a likeness by which to remember beloved wives, daughters, and sisters if they should die young, as was eminently likely.109 Alberti, that eloquent and influential spokesman for the arts, observed how through portraiture "the absent [were made] present to their friends, and "the faces of the dead go on living for a very long time.110 The poet Petrarch declared himself frustrated by the inadequacy of Simone Martini's portrait of his beloved Laura to evoke her real self as well as his words could do;111 Leonardo da Vinci, taking up this challenge, claimed the painter's skill was such that “lovers are impelled toward the portraits of the beloved, and speak to the paintings."112 In an age where life was often all too brief, especially for women, images in the realistic likeness of living flesh could confer immortality. While Leonardo sought to capture beauty in all its forms, Domenico Ghirlaridaio, on the frescoed walls of the family chapels of the Sassetti and Tornabuoni, produced portraits of individuals embedded in the groups of kinsmen, friends, and neighbors that were their social context. Commissioned in 1485 by Giovanni Tornabuoni, Lucrezia's brother, who was papal treasurer and manager of the Medici bank, the frescoes in Santa Maria Novella represented the patron's conception of his family, distinguished citizens offering prayers to God for the preservation of the lineage in this world and its salvation in the next.113 Flanking the chapel window are the portraits of the donor and his deceased wife, Francesca di Luca Pitti. Francesca Pitti’s tomb, a unique monument to a beloved wife who died in childbirth in 1477, was the most extreme expression 'by a Florentine man of luxurious love, and grief at its loss. A marble relief for the tomb from the workshop of Andrea Verrocchio depicts the tragedy; the dead child, the be785
reaved husband, the mourning women around Francesca's bed (fig, 11). Giovanni wrote to his nephew Lorenzo de' Medici: "I am so oppressed by grief and pain for the most bitter and unforeseen fate of my most sweet wife that I myself do not know where I am.”114 In the chapel, however, Giovanni and Francesca preside eternally over an affirmation of the continuity of life and the family and the city of Florence, represented by scenes of the Birch of John the Baptist and from the life of the Virgin. In these scenes, at once holy and domestic, may be identified the portraits of many of the Tornabuoni women, among them Giovanni's daughter Lodovica, attending at the Birth of the Virgin. His sister Lucrezia Tornabuoni, patron of a chapel dedicated to the Visitation in the Medici parish church of San Lorenzo, may appear in the Tornabuoni Visitation, along with both the first and second wives of the patron’s son Lorenzo (fig. 12.).115 Lorenzo's first wife, Giovanna degli Albizzi, was portrayed after her death in a portrait by Ghirlandaio (cat. 30), wearing the same dress as in the fresco (fig. 12.), and on a medal in the style of Niccolo Fiorentino (cat. n). She may be identified also in the Birth of Saint John (fig.13), but by contrast with the Tornabuoni men, less on the basis of her features than by her distinctive pendant that appears in her commemorative portrait, and in both the chapel fresco panels. Lorenzo's second wife, Ginevra Gianfigliazzi, appears in Botticelli's frescoes for Giovanni Tornabuoni's country house, the Villa Lemmi (fig, 14). This graceful, lighthearted scene for the decoratiori of a bedroom depicts a garden of love, a courtly and classical poetic theme. Ginevra receives flowers from Venus and her attendant graces, symbolising the female virtues, especially that of fertility.116 The number and nature of the portraits commissioned by Tornabuoni men of their womenfolk, even when these are recognizable as much by dress as physiognomy, indicate their value to the lineage and a strong desire to preserve their memory. A doggerel verse of 1536 listed “thirty-three perfections” of the ideal woman, among them: “Three long: hair, hands, and legs; Three short: teeth, ears, and breasts: Three wide: forehead, chest, and hips; Three narrow: waist, knees, and where nature places all that is sweet.”117 These desiderata were similar to those expressed in the preceding three centuries by writers from Petrarchan poets to putative mothers-in-law. The idealism of courtly love, finding its most sublime expression in Dante’s meeting with Beatrice at the gates of Paradise, envisioned the bellowed guiding her lover toward the love and knowledge of God, physical beauty being merely the outward and visible sign of an inner virtue. In the second half of the fifteenth century humanists set these ideas in the more sophisticated Christian material world as merely a reflec786
tion of its ideal form in the mind of God. Marsilio Ficino, mentioned earlier as the man who compared women to chamber pots, was the leader of this intellectual movement in Florence and the spiritual adviser to Lorenio's circle. He wrote a letter of consolation to Sigismondo della Stufa, Lorenzo’s closest friend, at the death of his beautiful fiancé Albiera degli Albizzi, sister of Giovanna who also died young: “Cease looking for your Albiera degli Albizzi in her dark shadow ... she is far more lovely in her Creator's form than in her own.”118 Real Florentine women seem to have diverged considerably from social as well as Christian ideals. Nevertheless, these powerfully influenced their behaviour and governed the decorum of their appearance in portraits. In the early sixteenth century, as the Medici moved toward the establishment of their family as dukes of Florence in 1534, portraits of women in their circle were presented as icons of public virtue as well as living beings.119 It is often observed that women are nearly always seen by men to represent something other than themselves – ideals, symbols, allegories.120 Renaissance literature and art represented women as symbolic being performing signifying functions within the allegorical world of texts or paintings.121 This was part of their exemplary effect, as Renaissance people saw the world naturally in symbolic and allegorical terms learned from the Bible and church liturgy.122 Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginevra de’ Benci (cat. 16) fuses real and ideal in a portrait of a woman with a historical identity and personal attributes that lent themselves to this process.123 The Venetian humanist Bernardo Bembo chose her as the object of his platonic love, she was idealised in the Petrarchan poetry of several men in the Medici circle, her father and uncles were among the most prolific writers and codifiers of Florentine vernacular poetry, and she herself enjoyed the reputation of an accomplished poet. Ginervra is often seen as a personification of nature of which she is part in her portraits;124 a prickly personality, like the leaves of the juniper bush that stands for her name, may be revealed in her poetry, of which a single telling line survives: “I ask you forgiveness and I am a mountain tiger.” Both the Renaissance ideal of women and their actual experience were shaped by the needs and expectations of the male lineage, the republican state, the Christian church, and the humanist and vernacular cultures that provided admired exempla for this society and revived and revered the art and literature of antiquity, and whose governors, like Lorenzo de’ Medici, wrote love poetry in the ‘sweet style’ of the creators of the Tuscan language, the three crowns of Florence: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. All these forces combined to represent chastity as the chief virtue of women, and their idealised beauty as ideally residing in the possession of this virtue, essential to the honor of their men. This is a fundamental distinction in the representation, in ei787
ther words or images, of men and women. Notably, although the reverse of Ginevra’s portraits bears the poet’s laurel and the palm of fame, Ginevra’s motto, Virtutem Forma Decorat, derived from Bembo’s Virtus et Honor, represents a crucial sift of emphasis. In women even beauty is but the adornment of personal virtue; honour is a public virtue that pertains only to men. Female portraits cannot simply be used as evidence of the real experience of women, but they do tell us much about the context and content of Renaissance women’s actual lives. At the same time representations, either artistic or literary, were admitted in highly cultured Renaissance Florence for invention as well as mimesis, and were governed by the rules of genre and the artist’s aims. What women’s portraits may ultimately best represent is the complex and subtle dialogue between life and art in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence.
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SECTION 5
S. Chojnacki, Patrician Women in Early Renaissance Venice Almost a century ago the Venetian archivist and historian Bartolomeo Cecchetti undertook to discover what he called 'the general concept that Venetians had of women'.(1) Though he called his study 'Woman in the Middle Ages in Venice', nearly all his documentation came from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the early Renaissance. His conclusions after a long and wide ranging survey of various aspects of the feminine experience during the period were pretty forthright. 'Neither works of imagination', he declared, 'nor high intellectual attainments, nor flights of poetry adorn the figure of woman in Venice's earliest epoch. Modest, domestic [casalinga], she is swept up in the great whirlwind of life; and she appears to us only in her weaknesses, or in the splendor of her beauty, or in the context of one of the high offices of her mission - her children, her family.'(2) Cecchetti's characterization contrasts with some other writers' pictures of women in the Middle Ages. Some forty years ago Eileen Power asserted that 'taking the rough with the smooth and balancing theory against practice, the medieval woman played an active and dignified part in the society of her age'. And more recently David Herlihy concluded that 'woman comes to play an extraordinary role in the management of family property in the early Middle Ages, and social customs as well as economic life were influenced by her prominence'.(3) Perhaps the contrast between these writers and Cecchetti can be explained chronologically. Miss Power and Herlihy were dealing with the early and high Middle Ages, while the early Renaissance that Cecchetti focused on has been viewed as witnessing, in another writer's words, 'a slow and steady deterioration of the wife's position in the household' in Europe generally.(4) Yet this idea too has been implicitly challenged in the past couple of years. Richard Goldthwaite, writing on Florence, perceives an actual increase in the effective role of women in the household in the early Renaissance.(5) This paper is an attempt to examine some of the conflicting ideas and to confront Cecchetti's view of Venetian women during the early Renaissance. My scope is more modest than his was. While he sought to discover Venetians' 'general concept' of women, I consider only patrician women during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. More over, my focus is limited to one aspect of women's role in society, their effect on interfamilial relations. Within these limits, however, I shall argue that Cecchetti's dismissal of women was inaccurate. Women did have an important influence on eco789
nomic and social relations within the patriciate. Not only that: because of their social and economic influence, patrician women contributed a good deal to the relative intra class harmony and stability that constituted one of the hallmarks of the Venetian patriciate during the Renaissance. The sources of this rather significant feminine role in patrician society are threefold: (1) the elementary social principles that governed Venetian society; (2) the status of women and of their property under the law; and (3) certain social and economic developments that increased women's economic importance during the period. I propose to consider these three things in turn, then to take a look at the ways in which they increased the importance of women in patrician society. I There are two things about the organization of Venetian society that bear on the situation of patrician women, one deeply embedded in the legal and cultural traditions to which Venice belonged, the other a more recent phenomenon. The first is that complex of attitudes, legal principles, and succession rules that for convenience's sake we can call the patriarchal regime. Like other European societies, Venetian society was male-dominated. Both of the traditions from which Venice drew its laws and customs, the Roman and the Germanic, were patriarchal, and Venice inevitably followed their lead.(6) Descent, for example, was reckoned patrilineally (i.e., through the male line), and agnates (male line kin) were favored in the succession to intestate individuals.(7) The most important monument of this male dominance, however, the one that gave significance to the others, was the fraterna, the shared patrimony among brothers.(8) By its provisions, the sons of a family were locked together in the joint inheritance of their father's estate. And their sisters were excluded, possessing only the right of their dowries.(9) On the face of it, then, the Venetian social order was founded on juridical principles that put women in a secondary position as far as the long-term interests of the kin group were concerned. The second feature of Venetian social organization that had an impact on the role of patrician women was the peculiarity of aristocratic status in Venice. In contrast to the situation elsewhere in Italy Venice had a defined, hereditary aristocracy. A series of legislative measures at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century had pretty effectively closed the patriciate to all but the members of those families already represented in the government in the 1290S. There is debate on the shortand long-term significance of these measures, collectively known as the 'Serrata', or closing, of the Great Council, but it is clear that they laid a juridical basis for some 150-200 clans and families to regard themselves with self-conscious assurance as Venice's ruling class.(10) In the context of our subject, however, the Serrata had a couple of effects. For one thing, it gave added importance to the patrilineal orientation of society. Now patrician status itself demanded the ability to prove one's descent from patri790
cian stock through the male line.(11) Consequently, patricians had a stronger motive than ever to entertain a sense of the lineage in which only the masculine chain of descent mattered. At the same time, they also had a strong motive to pay strict attention to their social connections. The emphasis on pedigree that their hereditary status gave rise to,(12) the political associations that they were involved in as monopolists of Venetian political activity, and the impulses toward internal differentiation within the class all led patricians to view marriage ties as what we may now term as Levi-Straussian alliances of considerable significance for the family's interests and status. Whom their sisters and daughters married meant a great deal to patrician men. When, for example, the patrician Gasparino Morosini, in a will of 1401, bequeathed some money for the dowry of a daughter of his dead son, he instructed that the husband she eventually should marry had first to be acceptable to Gasparino's surviving sons and to certain of his cousins in the male line.(13) The reason was that the young suitor who met the test would be a potential business associate, will executor, legal representative, political colleague would in short carry into the marriage all sorts of associations with and potential benefits for Gasparino's line.(14) So it was appropriate that members of the line, the potential beneficiaries of the relationship, should pass on the suitability of their niece's future husband. This combination of social principles gave women a curious status in patrician society. On one hand, the patrilineal and patrimonial character of society excluded them from full and enduring membership in the lineage which they nominally left upon marriage. But on the other hand, they figured prominently in their families' social strategy, representing an important means of improvement, or at least maintenance, of their families' social and economic status through marriage ties. This distinctive social identity gave women a kinship orientation that contrasted in some interesting ways with that of men, and also as we shall see provided them with a particular kind of social leverage outside the natal lineage. We can get some idea of the difference between men's and women's kinship orientation from the bequests that they wrote into their wills. For this purpose, I looked at fifty married men's wills and fifty married women's wills from the period 1305-1450.(15) To simplify the analysis, I considered only bequests to first- and second-degree natal and marital kin. That is, for the natal kin, to parents and siblings, grandparents, uncles and aunts, first cousins, nieces and nephews, and for the marital kin, to spouses, children, and grandchildren. The most striking bit of information that comes out of the analysis is that while men directed the largest portion of their bequests, two-thirds in fact, to their marital kin, women divided their bequests just about evenly half to natal kin, forty-five percent to marital kin. (In both cases, five to six percent went to affines.)(16) 791
Like all figures, these are a bit tricky. The trickiness is especially true in this case because the figures here gloss over some differences in the life cycles of testators and the developmental cycles of their families. That is, there is the suggestion that on the average men may have been older when they made their wills than women were when they made theirs. (In the absence of precise demographic data it is very hard to know dates of birth or of other vital events.) Nineteen of our fifty women mentioned living parents, while only five of the men did; moreover, the men mentioned twice as many children as women did - by 124 to 62. Both of these differences, fewer parents and more children, would indeed suggest that men were older when they drew up their wills; and this, rather than differences in kinship orientation, might account for the greater percentage of bequests to marital kin in men's wills: they simply had fewer living natal kin when they wrote their wills. There are, however, a couple of considerations that soften this impression. For one thing, the presence or absence of names in a will may or may not indicate the existence of individuals; all that they do indicate with certainty is that an individual was cut into an inheritance or was named as an executor. This point becomes a matter of significance when we note that the women in our sample tended more than men did to make blanket bequests to their children without indicating either their numbers or their names; only three of the men made such blanket bequests, while eleven of the women did.(17) This partially accounts for the greater number of individual children mentioned in the men's wills. Secondly, the patrimonial regime itself may explain in part the lower number of parents and siblings appearing in men's wills. A man's economic relationship to his father and brothers was governed by the rules of the patrimony, particularly the principle that a father's estate was to be shared equally and jointly by brothers, united in the fraterna.(18) Under these circumstances, a man may have regarded it as redundant or generous beyond the call of fraternal and filial duty to put his brothers and father in his will. Finally, the impression that men wrote their wills at a more advanced age than women did or at least at a further stage in their natal and marital families' developmental cycles is mitigated by the facts that just as many women as men, eight, mentioned grandchildren, and that more of the women were widowed than men by twenty-two to thirteen.(19) So while it might be appropriate to explain in part the differences in men's and women's bequest patterns by hypothesizing-that they wrote wills at different points in their life cycles and in their families' develop mental cycles, the evidence is not conclusive that this was in fact the case.(20) A better explanation, I think, is that men simply took more responsibility for the economic fortunes of their marital families than women did. It seems likely that men, with their economic relationships to their natal families clearly established by law, concentrated their own efforts on their wives and 792
children, whose contribution to the enduring prosperity of the lineage depended very considerably upon paternal provision.(21) Women, on the other hand, not so deeply involved in the meshes of e patrimonial and lineage system, made their bequests on the basis of other considerations, including that of sentiment.(22) This last consideration leads to another aspect of these feminine be quest patterns, and it also raises a puzzling question. If, as we noted earlier, women participated only instrumentally in the affairs of the lineage (as the currency with which families established marital alliances), why is it that they maintained the close ties to their families of origin that their bequests reveal? A suggestion toward an answer may be found in -the writings of social anthropologists. Meyer Fortes, for example, basing himself on categories derived from the study of African societies, notes the differences between two kinds of social interest that individuals may have. On one hand, there are those interests that have, in Fortes' words, 'the sanction of law and other public institutions', on the other hand there are those 'that rely on religion, morality, con science and sentiment for good observance'.(23) He goes on to observe that where corporate descent groups exist and constitute a framework within which individuals take their places in the larger societyand I think that the Venetian patrician lineage is such a group they are governed by formal law. But in these same societies, Fortes maintains, less formally institutionalized sanctions, such as sentiment and morality, govern the relations within what he calls 'the complementary line of filiation' but which we may simply call the tie that exists among husband, wife, and children by reason of their collective involvement in raising a family.(24) And because in a patrilineal society the mother comes from outside the lineage incest taboos being universal the set of relationships involved in the elementary family are different from those involved in the lineage. Consequently, the mutual attitudes and expectations of lineage members are different from those of family members. Applying these rather schematic ideas to the Venetian situation we can see that the men, because of their necessary lineage orientation as hereditary patricians, concentrated on promoting the interests of the lineage. h this connection, it is worth noting that the one category of natal kin that men favored in their wills more than women did was secondary male natal kin-grandfathers, uncles, cousins, and nephews of the same surname in other words, precisely those men who were linked to the testator by a common lineage interest, but whose relationship with him was not covered by the legal rules of the fraterna among brothers.(25) But women, on the other hand, were comparatively free of these lineage restrictions. Their kinship orientation seems to have been based more on the ties of sentiment and morality that Fortes referred to. A good indication of this feminine attitude can be seen in the sexual distinction between men's and women's bequests. The women 793
in our sample of wills clearly favored the women among their natal kin over the men, and this is true of both primary relatives, mothers and sisters, and secondary relatives, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and nieces.(26) Since these female relatives, like the women writing the wills themselves, took formal leave of the natal lineage when they married, be quests to them represented gestures of personal, rather than lineage, loyalty. Pulling all these considerations together, we can make the general observation that while old traditions and recent political developments fastened upon Venetian patrician men a concern for the patrilineage, women's more tenuous and temporary role in the lineage resulted in a freer, more flexible kinship orientation. As we shall see, the difference had important implications for patrician social relations during the early Renaissance. But before we get to that it is important to take a look at Venetian women's position under the law. II If Venetian women were different from their menfolk by reason of their freer, less lineage-structured social orientation, they also enjoyed, and sometimes suffered, distinctive treatment by the law. Of course, a good deal of the difference between men's and women's legal status derived from the patrilineal system of descent and succession. An ex ample of this is the rule that a girl's only claim upon the family patrimony was for her dowry. But though on the face of it this rule would seem to favor men, in fact it cut both ways. A whole literature piled up among medieval commentators on Roman law, who argued that a girl's dowry had to be not only 'congruent' with her family's status, but in fact should represent an amount roughly equal to a full share of the patrimony.(27) Moreover, when fathers died without providing adequate dowries for their daughters, the same commentators maintained, the girls' brothers were obliged to take up the burden.(28) Another difference arising from patrimonial considerations had to do with succession to mothers and to fathers. A married, and thus dowered, daughter of a man who died intestate had no further claim on his estate. This is perfectly consistent with what I just mentioned; the dowry that she had taken to her marriage was all that she was entitled to. But when a woman died intestate, all her children-sons, unmarried daughters, and married daughters-entered equally into the inheritance.(29) The reason was that women's property was not part of the patrimony, but, like women themselves in this patriarchal society, responded to the impulses of filiation, a thing of sons and daughters both, rather than to those of the descent group, which of course favored the males.(30) But the distinctive position of women before the law went deeper than just the implications of the patrilineal system. It reflected Venetian society's conception of a fundamental difference between maleness and femaleness. The difference comes through 794
with almost disturbing clarity in the criminal statutes. One section of them prescribed a whole series of corporal punishments for theft, varying in degree of gruesomeness with the value of the stolen goods. But where a man lost an eye, a woman lost her nose; where a man lost an eye and a hand, a woman lost her nose and one lip; and so on ad nauseam.(31) And these penalties were imposed in practice. On 16 March 1356 Jacopa, wife of Piero Alessandri, was sentenced to have her nose and both lips cut off and to be whipped for stealing a neighbor's tunic valued at twenty lire di piccoli - really a rather small sum. On 8 December 1363 Maria, wife of Nicolo de Foremillio, was sentenced to the loss of her nose and one lip, a whipping, and a branding for stealing roughly the same amount.(32) Why this difference in penalties according to sex? A likely reason is that punishments for men were designed to deprive them of the means of earning a livelihood (or its perversion, stealing); but those for women were designed to deprive them of the means of attracting men. We may regard this nowadays as chauvinistic role assignment; in any case there is not much doubt that the women who received these grisly sentences had little future as sex objects.(33) In the less picturesque but also less aberrant realm of civil law too, the Venetian view of women as different in some fundamental ways had its effect on official activity. For one thing, courts and legislators felt a responsibility to protect women. The Great Council said as much in the preamble to an act of 1352 regulating inheritance rights: 'In legal matters involving men and women,' the preamble reads, 'upon whom nature bestows equal affection, we want not to introduce prejudicial differences but, rather, to take humanely into account the fragility of women.'(34) It must be noted, however, that the same act then went on to re-affirm that men were to be preferred as heirs to immovable, or real, property over women of the same kin relationship to the deceased, though both shared equally in the succession to movable goods. But other than promoting male succession to real property, a principle universally observed in Italian society,(35) Venetian institutions did in deed protect these fragile women. A good indication is in the sphere of the respective rights of husbands and wives. Given the patriarchal cast of Venetian law and custom one might expect men to enjoy unrestrained dominion over their wives.(36) But the reality was in fact quite different. A measure of 1374, for example, asserted the right of a woman to sue for separate maintenance if she lived apart from her husband because of some grievance against him.(37) And this was not just an empty formal legalism. Already in 1317, and probably earlier, the courts had made separate maintenance awards.(38) A case before the Giudici del Procurator in 1343 illustrates the kind of domestic situation in which Venetian of officialdom responded to women. Caterina Morosini, a patrician wife, filed suit in that year for separate maintenance, alleging that 'the cruelty, harshness, and wickedness of . . . Micheletto Morosini, her husband, were such that he threw the said Ca795
terina, his wife, out of his house. Nor,' Caterina's complaint continued, 'does she want to live with the said Micheletto', preferring to remain removed from his 'cruelty and wickedness'.(39) For his part, Micheletto responded that 'Caterina, his wife, would never live with him, that he would never take her into his home'.(40) Unfortunately for his case, his testimony consisted of these and other 'verba iniqua et dolosa' (wicked and deceitful words). In any case, the judges found for Caterina, awarding her a judgment of thirty ducats a year, which Micheletto was obliged to pay, under pain of imprisonment, as long as the marriage should last. By way of epilogue, we may be pleased to learn that the spouses appear to have been reconciled: in his will of 1348 Micheletto made provision for the eventuality that Caterina was pregnant.(41) This case is interesting because it reveals that the tutela of husbands over their wives was indeed limited, that husbands had to conform to certain standards of behavior vis-a-vis their wives, and that Venetian judges, married men themselves though they most likely were, could be responsive to a wife's legitimate complaint against a nasty husband. In a wider context, moreover, the judgment here indicates that male society in Venice took an active interest in looking after the daughters that it married off in the interests of the lineage. No doubt an element of paternal and fraternal solicitude entered into such protection. But more material considerations, centering very likely on the bequest tendencies we noted in women's wills, played their part too. It was in the interest of Venetian men to be loyal to their married daughters and sisters because they stood to benefit from the loyalty that the women reciprocated. The same consideration can be seen even more clearly in the laws protecting women's property. There were essentially two kinds of property that married women could make use of: outright possessions, which seem generally to have derived from legacies, and dowries.(42) In Venice there were no restrictions on a married woman's use of property that she owned outright. She could enter into any transaction that she pleased with it, the statutes asserted, 'even without her husband's consent'.(43) And despite the principle that a girl had the right only to a dowry, it was fairly common for women to enjoy possession of non-dowry property as well. In a will of 1397, for example, Giovanni di Marino Morosini, who had already furnished his married daughter with a dowry of 1000 ducats, bequeathed to her an additional 10,000 ducats' worth of shares in the funded state debt, or Monte.(44) Although the daughter was not to sell the shares, and although she could not dis pose of them in her will since Giovanni was making other dispositions for their use after her death, she could count during her lifetime on an annual interest of 300 to 400 ducats from the legacy, a very nice 6it of potential investment capital.(45) And Giovanni's bequest was exceptional only ill its amount. Venetian men not infrequently remembered their married daughters and sisters in their wills.(46) And it 796
comes as no surprise that women showed an even stronger disposition to make bequests to their married female kin. Among wills of the Morosini women there are forty married daughters mentioned; twenty-eight of these received bequests from their mothers.(47) And in fact this is perfectly consistent with the statutory provision, noted earlier, that admitted married women to the inheritance of their intestate mothers. What all of this indicates is that women did have means of getting property over and above their dowries. So the statute affirming a married woman's right to the free employment of her non-dowry property was not just an empty formality but was addressed to concrete situations. But by far the greatest part of a woman's economic substance, and thus her most important means of economic influence upon her kinsmen and associates, was her dowry. Because the dowry was regarded as a means of helping the husband bear the economic burdens of marriage, his wife could not invest or otherwise use it without his consent.(48 )Yet it was still regarded as her property.(49) I was unable to find in the Venetian statutes anything limiting the husband's use of the dowry, but in Italy generally such limits did exist, and in any case there is Venetian evidence of husbands rendering to their wives some of the profits that they made investing their dowries.(50) Moreover, the statutes were quite precise in defining the safeguards protecting a woman's dowry from her husband's maladministration. In the first place, a husband's entire estate was put under obligation toward repayment of his wife's dowry, and he was required to deposit with the Procurators of San Marco an amount sufficient to guarantee repayment of the dowry, to his wife or her heirs, upon the death of either of the spouses.(51) But either because the rule was not always observed or because husbands did not always possess sufficient property for such a deposit, other safeguards also were employed. One was the practice of having a guarantor of the dowry cosign the receipt along with the husband.(52) Even more important was the principle that the male kin of a deceased husband had to supply whatever was lacking in the husband's estate for full restitution of his widow's dowry. Usually, responsibility fell to the husband's father, or his father's estate, and this was true even when the married son had been emancipated from the father's patria potestas.(53) But on occasion other agnatic kin of the husband also were held responsible; even an emancipated son could be required to contribute toward the restitution of his father's widow's dowry.(54) Finally, the statutes stated clearly, 'in order that from this time forward no question should arise', that the repayment of his wife's dowry took precedence over all other obligations a man might have incurred on his estate.(55) When he died his heirs and creditors had to wait till his widow had secured restitution of her dowry; and she even had the statutory right to choose from among the goods in her husband's estate.(56) 797
The indications are, then, that Venetian law went to great lengths to guarantee women's dowry rights, and for that matter their property rights in general. There seem to me to be two reasons for this solicitude. One is the obvious one that a widow had to have the means of supporting herself, and especially of furnishing herself with a second husband. At a time when girls married in their early teens and when wives generally outlived their husbands, young or middle-aged widows simply had to possess material resources.(57) The second reason, and the more interesting one, is a paradox. Male society protected the interests of women, secondary and temporary members of the lineage though they were, out of concern for the well-being of the lineage. It was in the interest of Venetian men to ensure that the dowries and other donations that they gave their daughters and sisters would not be permanently alienated from the patrimony out of which these feminine provisions had been carved. Seen from the perspective of the lineage, protecting a woman's right to the restitution of her dowry meant, in effect, protecting her capacity to return it, or at least part of it, to her natal kin by means of testamentary legacies - something that, as we saw earlier, women did in half of their bequests. But in fact the testamentary legacy was not the only way in which a married daughter could use her dowry for e economic benefit of her natal kin. Widows also had the ha6it of making their substances available to their kinsmen for business purposes. For example, Tomasina, widow of Albano Zane, invested 1000 ducats in a business venture her father was undertaking in 1380. Again, in her will of 1394, Beria, widow of Martino Morosini, noted that her brother and her nephew, Bernardo and Zanino Contarini, had borrowed 1000 and 100 ducats, respectively, from her for business purposes.(58) It is this kind of economic choice that reveals the extent to which the laws guaranteeing women's property rights can be said also to have protected their natal families' investments in women's dowries. Yet we must not lose sight of the fact that a widow's natal kin shared their largesse with her marital kin - her children and grandchildren above all.(59) It is this division of social and economic allegiance bet-ween two families, two lineages, at makes the role of women in patrician society interesting. And that role, formulated in response to women's position in the patriarchal regime and defined by Venetian law, became even more important as a consequence of certain social and economic developments of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. III The most important of these developments was the inflationary trend in dowries during the period, in Venice as elsewhere in Italy.(60) In the mid-fourteenth century an average patrician dowry was about 650 ducats; already by the 1370s and 1380s it had risen to 1000 ducats.(61) And the rise continued at an alarming rate. It alarmed 798
enough patricians to induce the Venetian Senate to pass a law in 1420 imposing a fine on all parties to dowry transactions involving more than 1600 ducats a pretty good indication that there were lots of dowries in amounts greater than that.(62) The reasons for the rise are complex, and although this is not the place to go into them in detail it is worth noting that the question of dowry inflation can be a useful wedge into some big social and economic aspects of the late-medieval Italian experience. Some writers have observed that higher dowries reflected a higher cost of living; prospective husbands simply demanded higher dowries from their brides to help them make ends meet which after all was the purpose of the dowry.(63) Another possible cause of the increase may have been social mobility or in Venice intraclass differentiation between the oldest noble clans and newer ones which had gained patrician status during the leveling of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In this situation relative patrician newcomers sought status by means of higher dowries and more ancient families preserved theirs by the same means.(64) Still another cause may have been the loss of other investment opportunities in the wake of fourteenth-century economic dislocation.(65) For our purposes, though, the most significant force pushing dowries upward was large dowries themselves. As the first and second generations of richly endowed wives observed their daughters approaching marriageable age, they hastened to make their own increasingly weighty contributions to the girls' marriage portions. I found, for example, that among 305 wills of the Morosini clan written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there was quite an increase in the involvement of women in the dowry accumulation of their daughters. In the period 1331-1370, dowry bequests from fathers outnumbered those from mothers by a ratio of 6-to-1; in the period 1371-1410 the fathers' bequests outnumbered those of mothers by only 2.2-to-1; but in the period 1411-1450 dowry bequests of mothers had come to outnumber those of fathers, by 1.5-to-1.(66) The explanation for this increase in maternal beneficence is not just that women had more money as a result of dowry inflation, though this certainly was an important factor. Nor was it just that women's consciousness of the importance of good dowries for their own daughters had been raised. Equally important was the fact that more women were writing wills. To cite the Morosini wills again by way of illustration, in 1331-137e women accounted for 56 percent of the wills; in 1371-1410 their share was 66.9 percent, and in 1411-1450 it had risen to 71.7 percent.(67) In part, this striking increase in feminine testation can be explained by the fact of larger dowries; women now had a greater reason to exercise care regarding the disposition of their estates. Since the law stated that the inheritance of intestate women belonged to their children alone, a woman who wanted to make bequests to her natal kin out of her considerable estate and, as we have seen, most women did want to would have to be sure to draw up her 799
own will. But another reason for the increase in women's wills can be found in the impact of the pestilence that struck Venice repeatedly in the century after 1348.(68) The vivid acquaintance with unexpected mortality that characterized the generations of the Black Death and its aftermath appears to have persuaded all Venetians to write more wills, and to write them earlier in life. And although both sexes increased their will-writing, it was women's wills that accounted for the great bulk of the increase. Thus, among the Morosini's wills that I found there were, during the period 13111350, sixteen men's wills and nineteen women's wills, a ratio of 1.2 in favor of women. Then during 1351-1390 there were thirty-three men's wills but no fewer than fifty-four women's wills, a feminine ratio of 1.6. And from 1391 to 1430 there were, again, thirty three men's wills, but now eighty-seven written by women, a feminine ratio of 2.6. I attribute this outstripping of male testation by female to the fact that women had, and now took, more opportunities to write wills than men did; as noted above, they married younger than men did and they tended to outlive their husbands and thus to witness more changes in the life cycles of their potential beneficiaries, in response to which they altered their bequests.(69) In view of the larger estates that they now possessed by reason of their larger dowries, and in view of the always-present possibility that the plague might suddenly snatch them away, these Venetian patrician wives took occasion to write several wills in the course of their adult lifetimes.(70) The fact that they did so, taking pains to determine for themselves the destiny of their estates instead of letting the statutory regulations take effect, indicates that women had a clear sense of their legal prerogatives and their economic significance, and were determined to exercise them on behalf of the kin that they felt most responsibility for or sympathy with and without regard for lineage. IV Up till now we have considered several aspects of patrician women's position in the early Renaissance in Venice. We noted, in the first place, that in the patrimonial and patrilineal society of which they were part women demonstrated their own social orientation, different in important ways from that of their menfolk. Less concerned with the interests of the lineage, they appear to have responded more to impulses of personal sentiment than of collective descent-group interest. And we observed that this distinctive social sense expressed itself in their economic choices, in wills and in business investments. Secondly, we saw that Venetian law, and Italian law generally, responded institutionally to women's distinctive position. Particularly important was the protection that the law, and its representatives, gave to women and the property they possessed. Although wives were denied complete control over the use of their greatest asset, their dowries, nevertheless their ultimate dominion over these dowries and their right to dis800
pose of them in wills and during their widowed lifetimes was assured. Finally, we observed that during the late Middle Ages women's economic substance increased largely a result of dowry inflation and that their determination to keep control of this enlarged wealth also increased. The general impression that this configuration of women's position conveys is that they had the means of producing a pretty sizable impact on society. Did they in fact have an impact? It seems to me that in three areas at least they did. The first area is one that we have already touched on women’s economic activity. Disposing as they did of ever larger estates, women were now in a position to have a substantial economic impact on their kinsmen and other associates. As it happens, Venetian women, like their sisters elsewhere, had a history of business enterprise.(71) It took many forms: making loans to businessmen,(72) investing in manufacturing concerns;(73) and putting money into the state-run galley voyages to distant ports of call.(74) Sometimes these investments were made outside the web of kinship, but the most substantial sums seem to have been committed to kinsmen. And now, with larger amounts to work with, women were capable of making large-scale capital investments of as much as 1000 ducats at a time- and more.(75) There can be little doubt that the possibility of such economic cooperation from widowed daughters and sisters eased the minds of fathers and brothers as they contemplated the dowry inflation. But these substantial feminine investments went to marital kin as well as to the natal kin who had, in effect, footed the dowry bill. For example, in her will of 1398 Chiara, widow of Marco Morosini, noted that her son-in-law, Francesco Zen, owed her the hefty sum of 3000 ducats, which he had borrowed from her.(76) Like the sizable bequests that such widows of substance now made,(77) their business capital made them figures of considerable economic influence over both natal and marital kin-a sort of Venetian instance of the proverbial rich aunt, and consequently formidable figures indeed on the economic and social scene. The second effect of patrician women's position in early renaissance Venice is connected with their economic strength; It is the psycho logical leverage that they came to exercise over their male kinsmen. In an interesting article on the position of women in modern rural Greece, Ernestine Friedl notes that women there have considerable 'informal power over household economic decisions and over the economic and marital future of their sons and daughters' because of their contribution, through their dowries, to the household economy.(78) In Venice, women were able to influence the course of family, and kin group, affairs in the same way. For example, women were now able to attach persuasive conditions to their bequests. This is something that their husbands traditionally had done, but for the typically masculine purpose of promoting the lineage. Male testators regularly bequeathed to their wives a yearly income, or some prop801
erty, or both, on condition that the wives not remarry, instead devoting their widowhood to the upbringing of their children.(79) The purpose was to ensure that the testator's offspring would not become stepchildren of another husband, from another lineage. Now women could use the same kind of pressure, but for purposes of their own, which seem more behavioral than lineage-centered. For example, Beruzza, wife of Marco Soranzo, threatened to cut her be quest to her husband in half if he did not free a certain female slave, named Anna, upon Beruzza's death.(80) This was not a trivial whim; her reason was her concern, as she wrote, 'for the salvation of his soul and mine'; there is here the strong suggestion that Marco was using Anna for purposes other than just domestic housekeeping, an illicit liaison that Beruzza wanted to put an end to.(81) In another example, Agnesina, widow of Lodovico Morosini, gave the bulk of her estate to her son Vittore only on condition that he first free himself from his debts.(82) This economic leverage that women were now able to exercise in the area of men's behavior is a large matter, with all sorts of cultural implications, and it would repay further study. But in the present context we can at least make the general observation that Venetian men had reason to stay on the good side of their kinswomen, and this gave women a powerful means of influencing male activity.(83) The final effect of women's position that I want to mention is related to the first two, but in the larger political context seems to me the most important of all. It is that because of their social, legal, and economic position Venetian women contributed to the strengthening and stabilizing of ties among patrician lineages and within the patriciate generally. It has been frequently remarked that in Venice, unlike, say, Florence, patrician kinship ties beyond the elementary family remained strong well into the sixteenth century; this is usually attributed to the institutional endurance of the fraterna, which lasted for a couple of generations.(84) But equally well known is the Venetian patriciate's unusual degree of intraclass cooperation and collective political discipline - at least as compared with other Italian aristocracies of the time.(85) Anthropologists, among others, have observed that a strong sense of lineage and a well-defined commitment to a state usually do not coincide, they are, rather, alternative modes of sociopolitical organization.(86) Yet in Venice they co-existed. And one reason, an important one, was that married women became an increasingly important focus of the economic interests of both their own lineages and those of their husbands. As ever larger portions of the patrimony became earmarked for dowries, the brothers of brides sought to maintain ties to their married sisters, ties that yielded economic benefits in the forms of legacies and investments, as we have seen. For their part, husbands and sons also could entertain expectations of a share of their wives' and mothers' substances. And given the strength of lineage solidarity among males, as demon802
strated in the fraterna's endurance and in the high incidence of men's bequests to secondary male natal kin, the benefits that these various natal and marital familiars received from their womenfolk radiated outward to a wider circle of kinsmen of both lineages. As a consequence, a married woman became a link between the separate economic destinies of two lineages, pulling them together into a sort of suprafamilial, supralineage economic association. The complexity of associations of this type is illustrated in the 1431 will of Ingoldise, widow of Simone Morosini, whose bequests ranged over a web of kinship including three different patrician clans.(87) She bequeathed 200 ducats to the daughter of her sister Nicoletta, wife of Dragono Zen; she gave 1000 ducats to her granddaughter Maria, the wife of Marco Zane, as well as 100 ducats to Marco Zane himself, and 100 ducats to each of Maria and Marco's sons; the rest of her estate she gave to Giovanni Morosini, son of her own late son Piero. Moreover, just to spin the web even more densely, she named her brother, Antonio Contarini, and his sons among her executors, along with her grandson, her married granddaughter, and the latter's husband. Nor were these large clusters of kinsmen on both sides of the marriage link simply competitors for feminine largesse. The rise in dowry levels was accompanied, naturally enough, by a rise in the importance attached to the alliance dimension of marriage ties.(88) The expectations from a son-in-law to whom a father sent not only his daughter but a lot of money too were naturally high. The return on the investment might be political benefits, as Frederic Lane has observed in the case of the Pisani and Vendramin families.(89) But in any case the family of the bride would naturally hope for economic advantages. The same Gasparino Morosini, whose intentions regarding the marriage of his granddaughter I mentioned earlier, is a case in point. The ties that he forged with the father and brothers of his first wife- he married three times remained strong well after the wife's death. In his will of 1374 he bequeathed fifty ducats to each of his late wife's brothers, 'Because', he stated, 'of the great love and interest I have always felt for their house'.(90) And just as he was performing toward his late wife's kinsmen exactly as a good brother-in-law should, on the other side of the affinal equation he expected as much from his own sisters' husbands: in the same will he named one of them, Piero Venier, as his principal executor. Gasparino's example is only one of many; associations among affines, political and especially economic, were a regular feature of patrician society. And the influence of women on the conduct and on the economic direction of such associations could be, as we have seen, considerable.(91) In these circumstances a dense and complex network of associations was woven throughout the patrician class. In the first half of the fifteenth century, for example, the Morosini entered into 240 marriages with 70 different
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clans; the Balbi contracted 31 marriages with 24 different clans; the Da Canal had 40 marriages with 29 different clans.(92) This wide range of spouse selection within the patriciate and the close interlineage ties that resulted created an overlapping system of horizontal ties among patrician clans that complemented the vertical ties of lineage within the clans. The role of women in re-enforcing this cross-lineage association, by means of their wealth and their flexible and unprejudiced social orientation, constituted their most significant function in early renaissance Venetian society. How important it was among all the other factors that contributed to the patriciate's relative stability is a big question that cannot be dealt with here. But it is not too much to say that nature's equal affection, along with women's economic strength, legal status, and distinctive kinship orientation, played a role of considerable importance in achieving the celebrated integration of Venetian patrician society in the Renaissance. Notes *Much of the material used in this essay was gathered in Venice in 1970 with the support of a grant from the American Philosophical Society, to which I express my thanks. I would also like to thank my colleagues, Professor Louise Tilly and Professor Stanley Brandes of, respectively, the History and the Anthropology Departments of Michigan State University, for reading an earlier draft of this essay. 1. B. Cecchetti, 'La donna nel medioevo a Venezia', Archivio veneto, XXXI (1886), 33-69, 307349. This essay is a rather loosely organized series of descriptions of various aspects of the feminine situation in Venice. Although Cecchetti applies little analysis, there is a good deal of interesting and useful material, culled from archival sources, in the essay. 2. Ibid., p. 344. 3. E. Power, 'The Position of Women', in rhe Legacy of the Middle Ages, eds. G. C. Crump and E. F.Jacob (Oxford, 1932), p. 433; D. Herlihy, 'Land, Family and Women in Continental Europe, 701-1200', Traditio, xviii (1962), 89. See also Herlihy's more comprehensive recent statement, Women in Medieval Society. The Smith History Lecture, 1971 (Houston, 1971). 4. M. Petiot, as quoted in P. Aries, Centuries of Childhood; A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York; paperback edition, n.d.), p. 356. 5. See R. Goldthwaite, 'The Florentine Palace as Domestic Architecture', American Hisforical Review, LXXII (1972), 1011. Discussing household relations during this period, David Herlihy notes the contemporary view that the upbringing of children was 'too much dominated by women'g with unfortunate results for the children's characters. In any case, Herlihy goes on, a wife, usually years younger than her husband, 'enjoyed a more intimate, and usually a longer contact with her children'; moreover, wives normally survived into a grandmotherly widowhood, during which they 'lived with their married sons, aided in the management of their homes and the raising of their children'. Herlihy does not, however, state this as a recent development. 'Some Psychological Roots of Violence in the Tuscan Cities', in Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities, 12001500, ed. L. Martines (Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1972), pp. 148-149. 6. On women and the effect of Germanic and Roman law on them, see Herlihy, 'Land, Family and Women', pp. 89-91; A. Pertile, Storia del diritto italiano, 2nd ed. (Turin, 1894), m 232-244; and above all the monograph of P. Ercole, 'L'istituto dotale nella pratica e nella legislazione statutaria dell'Italia superiore,' Rivista italiana per le scienze giuridiche, XLV (1908), l9l-302; XLVI 804
(1910), 167-257 (I shall abbreviate the two parts of this article 'Istituto dotale', I, and 'Istituto dotale', II). There is also some useful information on the property rights of women in F. Brandileone, 'Studi preliminari sullo svolgimento storico dei rapporti patrimoniali fra coniugi in Italia', in Scritti di storia del diritto (Bologna, 1931), I, 229-319. 7. The rules governing succession to intestate individuals are found in the Venetian statutes. I use the following edition: Volumen statutorem, tegum, ac iurium D. Venetorum . . . (Venice, 1564). The succession rules are in Bk. IV, chs. 24-27, pp. 70v-74v. 8. 8 The main source on thefraterna is C. Fumagalli, II diritto di fraterna nella giuris prudenza da Accursio alla codificazione (Turin, 1912). See also E. Besta, La famiglia nella storia del diritto italiano (Milan, 1962), pp. 207 209; Pertile, Storia del diritto, iii, 282; and, on Venice, M. Ferro, Dizionario del diritto comune e veneto (Venice, 1779), v, 27S278. 9. '.., filie ... sint contente dote sua....' Volumen statutorum, Bk. IV, ch. 25, p. 73V. See also Ercole, 'Istituto dotale,' I, 212 222. 10. This question has been discussed most recently, and with full bibliographical ref erences, by F. C. Lane, 'The Enlargement of the Great Council of Venice', in Florilegium Historiale: Essays Presented to Wallace K. Ferguson, eds. J. G. Rowe and W. H. Stockdale (Toronto, 1971), esp. pp. 25z ff. On the degree of restrictiveness of the measures, see S. Chojnacki, 'In Search of the Venetian Patriciate: Families and Factions in the Fourteenth Century', in Renaissance Venice, ed. J. R. Hale (London, 1973), pp. 52-58. Throughout this essay, my use of the terms 'family', 'lineage', and 'clan' is rather precise. 'Family' refers to the conjugal (or nuclear or elementary) domestic group made up of parents and children, married or unmarried. 'Lineage' is a consanguineal kin group whose members' knowledge of their relationships with one another stems from their knowledge of their descent from a common ancestor; a branch of a clan, for example, may be a lineage. 'Clan' is a consanguineal kin group whose members exhibit a sense of community, but whose common ancestor is too far back in the past to be traced accurately; hence clan members' precise relationships to each other are often not known; the older Venetian patrician clans conform to this sense. Cf. R. Fox, Kinship and Marriage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 36-40, 4>50; and G. P. Murdock, Social Structure (New York London, 1949), pp. 1 ff., 46-75. 11. The evolving requirements for demonstration of patrician status are in Archivio di Stato, Venice (henceforth, ASV), Avogaria di Comun, Reg. 14, fs. 3r-12v; and in Biblioteca Marciana, Venice (henceforth, BMV), codici italiani, classe vii, 196 (8578), fs. 1r-sr. Some of the legislation is summarized in M. Merores, 'Der grosse Rat von Venedig und die sogenannte Serrata vom Jahre 1297', Viertaljahrschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, xe (1928), 7S81; Larle, 'TheEnlargement', pp. 254-258; Chojnacki, 'In Search', pp. 52-53. 12. On class-consciousness among the patricians, see B. Cecchetti, 'I nobili e il popolo di Venezia', Archivio veneto, m (1872), 428 ff. 13. ASV, Archivlo notarile, Testamenti, Busta (all henceforth abbreviated NT) 571, Giorgio Gibellino, 'carte varie', dated 28 April lol. Another example: in a will of 1416 Nicolo di Giovanni Morosini instructed that his unmarried sister be given some money so that she could marry 'cum honore et prout congruit conditionem domus mee hon orificentius'. NT 1234, Francesco Sorio, no. 509. 14. The notarial records are full of evidence of such affinal relationships. See below, pp. 181-183 and notes. 15. The sample is taken from a group of 305 wills written by members of the Morosini clan or by wives of Morosini men. I simply selected the first fifty married males and the first fifty married females alphabetically. The total number of bequests is 235 for the men, 215 for the women. The wills are in various funds of the ASV, especially NT; Archivio notarile, Cancelleria inferiore
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(henceforth abbreviated CI); and the commissarie in the archive of the Procuratori di S. Marco (abbreviated PSM). It should be noted that in several cases one testator (or testatress) wrote more than one of the wills in the sample. Thus the fifty women's wills were written by thirty-seven women, and the fifty men's wills were written by forty-four men. For present purposes, however, the way legacies were fmally paid is less important than testators' intentions. And the evidence of wills written at diffierent points in the testators' life cycles and in those of their beneficiaries makes the sample even more representative. See also the following paragraph. 16. This can be seen more easily in tabular form: Men's Bequests Women's Bequests To natal kin 65 (27.7%) 107 (49.7%) To marital kin 156 (66.4%) 96 (44.7%) To affinal 14 (5-9%) 12 (5.6%) Totals 235 (100.0%) 215 (100.0%) It should be noted that these bequests to kinsmen dominated in women's wills. Occa sionally, a woman would make a small bequest to a friend e.g., Orsa Morosirli's 1425 legacy of twenty ducats to 'amice mee' Chiara Contarini (CI 24, Rolandino Bernardo, 16, c. 7sv, ho. 209). But except for such rare exceptions, and more frequent nonkinship bequests listed in the category of pious charity, most feminine bequests remained within the web of kinship. 17. The specificity of men's bequests to children, as compared with the generality in women's wills, suggests that men had more specific plans for the economic destinies of their children. See the following paragraph. 18. See A. Pertile, Storia del diritto italiano, 2nd ed. (Turin, 1893), IV, 128-133; Ferro, Dizionario, rv, 316-320. This argument is re-inforced by the fact that men's bequests to mothers and sisters outnumbered those to fathers and brothers by 16-4. For the fraterna in action in Venice, see F. C. Lane, 'Family Partnerships and Joint Ventures in the Venetian Republic', Venice and History (Baltimore, 1966), p. 37 and passim. 19. Two of the women and four of the men with living spouses mentioned previous marriages. It should be noted that women married younger than men did and tended to survive their husbands more frequently than the reverse; this was a general trend, not just reflected in these wills, so widowed women would tend to be younger than widowed men. See above, p. 177, n. 5 and n. 57. 20. On the developmental cycles of families, see the comments of Meyer Fortes in his 'Introduction' to J. Goody, ed., The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 2-4, and elsewhere in the volume. See also P. Laslett's 'Introduction' to Hogsehold and Family in Past Time, eds. P. Laslett and R. Wall (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 32-34. 21. Women were legally entitled to full restitution of their dowry upon the death of their husbands; however, many men still specifically authorized repayment of the dowry in the wills, presumably to spare their future widows the inconveniences involved in the dowry restitution procedure. In addition, large numbers of men made bequests to their wives beyond restoring the dowry, as an inducement to them not to remarry, so that the children of the marriage would be cared for by their mother, and without a step father from another lineage; in such bequests the cond*ion that the widow not remarry is quite explicit. On widows' rights to dowry restitution, see Ercole, 'Istituto dotale,' ii, 222-223 ff. 22. The statutes did require mothers to contribute to their sons, however. Pertile, Storia del diritto, iv, 91-95; lzolumen statutorum, Bk. IV, ch. 28, p. 74v. 23. Fortes, 'The Structure of UnilinLeal Descent Groups', American Anthropologist, LV (1953) 32. 24. Ibid.,p.33. 806
25. Compare men's bequests to natal male kin with those of women to the same categones of kin: By men By women To primary natal male kin 4 26 To secondary natal male kin 39 22 Pertile, Storia del diritto, iv, 76-79, discusses the principles behind favoring male kin in succession beyond the elementary family. In fact, the sons of a dead brother were entitled, collectively, to one share of their paternal grandfather's patrimony- their father's share; they did participate legally in that sense in the joint patrimony with their father's brothers. 26. These patterns can be more clearly seen in tabular form: Men's Bequests Women's Bequests To primary natal males 4 26 To primary natal females 16 34 To secondary natal males 39 22 To secondary natal females 6 25 I interpret the relatively large number of bequests by men to their primary natal female relatives as an indication of the interest men had and legally were obliged to have-in their sisters' dowries, and to their desire to provide for their widowed mothers' well-being. 27. 7 Ercole, 'Istituto dotale', I, 212-213, 231-235; Ferro, Dizionatio, IV, 383. 28. Ercole, 'Istituto dotale', I, 238-246; Perro, Dizionario, iv, 385. Volumen statutorum, Bk. II, ch. 8, p. 17V; Bk. IV, ch. 25, pp. 71V-72V. I discuss this question of dowry responsibility at length in an article, 'Dowries and Kinsmen in Early Renaissance Venice', forthcoming in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 29. Volunren statutotum, Bk. IV, ch. 28, p. 74v: '. . . tam masculis, quam foeminis vir ginibus, maritatis, & viduis, omxiium mobilium & immobilium aequaliter successio deferatur. 30. On wives' property in general, see Pertile, Storia del diritto, m, 320-332; Ercole, 'Istituto dotale', II, 179-190. Pertile makes the general observation (Storia del diritto, n, 92-95) that men were favored over women as heirs to their mothers. But in Venice this does not seem to have been the case. 31. Volumen statutorum, 'Liber promissionis maleficii', chs. 2-3, p. 129V; Bk. VI, ch. 79, p. 125V. 32. ASV, Signori di Notte al Criminal, Processi, Reg. 7, fs. 2r-3r; Reg. 8, f. 3gv. 33. Cecchetti notes cases where feminine beauty appeared to have an influence on oSlcial activity: a fine was reduced for a father who had a daughter who was 'belta e nubile' (Cecchetti's emphasis); a man who cut ('amputavit') the hair of a woman against her will was fined 100 lire. 'La donna nel medioevo a Venezia', pp. 38-39. 34. 'Nolentes igitur ubi de iure tractatur inter mares, & feminas, quibus natura parem subministrat affiectum, di Serentias praeiudiciales inducere, sed potius mulierum fragilitati quadam humanitate consulere....' Volumen statutorum, consultum no. 39, p. 169V. On women and the law in general, see Pertile, Storia del diritto, iii, 232-244. 35. On the general Italian preference for keeping real property in the hands of males, for both familial and political purposes, see Ercole, 'Istituto dotale', I, 289-294; Pertile, Storia del diritto, iii, 239; F. Niccolai, 'I consorzi nobiliari ed il Comune nell'alta e media Italia', Rivista di storia del diritto italiano, (1940), 318. 36. See the discussion of the tradition of male tutela, and its apparent weakening already in the late Roman period, in Herlihy, 'Land, Pamily and Women', pp. 89-91. Pertile (Storia del diritto, iii, 232 ff.) discusses the Germanic mundium, or protective power over women, and its endurance in the Middle Ages. He notes, however p. 239-240, n. 37), that there is no mention of it in the statutes of the Veneto region.
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37. ' . . . mulier . . . quae non steterit cum eius viro, et ipsa de predicto eius viro, con questa fuerit....' Volumen statutorum, consultum no. 8, p. 144v. 38. CI 114, Marino, S. Toma, protocol 1335-1350, no pagination: on 1 January 1340 (1339, Venetian style), Beriola, wife of Marco Erisso, made out a receipt to her husband for 12½ soldi di grossi, 'quos mihi dare tenebatis pro mia provisione victus et vestitus de medio anno presenti . . . prout patet per quandam breviarem legis cartam . . . subscrip tione dominorum judicum procuratorum'. The document referred to was dated lo December 1317. 39. '. . . Megavit quod duricia et asperitas ac nequicia ipsius Michaleti Mauroceno viri sui talis et tanta erat, quod ipsam Catarinam uxorem suam de domo expulebat. Nec cum ipso Michaleto vult ipsa stare et habitare, et quod ad huc secum libenter astandum dum modo a sua duricia et iniquitate removetur et eam secum tenere et tractare ut conveniens est vellet.' PSM de Citra, B. 179, Micheletto Morosini, parchment dated 9 June 1343. The Giudici del Procurator, the magistracy involved in this case as well as the one meniioned in the previous note, had competence in matters dealing with the financial arrangements between spouses. See A. da Mosto, L'Archivio di Stato in Fenezia, Bib liotheque des 'Annales institutorum', vol. v (Rome, 1937), I, 93. 40. '. . . dixit quod dicta Catarina uxor sua numquam secum staret, nec ipsam modo aliquo reciperet in domo sua. PSM de Citra B. 179, loc. cit. 41. His will is dated 15 May 1348. Ibid., parchment no. 1. The will also alludes, very unclearly, to a dead child. In Caterina's will of 13 52 there is no reference to any children, living or dead. NT 1023, Ariano Passamonte, no. 17. 42. There is a large literature on women's property and its status during marriage. The fullest discussion is in Ercole, 'Istituto dotale', II, 167-190. See also Brandileone, 'Stud preliminari', pp. 27+289 and passim; Pertile, Storia del diritto, m, 320-361; Besta, La famiglia, pp. 143-169. On Venice, see the observations in R. C. Mueller, 'The Procurators of San Marco in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: A study of the offilce as a financial and trust institution', Studi veneziani, xm (1971), 175-184. 43. '... etiam sine consensu viri sui....' Volumen statutorum, Bk. I, ch. 39, p. 19V. See also Pertile, Storia deS diritto, m, 327, 3 52. Ercole seems to suggest that in Vemce this right of women did not extend to the 'parafernal goods' i.e., the corredum or trousseau-that accompanied the dowry; 'Istituto dotale', I, 204-205. According to him, the husband had control over such possessions, however, the statutes that Ercole cites (p. 205, n. 1) do not seem to me to sustain this conclusion. 44. CI 242, Giacomo Ziera, 5, protocol, f. 1V. Giovanni had no sons himself, although he was generous in his will to his brothers' sons. The main study of the Venetian funded debt is the 'Introduzione' to G. Luzzatto, ed., I prestiti della Repubblica di Venezia. Sec. XII-XV, Documenti Emanziari della Repubblica di Venezia, ser. III, vol. I, pt. 1 Cadua, l9Z9). The introduction has been reprinted as II debito pubblico della Repubblica di Veneziv (Milan, 1963). 45. For interest payments on Monte shares, see F. C. Lane, 'The Funded Debt of the Venetian Republic', in Venice and History, p. 87. 46. A couple of other examples; in a will of 1348 Andreasio di Michele Morosini be queathed fifty lire to each of his five married daughters. PSM Misti 182a, Andreasio Morosini, protocol (no pagination). In the same year, Andrea Morosini cavaliere be queathed to his married sister the income from 2000 lire in Monte shares during her lifetime. PSM de Citra 180, Andrea Morosini, protocol I, fs. 5r-11r. 47. Of the 305 wills in the sample, 196 were written by wives or widows. Of these, seventy-four clearly identified living daughters in their wills, among whom there were forty clearly identified as married. 48. Volumen statutorum, Bk. I, ch. 39, p. lpv. More generally, Ercole, 'Istituto dotale', I, 197-198; Besta, Lafamiglia, pp. 143-151. 808
49. Pertile put it in a nutshell: 'Della dote la moglie conservava la proprieta, tanto che in qualche luogo ne faceva suoi anche i frutti, in tutto o in parte, secondo che gli sposi avean convenuto; ma comunemente l'usufrutto della dote spettava al marito giusta le leggi romane ad sustinendum onera matrimonii.' Storia del diritto, iii, 324. 50. In his will of 1349, Goffredo di Francesco Morosini bequeathed to his wife a life time annuity of fifty ducats as interest for his use of her dowry. NT 576, Giovanni de Comasini, no. 95. Ercole observes that 'come moglie e madre essa [i.e., the wife] aveva diritto di partecipare di fatto, durante il matrimonio, del godimento della sostanza dotale'. 'Istituto dotale', II, 181. 51. For the general obligation, see Volumen statutorum, Bk. I, ch. 34, p. 17V: 'omnia bona viri sunt obligata mulieri....' On the deposit, see ibid., Bk. rIt, ch. 29, p. 49v bis (er roneously paginated 50v), and Bk. VI, ch. 31, pp. 101V-102V. If the obligated property was real estate and the husband wanted to sell it, he was to offer it to his wife first; if she declined it, he could make the sale to a third party, but the payment would have to be deposited with the Procurators. On a related matter, see Mueller, 'The Procurators', pp. 175-176. Pertile discusses the husband's obligation under the term antefactum (Storia del diritto, m, 327-334). Brandileone ('Studi preliminari', pp. 273-274) suggests that the antefactum amounted to a fraction, usually one-half, of the dowry amount; this was not true of Venice. 52. The cosigner was usually a relative. E.g., Elena Morosini cosigned with her son Andrea, 2 April 1384. CI 21, Giovanni Boninsegna, protocol 2, f. 51V. Leonardo Morosini cosigned with his brother Paolo, 2 May 1352. ASV, Raccolta Stefani, Archivio genealogico, Cassa 33, 'Morosini'. 53. The statutes were clear on the obligation of the widow's father-in-law when the husband was unemancipated. Volumen statutorum, Bk. I, ch. 56, p. 26v; see also Ercole, 'Istituto dotale', II, 23S237. But in practice the fathers of emancipated sons also were assessed the balance. E.g., when Marina, widow of Pangrazio da Molin, filed for restitu tion of her dowry in 1368, the estate of her father-in-law, Benedetto da Molirl, was required to satisfy the deficiency in Pangrazio's estate, even though the latter had been divisus. CI 114 Marino, S. Toma, protocol 1366-1391, dated lo May 1368. 54. In 1371, Bernardo Bon was required to pay to the estate of his late father's widow what was lacking in his father's estate for repayment of the dowry, even though Bernardo had been divisus. (It is not clear whether the widow was Bernardo's mother or step mother.) Ibid., dated 19 March 1371. 55. 'Ut amodo nulla quaestio oriatur . . . ipsa [i.e., the wife] sit prior caeteris credito: ibus.' Fotumen statutorum, Bk. I, ch. 34, p. 17V. This was reaSlrmed in 1471, ibid., Con sultum no. 47, pp. 175V-176V. See also Ercole, 'Istituto dotale', II, 222-223, 255-57. 56. '. . . dabitur potestas mulieri in iudicatu suo de proprietatibus & bonis viri tollendis. . . .' Volumen statutorum, Bk. I, ch. 56, p. 26V. Moreover, the judges awarding the property were to 'omnem cautelam adhibeant, ut eas possessiones appretientur, quae coniunctae sunt, vel utiliores pro mulieribus'; ibid., ch. 61, pp. 27v-28v. 57. Parents in their wills usually sought to have their daughters marry in their early teens, at 12-14 years in the mid-fourteenth century, at 14-15 years in the mid-fifteenth. This corresponds to practice prevailing in Tuscany; see Herlihy, 'Some Psychological and Social Roots of Violence', p. 146. Regarding husbands predeceasing their wives, this general demographic tendency is documented in the dowry restitution records; if the husband died first, his widow received her dowry, if the wife died first, her heirs received it. Of 110 patrician marriages indicated in this source as terminated between 1366, and 1380, seventy-seven ended with the death of the husband, only thirtythree with the death of the wife. CI 114, Marino, S. Toma, protocol 1366-1391, passim. 58. Tomasina's investment is in CI 20, Giovanni Bon, fascicle 4, dated 21 March 1 3 80. Beria's will is in NT 574, Giorgio Gibellino, no. 595. 809
59. This largesse, already noted in wills, extended to business contracts too. E.g., P;etro Zane got an investment loarl of 240 lire from his mother, Beriola, in 1337. CI 11, Bartolomeo prete, protocol 1, dated 25 August 1337. Nicolo DolEm received a similar loan, in the amount of 1000 lire a grossi, from his mother, Cecilia. CI 14 Nicolo Betino, protocol 4, dated 25 April 1353. 60. Cf. Herlihy, Women in Medieval Society, pp. 5-6. On Elorence, see the comments of L. Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 1390-1460 (Princeton, 1963), pp. 37-38. Dante was censorious about a rise in dowries already in his time; refernng to the time of his greatgreat-grandfather, Cacciaguida, he wrote: Non faceva, nascendo ancor paura La figlia al padre, che il tempo e la dote Non fuggian qwnci e quindi la misura. Paradiso XV.103-105 See also Ercole, 'Istituto dotale', I, 280-281. 61. The mid-century dowry average was extracted from fifty patrician marriages contracted between 1346 and 1366; the later average was extracted from twenty-five patrician marriages contracted between 1370 and 1386. All of these were found in CI 114, Marino, S. Toma, protocol 1365-1391, passim, which provides records of dowry transactions as the basis of widows' claims to dowry restitution. I have been unable to find a similar source for the fifteenth century. The dowry bequest of 1000 ducats in 1338 mentioned in Mueller, 'The Procurators', p. 181, seems abnormally large. For some examples of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century dowries, see F. C. Lane, Andrea Barbarigo, Merchant of Venice 1418-1449 (Baltimore, 1944), pp. 28-29; idem, 'Pamily Partnerships', pp. 37-38; A. da Mosto, 'Il navigatore Andrea da Mosto e la sua famiglia', Archivio veneto, 5th ser., II (1927), 176, 192. 62. The act is reproduced in Marco Barbaro, 'Libro di nosse patrisie', BMV, codici italiarli, classe ni, 156 (8492), f. a. It is also digested in ASV, Compilazione leggi, B. 186, fasc. 1, fs. 104rv. Por references to similar measures elsewhere in Italy, see Pertile, Storia del diritto, m, 322. Pertile notes that the intent of such measures was to prevent sons' being deprived of their rightful shares of the patrimony by dowry increases for their sisters. 63. Ercole, 'Istituto dotale', I, 282-284. It will be recalled that the dowry's purpose was to enable the husband to bear the onera matrimonii. 64. There is evidence, which I propose to treat in a full-length study of patrician kinship relations, of increasing self-consciousness on the part of the oldest patrician clans in the century and a half after the 'leveling' of the patriciate in the Serrata, and, on the other hand, of resentment toward these old clans by the newer ones. See, briefly, Chojnacki, 'In Search', pp. 49-50. On the matter in question, incomplete evidence suggests that there was a disproportionate amount of endogamy among the twenty-four older clans, called case vecchie. For a Plorentine instance of dowryengineered social mobility, see G. Brucker, 'The Medici in the Fourteenth Century', Speculum xx (1957), 10-11. 65. 5 See R. Cessi, 'Le relazioni commerciali tra Venesia e le Fiandre nel secolo XIV', in Politica ed economia di Venezia nel Trecento (Rome, 1952), pp. 71-178, for a discussion of difficulties occasioned Veneiian trade by events in transalpine Europe. See G. Luzzatto, Storia economica di VenezZa dall'XI al XVI secolo (llenice, 1961), pp. 141 ff., for a discussion of the state fisc's rapacity in levying forced loans at moments of political crisis. The resulting shares in the state debt (the Monte) could be negotiated as dowry payments. 66. The exact figures, based on bequests explicitly for dowry purposes, are in the following table: 1331-1370 1371-1410 1411-1450 From fathers 6 24 11 From mothers 1 11 16 810
For a fuller discussion, see the forthcoming Chojnacki, 'Dowries and Kinsmen'. 67. In tabular form: Men's Wills Women's Wills To 1330 8 (57.1%) 6 (42.9%) 1331-1370 22 (44.0%) 28 (56.0%) 1371-1410 40 (33.1%) 81 (66.9%) 1411-1450 34 (28.3%) 86 (71.7%) Some allowance must be made, in considering these figures, for the accident of survival and for the fortunes of research. But the tendency seems unmistakable. 68. According to Beloch, the plague struck Venice eleven times between 1347 and 1400. K. J. Beloch, Bevolkerungesgeschichte Italiens, E (Berlin, 1961), pp. 3-4. 69. It should be noted that these multiple women's wills, whatever their other implications, do not account for mothers outstripping fathers in fifteenth-century dowry be quests (above, n. 66). Among all the testators who bequeathed dowries to their daughters there were two men and only one woman who wrote two wills-thus making, in each case, two bequests to the same daughter, of which one of course canceled the other out. 70. Of the 305 Morosini wills examined, eighty-seven, more than one-quarter of the total, were written by thirty-six individuals who drew up more than one will. Of these thirty-six, twenty-eight were women. 71. E.g., in 1138 Ratolica Giustinian invested in a colleganza with her son-in-law, Enrico Contarini. R. Morozzo della Rocca and A. Lombardo, eds., Documenti del com mercio veneziano nei secoli XI-XIII (Turin, 1940), I, 74. For a discussion of Genoese women's business dealings in the early thirteenth century, see W. N. Bonds, 'Genoese Noblewomen and Gold Thread Manufacturing', Medievalia et Humanistica XVII (1966), 79-81. 72. E.g., Alice Contarjni was active in the small loan business in 1320. CI 73, Egidio, S. Sofia, protocol 1, acts dated 15 April and 20 November 1320. Caterina Michiel made at least one loan of 300 lire. CI 79, Gasparino Favacio, protocol, dated 14 February 1360 (1359, Venetian style). 73. In 1420 Ingoldise Morosini entered into partnership th one Giovanni di Spagna in the soapmaking business ('contraus in simul societates seu compagnias in arte saponarie'). CI 24, Rolandino Bemardi, protocol sI, f. 56rV. 74. Palma Signolo made such an investment in 1311. Cl 10, Michele Bondemiro, protocol, f. 3v. Leonarda Morosini received in 1348 a return on her investment in an earIier voyage to Alexandria. CI 114, Marino, S. Toma, protocol 1335-1350, dated 5 August 1348. On the state-run galleys, see various works of F. C. Lane: 'Venetian Ships and Shipping during the Commercial Revolution' and 'Family Partnerships', both in Venice and History. 75. See above, p. 193. 76. 76 NT 670, Alessandro Marino, no. 126. 77. Some examples: In 1439, Caterina, wife of Moise Contarini, bequeathed 3000 ducats' worth of Monte shares to her father, to be distributed to her brothers. NT 1155, Benedetto dalle Croci, no. 68. In 1389 (1388, Venetian style), Cristina, wife of Giovanni Morosini, willed 1000 ducats to her husband. NT 921, Nicolo Saiabianca, no. 494. In 1426, Maria, wife of Nicolo Morosini, bequeathed 2000 ducats for her daughter's dowry. NT 746, Marciliano de' Naresi, no. 83. 78. E. Priedl, 'The Position of Women Appearance and Reality', Anthropological Quar terty, XL (1967), 108. Her main thesis accords with much of what I have written here: a formal structure, male-dominated, still leaves room for feminlne influence, largely because of economic power. My thanks to Professor Stanley Brandes of Michigan State's Anthropology Department for this reference.
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79. For just one of numerous examples, Piero di Giovanni Morosini, in his will of 1383, named his wife Pranceschina as one of his executors and bequeathed her some Monte shares and the income from his real estate all on the condition that she not remarry. NT 571, Giorgio Gibellino, no. 169. 80. NT 108, Giovanni Boninsegna, no. 296 (22 October 1388). 81. . . pro salute anime sue et mee.' In another place she asked him to free the slave 'ob amorem dei et salutem anime sue'. Ibid. For a discussion of the sexual activity be tween masters and their female slaves and of the resultant resentment felt by the ladies of the house see I. Origo, 'The Domestic Enemy; The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Pifteenth Centuries', Speculum, xxx (1955), 343-344. 82. NT 1233, Pietro Zane, fs. 141V-142V (5 August 1417). 83. See the interesting comments on this theme in a Florentine context in Goldthwaite, 'The Florentine Palace', p. 1011. 84. fraterna, lasting legally for two generations, would thus embrace several families of the same line- brothers' families and those of their sons. See Lane, 'Family Partnerships', p. 37; Pertile, Storia del diritto, m, 282. On the Florentine case, R. A. Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence: A Study of Four Families (Princeton, 1968), should be read in conjunction with R. Starn, 'Francesco Guicciardini and EIis Brothers', in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, eds. A. Molho andJ. A. Tedeschi (Florence and Dekalb, Ill., 1971), pp. 411-444. 85. This is one of the elements of the 'myth of Venice', on which there is a large literature. See, for example, G. Fasoli, 'Nascito di un mito', in Studi storici in onore di Gioacchino Volpe (Florence, 1958), I, 455-479; F. Gaeta, 'Alcune considerazioni sul mito di Venezia', Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, xxm (1961), 58-75. 86. See, for example, Fortes, 'The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups', p. 26: 'The more centralized the political system the greater the tendency seems to be for the corporate strength of descent groups to be reduced or for such corporate groups to be non existent.' See also G. Duby, La societe auoc Xle et Xl le siectes dans ta region maconnaise (Paris, 1953), as quoted in this regard by Aries, Centuries of Childhood, p. 355. For the invocation of this principle in Italy, see Goldthwaite, Private Wealth, p. 253; and N. Tamassia, Lafamiglia italiana nei secoli decimoquinto e decimosesto (Milan, lplo), p. 111. 87. NT 721, Andrea Marevidi, no. 226. 88. 8 Marriage contracts among nobles are hard to find, in my experience. However, one between the Sanudo and Morosini families in 1344 (1343, Venetian style) illustrates very well the complex interweaving of two families' economic interests in the connection. Museo Correr, Venice, Codici Cicogna, no. 3427/11. 89. 'Family Partnerships', pp. 38-39. 90. '. . . per grande amor e raxion chio o portado sempre a quella caxa.' NT 1062, Lorenzo della Torre, no. 300. Gasparino's first wife, the sister of these beneficiaries, was dead already in 1371, when Gasparino retumed her dowry to her family. Cl 114, Marino, S. Toma, protocol 1366-1391, dated 17 December 1371. By the time of the 1374 will Gasparino had remarried. 91. See the example of Andrea Barbarigo and his afEmes from the Cappello family. Lane, Andrea Barbarigo, pp. 27-30. Especially interesting is Andrea's relationship with his mother-in-law p. 29). 92. Barbaro, 'Libro di nozze patrizie', fs. 322v-326r, 39v-40r, 103r-104v.
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SECTION 6
Michael Rocke, Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy Sexual and gender identities are so fundamental to our make-up that there has long been a tendency to naturalize them, to view them, that is, as an intrinsic part of our individual natures - often equating gender (masculinity/femininity) with biology (male/female). Recently, however, historians, anthropologists and other scholars have challenged this perspective. On the one hand, studies in the history of sexuality and gender have begun to cast into increasingly bold relief the fact that different societies define gender and 'appropriate' forms of sexual behaviour in various ways. This has been a major field of research in recent years. In addition to the pioneering works of John Boswell and Guido Ruggiero on the history of sexuality and gender in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Michael Rocke has emerged as one of the most creative scholars working on this dimension of Renaissance culture. Rocke's approach is a vivid example of the new cultural history. He not only explores the prescriptive language of moralists and preachers such as Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) and Girolamo Savonarola (1452-98) as well as developments in law and medicine in shaping ideas about gender in Renaissance Society, he also looks to court records to examine the ways in which sexual crimes (fornication, rape, prostitution, child abuse and sodomy) were perceived and prosecuted. His essay portrays a world anxiously intent on developing clear gender definitions. The sexuality of women, especially those at the higher reaches of the social scale, was carefully patrolled through an emphasis on chastity and early marriage, while adult males were granted considerably more freedom. Indeed, for men at least, Renaissance culture was relatively tolerant of certain types of behaviour that, officially, constituted transgressions but which were, in fact, consistent with prevailing attitudes about femininity and masculinity. In the fifteenth century, for example, prostitution was not only tolerated but even legalized and regulated by governments. Brothels functioned, in part at least, as Safety-valves designed to protect girls of good families from the sexual appetites of adolescent and adult males. Rocke's most compelling illustration of the ways in which Florentines organized and understood gender, however, comes from his examination of homosexual behaviours. Renaissance culture did not categorize men or women as hetero- or homosexual in ways that only became normative in the nineteenth century. To the contrary, in the Renaissance, proper masculine behaviour was determined not by the biological sex of one's partner but by whether or not the adult male was the active, penetrating partner (which was deemed acceptable whether with a man or a woman) rather than the passive, penetrated partner (which for adult males was deemed unacceptable). Rocke, therefore, describes a gender regime radically different from our own and concludes his essay by underscoring 'the distance that 813
separates the culture of sex and gender in Renaissance Italy from that which prevails in the modern world'. Rocke's essay, which is very slightly abridged here, originally appeared in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, eds Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (London, 1998), 150-70. For a further elaboration of his arguments here, readers should turn first to his Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1996), a book that opens up a new window on male sociability and the role of sexuality in the construction of Renaissance society. Students will find intriguing comparisons and contrasts in Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1985) as well as in Virginia Cox's essay 'The Single Self', which is presented in the following chapter. .. .. .. In February 1496, friar Girolamo Savonarola, campaigning to reform the morals of Florentine society, fulminated against the sexual debauchery that, in his view, had 'ruined the world, ... corrupted men in lust, led women into indecency, and boys into sodomy and filth, and made them become like prostitutes'. His condemnation of erotic licence stemmed not merely from its immorality, but also from his conviction that the indulgence of sexual pleasures produced a dangerous confusion of gender boundaries: 'Young lads have been made into women. But that's not all: fathers are like daughters, brothers like sisters. There is no distinction between the sexes or anything else anymore'.1 Savonarola's comment reveals some central assumptions of the culture of sex and gender in Renaissance Italy. Sexual behaviour was in fact a basic component of the complex of cultural and social signifiers that distinguished individuals, beyond their belonging to one biological sex or the other, as gendered beings, as masculine or feminine. His insistence on the transformative capacity of sex to make men into women, and presumably vice versa, indicates an awareness that gender identity was not a natural or fixed quality but was constructed and malleable, and as such it needed to be adequately shaped, reinforced and defended. The friar's remarks also betrayed deep anxiety about establishing and enforcing borders, not only between licit and illicit sexual comportment, but also between related virile and feminine conventions and ideals for it was in part around such confines that society was properly ordered. Norms and ideals In this strongly patriarchal and patrilineal society, the control of women's sexual conduct and reproductive functions was accorded especially high importance. 814
Centuries-old philosophical, medical, legal and religious discourses on sexual difference continued to sustain the notion that women were inferior in all ways to men and subject to their dominion. Medieval understanding of female biology contributed to beliefs that women were passive and receptive in their sexual nature yet possessed a powerful yearning for semen and a more ravenous sexual appetite than that of men - a view reinforced by the Judeo-Christian myth of Eve the temptress, responsible for original sin and the fall from grace. Both religious doctrine and lay society upheld chastity as the supreme virtue of women, whether as young unwed virgins, wives or widows. The purity and modesty of the donna onesta was regularly contrasted with the shamelessness and incontinence of the 'indecent' woman, embodied especially in the figure of the prostitute. The defence of female virginity before marriage and chastity there after also played an essential role in the pervasive culture of honour, a Woman's sexual behaviour largely defining both her own standing and reputation and those of her family and of the males responsible for 'governing' her. Such concerns loomed especially large for wealthy and propertied families, for whom the guarantee of paternity deter mined the transmission of patrimonies and the competition for public honour carried momentous political stakes. This obsession was aptly stated by the Florentine patrician and humanist Matteo Palmieri in his Vita Civile: Wives must exercise the greatest and most extraordinary guard not only against uniting with another man, but even to avoid all suspicion of such filthy wickedness. This error is the supreme disgrace to decency, it effaces honour, destroys union, renders paternity uncertain, heaps infamy on families and within them brings dissension and hatred and dissolves every relationship; she no longer deserves to be called a married woman but rather a corrupt wench, worthy only of public humiliation.2 It was in part to safeguard both their daughters' virginity and the family's honour that parents rushed their girls into marriage as soon as Possible after sexual maturity, usually between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. For the same reason, unmarriageable patrician girls were quickly made nuns and secluded within a convent. To preserve their chastity, women of middle- and upper-class families tended to be isolated in their homes, and their contacts with men were carefully controlled. Women at lower social levels, who generally lacked this powerful familial protection, had greater exposure to males and more freedom in their daily lives; for them, the conventions regarding virginity and chastity were probably somewhat less rigid.
815
Despite religious proscriptions against all extra-marital sex, standards and expectations with regard to male sexual behaviour were generally more flexible than those applied to women. No social ideal compelled men to remain virgins before marriage or demanded fidelity of them afterward. They were supposed to obey laws against rape, adultery and other illicit acts, but lax enforcement and light penalties for many offences helped dull their dissuasive force. While men were to respect the virtue of women of honourable families, they had a large pool of slaves and servants, poor or immodest women, and prostitutes with whom they could acceptably indulge their desires. This sexual liberty was reinforced by the late age at which men normally married - from their late twenties to early thirties - and by substantial rates of men who never married. Denied economic autonomy under their fathers' patriarchal rule, and forbidden significant civic roles, young men lived in a state of prolonged and powerless adolescence. These footloose bachelors were the main protagonists of the violence and sexual debauchery characteristic of Renaissance Italy. City fathers, themselves once young, viewed their profligacy with some sympathy and indulgence; it also provided an excuse for barring them from the serious business of governing, since 'they say youths should not discuss public affairs, but pursue their sexual needs'.3 Masculine identity did not, however, lie only in the double standard that allowed men the sexual freedoms denied to women, but also in conventions that identified manliness solely with a dominant role in sex. In this regard, males' sexual and gendered norms were as rigid as those imposing chastity on females. Potency figured among the constitutive features of masculinity, such that a man's failure to achieve erection was grounds for annulment of his marriage or for divorce.4 The association of virility with dominance was one source of the religious ban against couples engaging in intercourse with the woman on top, an 'unnatural' position considered emblematic of woman's usurpation - or man's abdication - of males' superior status.5 Similar notions pervaded same-sex relations, in which adult men were expected to take an exclusively 'active' role in sex with adolescents, behaviour that corresponded fully with masculine ideals, while a mature man's assumption of the receptive role was abhorred as a dangerous transgression of gender norms. Conjugal relations and religious precepts The church, the most authoritative source of moral teachings on sexual behaviour, established guidelines and norms which in principle were equally applicable to men and women. For all, sex was licit only within marriage, with the conscious aim of procreation, in prescribed times and conditions, and in a single position, with the couple facing and the man above. All intercourse outside marriage, as well as conjugal sex 816
for mere pleasure, in forbidden positions, or in a manner that might impede generation, was condemned and prohibited. Although some late medieval theologians began to modify these tenets somewhat, sanctioning sensual pleasure as a reproductive aid and even permitting unconventional positions, the church's sexual orthodoxy remained restricted.6 How closely couples observed these prescriptions is another matter and is difficult to ascertain. That moralists continued to vehemently denounce practices such as anal intercourse that could serve contraceptive aims, and the rapid decline in wives' fertility that has been observed in fifteenth-century Tuscany, would suggest that many spouses disregarded the sexual guidance of their preachers and confessors.7 However its teachings on sexual conduct were received, the church played an important and perhaps more effective role in forming and transmitting notions of gender. While all were supposed to bear equal liability for their carnal acts, preachers presented sexual doctrines to the faithful in ways that carried considerably different messages for men and Women. The sermons of Bernardino of Siena to the Sienese and Florentines in the 1420s offer some pertinent illustrations.8 Bernardino's preaching on conjugal life fitted well with his culture's growing emphasis on marriage as a form of companionship between spouses who were to treat each other with mutual love and respect.9 Regarding sex, he maintained that spouses shared responsibility for preventing each other from sinning, stressed that fidelity was a duty of wives and husbands, and reproached both for sexual failings. His teachings were embedded in a framework of values consistent with church doctrine and patrician ideals, that endorsed sexual moderation for both sexes, sustained the notion that women's frailty of reason made them more inclined than men to sin, and upheld wives' subjection to their husbands' authority. Within these traditions, however, the emphases and omissions of his remarks, or the shifts depending on the audience addressed, show some ways in which gendered assumptions framed his teachings and how ideal genders were shaped. This can be seen most clearly in Bernardino's sermons about a basic tenet of church doctrine, that is, the equality of spouses' rights and duties With regard to the 'marriage debt': while carefully observing the proper times, position, devout spirit and procreative aim of sex, husbands and wives possessed an identical right to intercourse, which their spouse was obliged, under penalty of mortal sin, to 'render' to them. Bernardino reiterated that this injunction applied indistinctly to both partners, but in developing this egalitarian theme he employed examples and lessons that revealed and reinforced assumptions about gender difference. He normally directed his remarks on rendering the debt to wives, rather than to husbands, as if he assumed that males 817
more commonly importuned their spouses for sex, thus implicitly fortifying notions of man's 'active' nature and pressing desire and of woman's 'passivity' and, ideally, her modesty.10 Sexual continence and shame were considered women's crowning virtues, and when he discussed marital sex Bernardino reminded wives to remain as chaste as possible, never allowing their spouses to see them naked, to look at their 'shameful parts', or to touch them indecently. On the few occasions he acknowledged wives' prerogative to request intercourse, he in effect disempowered them by insisting on their modesty. So as to reduce a wife's temptation to commit adultery, it was better, he claimed, that the husband anticipate her request and render his carnal obligation voluntarily, rather than for her to voice her longings. While a wife was bound to respond only if asked expressly for sex and was exonerated if her husband's signals were unclear, a husband was obliged to react to the 'smallest sign' of his wife's yearning to protect her from the indelicacy of having to express her desire.11 Although Bernardino stressed women's virtue and modesty in carnal relations, he paradoxically also placed on them a greater burden of sexual knowledge and responsibility. He began one discussion on conjugal sex by warning that ignorance of sin exculpated neither partner, but proceeded to address only the wives, mothers and nubile girls in the congregation. Girls about to marry 'had to know how to do ' it', and sinned if they neglected to learn; mothers who failed to impart the facts of life to their daughters committed a serious mortal sin.12 Rarely, if ever, did he encourage fathers to give their sons lessons in sex education. Accordingly, Bernardino often instructed wives about the times and conditions when they could and should legitimately refuse their husbands' requests, thereby giving them some control over the frequency and character of intercourse. Although he warned both partners about the evils of unrestrained passion and specific sins, he tended to represent husbands as more inclined to 'disorderly affections' and excessive lust, which it was wives' duty to curb and correct. He insisted that, while wives were bound to obey their husbands, this never meant yielding to sinful requests. They were to refuse especially when their spouses wanted, as he implied they often did, to engage in acts contra naturam that impeded procreation. He also warned the wife to decline if her husband had imbibed too much wine, was crazed with lust, or desired sex so frequently that it might devitalize his seed, make him lose his senses, or cause illness or death.13 Repeating an ancient taboo, revived vigorously in the Renaissance, he admonished women to rebuff husbands' requests for coitus during their menstrual period, which according to both popular and learned belief risked generating deformed or leprous children.14 But in Italy, he conceded, a wife had better conceal her menstruous state and quietly render the debt, because otherwise her hus818
band would demand anal intercourse. Bernardino also instructed wives, not husbands, to assess their mates' age and their physical and spiritual condition when considering whether or how often to consent to intercourse. He more often mentioned husbands' threats to satisfy their desires elsewhere as binding wives to render the debt, a tacit acknowledgment of men's greater opportunities to pursue extra-marital relations. It was only wives, however, whom he urged to grant consent selectively, in order to wean their husbands gradually from sex and convince them to embrace abstinence - for the church, the 'perfect state'.15 The law and the courts Distinctions in the treatment of men and women also characterized the regulation of illicit sex, both in law and in court practice. Italian governments between 1400 and 1600 took a forceful role in legislating and policing sexual behaviour. Although legal norms, judiciary systems and the enforcement of sex laws varied widely, making generalization difficult, these distinctions commonly reflected male assumptions about the sexes' different natures and the need to enforce conventional gender roles and ideals. Laws and courts were influenced by beliefs that Women's desires were more ravenous than men's, that women were more prone to sin, and that therefore their sexual behaviour had to be regulated more strictly. 'The laws presume that all women are usually bad', according to one commentator, 'because they are so full of mischief and vices that are difficult to describe'; a Belluno law of 1428 decreed that no woman over the age of twenty should be presumed to be a Virgin, unless her virtue could be convincingly proved.16 Frequently, the social status, life-cycle stage or reputed virtue of the woman involved in illicit sex helped determine distinctions in guilt or penalties. This was especially true of rape and fornication, in which women were usually considered victims and absolved, but also of adultery or sodomy, in which women were often held criminally liable. Generally, the higher the woman's status was the greater the penalty levied on her seducer or lover, but finer distinctions were also drawn. The Florentine statutes of 1415 set a fine of 500 lire for men who had intercourse, whether consensual or forced, with a virgin, a respectable widow or a married woman, and allowed harsher punishment depending on the 'condition and quality of the person'. For the violation of women 'of lesser condition', the fine fell to 100 lire, while sex with a consenting servant or a prostitute carried no penalty at all.17 Venetian authorities levied progressively milder penalties on rapists according to whether their victims were prepubescent girls, wives, widows or, at the bottom of the scale, sexually mature nubile women; the severest penal ties were reserved for those who raped women of high status.18 819
The treatment of adultery revealed the sharpest gender discrepancies and bore the most onerous consequences for women. Despite the genderblind injunction against extra-marital sex, in practical terms adultery was a crime of wives. Husbands' infidelity, unless with a married woman, was considered of little significance, while that of wives was deemed a most serious offence that dishonoured their spouses and undermined the conjugal bond. Courts commonly punished an adulteress more severely than her partner, and her penalty usually included the forfeiture to her husband or children of her dowry - a key commodity in the definition of a woman's honour and often her sole means of subsistence in widow hood. Sometimes adulterous husbands were also legally subject to punishment: in Venice this might mean prison or exile plus the loss of their wife's dowry. But from 1480 to 1550 not a single Venetian husband was convicted for infidelity, unlike scores of wives prosecuted from the 1360s onward.19 This gender disparity accorded fully with religious precepts. According to Bernardino, in addition to her dowry an adulteress' husband had the right to expel her from his house, yet he forbade the wife of a philandering man to abandon him under any circumstances. He once stressed the differently gendered implications of infidelity by asserting that a husband's adultery was a greater sin, since as a man he was more rational and should therefore be more devoted, but a wife's unfaithfulness resulted in her 'perpetual shame', for she had 'no other virtue to lose' than her sexual honour.20 Women's shame also influenced the courts' tendency to punish them with public humiliation. Floggings and mutilations were common penal ties for men too, but it appears that women convicted of sex crimes were more frequently exposed to public derision. While male adulterers were usually fined, jailed or exiled, adulteresses (besides losing their dowry) were often whipped along the streets, in various states of undress and sometimes wearing a defamatory mitre on their heads; occasionally their heads were shaved. In Pescia in 1419 an adulteress, half-naked and wearing a 'crown of shame', was placed on a donkey and whipped through the countryside.21 In Florence between 1490 and 1515, more than half of the women convicted of sodomy with men were sentenced to a flogging or the pillory, while only a third of their partners received similar penalties; most of the men, unlike the women, were allowed to avoid the shaming by instead paying a fine. Since women's honour and reputation were more contingent than men's on community opinion, authorities tended to punish them in precisely that public fashion that would be most defamatory. Unauthorized sexual behaviour and gendered identities.
820
Social conventions, religious precepts and the policing of sex all played important roles in constructing and transmitting notions of gender ideals and of distinctions between the sexes, but so did sexual behaviour itself. The forms of sexual comportment that are best documented, however, are those that were illicit or occurred outside marriage, and it is consequently this realm of unauthorized sex that has proven most fruitful for historians seeking to throw new light on gender relations and identities in Renaissance Italy. A key figure here was the prostitute, central to the sexual culture and gender system of Renaissance Italy, both for the services she provided and for the symbolic functions she performed. Christian society had long considered prostitution a distasteful but necessary evil, a 'lesser sin' that was grudgingly tolerated to prevent greater transgressions: 'Do you see that in cities prostitutes are tolerated? This is a great evil, but if it were to be removed a great good would be eliminated, because there would be more adultery, more sodomy, which would be much worse'.22 In a sexual regime that prescribed female chastity but tacitly condoned male fornication, the prostitute played the dual role of furnishing an outlet for incontinent bachelors and philandering husbands, while also diverting their desires from adolescent males and women of 'good' families, whose virtue and honour were thus safeguarded. Prostitutes and their clients were usually exempt from laws against fornication and adultery, though authorities limited the locations and visibility of their debauchery to protect the morality of upright citizens and defend the purity of civic and sacred buildings. During the Renaissance, the notion of the public utility of prostitution underwent a significant evolution, however. From the mid-1300s, governments began to abandon earlier exclusionary policies that relegated prostitutes and brothels outside the city walls and forced such women to wear identifying signs or apparel. Instead, the state became the official sponsor of urban sexual commerce, establishing municipal brothels or designated residential areas where whores could lawfully ply their trade. Dress codes and other norms intended to distinguish prostitutes were relaxed or abandoned. Some cities created magistracies to administer the bordellos or defend whores from assault and other offences, such as the 'Officers of Decency' in Florence in 1403 and the 'Protectors of the Prostitutes' in Lucca in 1534.23 By around 1500, however, this attitude of tolerance was beginning to change again, in Italy as elsewhere. The complexity of the marriage market and the steady escalation in dowries made it increasingly difficult for girls to marry. Convents thrived as patrician families discarded growing numbers of unwed daughters by banishing them to nunneries, while humbler women slid into situations of solitude and poverty that made them easy recruits to the ranks of occasional and professional whores. 821
The spread of prostitutes from brothel areas into 'honest' neighbourhoods, together with the new phenomenon of prosperous courtesans who imitated the fashions and demeanour of patrician women, heightened concerns both about the bad example these unruly females posed to chaste women and about the blurring of social and moral distinctions between the donna onesta and the lusty meretrice. The sixteenth century consequently saw a return to a more negative assessment of the ancient sexual trade. Brothels remained open, but authorities revived or tightened policies on residence or dress to stigmatize prostitutes - laws that only a few wealthy courtesans could evade by buying licences or exploiting the protection of powerful clients.24 Influenced also by religious reform movements, there was a proliferation of institutions to convert prostitutes and to prevent poor or precarious females from slipping into the profession.25 Prostitutes, whether professionals in brothels, courtesans catering to upper-class clients, or women who occasionally sold themselves, undoubtedly played an important role in men's sexual education and experience, and thus in the formation of masculine identity. This was precisely one of the criticisms leveled by Catholic reformers after the Council of Trent against the evil influence prostitution had in shaping men's sexual habits and attitudes towards women.26 In their heyday the brothels were also central institutions of male sociability, especially for young bachelors. They provided a public forum where camaraderie and erotic licence mingled with outbreaks of violence, where men tested and displayed their virility in brawls and sexual conquests. It was in the brothel, an anecdote by the Florentine humanist Poliziano suggests, that youths who were once sodomites' 'passive' boyfriends could redeem their reputations by proving their manliness with compliant whores.27 Unauthorized sex involving males and females encompassed far more than men's commerce with prostitutes, however. Legal records suggest that fornication, rape and adultery were typical features of the sexual culture, such activities hardly being discouraged by the light penalties usually levied on (male) offenders. But even the serious crimes of sex with nuns and (by the later 1400s) heterosexual sodomy were also commonplace occurrences on the rosters of carnal offences.28 Evidence on unauthorized sex tends to confirm that, for women especially, the relationship between sexual behaviour and gender was subtly but significantly shaped by their social status. This illicit realm involved men from the entire social spectrum, but the women who were implicated were - except for nuns - mainly from the class of artisans, peasants, poor labourers and shopkeepers. Women of higher status were rarely embroiled in sexual scandals or crimes, and if they were, their families had the 822
means to conceal the disgrace, to discipline the fallen or defiant woman privately, or to ensure that their assailants or lovers were severely punished. On the whole, the protective net thrown up by patrician males around their families' females effectively minimized women's perilous liaisons with men outside their kin group. Conscious of their family's status and indoctrinated from childhood that its honour depended on their chastity, genteel women probably tended to assimilate the values and gender ideology of their class, scrupulously avoiding behaviour that could defame them as much as their fathers, husbands and kinsmen.29 The morality of humbler women was perhaps no less principled, but their circumstances of hardship and work, or their lack of networks of male kin, exposed them to the flattery of dishonest or fickle seducers, to sexual molestation by employers and social superiors, and to assaults by individuals or gangs. Court records are littered with such stories: plebeian girls and women attacked while alone on country roads or in the fields, servants and apprentices exploited sexually by their masters, isolated widows and their daughters powerless to defend their homes and virtue against assailants. Moreover, whether forced or consensual, most sexual relations between socially dominant men and their servants, slaves and other disadvantaged women simply evaded any judiciary control. The abandoned offspring of such unions swelled the overflowing foundling homes of Renaissance Italian cities.30 Because the imperatives of status, property and paternity that so heavily constrained patrician women's sexual behaviour carried less force among the less wealthy, working women appear to have had their own sense of proper sexual conduct and illicit activity, implying different customs and norms from those that prevailed among the dominant classes. For both rural and urban young people of the lower classes, for instance, premarital intercourse was evidently accepted and widespread, as long as relations were initiated with an intent to marry, or at least to create a stable bond. Such romances generally came to court as fornication only when the man failed to maintain his promise of marriage and abandoned his lover, often pregnant or with a young child. The loss of virginity impaired a woman's future chances of marrying, and the tribunals to which these deflowered victims of desertion or rape turned for redress usually sought to redeem their honour and restore their marriage prospects by forcing their seducers or violators to give them a dowry or, alternatively, to marry them. Prosecution of fornication often became embroiled in ambiguities about what constituted a valid marriage, since, according to the pre-Tridentine church, this required no other formalities than the partners' mutual consent. For this same reason, long-term informal unions and clandestine marriages remained unexceptional outside the upper classes well into the sixteenth century, and even women's extra-marital relations were not uncommon.31 Facilitated by the contacts that they forged with 823
men through neighbourly ties, work and sociable occasions, these plebeian romances were sometimes the fruit of an intolerable marriage, the evasion from a violent or overbearing husband, and may have been aided by neighbours and relatives. Such affairs typically attracted judicial attention only when they exceeded bounds of discretion or when a wife actually fled with her lover, signalling the open rupture of her conjugal union.32 Studies of illicit sex have also begun to illuminate in sharp relief the problem of men's sexual abuse of children, both female and male. In Florence from 1495 to 1515, over one third of the forty-nine documented victims of convicted rapists were girls between the ages of six and twelve, and at least half were aged fourteen or under; numerous others were seduced without force or were sodomized. One man condemned in 1488 regularly picked up children begging in the market, sodomized them in his home, and then offered them to others to ravish; some of his cronies, conducted before one ten-year-old victim, were reportedly repelled by her tender age and refused to touch her, but others had no such scruples.33 In a typical year, an average of four boys aged twelve or under would also come before the courts as victims of sodomizers, often having suffered severe anal injury. In Venice, too, pre-pubescent children were common victims of sexual abuse. A Venetian law of 1500, which prohibited pimps from prostituting girls under the age of twelve, revealed that it was regular practice to offer clients girls as young as seven to nine years of age to be sodomized. The abuse of children merits further attention, for this was evidently not merely a problem of individual aberration. The frequent subjugation of impotent juveniles probably reflects a psycho sexual immaturity and aggressiveness, and an insecurity about masculine identity that had deep social, cultural and familial roots.34 Another prominent, if less explored, aspect of male behaviour was assaults by gangs against women or younger boys. In Florence between 1495 and 1515, nineteen out of forty-nine documented female rape victims were attacked by at least two men, and typically by three to six or more; in 1499, thirteen men abducted a married woman from her home and violated her. Many more men took part in collective ravishings (eighty-nine) than in single assaults (thirty), and among the perpetrators, patrician youths figured prominently (thirty-four of eighty-nine). Groups of men also brutally sodomized women, such as Costanza, a thirty-year-old servant sodomized and raped by fourteen youths in 1497, or Francesca, a married woman who in 1501 was anally raped by thirty assailants. Gangs attacked adolescent males as well, part of a broader context in which the sexual 'possession' of boys by groups of men, whether by force or not, was both common and deeply implicated in the fashioning of manly and social identities. The gangs that terrorized women and boys offered strength in 824
numbers to overpower their victims and guarantee the success of their sordid ventures, but their members also gave one another psychological incentive and support, an incitement to prove their virility before their comrades as, one after the other, they humiliated their helpless prey.35 Besides' reinforcing an impression of the aggressive and predatory character of masculine behaviour and identity, evidence about illicit sex can also provide glimpses of individuals who implicitly evaded or openly challenged not only the law but also prevailing gender conventions. A few mature men, as will be seen, defied masculine norms by taking the proscribed receptive role in same-sex relations. Women, by contrast, were not always passive victims but instead often assumed an assertive role in seeking to fulfil their sexual desires and in shaping their own affective experiences and sense of identity. Some enterprising nubile girls apparently engaged calculatingly in pre-marital sex, to circumvent parental objections over their choice of a spouse. In extra-marital affairs wives are commonly found taking the initiative, perhaps to relieve the monotony of a loveless union or escape the brutality of a cruel husband.36 Especially striking examples of women resisting gender and social conventions to pursue erotic pleasure and male companionship come from what is, at first glance, a most unlikely source - the nunnery. Many of the women who swelled Italy's -bulging convents were deposited there, willingly or not, by genteel families unable to place them in suitable marriages; not all were prepared or willing to submit to a regime of chastity or to renounce the world. Not only were nuns often implicated in sexual scandals involving laymen or priests, but some managed to conduct quite rich sexual lives, apparently shielded by a web of complicity within and perhaps outside the convent.37 Other women confuted the submissive role assigned them in gender ideology by withstanding assailants or by denouncing abusive husbands. A distinct sense of determination and proud identity emerges from the protest that a young Florentine patrician wife, Agnoletta de' Ricci, made to her husband Ardingo, whom she publicly accused in 1497 of having repeatedly sodomized her: 'I told him that in no way did I want him to treat me like an animal, but like a woman of perfect character'.38 Such examples serve as reminders that, though the dominant ideology of gender and sexual behaviour was powerfully constraining, it was also contestable - and contested - terrain. Same-sex relations and masculine identity Same-sex relations between males, classified as sodomy, provide an especially revealing perspective on the construction of masculine identity. Ranked among the most nefarious of carnal acts in both church doctrine and legal rhetoric, sodomy - mainly but not only sex between males - was one of the most frequently prosecuted and 825
heavily penalized crimes in Italy between 1400 and 1600. Reputedly common across the peninsula, sodomy so alarmed the governments of Venice, Florence and Lucca that they created special judiciary commissions to prosecute it (in 1418, 1432 and 1448 respectively). Penalties and patterns of control varied, but in Florence the Office of the Night, as the magistracy there was known, unearthed an exceptionally thriving sodomitical milieu. Between 1432 and 1502 as many as 17,000 males were incriminated and some 3,000 convicted for homosexual relations. Indeed, sodomy was so common and its policing in the later fifteenth century so effective that, by the time they reached the age of forty, probably two of every three Florentine men had been officially implicated.39 Whether this 'vice' was as pervasive elsewhere remains to be seen; nonetheless, the evidence suggests that throughout Italy same-sex relations shared similar forms, contexts and ascribed cultural meanings. Generally, homosexual behaviour had little to do with current notions of sexual orientation or identity, but was organized instead around notions of gender and life stages. For most males, same-sex sodomy was a sporadic or temporary transgression that did not preclude relations with females or imply anything about long-term inclinations.40 Some contemporaries saw connections between homoeroticism and the quality of relations between men and women. Bernardino of Siena singled out sodomites for their loathing and paltry esteem of women, while the Sienese novelliere Pietro Fortini attributed the homoerotic bent of both Florentine and Lucchese men to their universal misogyny, asserting that their 'vices are such [referring to sodomy] that they cannot bear to look at women, who they say are their enemies'. Acting in part on the belief that making public women accessible would help curtail sodomy, the governments of both Florence and Lucca promoted municipalized prostitution. This sexual equation was given a different twist by Savonarola: Florentine parents, he said, so feared the disgrace of unwed pregnant daughters that they encouraged their sons to engage instead in what they deemed the 'lesser evil' of sex with men.41 Notions of gender also shaped sex between males in more direct ways, while homosexual behaviour in tum had important implications for masculine identities - implications that were relevant for all males, whether they engaged in sodomy or not. Same-sex relations in Italy corresponded to a hierarchical pattern, very ancient in Mediterranean cultures and long-lasting throughout Europe, in which adult males took the so-called active, usually anally insertive role with 'passive' teenage boys or adolescents to the age of about eighteen or twenty. In Florence, the bestdocumented example, nine out of ten active partners were aged nineteen and above; 826
mainly in their twenties and thirties, their mean age was twenty-seven. Of those who took the passive role, nine out of ten were between the ages of thirteen and twenty, with a mean age of sixteen. Reciprocal or age-reversed relations were rare, and limited to adolescence, while it was rarer still for mature males to have sex together. Indeed, the assumption of the receptive sexual role by adult men constituted a widely respected taboo.42 Sex between males thus always embodied oppositions - older and younger, active and passive, penetrator and penetrated. These were far from neutral distinctions, for contrasting values related to gender adhered to them, values such as dominance and submission, honour and shame, and, not least, masculine and feminine. These differences were neatly expressed in fourteenth-century Florentine laws, which blandly designated the active partner either as pollutus (morally corrupt) or as someone who committed sodomy with another, but contemptuously branded the passive as one who had dirtied or disgraced himself, or who 'willingly suffered the said crime to be inflicted upon him'.43 The gendered meaning of sexual roles, central to conceptions of same sex behaviour, emerged most vividly from denunciations accusing men and boys of sodomy. Informers commonly referred to the passive partner, and only to him, with derogatory feminine expressions and metaphors. People derided sodomized boys with the epithets bardassa, derived from an Arabic word for slave and designating a debauched boy who offered himself to men, usually for payment; puttana (whore); and cagna or cagna in gestra (bitch or bitch in heat); all evoking the common place of voracious female lust. Most often, however, informers referred to them simply as women, stating that a man kept or used a boy 'as a woman', or even 'as his wife'. What turned these boys symbolically into women was not any effeminate appearance or manner, but rather their assumption of the subordinate position in sex, which was construed in this culture as feminine. In contrast, accusers virtually never represented the 'active' partner in feminine terms, calling him at most a 'sodomite' or 'bugger'. Neither term bore overt gendered connotations other than indicating the dominant role in sex. Indeed, while passive partners were hardly ever described using these terms, both were regularly used to indicate men who sodomized women.44 Late medieval and early modem Italians evidently found it difficult to conceive of same-sex relations whether between males or females - outside the traditional gender dichotomy of masculine and feminine roles.45 These representations suggest that the sodomite, though castigated as a criminal and a sinner, was perceived as conforming to the behaviours and values defined in this 827
culture as masculine. As long as he observed proper conventions, a man's sexual relations with boys did not compromise his status as a 'normal' and virile male. Indeed, the act of dominating another male, even if a boy, might well have reinforced it. Since sodomizing someone did not constitute deviation from 'manly' norms, and the 'womanly' role was in effect limited to very young males, this permitted all mature men to engage in same-sex activity - as very many did - without endangering their masculine identity or being relegated to a distinctive category of deviants. What was an aberration was, of course, the passive sexual role. But as this was normally restricted to the phase of physical and social immaturity, it marked only a temporary detour from a boy's progress towards manhood. In Florence, virtually all adolescent passives whose later same-sex activity is documented converted with success to a solely dominant role with teenage boys. This helps explain why passive minors usually received much lighter penalties than their companions, or, as in Florence, no punishment whatsoever, no matter how promiscuous they were. If penalties were levied, they often involved corporal punishments of the sort usually applied to women.46 This also accounts for the paramount significance attributed to the transition to sexual adulthood, with its expectations of adherence to virile conventions. For Florentine boys up to the age of eighteen or twenty, the passive role was considered more or less consonant with their status, but afterward most men carefully avoided the shame of being penetrated 'like a woman'. This was a crucial experiential and symbolic passage, and the border between passive and active, boyhood and maturity, feminine and masculine, was anxiously patrolled by both community and state. With a combination of embarrassment and derision, informers castigated the rare youth or older man who still 'let themselves be sodomized', emphasizing their dishonour and disgrace. The authorities often reinforced these concerns about proper masculine roles by punishing over-aged passives with exemplary penalties of public floggings, exorbitant fines or exile. So powerful was the aversion to older men's sexual receptivity, in particular, that when Salvi Panuzzi a sixty-three-year-old citizen long notorious for sodomizing boys, publicly admitted in 1496 that he himself had been sodomized by several youths, the Night Officers condemned him to death by burning, one of only three known capital sentences they levied in their seventy year activity. Yet while they abhorred his acts, they also feared that his execution, by rendering public his womanish 'evil ways, ... might bring shame on the entire city' and make a mockery of Florentine manhood. They therefore commuted his sentence, upon payment of a huge fine, to life imprisonment hidden away in la pazzeria, the prison ward for the insane.47
828
The exemplary punishments imposed on adult men for taking the 'unmanly' sexual role emphasize that individual erotic behaviour and collective gender norms and identity formed part of a seamless whole. Informers expressed concern that the passivity of older men, a disgrace to themselves, would also implicate and malign the honour - that is, the virility - of the entire male community. By defusing the potential shame of Panuzzi's execution, and by secluding this violator of manhood among the dangerously insane, the Night Officers affirmed both the public nature of gender and the commune's role in defending the conventions that helped fashion masculine identity. Such worries were hardly limited to Florence. In 1516, Venetian lawmakers, their offended sense of masculine propriety fairly bursting from their words, resolved to stamp out 'an absurd and unheard-of thing [that] has recently become known, which can in no way be tolerated, that several most wicked men of 30, 40, 50, 60 years and more have given themselves like prostitutes and public whores to be passives in such a dreadful excess'. This revelation scandalized local commentators, in part because it evoked a deep anxiety that the hierarchy of age and gender on which masculine identity was constructed risked being subverted. One nobleman was appalled that 'Fathers and Senators', men who were 'mature, full of wisdom, with white beards' - the very symbols of patriarchy - would shamelessly allow youths to penetrate them, and he branded this 'truly a wicked and abhorrent thing, never before heard of in our times, especially among old men'. Equally menacing to their manly sense of self and civic image was the news that informed foreigners were now gleefully ridiculing the virility of all Venetians.48 Similar concerns about defending Florentine manhood led the government of Duke Cosimo I, in a law of 1542, to single out the adult man Who dared allow himself to be sodomized by ordering his public execution by burning, 'for his own punishment and as an example to others', as 'a wicked and infamous man'.49 Perhaps more effectively than any other contemporary erotic behaviour, the samesex practices described here, with their age-, role and gender-bound conventions, underline the distance that separates the culture of sex and gender in Renaissance Italy from that which prevails in the modern Western world. Little trace, if any, can be found then of the categories that today largely define sexual experience and personae; it was not, in other words, the biological sex of one's partners in erotic pleasures that significantly distinguished and classified individuals, but rather the extent to which their sexual behaviour conformed to culturally determined gender roles. In different but related ways, the norms and ideology of gender forcefully shaped and constrained the experience of sex for both women and men. And sexual activity, in turn, played important roles in fashioning gendered identities and – reinforcing – or sometimes challenging - traditional gender conventions. As historians and other scholars 829
continue to explore the complex and still relatively uncharted universe of sexual comportments, attitudes and controls throughout the rural and urban communities of the Italian peninsula, their studies promise to further enrich our understanding of the culturally specific modes of the construction of sex and gender in late medieval and early modem Italy. Notes 1 Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche sopra Amos e Zaccaria, P. Ghiglieri (ed.) 3 vols (Rome, 19712), vol. I, 194, 200 (23February1496). 2 Matteo Palmieri, Vita Civile, F. Battaglia (ed.) (Bologna, 1944), 133. 3 Donato Giannotti, Opere politiche e letterarie di Donato Giannotti, F. Polidori (ed.) 2 vols (Florence, 1850), vol. I, 230. On late male marriage and sexual behaviour, see David Herlihy, 'Vieillir a Florence au Quattrocento', Anna/es, ESC 24(1969), 1346-9; Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York, 1985), esp. 159--62; Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1996), 113-32. 4 James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, 1987), 512; Vern Bullough, 'On being a male in the Middle Ages', in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, C. A. Lees (ed.) (Minneapolis, 1994), 41-2. 5 Natalie Davis, 'Women on top', in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eig11t Essays (Stanford, 1975), 124-51. 6 Nicholas Davidson, 'Theology, nature and the law: sexual sin and sexual crime in Italy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century', in Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy, T. Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (eds) (Cambridge, 1994), 77-85. 7 David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs families: une etude du catasto florentin de 1427 (Paris, 1978), 441-2; Christiane Klapisch Zuber, 'Famille, religion et sexualite a Florence au Moyen Age', Revue de l'histoire des religions 209(1992), 381-92; Maria Serena Mazzi, Prostitute e lenont nella Firenze del Quattrocento (Milan, 1991), 55-9, 61-86. 8 Prediche volgari sul campo di Siena 1427, Carlo Delcorno (ed.) 2 vols (Milan, 1989), vol. I, 538--621 (hereafter Siena 1427); Le prediche oolgari, C. Cannarozzi (ed.) 2 vols (Pistoia, 1934), vol. I, 380-404 (hereafter Florence 1424); Le prediche volgari, C. Cannarozzi (ed.) 3 vols (Florence, 1940), vol. II, 173-90 (hereafter Florence 1425). 9 For example, Siena 1427, I, 556, 568-9; Florence 1424, I, 412; Florence 1425, II, 177. On increasingly positive evaluations of marriage, see Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans, 5868. 10 Florence 1424, I, 381-404; Siena 1427, I, 573--603. 11 Siena 1427, 594, 617-18; Florence 1425, II, 179; Florence 1424, I, 393. 12 Siena 1427, 577-83. 13 Florence 1424, I, 388-9, 395-8; Siena 1427, I, 588-91, 593, 600, 602-3. 14 Florence 1424, I, 387-8; Siena 1427, I, 591-2. On menstruation beliefs, see Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Differences in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, an~ Culture (Cambridge, 1993), 173--6, 268; Ottavia Niccoli, '"Menstruum quasi monstruum": monstrous births and menstrual taboo in the sixteenth century', in E. Muir and G. Ruggiero (eds) Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective (Baltimore, 1990), 1-25. 15 Siena 1427, I, 592, 594-7, 600-1. 16 Brundage, Law, 492; quote from Giovanni Nevizzani, Silva nuptial is ... (Lyons, 1524), fol. 21 va (cited in ibid., 548-9). 830
17 Sta~uta populi et communis florentiae publica auctoritate collecta castigata et prae posita anno salutis MCCCCVI, 3 vols (Fribourg, 1778-83), vol. III, rubric 112 318. ' 18 R1;1ggiero, Boundaries of Eros, 96-108. 19 lbid., 45~9; Giovanni Scarabello, 'Devianza sessuale ed interventi di giustizia a Venezia nella prima meta del XVI secolo', in Tiziano e Venezia, exhibition catalogue (Vicenza, 1980), 79; Brundage, Law, 517-21. 20 Siena 1427, I, 557; Florence 1424, I, 413; Florence 1425, II, 178. 21 Sam1;1el K. Cohn, Jr., Women in the Streets: Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore, 1996), 114; see also Brundage, Law, 520; Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, 54-5. 22 Giordano da Pisa, Quaresimale Jiorentino 1305-1306, Carlo Delcorno (ed.) (Florence, 1974), 210. 23 Richard C. Trexler, 'Florentine prostitution in the fifteenth century: patrons and clients', in idem, The Women of Renaissance Florence (Binghamton, 1993), 31-65; Mazzi, Prostitute; John Brackett, 'The Florentine Onesta and the control of prostitution, 1403-1680', Sixteenthcentury Journal 24(1993): 273-300; Elisabeth Pavan, 'Police des moeurs, societe et politique a Venise a la fin du Moyen Age', Revue historique 264(1980): 241-88; Romano Canosa and Isabella Colonnello, Storia della prostituzione in Italia dal Quattrocento alla fine de/ Settecento (Rome, 1989). 24 Trexler, 'Florentine prostitution', 60-5; Mazzi, Prostitute, 225-31, 403-7. On rising dowry values, see Anthony Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge MA, 1994), 298-310. On the growth of monasteries and convent populations, see Richard C. Trexler, 'Celibacy in the Renaissance: the nuns of Florence', in idem, The Women of Renaissance Florence, 10-19; Judith C. Brown, 'Monache a Firenze all'inizio dell'eta moderna: un'analisi demografica', Quaderni storici 29(1994): 117-52. On courtesans, see Brackett, 'Onesta', 293-5; II gioco dell'amore: le cortigiane di Venezia dal Trecento al Settecento, exhibition cata logue (Milan, 1990). 25 Sherill Cohen, The Evolution of Women's Asylums since 1500: From Refuges for ~xProstitutes to Shelters for Battered Women (New Yor.k, 1992); Lu~ia ~errante, Honor regained: women in the Casa del Soccorso di San Paolo in sixteenth century Bologna', in Muir and Ruggiero, (eds) Sex and Gender, 46-72. 26 Brackett, 'Onesta', 293; Guido Ruggiero, 'Marriage, love, sex, and Renaissance civic morality', in J. G. Turner (ed.) Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images (Cambridge, 1993), 25-6. 27 Angelo Poliziano, Detti piacevoli, T. Zanato (ed.) (Rome, 1983), 78, no .. 211. 28 Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 215-16; Canosa and Colonnello, Sioria, 67-71; Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, 70-84, 118-20. . . . 29 For unchaste women from 'good' families, see ibid., 36-9, 55-64; and Mazzi, Prostitute, 8896. 30 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, 'Women servants in Florence during the fou~ teenth and fifteenth centuries' in B. A. Hanawalt (ed.) Women and Work m Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington, 1986), 69-70; Philip G~vitt, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410-1536 (Ann Arbor, 1990), 207. 31 Brundage, Law, 514-18; Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, 16:-44, 89-108; Sandra Cavallo and Simona Cerruti 'Female honor and the social control of repro duction in Piedmont between 1600 and 1800', in Muir and Ruggiero (eds) Sex and Gender, 73-109; Gene Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence (Berkeley, 1986); Daniela Lombardi, 'Intervention by church and state in marriage disputes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Florence', in Dean and Lowe, (eds) Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy, 142-56. In 831
Florence, unlike Venice, men condemned for fornication or rape were rarely given the option of marrying their victims, though they commonly had to provide a dowry for the unmarried ones. 32 Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, 45-69; Mazzi, Prostitute, 103-8. 33 ASF, OGBR 79, fols 9v-10r (8 March 1488). 34 Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 162-3; Scarabello, 'Devianza', 80; Patricia Labalme, 'Sodomy and Venetian justice in the Renaissance', Legal History Review 52(1984): 236-7; Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, 95, 121-5, 149-54. 35 Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 163, 182-9; Ruggiero, 'Marriage', 17-18; Mazzi, Prostitute, 110-12. Cases cited: ASF, OGBR 113, 78v (6 March 1499); ASF, UN 31, 65r-66v, 119v (21 February-5 April 1497); ibid. 34, 56r (26August1501). 36 Elizabeth S. Cohen, 'No longer virgins: self-presentation by young women in late Renaissance Rome', in M. Migiel and J. Schiesari (eds) Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance (Ithaca NY, 1991), 172-4; Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, 16-69; Mazzi, Prostitute, 87, 103-16; Scarabello, 'Devianza', 78. 37 Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, 78-84; Scarabello, 'Devianza', 78-9. 38 ASF, UN 31, 44v (3 January 1497). 39 Rocke, Forbidden Friendships; Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, 109-45; Labalme, 'Sodomy'; Pavan, 'Police', 266-88; Canossa and Colonnello, Storia, 57-73. 40 Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 87-132. 41 Bernardino of Siena, Florence 1425, II, 276; Siena 1427, I, 560; ibid., II, 1158, 1160, 1166; Novel/e di Pietro Fortini, T. Rughi (ed.) (Milan, 1923), 64; Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche sopra i Salmi, V. Romano (ed.) 2 vols (Rome, 1969), vol. I, 164. 42 Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 94-7, 113-19. Passive partners in Venice appear somewhat younger than in Florence, though this may only reflect poorer reporting of age there; Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, 118, 121-5; Pavan, 'Police', 284. 43 R. Caggese (ed.) Statuti del/a repubblica fiorentina, 2 vols (Florence, 1910-21), vol. II, 218; ASF, PR 52, 128rv, (13 April 1365). 44 Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 105-10. 45 Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1986). 46 Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 51-2, 61, 99-101, 214-15; Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, 121-4. 47 Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 101-5. 48 Labalme, 'Sodomy', 243 n73, 251 n160; Scarabello, 'Devianza', 82. 49 L. Cantini (ed.) Legislazione toscana raccolta e il/ustrata, 32 vols (Florence, 1800-8), vol. I, 211-13.
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