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Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe

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Habent sua fata libelli

Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies Series General Editor Raymond A. Mentzer University of Iowa Editorial Board of Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies Elaine Beilin Framingham State College Miriam U. Chrisman University of Massachusetts, Emerita Barbara B. Diefendorf Boston University Paula Findlen Stanford University Scott H. Hendrix Princeton Theological Seminary Jane Campbell Hutchison University of Wisconsin–Madison Ralph Keen University of Iowa Robert M. Kingdon University of Wisconsin, Emeritus Mary B. McKinley University of Virginia

Helen Nader University of Arizona Charles G. Nauert University of Missouri, Emeritus Theodore K. Rabb Princeton University Max Reinhart University of Georgia Sheryl E. Reiss Cornell University John D. Roth Goshen College Robert V. Schnucker Truman State University, Emeritus Nicholas Terpstra University of Toronto Margo Todd University of Pennsylvania

Merry Wiesner-Hanks University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

an Time,Space, omen’s n Lives early

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modern europe

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dited by Anne Jacobson Schutte Thomas Kuehn Silvana Seidel Menchi

Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies Volume 57 Truman State University Press

Title Page

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Copyright 2001 by Truman State University Press, Kirksville, Missouri 63501 All rights reserved. Published 2001, Second Printing 2005. Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies Series tsup.truman.edu Cover illustration: Cittore Carpaccio, Two Venetian Ladies , c. 1510–15. Oil on wood. Courtesy of Civico Museo Correr, Venice Cover and title page design: Teresa Wheeler Text: AGaramond, copyright Adobe Systems Inc.; display type: Optimum DTC. Printed by McNaughton & Gunn, Inc., Saline, Michigan USA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Time, space, and women’s lives in early modern Europe / edited by Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, Silvana Seidel Menchi. p. cm. — (Sixteenth century essays & studies : 57) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-943549-82-5 (case : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-943549-90-6 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Women—History—Middle Ages, 500–1500—Congresses. 2. Women—Europe— History—Congresses. 3. Women—Europe—Social conditions—Congresses. I. Schutte, Anne Jacobson. II. Kuehn, Thomas, 1950– III. Seidel Menchi, Silvana. IV. Title. V. Series. HQ1143.T4613 2001 305.4'09'02—dc21 2001043061 CIP

Truman State University Press gratefully acknowledges permission to publish these articles in English that first appeared in Italian in Tempi e spazi di vita femminile tra medioevo ed età moderna, a cura di Silvana Seidel Menchi, Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, Bologna: il Mulino, 1999.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any format by any means without written permission from the publisher.

∞ The paper in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

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Contents Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Introduction Thomas Kuehn and Anne Jacobson Schutte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Part 1 Women’s History and Social History: Are Structures Necessary? Merry Wiesner-Hanks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 The Querelle des Femmes as a Cultural Studies Paradigm Margarete Zimmermann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 Grammar in Arcadia Gabriele Beck-Busse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29 The Girl and the Hourglass: Periodization of Women’s Lives in Western Preindustrial Societies Silvana Seidel Menchi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41

Part 2 Getting Back the Dowry: Venice, c. 1360–1530 Stanley Chojnacki. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77 Daughters, Mothers, Wives, and Widows: Women as Legal Persons Thomas Kuehn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97 Women Married Elsewhere: Gender and Citizenship in Italy Julius Kirshner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .117

Part 3 “Saints” and “Witches”: in Early Modern Italy: Stepsisters or Strangers? Anne Jacobson Schutte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .153

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The Dimensions of the Cloister: Enclosure, Constraint, and Protection in Seventeenth-Century Italy Francesca Medioli. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .165 The Third Status Gabriella Zarri . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .181

Part 4 “Non lo volevo per marito: in modo alcuno”: Forced Marriages, Generational Conflicts, and the Limits of Patriarchal Power in Early Modern Venice, c. 1580–1680 Daniela Hacke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .203 Becoming a Mother in the: Seventeenth Century: The Experience of a Roman Noblewoman Marina d’Amelia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .223 Space, Time, and the Power of Aristocratic Wives in Yorkist and Early Tudor England, 1450–1550 Barbara J. Harris. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .245 Eighteenth-Century Marriage Contracts: Linking Legal and Gender History Gunda Barth-Scalmani . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .265

Part 5 En-Gendering Selfhood: Defining Differences and Forging Identities in Early Modern Europe Kristin Eldyss Sorensen Zapalac . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .285 Construction of Masculinity and Male Identity in Personal Testimonies: Hans Von Schweinichen (1552–1616) in His Memorial Heide Wunder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .305 About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .325 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .329

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Illustrations Grammar in Arcadia

Gabriele Beck-Busse

Fig. 1. Pietro Longhi, Il Precettore dei Grimani (The Teacher of the Grimani Family). Private collection of Alessandro Orsi, Milan. Photo courtesy of the Museo Correr, Venice. (Fototeca V.19209) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37 Fig. 2. Pietro Longhi, La Lezione di geografia (The Geography Lesson). Pinacoreca Querini Stampalia, Venice. Photo courtesy of the Museo Correr, Venice. (Fototeca V.19213) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38 The Girl and the Hourglass

Silvana Seidel Menchi

Fig. 1. Jörg Breu the Younger, The Scale of Life, 1540. Photo courtesy of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .52 Fig. 2. Giorgione, The Three Ages of Man. Photo courtesy of the Galleria Palatina, Florence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53 Fig. 3. Cristofano Bertelli, The Ages of Woman’s Life, c. 1560. Photo courtesy of the Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. . . .54 Fig. 4. Anonymous Italian, The Ages of Woman, mid-sixteenth century? Photo courtesy of the Warburg Institute, London. . . . . . . . . . . .55 Fig. 5. Bernardo Strozzi, Old Woman at the Mirror. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56 Fig. 6. Hans Baldung Grien, The Three Ages of Life and Death, 1509–11. Photo courtesy of the Kunstmuseum, Vienna . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59 Fig. 7. Hans Baldung Grien, The Seven Ages of Woman, 1544–45. Courtesy of the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60 Fig. 8. Copy of Hans Baldung Grien, The Three Ages of Woman and Death. Courtesy of the Musée des Beaux Arts de Rennes . . . . . . . . . . . . .61

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Introduction Thomas Kuehn and Anne Jacobson Schutte This volume grows out of an international conference held in October 1997 in Trento and nearby Rovereto under the sponsorship of the Istituto Storico Italo–Germanico and the Dipartimento di Scienze Filologiche e Storiche of the Università degli Studi di Trento.1 Some thirty scholars from Italy, Germany, France, Austria, and the United States, with the help of numerous auditors, attempted to address a set of problems associated with “Time and Space in Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe.” In planning the conference, the organizing committee (Silvana Seidel Menchi, Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, Gabriella Zarri, and Heide Wunder) sought to move beyond the question “Did women have a Renaissance?” posed twenty years earlier by Joan Kelly-Gadol,2 which was soon criticized as being narrowly framed and based solely on literary evidence.3 Instead, we conceived the agenda in terms of the female life cycle, from birth to old age and death.4 And we thought in terms of the social and physical spaces within which women lived their

1The history departments of Clemson University and the University of Virginia provided moral endorsement. 2Joan Kelly-Gadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 137–64; Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, and Susan Stuard, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 175–201; also in Joan Kelly, Women, History, and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 19–50. 3Kelly’s formulation of the question no longer seems useful; it was omitted from Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Susan Mosher Stuard, and Merry E. Wiesner, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). For a selective list of responses to Kelly’s question, see Carole Levin, “Women in the Renaissance,” in Becoming Visible, 3rd. ed., 169–70 (n. 3). 4This inspiration came from an anthology used by one of the organizers with great success in the classroom: Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States, ed. Erna Olafson Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981). See also Merry E. Wiesner, chap. 2, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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Introduction lives and influenced their societies, communities, and families.5 We asked presenters to emphasize the options available to women in various regions, social classes, and statuses of life, while not neglecting the ways in which women’s choices were conditioned and limited. In addition, we requested that they pay attention to major theoretical issues in the historical study of women: the older “oppression” model versus the newer “agency” model; the advantages and disadvantages of focusing exclusively on women as a distinct social group (history of women) or concentrating on relations between the sexes and the construction of “femaleness” and “maleness” (history of gender). Thus we aimed to foster a refinement of scholarly investigation that would reveal the existence of, or at least point the way toward, a new paradigm. Predictably, this ambitious charge, formulated in distinctively North American terms, proved more congenial to some presenters than to others. Practical limitations, furthermore, precluded exhaustive coverage of early modern Europe: with a few exceptions, the essays gathered here focus upon two geographical areas, Italy and Germany, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.6 Nonetheless, we believe that the volume as a whole succeeds in offering fresh insights drawn from research in a variety of sources, many of them not fully explored (if at all) in earlier scholarship. Perhaps more important, it serves as a methodological benchmark. Focusing on stages of the life cycle, these essays demonstrate, opens a wider window on gender— mainly but not exclusively the female gender—than did some previous approaches. This focus reformulates the “woman question” in two ways: by moving out from the realm of elite men’s prescriptive pronouncements about female nature (although that subject still merits attention and receives it in several essays included here) to women’s lived experience; and by changing the singular, “woman,” to the plural, “women.” Here readers will encounter women of different ages in a variety of socioeconomic and cultural situations—from the much studied but not fully understood noblewomen of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence and Venice, to their counterparts in Rome and England, to the women who chose or were compelled to take

5Here we were guided by other anthologies: Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History, ed. Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 6For various reasons, four papers presented at the conference did not find their way into this volume. Two of them are included in the Italian version, Tempi e spazi di vita femminile tra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. Silvana Seidel Menchi, Anne Jacobson Schutte, and Thomas Kuehn (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999): Isabelle Chabot, “Seconde nozze e identità materna nella Firenze del medioevo”; and Luise Schorn-Schütte, “Il matrimonio come professione: La moglie del pastore evangelico.” Two other contributions were not submitted for publication: Mary Garrard, “Artemisia Gentileschi: A New Painting and Another Identity”; and Beate Schuster, “Zeit und Raum für Prostitution vom 14. bis 16. Jahrhundert.”

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religious vows, to the bourgeois women of eighteenth-century Salzburg. Significantly, these women do not stand alone in a monolithic, unambiguously subordinate, and passive position. On the contrary, we see them interacting with their parents, husbands, and other male “superiors,” as well as with their children, in an effort to shape their own lives. One of the concomitants of new approaches to the study of women is a new form of periodization, addressed in part 1. Kelly-Gadol’s question began from a conventional—some would say overly male—periodization in which the Renaissance figures as the beginning of the modern world. Although she saw herself challenging accepted schemes of periodization in her essay, Kelly-Gadol did not shift temporal markers so much as recast the quality of periods, mainly the Renaissance, in terms of their effects on women. In her wide-ranging essay, Merry Wiesner-Hanks works through themes of capitalism and patriarchy and asks whether one can find a structure or fashion a master narrative for women in early modern Europe. Prodded in part by consideration of the interplay between historical and literary studies, she offers searching criticism of the term “early modern.” The other essays in this section pursue this theme of literature and history and the conjoined theme of periodization. Margarete Zimmermann examines the literary querelle des femmes as a vehicle by which women’s voices came eventually to be heard, tracking its changing terms to twentieth-century feminism. Gabriele Beck-Busse compares two Arcadian dialogues intended to provide instruction in language in terms of their depictions of women. Finally, Silvana Seidel Menchi surveys multiple literary and artistic depictions of the stages of women’s lives, ending with legally significant ages. Her essay thus addresses the stages of the life course as usually laid out by men and wrapped around changes in the female reproductive cycle. Part 2 contains essays by the three male contributors to the conference and this volume, all from the United States. No papers were presented by males from other countries, notably not the host nation, Italy—which speaks about the academic status and acceptability of women’s history in European countries. These three are grouped not in order to set them apart from those of the women contributors but because they are similar in several ways. All three are Italian in focus, and in chronological terms they are the earliest papers in the book, covering fourteenth- and fifteenth-century events and developments. But they are consistent in more than temporal and spatial terms, which may indicate something about the sorts of concerns that bring men to the study of women’s history. The problem of female agency in the face of the ideology and laws of patriarchy is a common concern. In investigating that problem, all three also exploit legal and bureaucratic sources (in contrast to the literary sources at the heart of the essays in the first section): notarial texts, statutes, lawyers’ consilia, civic and fiscal records. Study of female agency and of these sorts of sources is not a uniquely male endeavor. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, who served as a commentator at the Trento conference, set the tone and direction of research in a series of forceful and elegant essays that first began to appear over

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Introduction twenty years ago.7 Interestingly, to varying degrees all three male authors seek to modify Klapisch-Zuber’s judgment that (largely Florentine) women were subordinated to family structures that “remained under the control of level-headed males” and that women “were not permanent elements in the lineage.”8 Dowry emerges as central in all these reassessments. Stanley Chojnacki attempts to demonstrate that Venetian husbands, in contrast to their Florentine counterparts, even in the face of dowry inflation that he pegs at 350 percent over two centuries, pledged property and securities to back return of their wives’ dowries following their (the husbands’) deaths. These women were thus given incentive not to remarry but to remain in their husbands’ homes and raise their children. Thomas Kuehn’s essay examines how Florentine women, against the legal backdrop of the academic ius commune and civic statutes, grew into greater legal responsibility and activity over the life course. Not surprisingly, he finds that widows, directly possessed of property (including the now returned dowry) and facing family responsibilities without a husband, had the most potential and need to be active in the disposal and use of property and legal rights. Their relationships with marital and natal kin also shifted during their lives; attention to such relationships is crucial to understanding their activities. This is perhaps most clear in Julius Kirshner’s analysis of the relatively anomalous case of the woman who married a man from a different city (more common in places like Modena and Milan than in Florence and Venice), thus calling into question her citizenship rights in both her city of birth and that of her husband. Here the law was ambiguous, the main position being a compromise worked out by the great fourteenth-century jurist Bartolus of Sassoferrato between the enlarged citizenship of late Roman law (enshrined in the Corpus iuris civilis) and the localism and nativism of the medieval communes. Within the contingencies of cases, as the examples from the jurist Baldus de Ubaldis demonstrate, rules designed to protect male interests (some of which persisted into the recent past) had effects not always deleterious to female interests and actions. One of the implicit themes in these essays is the existence of laws and extralegal conventions restricting women’s access to the halls of political power and other public domains. The essays in part 3 gravitate around the prominent presence in Italian cities of a very special zone of female activity: religious life within and outside convents. We begin with Anne Jacobson Schutte’s presentation of sainthood and witchcraft as opposite ends of a continuum, both best seen in the employment of rather harsh inquisitory procedures of proof. While female saints tended to come from socially privileged groups and witches from poorer and marginalized social origins, both gave occasion for the expression of male distrust of female nature. The same 7These are gathered in an English translation: Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 8Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “The ‘Cruel Mother’: Maternity, Widowhood, and Dowry in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in idem, Women, Family, and Ritual, 117–31, at 118.

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sort of distrust, running especially high in the menacing circumstances of the Counter-Reformation, produced severe rules for the enclosure of those women who chose or were forced to enter convents. Francesca Medioli’s essay shows that male authorities were tolerant of breaches of the rules that resulted in no scandal but also that some of these women resisted constraints, even to the point of escaping from their convents. Here again we encounter the theme of agency, but this time in relation to women’s identity and life choices rather than control over property and children. Gabriella Zarri examines the search in Counter-Reformation Italy for a “third status” (between marriage and strict enclosure in a convent) in which women could dedicate themselves to a celibate and religious existence. The educational and charitable work of the Dimesse and the Company of St. Ursula provides examples of what women who crafted a novel form of religious life could accomplish. Marriage constitutes the theme of part 4. Just as some women disliked and rebelled against the life in the convent foisted upon them by their families (as seen in Medioli’s essay), some women expressed their displeasure at the husbands selected for them. Daniela Hacke looks at Venetian annulment cases in which women claimed that they had not given their consent (required by canon law) to marriage.9 In sketching out the role of neighbors as witnesses in these suits, moreover, she raises questions about the degree to which the familial sphere was truly private. Marina d’Amelia’s analysis of the correspondence between Eugenia Spada and her mother is a revealing account of women’s relationships within families, including Eugenia’s dealings with her difficult mother-in-law. Much of this correspondence concerns the quintessentially female experiences of pregnancy, parturition, and motherhood. Fascinating details from morning sickness to weaning show how a woman’s body was culturally constructed, observed, and commented upon, and what one woman, at any rate, went through. Eugenia was later widowed, remarried, took her daughter into the new home, and had a child by her second husband, but remained profoundly interested in and attached to the sons she had to leave behind. D’Amelia’s sources and what they reveal about women’s lives stand at the opposite end from the laws and prescriptions drafted by men that constitute so much of our source material about women in the past. The two other essays in this group deal with northern European evidence. Using a wide variety of sources, including letters and diaries, Barbara Harris looks at English aristocratic wives. She notes that despite the English legal rule of coverture, by which a wife’s personality was absorbed into that of her husband, aristocratic husbands came to rely on their wives as guardians, agents, and executors. These women were effective managers of their own dowers and the property that would go to their children. In a similar vein, examining judicial and notarial records from late-eighteenth-century

9This is one of several themes covered in Chiara Valsecchi, “‘Causa matrimonialis est gravis et ardua’: Consiliatores e matrimonio fino al Concilio di Trento,” Studi di storia del diritto 2 (1999): 407–580.

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About the Contributors Gunda Barth-Scalmani is assistant professor in the Department for Austrian History at the Universität Innsbruck. With Brigitte Mazohl-Wallnig and Ernst Wangerman, she edited the volume Genie und Altag: Bürgerliche Stadtkultur zur Mozartzeit (1994). She has published articles on the history of gender, medicine, law, and bourgeois society in journals including L’Homme, Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft, and Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Salzburger Landeskunde, as well as in the collections Bürger zwischen Tradition und Modernität, ed. Robert Hoffmann (1997) and Rituale der Geburt: Eine Kulturgeschichte, ed. Jürgen Schlumbohm et al. (1998). Gabriele Beck-Busse was recently appointed Wissenschaftliche Assistentin in the Department of Romance Philology and Linguistics at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her Habilitationschrift is entitled Grammatik für Damen zur Geschichte der französischen und italienischen Grammatik in Deutschland, England, Frankreich und Italien (1605–1850). Stanley Chojnacki, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of essays on the political and social roles of Venetian patricians and gender relations among them. Some of these are gathered in Women and Men in Renaissance Venice (2000). Among his recent publications is “La formazione della nobiltà dopo la Serrata,” in Storia di Venezia, vol. 3, La formazione dello stato parizio (1997). Marina d’Amelia is professor of early modern European history at the Università di Roma “La Sapienza.” Her book Orgoglio baronale e giustizia: Castel Viscardo alla fine del Cinquecento (1996) includes a discussion of the role played by women in establishing feudal family identity and administering estates. Her articles on women and their dowries and female violence have appeared in the journals Quaderni storici and Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica, and she edited the volume Storia della maternità (1997). Her recent publication “Lo scambio epistolare tra Cinque e

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Seicento: Scene di vita quotidiana e aspirazioni” appeared in Per Lettera: La scrittura epistolare femminile tra archivio e tipografia, ed. Gabriella Zarri (1999). Daniela Hacke is Wissenschaftliche Assistentin in the Lehrstuhl für Frühe Neuzeit of the Historische Seminar der Universität Zürich. She earned her doctorate at the University of Cambridge with her dissertation, directed by Peter Burke, entitled “Marital Litigation and Gender Relations in Early Modern Venice (c. 1570–1700).” She is completing a critical edition and German translation of Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne (1600). Barbara J. Harris is professor of history and women’s studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her publications include Beyond Her Sphere: Women and the Professions in American History (1978) and Edward Stafford, Third Duke of Buckingham, 1577–1621 (1986). The essay in this volume is based on material from the book she is currently completing, Aristocratic English Women 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Career, for publication. Julius Kirshner, a historian of law, is professor of medieval and Renaissance history at the University of Chicago. With Osvaldo Cavallar and Susanne Degenring, he edited A Grammar of Signs: Bartolo da Sassoferrato’s Tract on Insignia and Coats of Arms (1994). He also edited the English-language version of the proceedings of a conference, “The Origins of the State in Italy,” held in Chicago in 1993. Thomas Kuehn, professor of history at Clemson University, is the author of Emancipation in Late Medieval Florence (1982) and Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (1991). He is currently completing a study of the legal and social position of illegitimate children in fifteenth-century Florence. Francesca Medioli, lecturer in Italian women’s history at Reading University, has worked extensively on forced monachization and enclosure. Her publications include L’“Inferno monacole” di Arcangela Tarabotti (1990) and articles in Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, Clio, and the collection of essays Il monachesimo femminile in Italia dall’Alto Medioevo al secolo XVII, ed. Gabriella Zarri (1997). Anne Jacobson Schutte, professor of history at the University of Virginia, specializes in religion, culture, and gender in early modern Italy. Her publications include Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Making of an Italian Reformer (1977), Printed Italian Vernacular

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Religious Books, 1465–1550: A Finding List (1983), and editions in Italian and English of Cecilia Ferrazzi’s inquisitorial autobiography (1991, 1996). She serves as North American coeditor of Archive for Reformation History/Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte. Silvana Seidel Menchi is professor of history at the Università degli Studi di Pisa. Among her numerous publications on sixteenth-century religious life, the bestknown is Erasmo in Italia, 1520–1580 (1987), which has appeared in German and French translations. She is now working on the records of matrimonial trials in ecclesiastical courts. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, is one of the editors of The Sixteenth Century Journal. Among her publications are Working Women in Renaissance Germany (1986) and Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (1993). Many of her articles on various aspects of women’s lives and gender structures have been collected in the volume Gender, Church, and State in Early Modern Germany (1998). Heide Wunder is professor of early modern social and institutional history at the Universität-Gesamthochschule Kassel. Her research centers on the history of gender and of the rural economy in the early modern era. One of her books has appeared in English translation: He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany (1998). Kristen Eldyss Sorensen Zapalac’s first book, “In His Image and Likeness”: Political Iconography and Religious Change in Regensburg, 1500–1600 (1990), was published as she was completing her fellowship in the Harvard Society of Fellows. After several years as a faculty member at Washington University in St. Louis, she is now director of Information Technology at Secora Corporation. She is completing a second book, tentatively entitled Inside/Out: Judith of Bethulia and the Engendering of Selfhood in the West. Gabriella Zarri, professor of modern history at the Università degli Studi di Firenze, has written many articles and books on the history of ecclesiastical institutions and religious life between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, with particular emphasis on the relationship between women and religion. She has edited several volumes of essays, including (with Lucetta Scaraffia) Donne e fede: Santità e vita religiosa in Italia (1994), in English translation as Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in

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Contributors

Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present (1999). Among her books are Le sante vive: Cultura e religiosità femminile tra medioevo e età moderna (1990) and Matrimonio tra medioevo e età moderna (2001). Margarete Zimmermann, professor of French and Italian literature at the Freie Universität Berlin, has published widely on twentieth-century French literature, Christine de Pisan and medieval literature and culture, the European querelle des femmes, and feminist literary history. She now serves as president of the International Christine de Pisan Society. Cofounder and coeditor of the gender studies yearbook Querelles and coeditor of the Ergebnisse der Frauenforschung, she has recently coedited two books: with Roswitha Böhm, Französische Frauen der Frühen Neuzeit: Dicterinnen, Malerinnen, Mäzeninnen (1999); and with Renate Kroll, Gender Studies in der romanischen Literaturen: Re-Visionen, Sub-Versionen (1999). She is currently working on a study of Christine de Pisan and a history of French literature by women.

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Index Illustrations are indicated by bold locators. Bartolo of Sassoferrato, x, 121–22, 126, 128, 133–34, 144 Beauvoir, Simone de, 17–18 Bertelli, Cristofano, 58 The Ages of Woman’s Life, 54 blood, 296 Boccaccio, Giovanni, xii, 22, 71, 286, 288– 89, 294, 300 Decameron, 70 Borromeo, Carlo, 187 Bourchier, John (earl of Bath), 261 relationship with wife Margaret, 262 Bouwsma, William, 9 Breu, Jorg the Younger, The Scale of Life, 52 Bürger, 268–69

A Aesop, 291 age of forty, 42, 44, 54, 64–65, 67 social and psychological, 66–68 of twelve, 62, 65 of twenty-five, 63–65 age roles, 42, 67, 98 “the ages of life,” 45–46 in art, 47 The Ages of Woman, 55 The Ages of Woman’s Life, 54 Allgemeines Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, 267, 276, 278, 280–81 Annales school, 14 annulment suits, 204–5, 214, 216, 221 strategies used in, 212–13 Arcadia, 32–33 Aristotle, 45 Assisi, 130 Augustine, 46 autobiographies, masculinity in, 307

C capitalism, and work, ix, 3–7 Castiglion Aretino, 124 Castiglione, Baldasar, 305–6 celibacy, female, 181, 196, 199 and teaching, 195 Cesana, Vittoria, 203, 212 Christianity, 287, 300 citizenship and gender, in twentieth century, 145, 147–48 unification of, 145 citizenship rights, x, xiv and civil law, 136 dual citizenship, 119–20, 122, 144 of foreign husbands, 120 and foreign marriage, 135, 137, 140, 144

B Baldo degli Ubaldi, x, 122, 125, 127, 129 consilia of, 123 Domina Agnes, 124–30 Domina Stefania, 138–44 La Perugina, 130–38 pro parte, 124, 137, 139 sapientis, 124, 130 Barberino, Francesco da, 70–72 Documenti d’amore, 64 Reggimento e costumi di donna, 67–68

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citizenship rights continued and inheritance rights, 139 and intercity marriage, 125–28 loss of citizenship, 120–21 and marriage, 118, 120, 122, 146 and punishment of crimes, 129 penalties on foreign marriage, 120, 127 of Roman women, 118–21 unipersonality of married couples, 120 cloister, 213 functions of, 176 lay women in, 178 nature of, 165 colleges, for women, 195–96 community of property, 266, 270, 276 joint, 275 partial, 272–73 Company of Saint Ursula, xi, 187, 189, 194, 197 lay character of, 185–86 and virginity, 186, 188 and vows, 185 Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, 166, 168–71, 174, 176–77 Congregation of Rites, 155, 157, 159 Congregation of the Holy Office, 154 consilia pro parte, 124, 137, 139 sapientis, 130 continuity and change, 4, 7, 13 Controversies of the Male and Female Sexes, 22 convents, x, 224 See also cloister and enclosure, xi Corpus iuris, x, 117, 119–20, 123, 134, 141 Council of Trent, 165–66, 173, 179, 220 Tametsi decree, 205 Counter-Reformation, xi The Courtier, 305–6 courts, and family conflicts, 209–11 coverture, xi, 105, 246–47, 261, 264 Cruz, Juana Inés de la, 198 cultural history, and feminism, 19 cultural studies, 17, 26

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D dal Giglio, Elena, 183 daughters, 101–2 de Beauvoir, Simone, 17–18 Decameron, 286, 288 decimal system, 46 deconstructionism, 8 de giudicato/diiudicatus, 79–81, 85, 88 Dimesse, xi, 189, 194, 197 functions of, 193 lay character of, 190, 192 disease, children’s, 230, 240 medical practices, 237 domicile, 119 Domina Agnes, 124–25, 135 Domina Stefania, 138 dowry, 102, 133–34, 137, 207–8, 215, 226, 252, 263, 271–72 259 detrimental practices, 77–78 and female wealth, 95 and Florence, 77 guarantees, 89 maternal, 94–95 Monte delle Dote, 90 paternal, 93 real estate, 91–92 inflation of, x, 79–80 and marital separation, 104–5 and marriage, 78–79 restitution, 100, 106, 110, 113 beneficiaries, 86 diiudicatus, 80 executors chosen by women, 86–87 fraternal coguarantees, 92–93 government oversight, 88–89 husband’s actions regarding, 82 maternal guarantees, 94–95 and the Monte delle Dote, 90 paternal guarantees, 93 regulations, 80–81, 84–85, 88 time of, 84 vadimonium, 80 widowhood and remarriage, 82–83 security, 89, 91–95 and Venice, 78

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Du Pont, Gratien, 22 E “early modern,” ix, 11–13 ecclesiastics, 226 Eleanor of Rutland, 257–59 emancipation, 101–3, 207 enclosure, ix, 165, 179, 192 breaches of, 169–71, 175 grounds for, 167–68 as imprisonment, 173 for male religious persons, 166 opposition to, 184 perceptions of, 173 nuns, 166 as protection, 178 resignation to, 177 unpopularity of, 167 England, Yorkist and Early Tudor, 245 Erba, Caterina, 161–63 Erondell, Peter, 29 essentialism, 14 F fables and Aesop, 291 collections of “Ælfredic,” 291 of Marie de France, 290–93, 295 Mishle Shu’alim, 291, 295, 298–99 gender identity and transformations in, 300–301 interpretations of, 288 of “pregnant” man, 285–87 translations of, 291 of widower and baby, 285, 287 family conflicts, 209, 211–13 physical violence in, 204, 214–15 public nature of, 219 resolution of, 204, 214–15, 220 feminism, ix, xvii, 17 early French, 24 late twentieth century, 25 Florence, 100 dowry practices of, 77 laws regarding women, 98

Fonte, Moderata, 197–98 French Garden, 29–30, 32, 36 G gender and citizenship, 117 cultural construction of, xii, xiv division of work, 6 Hellenistic-Christian views, xii history of, xvi, xvii Jewish views, xii stereotypes, xvii gender constructions, in autobiographies, 306 gender debate, 22, 25 gender dissonance, among Christian Europeans, 287 gender history, and language, 8 gender identity, 288 in Judaism and Christianity, 300 gender relations, xii Giglio, Elena dal, 183 Giorgione, The Three Ages of Man, 53 Glossa ordinaria, 119–20, 126, 134, 146 grammar books French, 29 French Garden, 29–40 “Grammars for Ladies,” 29, 33, 36 and pedantry, 36 Promenades de Clarisse, 29, 33–40 and teaching of moral values, 29, 31–32 Grien, Hans Baldung, 61 The March Toward Death, 57 The Seven Ages of Woman, 57, 60 The Three Ages of Life and Death, 57, 59 The Three Ages of Woman and Death, 57, 61 “the young girl and death,” 55 guardianship of children, 239, 247 H ha-Nakdan, Berechiah, 295, 297–98 scriptural additions to fables, 299 historical terminology, 8–12 historiography, xii–xiii, xvi household management, by wives, 251–52

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housewife, 5 I Il Carbaccio, 22 inheritance practices of Salzburg, 268 wardship, 248, 260 inheritance rights, 133–34, 139, 141–43, 208 primogeniture, 194 inquisition, 155 ius commune, x, 97, 102–6, 108, 115, 120, 123, 129–31, 134, 137, 141–43, 148 ius proprium, 97 J Judaism, 287, 300 K Kelly-Gadol, Joan, vii, ix, xiv, xv, 8–9, 25 Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, ix, 68, 77, 83, 111, 237 L lactation, blocking of, 235–36 ladder of life, 47, 49–50, 52–55 language and history, 7 language textbooks, 30, 33 La Perugina, 128, 130 law, ix, xiii, xiv and daughters, 101 and equality of sexes, 97, 99, 117, 149 Florentine, 100, 106 history of, 266, 273 and legal fictions, 127, 135–36 matrimonial, 267, 276–77 and mothers, 107 and personhood of women, 97–98, 115, 276 presumed female weakness, 99–100, 131 Roman, 99, 117, 120, 134 social practice of, 266 unipersonality of married couples, 127, 146 and widows, 108

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and wives, 103 written and verbal agreements, 270 Le deuxième sexe, 17 legal fictions, 127, 135–36 Les deux Perroquets, 34, n. 27 Lestrange, Anne, 254–56 letters, of women, 224 La Lezione de geografia, 36, 38, 39 life cycle See also life stages in art and literature, 47 conceptualizations of, 51 female, 52–53, 57 “ages of life,” 45 and aging, 43–44 in art and literature, 45 and marriage, 63 three phase calendar, 62, 70, 72 female perception of, 69 interpretations, 48–49 medieval and early modern interpretations, 47 stages, viii, ix turning points in, 42 life maps ladder of life, 47, 49–50, 52–55 medieval and early modern, 45, 47 and the Reformation, 49 wheel of life, 47 life stages, 42, 48, 114 See also life cycle in art, 49, 51–52, 54–55, 57, 62 female, 41, 43–44, 71 and law, 62–66 and marriage, 62, 66, 68–71 and sexual identity, 65 of wives, 246 literary and historical studies, 10–11 Lutheranism, xii See also Schweinichen, Hans von M Ma’aseh Book, 286, 288–89, 297 Maidalchini, Domenico, 225–26 death of, 238

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Maidalchini, Eugenia children of, 237, 240, 243 caring for, 238 children’s diseases, 230, 237, 240 guardianship of children, 225, 239–41 letters of, 225, 227, 237, 244 concerning daily life of baby, 236 marriages, 225–26, 239–41 pregnancy, 225, 227–28, 238 bodily changes, 231 lactation blocking, 235 medical practices, 230 search for wet nurse, 232–34 weaning, 236–37 preparations for motherhood, 229 widowhood, 239 Maidalchini, Pacifica, 226–28, 234 The March Toward Death, 57 Margaret of Bath, 260–64 Marie de France, 290–93, 295 marriage, xi, 103–4, 225, 242, 265 See also marriage contracts See also under life stages: female annulment of, xi, 73, 204–5, 212, 214, 216, 221 courts and, 209 arranged marriages, 245 clandestine, 205 contracts, 250, 261 and dowry, 77–96 early female age at, 71, 73 opposition to, 72 emotional relationships in, 245–46 financial support of married couple, 250–51 first marriages, 247–48 forced, 203 intercity, 122, 137, 139, 144 and inheritance rights, 133–34 laws regarding, 267, 276 legal concept of, 276–77, 280–81 negotiations, 253, 263 parental consent, 206 as partnership, 276 patrician, 208–9 principle of consent, 205, 209

remarriage, xi residence with in-laws, 250 resistance to, 204, 221 responsibilities of remarried widows, 260 second marriages, 247, 260 secret, 208–9 treatment of couples by parents and inlaws, 249–50 unipersonality in, 127 validity of union, 205–6, 208, 215 widowhood, xi women’s contributions to, 277 women’s contributions to family success, 246 in Yorkist and Early Tudor England, 245 young age at, 248 marriage contracts among Bürger class, 268–69, 274, 277 characteristics of, 271 generational effects of, 278–79 community of property, 266, 270–76 and gender relations, 280 in Germany, 266–81 as historical sources, 267 introductions to, 271 regulation of wedding gifts and dowry, 271–72 and social class, 266, 268, 270–73, 275 verbal agreements, 270 marriage negotiations, role of women in, 226 masculinity, xii in autobiographies, 307 Mattei, Girolamo, 225 Memorial of Hans von Schweinichen, 307 See also Schweinichen, Hans von. confession of beliefs in, 309 gender constructions in, 310, 320 genealogy in, 309–10 goals of, 308 historical period of, 308 masculinity in, 320 tension between noble and Christian values, 311, 314, 317, 319, 322 microhistory, xiii, xvi midwives, choosing of, 234

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miracles, 285 Mishle Shu’alim, 291, 295, 298–99 misogyny, 43, 55 Montecchio Vesponi, 125 Monte delle Doti, 90, 102 moral values, 29, 31 morning sickness, 227 motherhood, xi, 243–44 class awareness and relations in, 242 female perception and experience of, 223 mothers, 107 Roman, 223 Mozart, parents of, 269 Mozart, Wolfgang, 265 mundualdus, 100 N Nevizano, Giovanni, 43–44, 58, 63, 67 Nulla mulier, 130–32, 135, 138, 142 nuns, 165, 167–68, 213 annulment of vows, 171–72, 175–77 escaped, 172, 174–76 forced professions, 169 O Old Woman at the Mirror, 56 P parents authority of, 205, 213, 215–16, 220–21 responsibilities and duties of, 207 parturition, xi paterfamilias, 206, 217–18 patria potestas, 206–7 patriarchy, ix, xvii, 7 and continuity, 4 pedantry, 36 See also Les deux Perroquets periodization, ix, 13–14 biological, 44 and historical terminology, 9, 11–12 theoretical foundations, 45–47 of women’s lives, 41, 54 and androcentrism, 50 changes in, 51 and early marriage, 68

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medieval and early modern, 50 Perugia, 130 Pizan, Christine de, 20–21 polemiche sul sesso femminile. See querelle des femmes Il Precettore dei Grimani, 36, 37, 39 pregnancy, xi customs, 228 devotions during, 229 fears concerning, 231 in Italian upper class, 225, 228 rituals, 229 “pregnant” man fable, xii, 285–87, 292 compared to Boccaccio’s version, 293–94 interpretation of, 288, 296 in Mishle Shu’alim, 295 moral of, 298 physician character in, 297 sources of, 289 versions of, 294–95 principle of consent, 205, 209, 214, 220 Promenades de Clarisse, 29, 33–34, 36 public/private spaces, dichotomous gendering of, xv Pythagorean numbers perfect number seven, 46 Pythagorean tetrad, 45 Q querelle des femmes, ix, xiv, 17, 43, 305 changes in terminology, 23 definition of, 18–19 female authors, 22 French texts, 23–24 history of, 21–22, 24 and interdisciplinary research, 26–27 Italian texts, 23 in late twentieth century, 25 linguistic analyzation of, 19 texts, 22 textual and argumentative strategies, 20 querelle des sexes, 17 R Reggimento e costumi di donna, 67–68

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relationships husband–wife, 245 parent–child, 203, 206, 213, 224 conflicts in, 204 household order and, 214, 218–20 as metaphor for state government, 217 parental authority, 205 religious institutions, female, semireligious, 181, 184 See also Company of Saint Ursula; Dimesse functions of, 196 religious life, and convents, x religious writings, of women, 224 Renaissance, 8 effects on women, xv and feminism, 9–10 and women, 3 rights citizenship (See citizenship rights) inheritance (See inheritance rights) S sainthood, x, 154 paths to, 160 as a social phenomenon, 153 trials for, 155 saints, 153 Salzburg, xii, 267–68 The Scale of Life, 52 Schweinichen, Hans von See also Memorial of Hans von Schweinichen attaining adulthood, 314, 316 attitude towards drinking, 314 biographical information, 311–12 career possibilities, 313 childhood, 312 first love, 315 Lutheran beliefs, 309, 323 marriage to Margarethe Schellendorf, 317–18 Memorial, xii, 307 personal relationships, 315, 320–22 release from duke’s service, 318 The Second Sex, 17

selfhood, 300 Christian concepts of, 301–2 Jewish and Christian concepts of, 287 modern concepts, 303 semireligious, 184 The Seven Ages of Woman, 57, 60 social history, and structures, 3 soul, nature of, 301–2 Spada, Eugenia. See Maidalchini, Eugenia Spada, Maria, 225–29, 232, 235, 238, 244 letters of, 224 Spada family, 226 Spada Veralli archive, 224 family, social rise of, 224 Spinelli, Maria Felice, 157–59 stereotypes, xvii Strozzi, Alessandra Macinghi, 69 Strozzi, Bernardo, Old Woman at the Mirror, 56 T “the third status,” 181–82 The Three Ages of Life and Death, 57, 59 The Three Ages of Man, 53 Tournon, Alexandre, 29, 35 tutela, 99, 109 U Ursula, Saint. See Company of Saint Ursula uxorial cycle, 246–47, 251 V vadimonium, 80–81, 83–85, 88 executors chosen by women, 86–87 Venice, 203 constitution of, 217–18 dowry practices in, 78–79 myth of, 216–18 Ventian Republic, saints of, 157 Viterbo, 138, 144 W wage labor, 6 wardship, 248, 260 weaning, 236–37

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wet nurses, 232–34 widower and baby fable, 285, 287–89 widowhood, xi, 225, 239 dowry restitution and, 82 widows, 108, 144, 191, 279 and dowry restitution, 110 as executors of husband’s estate, 247, 259 and guardianship of children, 109, 247 and remarriage, 110–12 wifehood, 246–47 (See also wives) wills, 138, 140, 247, 259, 262, 279 See also under dowry: restitution consent of male relatives to, 131–32 witchcraft, x, 160, 162–63 as a social phenomenon, 153 trials for, 155 witches, 153 wives, 103 See also Eleanor of Rutland; Lestrange, Anne; Margaret of Bath contributions to family success, 246 English aristocratic, xi, 245, 247, 257 as executors of husband’s estate, 260, 262 as heads of households, 251–53 as managers of finances, 262 as partners of husbands in managing assets, 253–54 relationship with natal family, 250 residence with mother-in-law, 250

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uxorial cycle, 251 women agency of, viii, ix, xi, xvi, 8, 101, 205, 264 colleges for, 195–96 and convents, x emancipation of, 101–3 history of, xvi, xvii, 4, 10, 13, 43 and language, 8 and structures, 3, 15 as legal persons, 97–99, 106, 113–14, 118 age of adulthood, 103 changes at marriage, 103 daughters, 101–2 mothers, 107 widows, 108–12 wives, 103 literacy of, 269 and marriage, xi oppression of, viii, xvi relationships with family, x, xi, 203 religious life of, x, xiv nontraditional alternatives, 182 roles of, 30–31, 44, 53, 183 in family life cycle, 223–24 semireligious communities for, 181–82 work of, 3, 5–7

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