January 10th (Katherine)

For class on January 10th, we discussed three readings about women in Renaissance Italy. One of the articles, Daughters and Oligarchs: Gender and the Early Renaissance State, focused on the interactions between gender roles and politics in the elite families of Renaissance city states.  I think the most interesting argument this article made was that the “measures to facilitate and regulate dowries put regimes at cross-purposes with their own membership,” meaning that elite governing men attempting to regulate the expense of dowries were at a conflict of interest for providing their daughters with expensive dowries (76). Elite men wanted their daughters to be married to protect the family honor (from the scandal of pre-marital sex), and the “surest way” for fathers to do so was by dowering their daughters with large sums of money to attract potential husbands (77). So, the price of dowries increased exponentially during the 15th century, despite policies that tried to limit their expense, because “Wealthy families found the [social and political] advantages of giving and getting large dowries more compelling than laws aimed at levelling the matrimonial playing field” (79).

An important component of this dowry situation was money; the flaunting of wealth transfer was a part of maintaining social status for elite families. During discussion we connected this historical element of conspicuous consumption for status to the ways modern elites flaunt their money, and how wealthy influencers show off expensive purchases on social media. I also think there is a parallel between the ostentatiousness of recent elite weddings (as in European royal families) and the ostentatiousness of dowries as discussed in the reading. 

An important impact of ridiculously expensive dowries was that elite families could not afford many or multiple of them, so, they often sent their daughters to convents as a respectable alternative to marriage. Therefore, many nuns from elite families “had no motivation to observe the vow of chastity,” but were consigned “to a convent where at least the fiction of chastity would shield her family from the risk of sexual disgrace” (69-70). Related to this, our reading on prostitutes and courtesans in Renaissance also discussed the regulation of women’s sexuality in religious contexts. The text includes a 1539 Venetian law decreeing “no prostitute or courtesan of any kind may live or maintain herself anywhere near a church or holy site” (277). As with that example, the Catholic Church was a major influence in Renaissance Italy and impacted women both inside and outside convents. Our third reading, Women and the Italian Inquisitions, also demonstrated this. This reading included a lot of statistics and tables. The one I enjoyed discussing most in class was a table that showed a large number of women accused of illicit magic in the Friuli Inquisition were specifically accused of “therapeutic magic” between 1596-1610 and 1611-1670. In the final time period, 1671-1685, only two women were accused of “therapeutic magic” (81). We discussed how women who used traditional herbal healing methods (like midwives), may have stopped practicing openly as they saw others accused by the inquisition for that type of activity. More broadly, I’ve found it interesting to think about how the Catholic Church had so much control over everyday life in Italy for centuries, and the legacies of that control that are evident now.

I know this post is running long, but I want to mention one more church-related point. A potential legacy of the many elite daughters put in convents is the huge and continuing decline in the number of nuns in Italy. While not the only factor, the lack of pressure to get married and option to work instead of going into a convent have likely contributed to the decreasing population of nuns. In fact, this decrease is why there are guesthouses like the one we are staying in right now in Orvieto. We learned from our guide, Alessio, that the last nun who was living here has retired, so now this place is entirely a guesthouse.

Speaking of which, to celebrate getting to the end of this, here is a picture of a fresco in the room we held class in last night. And a picture from our visit to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. This is a well-known painting, Judith Slaying Holofernes, by Artemisia Gentileschi, a famous renaissance artist.