Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy

by Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane

• ISBN13: 9780226439266
• ISBN10: 0226439267
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1987-06-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, a brilliant historian of the Annales school, skillfully uncovers the lives of ordinary Italians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Tuscans in particular, young and old, rich, middle-class, and poor. From the extraordinarily detailed records kept by Florentine tax collectors and the equally precisericordanze(household accounts with notations of events great and small), Klapisch-Zuber draws a living picture of the Tuscan household. We learn, for example, how children were named, how wet nurses were engaged, how marriages were negotiated and celebrated. A wealth of other sources are tapped--including city statutes, private letters, philosophical works on marriage, paintings--to determine the social status of women. Klapisch-Zuber reveals how women, in their roles as daughters, wives, sisters, and mothers, were largely subject to a family system that needed them but valued them little.

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii
David Herlihy
Preface	xiii
State and Family in a Renaissance Society: The Florentine Catasto of 1427--30	1	(22)
Demographic Decline and Household Structure: The Example of Prato, Late Fourteenth to Late Fifteenth Centuries	23	(13)
``A une pane e uno vino'': The Rural Tuscan Family at the Beginning of the Fifteenth Century	36	(32)
Michel Demonet
Kin, Friends, and Neighbors: The Urban Territory of a Merchant Family in 1400	68	(26)
Childhood in Tuscany at the Beginning of the Fifteenth Century	94	(23)
The ``Cruel Mother'': Maternity, Widowhood, and Dowry in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries	117	(15)
Blood Parents and Milk Parents: Wet Nursing in Florence, 1300--1530	132	(33)
Female Celibacy and Service in Florence in the Fifteenth Century	165	(13)
Zacharias, or the Ousted Father: Nuptial Rites in Tuscany between Giotto and the Council of Trent	178	(35)
The Griselda Complex: Dowry and Marriage Gifts in the Quattrocento	213	(34)
An Ethnology of Marriage in the Age of Humanism	247	(14)
The ``Mattinata'' in Medieval Italy	261	(22)
The Name ``Remade'': The Transmission of Given Names in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries	283	(27)
Holy Dolls: Play and Piety in Florence in the Quattrocento	310	(21)
Index	331