assignment for Essays Guru

Open City: An Introduction to Gender in Early Modern Rome

Author(s): Elizabeth S. Cohen

Source: I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance , Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 2014), pp. 35-54

Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies

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G EN D ER I N E AR L Y M O DE R N RO M E

Open City: An Introduction to Gender in Early Modern Rome

Elizabeth S. Cohen, York University

DESPITE A RISK of anachronism in recalling Roberto Rossellini’s film of 1945,

the title Roma città aperta signals the twofold novelty of this cluster of essays on

gender in the pope’s capital during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “Open

city” conjures, first, early modern Rome’s notable social and political fluidity. This

openness stemmed in part from rulers’ deliberate policy, but it mostly emerged de

facto from interplay among aspiring authorities, competing elites, and a growing

and highly mobile population. These structural features produced unusual gen-

dered complexities but also opportunities. As these articles show, wealth, honor,

and social place—not only rank but also clerical and lay status—interacted in

subtle ways with gender to set the cultural values and personal agency associated

with particular works and people. The metaphor of “open city” also locates recent

developments in conceptualizing gender in early modern Europe that seem partic-

ularly suited to the Roman case. Broadly, these approaches point away from ideas

of gender as fixed dichotomies and hierarchies and toward more flexible notions

of multiplicity and negotiation. Specifically, recent studies add men and mas-

culinities to the mix. Deeply rooted Western precepts assigned superiority to men

and subordination to women. As the articles here show, however, in practice many

men did not confidently dominate all aspects of their lives, and at least some

women exercised creativity and efficacy in theirs. Like other scholarship in this

vein, these studies look beyond top-down, authoritative imposition of gendered

norms to highlight myriad individual acts and words—conventional, hopeful, ex-

perimental—from elites, middling sorts, and even ordinary people.

Contact Elizabeth S. Cohen at York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J1P3, Canada ([email protected]).

I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 17, number 1. © 2014 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved. 0393-5949/2014/1701-0001$10.00

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G E N D E R I N E A R L Y MO D E R N S T U D I E S

After 2005, anthologies exploring gender in Europe before 1800 have proliferated,

and two in particular offer general essays that help us situate the current cluster

of articles in the larger field. In one, Merry Wiesner-Hanks, early modern his-

tory’s consummate synthesizer, tracks the development of gender studies for the

period, with, first, roots in the recovery of women as part of the past and, later,

an explosion of inquiry that showed the great variety of female experience and

expression.1 Pervasive norms of female subordination associated women with

constraint, silence, and marginalization. Feminist scholars sought examples of

foremothers, women who, despite the burdens of being female and the risks of

transgression, spoke out and began to advocate for themselves and their peers.

Overall, this scholarship not only enriched knowledge of past women but also

elaborated categories and analytical concepts. The term “gender” itself serves as

a prime example, but certainly it is not the only word that we have needed to

adapt, rejig, or invent to accommodate the abundance of data and texts and to en-

hance and refine our understandings. Among other complexities, we need to dis-

tinguish patriarchal ideology, which privileges male authority, from the individ-

ual beliefs and decisions of men. And, as scholars seeking to understand the early

modern world, we must also take account of how some women benefited from

and learned to manipulate male privilege and, thus, might have had an investment

in that normative and cultural regime.

In another collection, editors Marianna Muravyeva and Raisa Maria Toivo

alert us to several currents in recent scholarship on early modern gender. They re-

mind us that, while engaging with early modern notions around soul, mind, and

body, we must take care not to conflate these concepts with twentieth-century

gender binaries and essentialisms, which inform some modern feminist studies

as well as other traditions of scholarship. The editors write, “gender was a dy-

namic process, rather than an essentialist or stable dichotomy—a process during

which a person’s social status and position were negotiated and renegotiated

when his or her hopes, expectations, and demands met those of the surrounding

community.”2 Thus, they argue that, concerning early modern women, scholars

should move beyond a single generalized model of women’s constraint and pre-

1. Merry Wiesner-Hanks, “Gender Theory and the Study of Early Modern Europe,” in Practices of Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Megan Cassidy-Welch and Peter Sherlock (Turnhout, 2008), 7–23.

2. Marianna Muravyeva and Raisa Maria Toivo, eds., Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York, 2013), 5. See also Megan Cassidy-Welch and Peter Sherlock, “Afterword,” in Practices of Gender, 317–26.

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sumed marginalization to investigate and weigh the diversity of female experi-

ences. Muravyeva and Toivo also astutely insist that, because gender was a cen-

tral feature of social hierarchies, power relations, and ideology, we need to under-

stand female and male as interconnected categories and to study women and men

in relation to each other.

An important development in gender studies has been the growing interest in

men and masculinity, or, by the terms that some early modernists prefer, in man-

hood or manliness.3 Not surprisingly, as with women, the more we know, the

more complexity we find. “Renaissance men” were, in fact, not all alike, and

masculinity came in many forms. Notably in Catholic and specifically Roman

contexts, laymen and celibate clerics differed. More broadly, manhood and patri-

archy were not equivalent; they intersected often, but far from always.4 In paral-

lel, early modernist scholars have come to recognize something that they should

not have neglected: in a deeply hierarchical society, most men much of the time

did not dominate those around them. This reminder has triggered interest in

male anxiety, the fear of failing to live up to manly ideals.5

Some feminist scholars resist this trend to emphasize men’s difficulties. They

worry that such work will scant the gendered burdens borne by women.6 Yet

scholarship on men need not discount male privilege. In a recent monograph,

Patricia Simons smartly traces through many cultural forms the iterations of the

superiority of the premodern male body.7 As her book deepens our understand-

ing of gender, it reminds us how maleness, if not all men, had a firm hold on

dominance. In the move to see genders as plural and interactive, masculinity

studies are essential.

Along with contemporary humanities scholarship more broadly, the study of

gender has, from its beginnings, featured interdisciplinarity. In the recent flour-

ishing of cultural studies, those trained in the study of early modern literature,

art, music, philosophy, politics, and society all want to get into the heads of past

people and discover how they experienced or at least represented being a woman

or a man. These interests have lead some scholars to strike out beyond their

3. For a historiographical introduction, see Alexandra Shepard, “Manhood, Patriarchy, and Gender in Early Modern History,” in Masculinities, Childhood, Violence: Attending to Early Modern Women and Men, ed. Amy Leonard and Karen L. Nelson (Newark, DE, 2011), 77–95; on terminology, 79.

4. These arguments have been most fully developed about England: see Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (New York, 2003).

5. Shepard, “Manhood, Patriarchy,” 87; elaborated in Androniki Dialeti, “From Women’s Oppres- sion to Male Anxiety: The Concept of ‘Patriarchy’ in the Historiography of Early Modern Europe,” in Muravyeva and Toivo, Gender, 19–36.

6. Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Manchester, 2006). 7. Patricia Simons, Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (New York, 2011).

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domain of specialized training into less familiar terrains. Often this undisci-

plining of inquiry has been creative and fruitful. However, as a conglomerate

field, “gender in the early modern world” is not homogeneous. It takes up many

kinds of questions: about language and artful representations; about ideas and

norms; about culturally and socially mediated practices; about social, political,

and religious institutions; about material experience; and about individual re-

sponses and actions. Styles of inquiry differ in where they enter this tangle of

possibilities and in the kind of answers about gender that they offer. All these

studies have value to contribute, but sometimes it is not easy, pace interdis-

ciplinarity, to integrate the results to the satisfaction of every sort of scholar. I

here describe three productive approaches to early modern gender studies that

differ in centering on the social historical, the textual, or the cultural. Obviously,

there is overlap among these modes, but I believe us wiser and better at our work

for recognizing a spectrum of varieties.

Of these three, social history undertakes to recover how men and women long

gone lived gender in an early modern world that had distinctive materialities,

economics, politics, and social relations. The strength of this approach lies in its

goal of seeing the whole society and the broad range of factors that shaped lives.

Social historians seek to know the minds and behavior not only of the powerful,

educated, or innovative but also of ordinary people enmeshed in the everyday.

For these scholars complexity lies in a past world that is out of reach. Historians

see their sources as not the past itself but rather a somewhat refractory means

to an end. The challenge is to reconstruct an elusive whole from documentary

fragments, often created for purposes quite different from those of the historians.

Although social historians exploit many kinds of evidence, they rely often on a

cranky miscellany of functional documentation, paperwork from ambitiously

expanding early modern institutions of state and church. Interested in patterns of

behavior and in their change over time, this mode of inquiry concerning gender

seeks to understand the diversities of experience up and down the social scale.

Nevertheless, these historians can be a bit schematic as they attribute motives

and attitudes to various sorts of social actors.

Social historical scholarship on gender and the functional documents on

which it often rests both demand informed use. Historians and other scholars

working in, for example, legal and administrative archives—such as the notarial

registers now much favored by art historians—have to learn how protocols and

conventions shaped these records. Without the refinement of artful expression,

there are still textualities that all must consider. On a broader level, scholars must

remember that even in the hierarchical early modern world, not all behavior was

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determined or alike. Complex social dynamics gave men and women options,

sometimes contradictory ones. Early modernists drawing on historical descrip-

tion as context or backdrop should think with the varieties and nuances of social

action as they do with those of text or artistic expression.

A second scholarly practice that I am calling here “text intensive” focuses on

artful or highly fashioned representations of the early modern age. Studies in this

mode usually focus on one or a few related works of literature, art, or music,

where gendered themes may figure in content and imagery. Although consumed

not only by the rich or literate, these texts were primarily created by and for

elites—social, political, intellectual, and artistic. While editing and reconstruction

may be critical, the text or representation is treated as a piece of the past that

survives in the present with its intricate meanings intact. Finding complexity in

the work itself and variety in its relation to other texts, scholars emphasize in-

ternal riches of form and expression. This mode of inquiry examines the text for

its own sake and not primarily, as do social historians, as a mirror on a larger

world. The historical setting of an artful work’s composition is often backdrop,

rendered selectively to frame but not to explain the text. For those interested in

gender, however, the kind of person—man or woman—who created the work is

also important. While maleness of authorship has often gone unexamined, the cir-

cumstances of the woman writer have attracted much reflection. Often enough,

studies have invoked a fairly generic model of the constrained female author or

artist who risks much to have her say. This scholarship is evolving to attend to the

quite varied conditions of women’s cultural production.

A third approach, occupying a sort of middle terrain between social historical

and text intensive, foregrounds the workings of culture on a broader scale. Texts

of many more and less refined sorts offer the means to reconstruct culture as a

cloud of shared vocabulary, meanings, scripts, valorized norms, and practices

accessible in a particular place and time. As a whole, culture included ideas, be-

liefs, tastes, and fears that were widely shared, but also attitudes or meanings that

worked differently for different people, men and women as well as the high and

the lowly. Nevertheless, the cultural bundle that we imagine occupying any per-

son’s head, while typically full of value-laden conventions and injunctions, was

also rife with inconsistencies and, so, open to possibilities. In this approach gen-

der was potently mediated through language, and male dominance worked not

only through external institutions but through internalized thought.8 As peo-

8. Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1999), 28–50.

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ple of the past sought to make sense—rationally but also spiritually and emotion-

ally—of what was happening around them and to chart courses for themselves,

this capacious concept of culture shaped but did not determine individual choices.

Apart from giving agency to culture, this mode of inquiry enhances the study of

gender by mobilizing a wide spectrum of cultural production: from broadsheets,

woodcuts, mountebank shows, or tales of the cantastorie, on the one hand, to

more personal documents like scribed letters or diaries, on the other. Although

“popular” is often a misleading label, these early modern vernacular forms expand

the reach of cultural inquiry beyond the elite.

The essays in the current collection approach gender from these three per-

spectives: Laurie Nussdorfer and Eleonora Canepari are social historical, Jessica

Goethals and Kenneth Gouwens foreground specific texts, and John Christo-

poulos and John Hunt describe nodes of broader cultural meaning. The cluster

samples early modern gendered identities within a specific place and time—the

city of Rome between 1527 and 1670. Fitting recent trends in gender studies as

well as Roman particularities, many of these essays highlight men and ideas of

masculinity. In this introduction I pause to fill in something of the scholarship

on women, in order to suggest that for neither sex did gender alone shape expe-

rience or expression. As these articles show, it was always inflected through other

social categories like rank, residence, and age. In the pope’s capital, the deeply

medieval division between clergy and laity complicated the picture to an unusual

degree. For men and for women the layering of obligations and possibilities did

not make life easy but did leave room for maneuver—the openness that I signaled

at the start.

EAR LY MODERN ROME

A distinctive Roman social and political environment interacted with broad

Italian—and European—expectations about being male or female. Although it

shared many features with other early modern cities, Rome was unusually open,

not by anyone’s principle or intention but de facto. There were several structural

reasons: its layered political framework and clerical leadership; its multiple social

elites; its economy built on intricate service and patronage relations as well as on

a market; and a fluid, heavily immigrant population where, anomalously, men

outnumbered women by a large margin. This uneven patchwork of urban ar-

rangements posed many problems; it was often not easy to thrive or even maneu-

ver. Nevertheless, the multiplicity of institutions, the many nodes of patronage

with benefits to distribute, the incessant demand for labor to serve the creature

needs and ambitious tastes of the papacy and its many visitors, high and low,

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meant many options, choices, and rewards for those who mastered the skills of

improvisation and flexibility.

Rome’s governmental structure and the frequent turnover of its political lead-

ership were not typical. While dynastic regimes and primogeniture dominated

access to monarchical power across early modern Europe, the papacy remained

elective and its holders mature, celibate men. Between 1523 and 1676, twenty-

one men ascended Peter’s throne. Of these, four reigned less than a year, and

incumbency averaged for the rest only eight years. The interregnum of the Va-

cant See, which often lasted weeks, and occasionally months, amplified moments

of discontinuity. As ruler, the pope wore several hats. Most grandly, he was the

spiritual leader of all (western) Christendom and the head of the institutional

Catholic Church, a wealthy, globalizing parallel state with wide networks of pa-

tronage and political influence. The pope was at the same time the prince of a

middle-sized, somewhat unruly temporal state with a swollen capital city. There

his administration, staffed by a mixture of clerics and secular men, maneuvered

successfully to enlarge the domains of justice, regulation, and taxation. Yet the

local commune, with its seat at the Campidoglio, also remained in play, oversee-

ing the local economy and regulating life on the streets. Consequently, the city’s

residents and visitors had to do business with several governments, partly over-

lapping and competing for sway and resources, each with its own tribunals. Cur-

rying favor, paying court, pushing paper, and nursing litigation all absorbed

much time and energy. When someone wanted to get something done in Rome,

there were often several venues and strategies to try.

The complexity of Rome’s governance and justice corresponded to competi-

tion and patronage networks among several social elites. The Middle Ages be-

queathed to early modern Rome, first, a clutch of powerful baronial families with

extensive feudal holdings outside as well as inside the city and, second, a roster of

municipal senators and other officers of the commune. The early modern period

was marked by the ascent of a third, curial, elite, many of them hailing from

other parts of Italy and relative newcomers to the city. With time in office un-

predictable and often brief, popes and their families worked quickly to assemble

ecclesiastical benefices and perks for kinsmen, to imprint their names publicly on

the cityscape, and to acquire properties in the countryside that could be passed

along to heirs. With concerns and appetites that frequently intersected, the cleri-

cal and secular nobilities were sometimes rivals, sometimes collaborators.

Bound tightly to the city’s central role as seat of the church, its economy was

mostly neither commerce nor manufacturing for an external market. Instead, the

city consumed enormously—locally produced goods and services as well as food,

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salt, wood, and other supplies from its hinterland and beyond. Grain passed

through markets, but the state intervened to commandeer supplies and moder-

ate prices, especially in hard times. The necessities of life also circulated through

networks where compensation for services or charity offered “for the love of

God” came in kind rather than money. Apart from more or less permanent res-

idents, the papacy attracted a steady stream of pilgrims, petitioners, careerists,

diplomats and their entourages, theologians, artists, tourists, and others. All these

men, and women, ate, drank, and slept, and visitors often shopped for antiqui-

ties, paintings, relics, and indulgences. The large contingent of nobles, dignitaries,

officials, professionals, and landlords lived also from investments, rents, and tax

farms.

Rome’s early modern expansion also contributed to its openness. In the six-

teenth and seventeenth centuries, although not as large as Venice or Naples, Rome

was growing in both people and physical cityscape. Although the population

fell from around 50,000 to 35,000 after the Sack of 1527, it began to rise again

in midcentury and reached 100,000 by the 1590s and 135,000 by the 1640s.9

Accommodating these inhabitants meant that much of the ancient Roman city,

radically depopulated in the early Middle Ages, was gradually reclaimed for res-

idential building. In addition, early modern popes and cardinals sought to put

their architectural and urbanistic mark on the cityscape with ambitious building

projects.

Rome’s unusual imbalance of men and women in the early modern period has

led demographers to dub it a “male city.” In two nicely complementary essays in

this cluster, social historians Laurie Nussdorfer and Eleonora Canepari delineate

the demography that fundamentally shaped the experiences of the city’s diverse

and highly mobile population. Although in northern European cities demand for

domestic labor typically drew young women immigrants, in Rome young men

were the most numerous arrivals. They caused a sharply skewed sex ratio of,

overall, circa seventy women for every one hundred men. Although elsewhere in

Italy, notably Venice, cities sometimes counted a male surplus, the Roman skew

was dramatic and long-standing. Nussdorfer takes us into the fine structure of

this known but until recently little-examined anomaly. Highlighting hefty dis-

9. For a compact overview, in English, see Eugenio Sonnino, “The Population in Baroque Rome,” in Rome, Amsterdam: Two Growing Cities in Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Peter van Kessel and Elisja Schulte (Amsterdam, 1997), 50–70. Other essays in this volume provide succinct introductions to the political, familial, and urban distinctions of Rome.

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continuities in sex ratios among Roman parishes, her article examines household

composition in the heavily male section of the city around the Pantheon. Her

focus here is not the large households of prelates, which she studies elsewhere,

but the impact of the male surplus on ordinary residential groups.10 Her sample

confirms the relative scarcity of nuclear families and the frequent fact of nonkin

living as boarders or resident workers or in ad hoc domestic clusters. Conse-

quently, in these parishes relatively few men presided as the patriarchal heads of

classic households, and most others had to negotiate their hierarchical relations

with other men in other ways.

Many early modern cities swelled through immigration. The traditional story

is that the influx of foreigners led local elites and institutions like guilds to throw

up barriers in self-defense. Recent explorations of the notion of “cosmopolis”

suggest, however, that the accommodation of outsiders was also a common need

in many early modern cities.11 In Rome, in any case, where the Catholic Church

made its center, it was comparatively easy for a man to arrive, move in, set up

shop, acquire a wife and property, and become a citizen. Although in relatively

smaller numbers, women too came in search of work, spiritual sustenance, or

justice. Canepari’s essay in this cluster uses a mix of archival sources to describe

the variable links, for men and women migrants, between work and residence.

People, high and low, flowed not only in but out. Some stayed at length, but many

others did not, nor did many know when they arrived how long they would stay.

Especially for the working class, a continuing back and forth left many to spend

part of the year in the city and part in their villages in the hinterland. As a result, as

Canepari highlights, there were lots of variant arrangements, some of them lasting

many years; these included, for example, single-sex households, most often male

but also smaller female ones.

W OM EN I N R O ME

The first scholarship on gender in premodern Italy, as elsewhere, talked about

women and sought to rescue from obscurity their experiences and their expres-

sion. Relying heavily on prescriptive sources and focused mostly on elites, a vi-

sion of women’s mostly constrained roles and devalued contributions, formu-

10. On aspects of lay and clerical masculinities, see Laurie Nussdorfer, “Priestly Rulers, Male Subjects: Swords and Courts in Papal Rome,” in Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture, ed. Jennifer Feather and Catherine E. Thomas (New York, 2013), 109–28.

11. Five sessions organized by Claire Judde de Larivière and Rosa Salzberg at the Renaissance Society of America meeting in 2013.

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lated in the 1970s, is still being invoked in broad accounts. Historians’ early

studies of the civil law, notarial records, and family papers for northern Italy

often, although not always, ratified this view.12 A detailed reconstruction of in-

tense patriarchal dominance in quattrocento Florence set a model, and, for a

time, scholarship loosely generalized this image to the rest of the peninsula and

into the early modern period. This same framework of normative subordina-

tion, chastity, and silence shaped much of the discussion of women’s emergent

cultural production. Scholars read the injunctions against women’s teaching or

public discourse as forcing careful modesty and self-censorship, as exemplified

by Isotta Nogarola.13 An evolving scholarship has shown, however, that, beyond

fifteenth-century Florence, Italian women’s circumstances and activities were

more varied. For example, the sixteenth century saw an expansion of women’s

writing as well as their entry into painting and music.14 Noblewomen, as patrons

and practitioners, and talented women professionals validated each other as cul-

tural producers in a legitimate sphere of public activity. More broadly, elite or

plebeian standing and lay, marital, and clerical status mediated women’s oppor-

tunities in many ways.

Because the essays in this cluster on gender in early modern Rome consider

mostly the works and experiences of men, this introduction first surveys the

scholarship on women, with particular attention to recent publications. The

study of early modern romane emerged piecemeal, but, by 1999, a conference

directly addressed the question of whether things were different for women in the

pope’s capital. The answer: different from quattrocento Florence, certainly. In

2010 and again in 2013 a large conference on early modern Rome included a rich

sampling of current work in which gender was a principal or secondary theme.15

Studies presented at these gatherings, and elsewhere, often as articles as well as

books, accent different components of women’s complex circumstances and var-

12. On Florence, see, e.g., Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1985); Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1991); for a different view of Florence in a later period, see Giulia Calvi, Il contratto morale: Madri e figli nella toscana moderna (Rome, 1994). More generally, see Gabriella Zarri, Recinti: Donne, clausura e matrimonio nella prima età moderna (Bologna, 2000).

13. Margaret King, “The Religious Retreat of Isotta Nogarola, 1418–1466: Sexism and Its Conse- quences in the Fifteenth Century,” Signs 4, no. 3 (1977): 807–22.

14. Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore, 2008); Elizabeth Nicholson et al., eds., Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque: Exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Milan, 2007); Craig Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley, CA, 1995).

15. Portia Prebys, ed., Early Modern Rome, 1341–1667: Proceedings of a Conference Held in Rome, May 13–15, 2010 (Rome, 2011).

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ied achievements. The issue of female agency is a touchstone. Earlier studies tended

to emphasize prescription and patriarchal constraint; more recently, scholarship

has explored what Roman women did accomplish, on their own and in collabora-

tion with men.

The study of law, and more broadly prescription, has tended to emphasize

what women could not legally do or did only at risk of penalties. In this domain

it is important to distinguish legal rights to property and to action. In Pesci fuor

l’acqua Simona Feci lays out the legal disabilities that Roman women faced rel-

ative to the men in their lives.16 At the same time, the local version of ius com-

mune was less disadvantageous to women than the regime in Florence and some

other northern Italian states. The focus on the law and constraint is notable in

studies of fifteenth-century Rome, often based in notarial records. For example,

concerning women’s wills, there is more than one reading of the evidence. On the

one hand, wills appear much shaped by formulas and likely the intent of male kin

and advisors; on the other hand, the bequests of personal items, even of small

material value, differ for men and women and reflect the testatrix’s own con-

cerns.17 In parallel, Anna Esposito, the doyenne of this research, examines in a re-

cent study the concept of fama, which had both legal and social dimensions for

women.18 The essay tracks, from the law’s perspective, the policing of women’s

reputations not so much among elites as down the social scale. While telling, these

sources do not expose, as do some early modern ones, the complexity of negotia-

tions around honor and women’s active role in them.

Rome was a city of much coming and going. Although heavy immigration,

mostly of young adult men, defined the city’s demography, mobility was impor-

tant for women as well. Arriving in a new place, full of unfamiliar people and

activity, meant both challenges and opportunities that played out differently for

elites and common folk.

Noble women typically operated within familial contexts, but those could be

demanding, roomy, or occasionally tragic. Across early modern Europe, marriage

16. Simona Feci, Pesci fuor l’acqua: Donne a Roma in età moderna; diritti et patrimoni (Rome, 2004).

17. Maria Luisa Lombardo and Mirella Morelli, “Donne e testamenti a Roma nel Quattrocento,” Archivi e cultura, n.s., 25–26 (1992–93), 23–130.

18. Anna Esposito, “La fama delle donne (Roma e Lazio, secc. XV–XVI),” in Donne del rina- scimento a Roma e dintorni, ed. Anna Esposito (Rome, 2013), 1–19. On canon law governing sexual behavior in a Roman context, see Anna Esposito, “Adulterio, concubinato, bigamia: Testimonianze dalla normativa statutaria dello Stato pontificio (secoli XIII–XVI),” in Trasgressioni: Seduzione, concubinato, adulterio, bigamia (XIV–XVIII secolo), ed. Silvana Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglioni (Bologna, 2004), 21–42.

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among high-ranking families often moved brides away from home. In Rome,

with its wealth of patronage and its intricate socially mobile elites, the appetite

for alliances was intense. Putting Rome at its center, Renée Baernstein’s investi-

gation of regional intermarriage highlights a two-way traffic.19 Outsider families

rising through the curia sought to marry daughters into the Roman nobilities,

while established local clans cultivated networks both with the Roman hinter-

lands and further afield. It likely took time for these daughters and brides to get

their footing, but some learned, even too well, to maneuver amid familial politics

and pleasures. The sad fates of Beatrice Cenci, Isabella de’ Medici, and Vittoria

Acorramboni have been put down—at least in Stendhal’s lurid tales—to patriar-

chal honor culture and the passions of specific Roman men, although one recent

account redirects attention to more prosaic disease and propaganda.20 Less well-

known stories about Clelia Farnese and Vittoria Savelli show that other nobly-

born women suffered, more or less deservedly, in these fraught maneuvers for

wealth and honor.21

In conventional roles as wives, mothers, and notably as widows, Roman

noblewomen with less dramatic histories took active part in the affairs of their

marital families. These matrons well exemplify Muravyeva and Toivo’s claim that

women, although subject to gendered constraint, need not be marginal. Between

the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, many women, displaying managerial

dexterity and personal fortitude, took responsibility for themselves and family

resources when male kin could not or did not.22 For women of high rank, the

19. P. Renée Baernstein, “Regional Intermarriage among the Italian Nobility in the Sixteenth Century,” in Marriage in Premodern Europe: Italy and Beyond, ed. Jacqueline Murray (Toronto, 2012), 201–19.

20. Elisabetta Mori, L’onore perduto di Isabella de’ Medici (Milan, 2011). For a narrative in English, see Caroline Murphy, Murder of a Medici Princess (New York, 2008).

21. Gigliola Fragnito, Storia di Clelia Farnese: Amori, potere, violenza nella Roma della Con- troriforma (Bologna, 2013); Thomas Cohen, “Double Murder in Cretone Castle,” in Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 2004), 15–42.

22. Renata Ago, “Maria Spada Veralli, la buona moglie,” in Barocco al femminile, ed. Giulia Calvi (Rome, 1992), 51–70; Benedetta Borello, Trame sovrapposte: La socialità aristocratica e le reti di relazioni femminili a Roma (XVII–XVIII secolo) (Naples, 2003); Caroline Castiglione, “Accounting for Affection: Battles between Aristocratic Mothers and Sons in Eighteenth-Century Rome,” Journal of Family History 25 (2000): 405–31, and “To Trust Is Good, but Not to Trust Is Better: An Aristocratic Woman in Search of Social Capital in Seventeenth-Century Rome,” in Sociability and Its Discontents: Civil Society, Social Capital, and Their Alternatives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Nicholas A. Eckstein and Nicholas Terpstra (Turnhout, 2009), 149–70; Marina D’Amelia, “Diventare madre nel XVII secolo: L’esperienza di una nobile romana,” in Tempi e spazi di vita femminile tra medioevo et età moderna, ed. Silvana Seidel Menchi, Anne Jacobson Schutte, and Thomas Kuehn (Bologna, 1999), 279–310, and “Nepotismo al femminile: Il caso di Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphilij,” in La nobiltà romana in età moderna, ed. Maria Antonietta Visceglia (Rome, 2001), 353–99.

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consequences might have broader import in the sfera pubblica, as the title of an

Italian collection puts it.23

Elite Italian women—those with means and a family name to honor—were

active also as patrons of architecture and art. Early on, Carolyn Valone ensured a

prominent place for Rome in this scholarship. In several articles on the theme of

matrons as patrons, Valone recovered women’s substantial contributions to Ro-

man churches in projects not only to commemorate husbands and family but

also to express their own spiritual and artistic tastes.24 Noblewomen in Rome, as

elsewhere, also played a part in building palaces. In one notable example, Alfon-

sina Orsini de’ Medici transplanted her ambitious plans for a palace from male-

dominated Florence to the more courtly environment of Rome, where she had

kinship ties to the pope.25 In another instance, Camilla Peretti, as a widow with

children, moved to Rome to collaborate with her brother Felice, later Pope Six-

tus V, on establishing a new family domain. Camilla, rather than Felice, pur-

chased the real estate on which the Villa Montalto rose.26 These examples con-

firm that Rome was a place where newcomers, including wealthy women, could

make a mark.

From the mid-sixteenth century, some affluent women born and raised in

Rome or married into families resident in the city increasingly began to leave

traces of their activities and sensibilities in writing. Letters—composed to dicta-

tion or in their authors’ own hands—have become a prized source in recent schol-

arship.27 Much of this record remained unpublished, but a few women asso-

23. About Rome, see essays by Ago, Borello, Caffiero, D’Amelia, Donato, Feci and Visceglia, and Groppi, in I linguaggi del potere nell’età barocca, vol. 2, Donne e sfera pubblica, ed. Francesca Cantù (Rome, 2009).

24. Carolyn Valone, “Women on the Quirinal Hill: Patronage in Rome, 1560–1630,” Art Bulletin 76, no. 1 (1994): 129–46, and “Matrons and Motives: Why Women Built in Early Modern Rome,” in Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins (Kirksville, MO, 2001), 317–35.

25. Katherine McIver, “An Invisible Enterprise: Women and Domestic Architecture in Early Modern Italy,” in Wives, Widows, Mistresses and Nuns in Early Modern Italy, ed. Katherine McIver (Farnham, 2012), 162–63, 166–68.

26. Kimberly Dennis, “The Villa Montalto and the Patronage of Camilla Peretti,” in McIver, Wives, Widows, Mistresses, 55–73.

27. Gabriella Zarri, ed., Per lettere: La scrittura epistolare femminile tra archivio e tipografia, se- coli XV–XVII (Rome, 1999); on Rome, see essays by D’Amelia and Fantini. Other examples include Marina D’Amelia, “‘Una lettera a settimana’: Geronima Veralli Malatesta al signor fratello, 1575– 1622,” Quaderni storici 83 (1993): 381–413; Deborah Stott, “‘I am the same Cornelia I have always been’: Reading Cornelia Collonello’s Letters to Michelangelo,” in Women’s Letters across Europe, 1400–1700, ed. Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb (Aldershot, 2005), 79–102; P. Renée Baernstein, “‘In My Own Hand’: Costanza Colonna and the Art of the Letter in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2013): 130–68. For a triangular correspondence between Artemisia Gentileschi, her husband, and her patron/lover, see Francesco Solinas, ed., Lettere di Artemisia (Rome, 2011).

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ciated with Rome also made distinctive contributions in print. Vittoria Colon-

na’s two volumes of Rime (1538, 1543, with many subsequent editions) reflected

her deep, highly personal spirituality. Tullia d’Aragona published in several

genres; her Rime and a philosophical dialogue, On the Infinity of Love, appeared

in 1547, before she returned to her native Rome in her later years, where she

worked on her poetic rendering of the Meschino. Margherita Sarrocchi published

in Rome a first version of her heroic narrative poem about the Albanian soldier

Scanderbeg in 1606; a much revised and augmented edition appeared in 1623 af-

ter her death.28

As an open male city, for women without titles and wealth Rome was more

problematic but not without possibilities. Given the female shortage, at least

some girls found husbands readily, although many men, not only clerics, were

not free to marry. Ordinary women, themselves often immigrants, relied on fam-

ily, compatriots, and neighbors to make their way.29 Most of them also helped to

support themselves and their families, and not a few headed households on their

own. Much female work offered only a modest chance to thrive; nevertheless,

nonelite women, young and old, actively sought a livelihood as best they could.30

Many found work in assorted services, low and high. Although in many early

modern cities domestic work was becoming more female, in Rome not only prel-

ates’ households but also those of ambassadors and noblemen gave employment

more to men than to women. Nevertheless, a few specialized services, like wet-

nursing, belonged only to women, and in others they appeared in some num-

bers.31 For example, as the city’s economy burgeoned in the fifteenth and six-

teenth centuries, Ivana Ait documented business opportunities for women in

28. On these three writers, from the Other Voice series, see Vittoria Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo, ed. Abigail Brundin (Chicago, 2005); Tullia d’Aragona, The Poems and Letters of Tullia d’Aragona and Others, ed. Julia Hairston (Toronto, 2014); Margherita Sarrocchi, Scanderbeide, ed. Rinaldina Russell (Chicago, 2006). See also Virginia Cox, “Women Writers and the Canon in Six- teenth Century Italy: The Case of Vittoria Colonna,” in Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France and Italy, ed. Pamela Benson and Victoria Kirkham (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005), 14–31. For further bibliography, see Julia Hairston’s afterword to this cluster of essays.

29. Eleonora Canepari, “Women on Their Way: Employment Opportunities in Cosmopolitan Rome,” in Female Agency in the Urban Economy, ed. Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach (New York, 2013), 206–23. For a case study, see Elizabeth Cohen, “Miscarriages of Apothecary Justice: Un- separate Spaces for Work and Family in Early Modern Rome,” Renaissance Studies 21, no. 4 (2007): 480–504.

30. Elizabeth Cohen, “To Pray, to Work, to Hear, to Speak: Women in Roman Streets circa 1600,” Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008): 289–311.

31. Claudio Schiavoni, “Le Balie del brefotrofio dell’Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Saxia di Rome tra Cinquecento e Ottocento,” Archivi e cultura, n.s., 25–26 (1992–93): 151–242; Caroline Castiglione, “Peasants at the Palace: Wet Nurses and Aristocratic Mothers in Early Modern Rome,” in Medieval

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hospitality and finance.32 Women’s artistic production, although less well devel-

oped than in some north Italian cities, still was notable. A few female artists—

Lavinia Fontana, Diana Scultori (or Mantuana), and a lone native Roman Arte-

misia Gentileschi—worked in the city for some years, usually in some form of

partnership with their husbands.33 Although the clerical city did not especially

celebrate them, they did manage some success in a busy art market. In another

part of the trade, the sculptor’s wife Costanza Piccolomini, as a widow, took over

the family business dealing in paintings.34

Infamously, along with Venice, Rome thronged with courtesans and their less

refined prostitute sisters. Although scholars reading moral treatises or local reg-

ulations tend to confirm their expectations of prostitutes’ marginalization, in prac-

tice Rome housed papacy and prostitutes in a complexly symbiotic relationship that

evolved with the Catholic Reformation. For the city’s many semirootless males,

courtesans, grand and middling, provided not only sex but also social and cultu-

ral services that linked their clients into Roman networks.35 From these women,

too, we occasionally hear voices.36 Tullia d’Aragona, through her unusual literary

accomplishment, negotiated her courtesan identity in subtle ways.37

Religious institutions, and their archives, also continue to attract scholars

interested in women. Through the expansion and reform of convents and asy-

lums, the Counter-Reformation reshaped the lives not only of religious women

but also of many others among the vulnerable and unfortunate. New rules about

cloister from the Council of Trent sharpened restrictions just as Rome’s roster of

and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, Practices, ed. Jutta Gisela Sperling (Farnham, 2013), 79–99.

32. Ivana Ait, “Donne in affari: Il caso di Roma (secoli XIV–XV),” in Esposito, Donne del Rinascimento, 53–83.

33. Caroline Murphy, Lavinia Fontana (New York, 2008); Evelyn Lincoln, The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker (New Haven, CT, 2000), 111–45; Mary Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi (Princeton, NJ, 1989). On women performers of music in Rome, see Amy Brosius, “‘Il suon, lo sguardo, il canto’: The Function of Portraits of Mid-Seventeenth-Century Virtuose in Rome,” Italian Studies 63, no. 1 (2008): 127–40.

34. Sarah McPhee, Bernini’s Beloved: A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini (New Haven, CT, 2012). 35. Alessandra Camerano, “Donne oneste o meretrici? Incertezza dell’identità fra testamenti e

diritto di proprietà a Roma,” Quaderni storici 99 (1998): 637–75; Tessa Storey, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome (New York, 2008).

36. Elizabeth Cohen, “Back Talk: Two Prostitute Voices from Rome circa 1600,” Early Modern Women 2 (2007): 95–126.

37. Julia Hairston, “‘Di sangue illustre & pellegrino’: The Eclipse of the Body in the Lyric of Tullia d’Aragona,” in The Body in Early Modern Italy, ed. Julia Hairston and Walter Stephens (Baltimore, 2010), 158–75, nn. 338–47.

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monasteries was growing.38 Nevertheless, as communities and sometimes as indi-

viduals, nuns sustained a lively religious culture.39 Art historians have studied

nuns as patrons as well as explored the spaces and decoration in institutions that

housed women.40 And not all religious women lived in strict enclosure.41 Several

Roman confraternities had a place for laywomen to enact their spiritual and

charitable convictions.42 However, in the work of Angela Groppi, we see how few

options were available to the poor women and girls who were thrust into multi-

plying asylums, organized on monastic models to provide minimal care, teach

virtue, and correct the errant.43

The scholarship on women in early modern Rome continues to diversify in

new directions. We have not yet accumulated enough evidence to make big

claims. Nonetheless, tantalizing suggestions, cropping up here and there, invite a

hypothesis that, as a large cosmopolitan, relatively “open” city, Rome was not

always such a bad place to be a woman. Did the demographic skew itself offer

opportunities to some? Male power and privilege pervaded, as everywhere in this

era. Yet in collaboration with family, with women, and with men, romane, both

by necessity and by choice, had an impact on their worlds.

MEN IN ROME

Although there has obviously been a long history of men in Rome, scholarly

interest specifically in masculinity, its varieties and its travails, is quite new.44 Yet

38. Alessia Lirosi, I monasteri femminili a Roma tra XVI e XVII secolo (Rome, 2012). 39. Stefano Andretta, La venerabile superbia: Ortodossia e trasgressione nella vita di Suor Francesca

Farnese, 1593–1651 (Turin, 1994). K. J. P. Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge, 2003), compares three convents in Rome, Florence, and Venice.

40. Marilyn Dunn, “Invisibilia per visibilia: Roman Nuns, Art Patronage, and the Construction of Identity,” in McIver, Wives, Widows, Mistresses, 181–205.

41. Katherine Gill, “Open Monasteries for Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy: Two Roman Examples,” in The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, ed. Craig Monson (Ann Arbor, MI, 1992), 15–47. For a recent review of the topic, see Querciolo Mazzo- nis, “Women’s Semi-religious Life in Rome (15th–17th Centuries),” in Prebys, Early Modern Rome, 1341– 1667, 488–98.

42. Anna Esposito, “Donne e confraternite,” in Studi confraternali: Orientamenti, problemi, testimonianze, ed. Marina Gazzini (Florence, 2009), 53–78; Elena Di Maggio, “Le donne dell’Ospedale del Salvatore di Roma: La beneficienza femminile tra Quattrocento e Cinquecento,” in Esposito, Donne del rinascimento, 21–83.

43. Angela Groppi, I conservatori di virtù: Donne recluse nella Roma dei papi (Rome, 1994), and Il welfare prima del welfare: Assistenza alla vecchiaia e solidarietà tra generazioni a Roma in età moderna (Rome, 2010). See also Alessandra Camerano, “Assistenza richiesta ed assistenza imposta: Il con- servatorio di S. Caterina della Rosa di Roma,” Quaderni storici 82 (1993): 227–60.

44. Renato Ago, “La costruzione dell’identità maschile (Roma, età moderna),” in La costruzione dell’identità maschile nell’età moderna e contemporanea, ed. Angiolina Arrù (Rome, 2003), 17–30; P.

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these investigations have been, in some aspects, presaged in studies of early

modern Roman social, political, and religious dynamics that have looked at house-

holds and institutions where men and women interact, collaborate, dispute, and con-

sume.45 Within this broad social historical frame, Nussdorfer’s and Canepari’s

contributions, described above, adjust the focus to reveal distinctively male pat-

terns of work and residence. Four further essays in this cluster investigate specific

settings in which Roman men of diverse position wrestled with the social and

cultural demands of honor. Of these, three undertake close readings of judicial,

poetic, or philosophical sources to highlight the difficulties of Roman masculinity.

Trial records for Rome, especially those of the Tribunale del Governatore,

have become a prime source for excavating the dynamics of everyday Roman life,

for women and for men. In a microhistorical essay, John Christopoulos examines

gendered ideas and practices among ordinary women and, especially, men as

represented in a trial about an alleged abortion. This situation provides an excel-

lent example of how cultural multiplicity subverted efforts to correct wrongful

behavior through simple repression. Here discourses of religion, honor, medi-

cine, and the law intersected, and both authorities and ordinary Romans had to

negotiate meanings. In particular, the recalcitrant uncertainties of female bodies

confounded the legal need to distinguish natural miscarriage from intentionally

procured abortion. The first was a misfortune, the latter a heinous sin and form

of homicide. These practical conundrums framed a truncated trial that entangled

two artisan families in Rome around 1600. Giuseppe was husband to Rosanna,

and Giovanni, a rosary-maker, to Rosanna’s older sister. Giuseppe, some two years

after his wedding, charged Giovanni with committing incest with his sister-in-law

Rosanna before her marriage and procuring an abortion for her to conceal his

misdeeds. The commonplace of men’s honor invested in the chastity of their wives

underpinned Giuseppe’s accusations. Yet the judicial case turned on a problematic

medical diagnosis. When treated with purgatives by a local barber, had Rosanna

been suffering from a dangerous retention of humors, or was she pregnant? For

the first, the prescription was the proper cure, but, for the second, it was at best ill–

Renée Baernstein, “Reprobates and Courtiers: Lay Masculinities in the Colonna Family, 1520–1584,” in Florence and Beyond: Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy, ed. David S. Peterson and Daniel E. Bornstein (Toronto, 2008), 291–303; Marina Baldassari, Bande giovanili e ‘vizio nefando’: Violenza e sessualità nella Roma barocca (Rome, 2005).

45. Renata Ago, Carriere e clientele nella Roma barocca (Rome, 1990), “Giochi di squadra: Uomini e donne nelle famiglie nobili del XVII secolo,” in Signori, patrizi e cavalieri nell’età moderna, ed. Maria Antonietta Visceglia (Rome, 1992), 256–64, and Il gusto delle cose: Una storia degli oggetti nella Roma del Seicento (Rome, 2006); Borello, Trame sovrapposte.

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judged and at worst criminal. Despite Catholic Reformation ambitions to restore

moral virtue, the experts, both legal and medical, often demurred in abortion cases

because discerning the mysteries of a woman’s body was so difficult.46

Jessica Goethals and Kenneth Gouwens both uncover in more formally liter-

ary texts a broad gendered unease in responses to the dismal Sack of Rome. In

1527, during months of violence and pillage by imperial troops, Rome’s clerical

leadership could not reimpose order or defend its people. Among the many who

fled were artists and intellectuals, including Paolo Giovio, the focus of Gouwens’s

essay. Pietro Aretino, about whom Goethals writes, had left Rome somewhat ear-

lier, due to more personal fears for his skin. Scholarship on early seventeenth-

century England has linked social and political anxieties to gendered expression,

and the articles here highlight a similar conjunction for sixteenth-century Italy.

Both find an ambivalent, somber vision of Roman masculinity, where men failed

in their duty of strength and protection and women figure as bodily objects of

imperfect male care or pale foils for male distress.

Goethals investigates the almost immediate literary impact of the Sack of

Rome in two poems sent by Pietro Aretino, intellectual gadabout and provoca-

teur, to his patron in Mantua just a few months later. Although both poems treat

the city’s sufferings, the two differ sharply in genre and tone, the one a funereal

canzone and the other a carnivalesque frottola. To account for this deliberate dis-

sonance, commentators have suggested that Aretino, at a critical juncture in his

career between Rome and Venice, was more eager to draw attention to his own

literary prowess than to reflect on the world around him. Goethals argues rather

that Rome’s shame stuck with Aretino and that he recurred to the situated themes

of gender and violence repeatedly in subsequent years.47

Another reflection on the Sack, but at a greater temporal and emotional dis-

tance, is Paolo Giovio’s humanist dialogue Notable Men and Women of Our

Time, explicated by Gouwens on the theme of troubled manhood. With three

dialogues devoted sequentially to soldiers, literati, and noblewomen, this text uses

a form and topics familiar in humanist writing of the early sixteenth century. Yet

the work has a very specific historical trigger in the Sack of Rome, which the

author had witnessed at the side of Pope Clement VII. According to Gouwens,

46. For a case study in a very different social context, see P. Renée Baernstein and John Christopoulos, “Interpreting the Body in Early Modern Italy: Pregnancy, Abortion and Adulthood,” Past and Present (May 2014), forthcoming.

47. For another take on masculinity and the Sack, see Jessica Goethals, “Spectators of the Sack: Rhetorical ‘Particularity’ and Graphic Violence in Luigi Guicciardini’s Historia del sacco di Roma,” Italian Studies 68, no. 2 (July 2013): 175–201.

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in the dialogue three sorts of elite men who should be leaders—an intellectual

named Iovius, a general, and a statesman—reflect on the Roman cataclysm as

a critical moment in a wider “crisis” of Italian masculinity. Neither the men at

arms in Dialogue One nor the men of letters in Dialogue Two have delivered as

they should. In the second context Gouwens speculates also on Giovio’s own

sexual uncertainties. Women, although they enjoy parity with men in the title,

play a secondary role in the argument. With much sincere, if unoriginal, praise,

Giovio makes Vittoria Colonna his heroine. Outside the text she was, in fact,

another of those strong matrons, who, in addition to her own creative produc-

tion, supplied intellectual and material nurture so that men could excel. She

offered Giovio refuge from the Sack, and, fictionalized, her house on the island of

Ischia becomes the dialogue’s setting. Nevertheless, concerning Giovo’s third

dialogue on noblewomen, Gouwens here highlights male inadequacy as much as

female virtue.48

With the Sack and its anxieties behind them, Roman men continued to vie for

honor in the streets. John Hunt’s essay links the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-

century proliferation of carriages in Roman streets to male rivalry. In early mod-

ern cities carriages for rent provided everyday transportation for many sorts of

people. Private carriages, however, vaunting the livery of their owners, quickly

became a glamorous, bullying feature of crowded urban streets. Initially, car-

riages served wellborn ladies and, illicitly, courtesans. Soon, however, as Hunt

relates, men too began to add the ostentatious display of carriages to their inces-

sant jockeying for precedence. The first male players of this new game were

wealthy secular men, for sixteenth-century popes—some, at least, committed to

reformist austerity—forbade carriages to the clergy. Yet, in the seventeenth cen-

tury, the all-too-human temptation to celebrate God’s glory with baroque gran-

deur not only in buildings but also on the move overwhelmed the tropes of

Christian humility. While the contradictions of clerical masculinity will find

fuller discussion elsewhere, Hunt’s example of carriages makes clear that highly

positioned clerics participated eagerly in the culture of honor.

Gender studies has launched an ever richer set of inquiries about the many

ways that men and women engaged with one another and how gendered catego-

ries of male and female mediated thought and choice in many domains. For

women and for men in early modern Europe, rules and norms had force: pre-

48. See also Kenneth Gouwens, “Female Beauty and the Embodiment of Virtue: Vittoria Colonna in Paolo Giovio’s Notable Men and Women,” Renaissance Quarterly 67, no. 4 (Winter 2014), forth- coming.

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scriptions and conventions must have shaped what people could imagine, what

they feared and hoped, and, by extension, what they said in various forms and

media. Yet, given the variety and complexity of culture, there was room for ma-

neuver. People’s thoughts and expressions were not routinely determined by gen-

der or class or any other isolated frame for identity. The real world of materiality,

bodily experience, and behavior may often have been less easily manipulated or

molded. Nonetheless, even in the flesh, there were always multiple imperatives,

obstacles, and temptations that had to be negotiated. For many, agency was in

the interstices, but still it mattered. These essays explore in fresh ways some of

these possibilities within the distinctive parameters of gendered authority and

culture in early modern Rome.

54 | I TATTI STUDIES IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE SPRING 2014

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