Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World

Sisters, Brothers and Others

Naomi J. Miller, Naomi Yavneh, Naomi J. Miller, Naomi Yavneh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351900164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

While the relationships between parents and children have long been a staple of critical inquiry, bonds between siblings have received far less attention among early modern scholars. Indeed, until now, no single volume has focused specifically on relations between brothers and sisters during the early modern period, nor do many essays or monographs address the topic. The essays in Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World focus attention on this neglected area, exploring the sibling dynamics that shaped family relations from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries in Italy, England, France, Spain, and Germany. Using an array of feminist and cultural studies approaches, prominent scholars consider sibling ties from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, including art history, musicology, literary studies, and social history. By articulating some of the underlying paradigms according to which sibling relations were constructed, the collection seeks to stimulate further scholarly research and critical inquiry into this fruitful area of early modern cultural studies.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Thicker than Water: Evaluating Sibling Relations in the Early Modern Period

Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh

While the relationship between parent and child has been a staple of critical inquiry since antiquity, the bonds between siblings have received far less attention. Despite early feminist acclamations of sisterhood, as well as the explosion of scholarly interest in reconsidering both the complexity of gender roles and the significance of domesticity in the early modern period, actual sisters and brothers have been rather neglected. A survey of recent studies of domesticity, the family and gender in the early modern period – including our own previous collection, Maternal Measures¹ – reveals multiple entries for mothers, fathers, nurses, sons and daughters, but virtually no mention of siblings. Rephrasing Mary Beth Rose’s famous question, ‘where are the mothers in Shakespeare?’ we might ask, ‘where are the brothers – and sisters, too?’

Yet in contradistinction to the issues explored by Rose, who ponders why the significance of mothers in Shakespeare’s time should be marked by their conspicuous absence within his texts,² and although siblings may largely be absent from late twentieth and early twenty-first-century accounts of the period, they are consistently present in early modern texts – and families. Brothers and sisters, especially twins, play an important role in Renaissance narratives, particularly romance and theater, allowing for creative, moving and often hilarious explorations of gender roles, familial relations and such important themes as the relationship between appearance and reality.³ This literary presence reflects, at least to some degree, the ubiquity of sibling interactions in contemporary lived experience: if the average mother bore a child every 24 to 30 months (more frequently in upper-class families where wet-nursing was the norm),⁴ those children were siblings, presumably affected by a range of factors including: their presence in a common household; the choices made for them on the family’s behalf (choices often determined by a child’s gender, birth order or even appearance); and high mortality rates (only 20–50 per cent of newborns might be expected to live to adulthood). Beyond questions of inheritance, marriage, dowries, and education, there were also issues of an emotional nature: rivalry and affection.

Inheritance, marriage, dowries, education. Here are topics easily located not only in indices, but in chapter headings and even titles of comprehensive studies of the early modern world. Yet the effect thereon, as, indeed, the significance thereto, of sibling relations is largely unaddressed. Like the Renaissance women in generations of scholarship before our own, siblings are, to paraphrase Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford in their superlative Women in Early Modern England, ‘everywhere and nowhere.’⁵ How are we to explain this absence? Perhaps it is that the emphasis on patriarchal and intergenerational structures has occluded the intragenerational. In a world in which women were constrained principally by the triple virtues of chastity, silence and obedience, and in which women were constructed as daughters and wives (property passed from father to husband), it is perhaps not surprising that feminist scholars seeking to explore the complexity of gender relationships in the early modern world would focus on the family ties most obviously associated with issues of power and authority – parenthood and marriage – while neglecting the significant fact that sons and daughters are often brothers and sisters.

For example, Mendelson and Crawford remark that ‘sons were educated separately, leaving the daughters with female companions.’ What even such astute historians omit from their discussion, however, is the relationship between those separately educated sons and daughters. A brother might, for example, whether inadvertently or conscientiously, afford his sister – at least vicariously – the education or experience denied her by her sex. After completing her own convent schooling at age nine, the sixteenth-century Venetian feminist Moderata Fonte demanded that her elder brother teach her what he had learned in school each day, thus providing her with the ability to both read and write Latin.⁶ Elise Reimarus not only experienced her own vicarious ‘Grand Tour’ through her correspondence with her brother, but also reinforced her brother’s intellectual pursuits, even as he fortified hers.⁷

This reciprocity is a central feature of the sibling relationship, extending beyond heterosexual sibling pairs. Sofonisba Anguissola’s paintings of her family members affirm her sisters’ intellectual powers, virtue and economic status, even as they assert the painter’s own artistic virtuosity.⁸ Same-sex sibling relations offer another opportunity to evaluate all the primary paradigms of sibling bonds – reciprocity, affection, competition, and alliance-building – even as we interrogate the significance of the gendering of those bonds.

Whatever might be gained by such reciprocity, it also attests to the affectionate bonds between siblings that underscore the common desire to memorialize deceased siblings. Mary Sidney, for example, commemorates and grieves for her brother Philip in a pastoral world of her own creation, while Lady Jane Cavendish Cheyne’s poetry mourns the death of her sister, Elizabeth Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater.⁹ Although only three of the Venetian virtuosa Gaspara Stampa’s poems had been published during her lifetime, her sister Cassandra arranged for the publication of the complete Rime after Gaspara’s death, affirming in a dedicatory letter that, although Cassandra would have chosen not to ‘refresh the wounds of so many sorrows, having lost such a valiant sister,’ she ‘must not, could not … disturb the glory of [her] sister by hiding her honored labors.’¹⁰ While Cassandra’s self-proclaimed reticence may have stemmed from her desire to present herself within the modest mores expected of the Venetian woman, we owe most of our knowledge of Stampa’s poetry to this unique contemporary edition (the second edition did not appear until the mid-eighteenth century) – the only one that does not present the poems as a pseudo-autobiographical Petrarchan narrative of love, loss and penitence.¹¹

While each of these four examples (Anguissola, Sidney, Cheyne and Stampa) is illustrative of the nature of sisterly ties, their significance extends beyond evidencing familial affection. Each story tells us something as well about how an early modern woman might situate herself as a writer or artist, negotiating a position between public and private.

Other aspects of family life, such as dowries, demonstrate some of the more concrete effects of sibling relations, presenting another area in which attention to such ties may provide insight into a complicated social process. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice, for example, the number of women in convents, by some estimates, exceeded those uncloistered, resulting largely from a system designed to restrict patrician status to a small percentage of the republic’s population and to consolidate the wealth of individual patrician families.¹² Due to skyrocketing dowry rates and the desire not to divide family property, only one brother might marry (generally in his late twenties or early thirties), leaving the others to live with his family in fraterna. Similarly, only one or two sisters (generally the youngest, so as to maintain familial control of dowry funds for as long as possible) would be betrothed at 13 or 14, while the others would be consigned for life to the convents, whose ‘spiritual dowry’ rates were kept artificially low by Senate proclamation.

While these coerced monachizations were of sufficient concern to draw the attention of the Patriarch Giovanni Tiepolo, who declared in a 1619 letter to the Senate that ‘More than two thousand patrician women … live in this city locked up in convents as if in a public tomb,’¹³ the practice continued throughout most of the century, suggesting its social and economic significance to the Republic – a fact not lost on the institution’s most vociferous critic, the cloistered nun Arcangela Tarabotti. L’inferno monacale (‘The Hell of the Convent’) presents a scathing indictment of the hypocritical social structures by which fathers incarcerate their daughters with the active support of both Church and state. In contrasting the experiences as nun and bride of two otherwise interchangeable sisters, receiving vastly different treatment for no reason other than the greed of others, Tarabotti not only underscores the injustice of a system in which women are valued merely as objects of display, but argues that such coerced monachizations constitute a crime perpetrated by the Church, the Republic and the fathers of Venice against not only individual women, but sisterly relations in general.¹⁴

Permanent cloistration of unwilling virgins was perhaps the most obviously oppressive version of the dynastic marriage arrangements Ariosto plays with in his romance epic, and which were a common aspect of upper-class and noble family life in the early modern world. What can the sibling relationship tell us about such alliances? And how does the political, social and religious rhetoric thereof reveal the significance of the sisterly or brotherly tie?

In an important article on ‘The Erotics of Absolutism,’ Margaret D. Carroll contrasts the visual and political rhetoric surrounding the 1615 dual marriage of the future King Philip IV of Spain to Elisabeth, sister of France’s Louis XIII, and of Louis to Philip’s sister, Anne (commemorated, she argues, in Rubens’s Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus [1615–18]), to the actual experience of the brides and grooms, as described by contemporary witnesses. Both the program for the festivities surrounding the signing of the treaty by which the marriages were arranged and Rubens’s painting of another two sets of siblings draw the analogy between Louis and Philip on the one hand, and Castor and Pollux on the other, underscoring that the important bond created by these betrothals is not that between husband and wife, but rather between the new ‘brothers,’ who, in Carroll’s terms, ‘Like the twins Castor and Pollux … once united by familial bonds, would banish the tempests of war from Europe.’¹⁵

In Carroll’s reading, Rubens’s presentation of the brides as ‘sacrificial victims … intimate[s] the sacred importance of these nuptials and the sovereign powers of the brides’ quasi-divine spouses.’¹⁶ But the rhetoric of sexual power and public fraternal bonding is belied by the experience of the real-life siblings, or at least the French ones. According to the diary of Louis XIII’s physician, Jean Heroard, 15-year-old Louis and 13-year-old Elisabeth spent the day of her departure sobbing and clinging to each other, until forcibly separated by the Spanish Ambassador.¹⁷ The sibling bonds of diplomacy might be more powerful politically, but the bonds of blood on which they were modeled were possibly more affecting. Whether moved by reciprocity, competition, or affection, early modern sibling relations not only coexist with other familial bonds, but often precede, underlie and sometimes even outlast those alternative familial constructs, as attested to by a staggering range of representations from the early modern world.

Drawing on art history, musicology, literary studies and social history, the interdisciplinary essays in this volume explore a broad spectrum of sibling bonds in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy, England, France, Spain, and Germany. Rather than dividing the contributions by country, language, genre, field, discipline, or chronology, we have chosen to organize the collection into four topical sections that correspond to some of the primary paradigms of sibling relations in the early modern world, considering issues of confinement and celebration, authority and empowerment, reciprocity and constraint, and affection and competition. The discussions of these paradigms are framed, in turn, by an array of feminist and cultural studies perspectives, enabling the volume to offer a spectrum of critical approaches to these shared groupings of topics.

Divine devotion

While the title of our introduction, ‘Thicker than Water,’ alludes to the obligatory bond among those conjoined by blood, sibling ties might also be created or augmented by the complexity of relations in religious communities. Accordingly, the volume’s first section, ‘Divine devotion,’ examines sibling devotion and competition in the context of a variety of religious practices, particularly those associated with convents in Spain, England, Italy, and Germany, both before and after the Reformation. In ‘Making a Saint out of a Sibling,’ Susan B. Laningham considers the relation between the sixteenth-century Spanish nun María Vela y Cueto and her brothers, who would tolerate no disparaging remarks about her, insisting that their sister was ‘a saint’ even when her fellow nuns in the convent challenged the sanctity that Maria’s brothers associated with her extreme ascetism and visions. Maria’s letters to her brothers, as well as her autobiography and the biography of a confessor, provide a composite glimpse into the relation between siblings launching a process of beatification, and suggest the conflicts that might arise between sibling ties of blood and those of the religious community.

The educational and spiritual value of religious sisterhood is underscored by the response to the anti-conventual strictures of Protestantism. Kari Boyd McBride’s ‘Recusant Sisters: Refusing Protestant Womanhood’ examines the extent to which the dissolution of the English convents in the sixteenth century closed off one avenue for women’s learning and the kind of sisterhood of religious and educational practice that had characterized the medieval religious. In response, a number of recusant women left England for the Continent, where they founded women’s houses in France and Flanders. At the same time, notable devotion to learning can be found among the followers of Catholic visionary leader Mary Ward, who not only espoused women’s education but called for women religious to be uncloistered like their Franciscan and Dominican confreres.

Although in Italy the significance of conventual life remained largely uncontested by the Reformation, the interplay of familial and religious sisterhood posed challenges to the institution both before and after the Council of Trent. In ‘Families, Convents, Music: The Power of Sisterhood,’ Craig Monson explores monastic and sibling ties in early modern Italy, focusing specifically on musical facets of convent life, as reflected in monastic documents. Because the Church hierarchy perceived strong family ties as a potential threat to the monastic ideal of common life, as well as to monastic government, official policy generally required that no more than two sisters be permitted in a single monastic institution, to avoid the creation of family power blocks. A study of the frequent challenges to this established quota, particularly in the instance of musical families, suggests that sibling relations offered alternative venues for the exercise of influence and agency, both within and outside cloister walls.

The Reformation is again the context for a consideration of relations between nuns in the final essay in this section, Merry Wiesner-Hanks’s ‘“Liebe Schwester …”: Siblings, Convents, and the Reformation.’ Wiesner-Hanks analyzes the depiction of personal relations, including blood relations, within convents in several works by German nuns written before and after the Reformation, including the ‘Denkwürdigkeiten’ of Charitas Pirckheimer and the letters of the Rem sisters in Augsburg. The essay also considers ways in which these writings were used in later arguments about convents, sometimes in accordance with the views of their authors and sometimes in opposition to them.

Ties that bind

Private family ties often had important political and economic ramifications, especially among noble or upper-class families; the volume’s second section views such public/private interactions through the lenses of history, art history, and literature. Certainly the history of early modern Europe is larded with regencies, stepparents and matchmaking powerplays; Jane Couchman calls attention to Catherine de Bourbon, the rarely mentioned sister of Henri IV of France (1553–1610), who played a significant public role as his regent in Navarre and Bearn. Equally significant was her later resistance, both public and private, to her brother’s conversion to Catholicism and to his attempts to bring about her own conversion as well. ‘Resisting Henri IV: Catherine de Bourbon and her Brother’ explores the gendered imbalance of power between the siblings as revealed in their correspondence, and reviews the history of this period by listening not only to the charismatic male figure, who then, as now, holds center stage, but also to the voice of his sister, an influential political and religious figure in her own right.

Moving to England, in ‘Sister-Subject/Sister-Queen: Elizabeth I amon...