Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy

Judith C. Brown, Robert C. Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317886570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

This major new collection of essays by leading scholars of Renaissance Italy transforms many of our existing notions about Renaissance politics, economy, social life, religion, medicine, and art. All the essays are founded on original archival research and examine questions within a wide chronological and geographical framework - in fact the pan-Italian scope of the volume is one of the volume's many attractions. Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy provides a broad, comprehensive perspective on the central role that gender concepts played in Italian Renaissance society.

PART ONE

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The Gendered City in Renaissance Italy

CHAPTER ONE

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The Geography of Gender in the Renaissance¹

ROBERT C. DAVIS

Students of the Italian Renaissance have long since learned to pay close attention to what happened in the city streets and piazzas of these intensely public, human-scale societies. It was here, as much as in the writings of the humanists or the art of the masters, that Italians expressed who they were, to themselves and to the outside world: whether in their carefully staged ceremonials or in the everyday allocations that they made of their limited public spaces to competing groups and classes. Some areas were designated for making money and others for making things; some were reserved for the nobility, others the preserve of commoners. Space was also set aside and embellished for ceremony and devotion, some in homage to the state and some to the Church, though in the Renaissance both forms of worship might well be mixed, in spirit as much as in location.

More recently, scholars have become interested in the gendered nature of urban space in the Italian Renaissance. As much as certain areas of these cities were consecrated to the prerogatives of commerce, ceremony, and class, so too, it is now recognized, were some places considered more masculine and others more feminine. Linked with an enduring ‘Mediterranean’ culture whose roots reached back to well before classical Athens, such social traditions in Renaissance Italy saw the public realm – the guild halls and taverns, the main streets and piazzas – as the appropriate male sphere; while to women were allotted the household, local neighbourhoods and parish churches, and the convent – all of those urban areas most ‘identified with the private, domestic, and sacred roles that women were expected to play in society’. As the source of the ‘strong symbolic and moral associations that helped define gender roles and determine relations between the sexes’, the sex-based cityscape can offer an excellent point of departure for this volume: the silent background, it might be said, of the fundamental interplay between gender and society in the Italian Renaissance.²

Social historians have seen this gender bipolarity as the direct consequence of a strongly patriarchal culture, in which ruling male elites sought to protect patrilineal interests, masculine honour and political power by ‘defining urban space in gender terms’. As we shall see elsewhere in this volume, the isolation and enclosure of women played a crucial role in promoting these goals. This chapter, however, will focus less on the goals underlying a sex-based urban geography than on how the geography itself was experienced by Renaissance men and women. We shall see, in fact, that the gendered valence of urban space was not only ‘defined’ though the edicts of male elites, but was also the result of an ongoing process, a continuing social interplay between the sexes and between social groups that helped maintain, extend or challenge prevailing notions that certain areas of the city should be reserved for men and others for women.³

To better chart the dynamics of Italy’s gendered geography, it is useful to turn to a source that even today still captures some of the immediacy of the experience – the writings of foreign visitors to the peninsula between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. As they flocked to Italy to make and write about what would eventually be known as the Grand Tour, these visitors and amateur authors from France, Germany, and above all Britain tried to bring alive for their readers (the ‘many that neither have beene there, nor ever intend to go thither while they live’) the exotic and sophisticated societies through which they were travelling.⁴ Hampered, however, by their own linguistic timidity and the often ferocious agendas of cultural enrichment that kept many of them endlessly scurrying from one church or monument to another, few of these Grand Tourists ever had much time to actually meet any Italians, much less penetrate very deeply into these often dauntingly complex societies. Yet even the most tenaciously ethnocentric of them found the time to convey to their readers the actual experience of walking the streets of the cities they visited, and it is this aspect of an otherwise often highly subjective source that can prove so useful in recapturing the visual sense of urban space in Renaissance and early-modern Italian cities.

Thus, travellers to Venice – which was, along with Rome, Italy’s most popular destination – have left us with portraits of how the money changers did business at the Rialto, how gondoliers signalled to avoid hitting one another, and the way in which gentlemen managed to keep walking side-by-side, despite the narrow streets. Determined to see as much of the public city as possible, visitors gawked at passing processions, invaded the Greek churches and Jewish synagogues, and gazed with admiring envy at the broglio, that special space set aside for the Venetian nobility, where neither they nor the city’s commoners were allowed to intrude. When there was seemingly nothing else around to describe, they even wrote about the paving stones that covered the Piazza San Marco.

But few things evidently struck them as more worthy of note than the dearth of Venetian women in the public spaces they were writing about. ‘Woemen … if they be chast, [are] rather locked up at home, as it were in prison’, observed Fynes Moryson, the sixteenth-century Scottish traveller. Philip Skippon would later note much the same thing: ‘All the young women (except the ordinary common whores) are close kept within … [for] Few women walk the streets besides the old bawds.’ Even what few women there were to be seen were hardly to be recognized as such, for they moved from home to church (the only public place they were seemingly allowed to frequent) bundled from head to foot in such heavy wraps and veils that, as Pietro Casola said in 1494, ‘I do not know how they can see where to go in the street’.⁵

Why the women of Venice (but also other Italian cities, where ‘the wemen … [were] locked up at home and covered with vayles when they goe abroad’) ventured out so much less in public than did those back home in London, Paris, or Amsterdam was the cause of much speculation. Nearly all the Grand Tourists were men, after all, and they would have dearly liked to meet some of these elusive females. Many, like Skippon, blamed ‘jealous husbands and parents’, who, it was said, abhorred above all else that ‘they should be capricornified’ – with ‘the fatall homes they so much detest’. As a result, daughters were bundled off out of the reach of other males: ‘sent to nunneries in their infancy, from whence they do not stir till they married, or take the veil. Some men supposedly tried to lock their wives up as well, in the depths of their homes; those who felt forced, out of respect for religious observances, to let their wives out to go to church, made sure that they were always ‘attended by old women, who observe their behavior; the old woman being one of the first things the husband provides after he is marry’d. There were, it seems, no other reasons for Italian women to go out in any case: ‘they never, or very rarely visit each other, and if they happen to meet any where, they do not converse together’. They did not even have to worry about the shopping, because ‘onely men, and the Masters of the family, goe into the market and buy the victuals, for servants are never sent to that purpose, much lesse woemen’.⁶

Though they painted a bleak picture of women’s public lives in Italy, these Grand Tourists were, in fact, only lamenting the absence from view of that ten or fifteen per cent of the females who made up their own class – the gentry, the nobility, the well-to-do. Back in England, one might mistake a duchess for a common whore,⁷ but these travellers seemed quite capable of recognizing ‘women of quality’ (or the lack of them) once they went abroad. If the public space in Italian cities was gendered, it was done so selectively, on a class basis, for unlike the patriciate, urban workers could simply not afford the luxury of locking up half their numbers at home. Though few visitors bothered to record the fact, market stalls, outdoor workshops, and local piazzas were certainly occupied by women of modest means, going about the various activities necessary for their families’ survival. Even these, however, seem to have exercised a certain reticence when out in such public spaces, a fact that was recorded by some of the more discerning foreign observers, who noted that ‘The ordinary Women cover themselves with a great Scarf, which opens only a little before their Eyes [‘… just as much as is necessary to see their way’] and they go abroad but rarely’.⁸

That working-class women in a cosmopolitan centre like Venice were so reluctant to expose themselves in the streets is not so easily explained by ascribing to them the same causes that kept elite women indoors: with ‘those of inferior rank’ there were no patrician men hovering in the background, fretting that the presence of wife or daughters in public might prove a threat to the honour of the lineage or its marriage strategies. These women made up that great mass of those without a family name or inheritence to defend, without an obsessive concern for personal or ancestral honour, but also with an acute awareness of how important it was for simple family survival that everyone – men, women and children – be out and about to earn their share of the daily bread. One reason they tended to keep inside, of course, was that the streets and alleys of Renaissance Italy could be dangerous places for women, who, unlike most men, did not apparently go about the city armed (a sword for patricians, a dagger or staff for ordinary men). Where the streets were narrow and unlit, the police often far from efficient, and unknown persons lurking around every corner, a solitary female was always at risk of robbery or sexual assault. Interestingly, the tourists who wrote of women scurrying past without making eye contact never wondered if this might have in good part been due to their own – foreign – presence. Some did, however, remark on the risks to female virtue in a city like Venice: ‘the frequent Attempts, that were daily made upon the Persons of these Modest Women; for even the most Sacred Places could not be esteem’d as assur’d Sanctuaries, and in which the Chastity of the Women were out of all danger’. Alexandre Saint-Disdier thought that ‘the Young Nobility Living in Idleness … [and] being addicted to the pursuit of their Pleasures’ was responsible for many such assaults, although he also added wryly that, ‘the Republick seem’d to believe that the Sea-Air render’d this Disorder habitual and without remedy …’.⁹

Making the streets male

Beyond any physical danger that streets and piazzas may have represented for Renaissance women (and, in fact, the judicial records do not especially support Saint Disdier’s assertion), there was also the intrinsic masculinity that characterized most public space in Italian cities and made it implicitly alien or even hostile to females. The public arena was, after all, repeatedly consecrated as male space by the ruling regimes themselves, as they demonstrated their dominance to their rivals and subjects, through such overwhelmingly male-oriented rituals as guild or confraternal processions, patrician games and contests, and state ceremonials. Yet what might be termed the day-to-day business of keeping public space in Italian cities masculine – that continual reassertion of male prerogatives to ensure that women would never feel completely comfortable on the streets of their own cities – certainly fell less to elites than to ordinary, working-class men and youths. As often as not, these commoners, far from publicly asserting their masculinity in concert with the patriarchal state, did so in defiance of government edicts, sometimes at considerable risk to themselves.

In Venice, where both horses and carriages were unknown and where elites had largely opted for the waterways, travelling about in their private gondolas, the thoroughfares and piazzas on land seem to have been the particular preserve of ‘those of inferior rank’. Perhaps as a result, Venetian artisans and workers seem to have developed an especially elaborate repertoire for their competitive forms of virile display.¹⁰ Certainly the most overtly masculine of these (though by its nature not especially threatening) was the so-called forza d’ercole, in which groups of men from opposing factions contended to see which side could build the tallest human pyramid. Some of the strongest and most agile groups were able to arrange themselves in an acrobatic spectacle that was eight men (about forty feet) high, usually with a young boy at the top, waving a flag and an open bottle of spumante. Other competitive games had the potential for much more manly disruption and display, however. The most notorious of these in Venice were the guerre dei pugni, or wars of the fists, where anywhere from several dozen to two thousand of the city’s toughest men would meet to battle in huge mobs for temporary, symbolic possession of one of the city’s bridges. When the passion to ‘get up on the bridges’ (montar sui ponti) ran hot among Venetian workers, these encounters would be staged virtually every Sunday and holiday for months at a time, often in direct defiance of the ruling elite and its police. In fact, the Venetian state often seemed of two minds about these popular eruptions: on the one side, nervous about the potential for damage and disorder represented by so many young men, crazed with excitement, drink and aggression; on the othe...