Women's Education in Early Modern Europe

A History, 1500Tto 1800

Barbara Whitehead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780815324676
• eBook ISBN: 9781135580940
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book chronicles 300 years of women's education during this time. Barabara Whitehead examines this history from a feminist perspective, pointing to the subversive actions of the women of this period that led to the formation of academia as we know it.

CHAPTER 1

Learning the Virtues

Convent Schools and Female Culture in Renaissance Florence

Sharon T.Strocchia

Education in Renaissance Italy operated along two sets of separate tracks: on the one hand, those distinguished by Latin and the vernacular; on the other, those created by gender. As historians have attended to the ways in which gender conditioned the acquisition and uses of learning in both Latin and vernacular modes, their inquiries have been hampered by the sparseness of local studies. This essay aims to enhance our understanding of how gender shaped vernacular education in fifteenth-century Florence, that most “Renaissance” of all Italian cities. Here I leave aside a statistical evaluation of literacy by gender, which Paul Grendler has attempted recently.¹ Instead, I consider the means by which fifteenth-century Florentine girls acquired vernacular literate skills in convent schools, and how that learning was embedded in a larger set of educational practices Florentines called “learning the virtues.” At the heart of the discussion is a previously unknown convent school run by the Augustinian nuns of Lapo, located in the diocese of Fiesole on the northern edge of Florence. The rich administrative records kept by the nuns themselves afford an important point of entry into the relationship between female education and female culture, including the fundamental social norms that education aimed to reproduce.

The first part of the essay locates the convent school of Lapo in the broader structures of Florentine schooling, then moves on to sketch the social profile of schoolgirls who attended it. The data derived from the Lapo school are checked against the records of another unknown convent school, that of San Niccolò dei Frieri, located on the opposite side of the city in the Oltrarno. The second part of the essay attempts to capture aspects of the learning experience for both nuns and their secular charges by looking at the nature of the curriculum and the purposes of convent education. The third and final part of the essay turns from reading to writing skills, and examines how girls’ graphic training was directed and often impeded by powerful contradictions within Florentine culture. For women as well as for girls, the learning and practice of writing highlighted the growing tensions between established gender expectations and the practical demands of urban life. By situating the education of girls in its social and cultural context throughout the essay, I hope to offer new information about convent schools and vernacular literacy while touching on the experience of growing up female in fifteenth-century Florence.

THE CONVENT SCHOOL OF LAPO

For both boys and girls born into merchant, banking, and professional families, vernacular education began at home with their mothers as their first teachers. Mothers who themselves had the rudiments of learning often taught the alphabet to their children, sometimes by shaping sweets in the form of letters.² Since the standard method of teaching reading in schools as well as in homes was alphabetic, basic vernacular teaching required no special expertise beyond mastery of the alphabet. One of the most commonplace teaching texts used in elementary education was a vernacular anthology based on the psalter (saltero de’ fanciulli), which functioned both as a pedagogical tool and as a religious text designed to instill Christian values.³ Several fifteenth-century humanists such as Francesco Barbaro glorified this “most serious duty” of mothers to educate and form the character of their children, which Stanley Chojnacki has argued allowed some mothers of the Venetian patriciate to exert greater moral leverage within a patriarchal framework.⁴ Similarly, the Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci praised the mother of Alessandra de’ Bardi “especially for the care she gave to the education of her family;” Vespasiano also cited the merits of Nanna Valori Pandolfini, calling her “the highest example of a good housewife,” as witnessed by “the excellent education she gave to her sons and daughters.”⁵

After this common initiation into rudimentary language skills and basic religious values, however, the educational paths pursued by boys and girls quickly diverged. Around the age of seven, boys of the Florentine elite were removed from their mother’s supervision to take on more strenuous educational tasks, proceeding in cumulative cycles of study that advanced them from one level of learning to the next. Once boys had mastered vernacular language skills in reading and writing schools, they moved on either to study accounting practices in abbaco schools for about two years, from age ten or eleven to thirteen to fifteen;⁶ or they proceeded directly to the Latin grammar course that distinguished the truly “educated” from the merely literate. Paul Gehl has concluded recently that in the trecento Florentine educational tradition, there did not seem to be a preferred order of study for boys, nor were there fixed ages for starting the various school courses.⁷ Yet despite the flexibility of courses and ages at which boys enrolled, a firm educational establishment was nevertheless in place designed to teach boys both vernacular and Latin forms of literacy.

The extent to which girls could utilize this establishment was subject to the strong task orientation of late medieval education, to culturally based gender restrictions, and to the contingent nature of girls’ schooling. In this bilingual culture with its two-track educational system, Latin learning functioned as the gateway to public and intellectual life; yet Florentine political arrangements acknowledged no legitimate public roles for women trained in Latin. Only in rare cases did girls learn Latin, either from private tutors, their fathers or brothers, or in a convent.⁸ Even vernacular education for girls in the fifteenth century was fraught with practical and ideological obstacles. One primary problem was the lack of a trained corps of female teachers who might instruct girls in a more acceptable gender-segregated environment. Giovanni Villani proudly noted the presence of female teachers (and students) in his 1338 survey of the Florentine educational system; both Gehl and Grendler cite the interesting case of the schoolmistress Monna Clementia, active circa 1304, to which Ronald Witt has added several additional examples.⁹ Yet definitive numbers for both female teachers and students are difficult to obtain since Florentines “preferred a private system of schools” that has left fewer documentary traces than in other Italian cities.¹⁰ Given the available evidence, it seems reasonable to infer that although it was not uncommon for upper-class families to employ a female teacher or governess to tutor girls privately at home, these individualized arrangements were disconnected from the educational structures in place for boys. Only rarely did girls study in neighborhood schools taught by men, and it was not until the Catholic Reformation that educational opportunities for girls expanded.¹¹

Given the scarcity of female pedagogues and the cultural discomfort caused by sexually integrated classrooms in the fifteenth century, it is not surprising that most Florentine girls educated outside the home were trained in a convent setting. Middle-class Florentine fathers and mothers obviously felt safer sending their daughters engaged in even limited educational ventures to learn from celibate religious women in the regulated, morally secure environment of female religious communities. The merchant Giovanni Manzuoli is a typical case in point. In October 1476 Manzuoli sent his young daughter Maria to Suora Pippa Bonsi, a Franciscan nun at the convent of Santi Jacopo e Lorenzo. Suora Pippa promised to care for the girl and to teach her “the virtues,” in return for six florins annual board and compensation; but after two and a half years, as Maria was probably nearing the end of her training, the girl died in the convent (June 1479).¹² Female monasteries in Venice also delivered a rudimentary vernacular schooling to some wealthy Venetian girls, although the high level of violence and sexual activity in certain houses may have thrown both their safety and morality into question.¹³

Despite the numerous references in Italian convent records to this type of elementary schooling, it is nevertheless worth emphasizing that in the fifteenth century there were no female religious orders specifically directed toward teaching. Some Italian Dominican nuns enjoyed a rather elevated reputation for learning, but they were not necessarily celebrated as teachers.¹⁴ Whatever training Florentine girls received in convent settings depended on the skill levels achieved by the individual nuns who taught them, on the girls’ length of stay in the convent, and on the nature and type of resources enjoyed by a particular religious house.

The convent school that forms the basis of this study underscores the haphazard, almost accidental character of female education in fifteenth-century Florence. The convent of Santa Maria del Fiore (commonly called Lapo after the name of its first benefactor) originated around 1335 as a small, informal community of women who opted to live together on a rocky summit in Fiesole, just outside Florence, without benefit of a formal monastic rule. In 1350 these eight female hermits, like many other semi-religious women of their day, were brought under official clerical supervision and chartered as an Augustinian convent.¹⁵ Sometime in the 1380s, the nuns relocated to a new site several miles closer to Florence on flatter terrain, thereby improving physical access to the community for urban residents.

Even in its earliest days, the Lapo convent showed itself to be an unusually active center of literate activity, with high skill levels and standards. Beginning in 1355, virtually all of the internal administrative records of the house—account books, memoranda, little chits and notes, lists of nuns, and necrologies—were kept by the nuns themselves, several of whom came from upper-class urban families that probably enjoyed their own traditions of female literacy, and who likely taught their untrained peers and successors how to read and write. Throughout the late fourteenth century many of the nuns responsible for record keeping, such as the highly visible abbess Jacopa and several of her sister nuns, displayed well-developed graphic skills, writing in a meticulous if sometimes stiff Gothic book hand that was quite distinct from the rapid, often sloppy cursive (mercantesca) familiar to readers of domestic diaries and merchant accounts. This lofty tradition of literacy continued unabated throughout the fifteenth century. Perhaps the single most concentrated illustration of the nuns’ graphic skills can be seen in a contract of May 1431, in which all sixteen nuns authenticating the document as witnesses wrote out a standard legal formula and their personal names in their own hands.¹⁶

Yet despite this literate tradition at Lapo, the development of a convent school there grew out of simple economic need rather than by design. In their 1427 tax report, the nuns stated that “they do not harvest either enough grain, wine, or oil” to live on and could claim assets of only 2,089 florins; by 1438 the Lapo nuns reported that their assets had declined to 1,366 florins.¹⁷ Since these observant nuns, having renounced family wealth, lacked a sufficient property endowment, they were forced to support themselves primarily by the sale of various kinds of handiwork. Taking advantage of new consumption patterns for luxury goods emerging in the late trecento, the convent developed a thriving commercial exchange with an overwhelmingly female clientele that clamored for the colorful ribbons, silk purses, embroidered cuffs, linen sheets and undershirts, thread, yarn, fine carded wool, stuffed pillows, and assorted trousseau items the nuns produced.¹⁸ An eighteenth-century chronicler estimated that the Lapo nuns derived fifty to sixty florins per year in the late 1360s from their handiwork.¹⁹

Supplementing these earnings from craft production was income derived from the nuns’ use of their literate abilities. By the 1380s the house had a flourishing scriptorium with at least three active scribes—Sisters Vangelista, Bartolomea, and Maria—who produced books for sale. These nuns copied what were probably devotional books for other women, as well as various liturgical books such as psalters and breviaries for their own use. For instance, in 1403 the nuns copied a “little book,” most likely a book of hours, for a Monna Bernarda; Suora Vangelista sold one of her products to a Monna Caterina in January 1406; and Suora Bartolomea copied another book in 1410 for Pippa Bueri, one of the convent’s most active female patrons. The high quality of their work can be inferred from the numerous transactions and sale of several books in these years to the learned friar Maestro Domenico, a master of theology at the powerful Dominican house of Santa Maria Novella. The Lapo nuns also made their graphic skills available for practical purposes of an everyday kind, producing several “writings” (scritti) of unknown content for women such as Pippa Bueri, who could read but not write.²⁰ Like other female religious communities in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence, Lapo offered an additional tier of graphic services beyond those provided by notaries, as nuns put their intellectual abilities and scribal skills to work for both the monastic community itself and for a wide range of monastic patrons. Through literate activities as well as commercial exchange, the Lapo nuns stood at the center of a vibrant network, in this case composed predominantly of women, that enabled them to serve neighboring areas in multiple ways, extend the social and spiritual reputation of their house, and traffic in the business of literacy.

That the Lapo community enjoyed a thriving literate culture can be seen as well by the precocious use o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1:Learning the Virtues: Convent Schools and Female Culture in Renaissance Florence
• Chapter 2:Equal in Opportunity? The Education of Aristocratic Women 1450–1540
• Chapter 3:The Pattern of Perfect Womanhood: Feminine Virtue, Pattern Books and the Fiction of the Clothworking Woman
• Chapter 4:The Rei(g)ning of Women’s Tongues in English Books of Instruction and Rhetorics
• Chapter 5:The Literacy of Jewish Women in Early Modern Italy
• Chapter 6:To Educate or Instruct? Du Bosc and Fénelon on Women
• Chapter 7:“Its Frequent Visitor”: Death at Boarding School in Early Modern Europe
• Chapter 8:‘A Knowledge Speculative and Practical’: The Dilemma of Midwives’ Education in Early Modern Europe
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Index