Negotiating the Art of Fatherhood in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy

Juliann Vitullo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030290443
• eBook ISBN: 9783030290450
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Negotiating the Art of Fatherhood in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy examines contested notions of fatherhood in written and visual texts during the development of the mercantile economy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy. It analyzes debates about the household and community management of wealth, emotion, and trade in luxury "goods, " including enslaved women, as moral questions. Juliann Vitullo considers how this mercantile economy affected paternity and the portraits of ideal fatherhood, which in some cases reconceived the role of fathers and in others reconfirmed traditional notions of paternal authority.

© The Author(s) 2019

J. VitulloNegotiating the Art of Fatherhood in Late Medieval and Early Modern ItalyThe New Middle Ageshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29045-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Juliann Vitullo¹

(1)

School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University , Tempe, AZ, USA

Juliann Vitullo

End Abstract

In his description of contemporary fourteenth-century occupations, the Florentine writer and town crier, Antonio Pucci, includes not only traditional ones that had been common in medieval estate literature, such as the three orders of knights, priests, and peasants, but also professions that were increasingly important in communal Italy, such as merchants. What skills and abilities does a merchant need?

A merchant should be a good reader and writer as well as a good accountant, and he should know how to engage and work with all manner of people; he should also speak in a measured way and be well mannered so that he knows how to behave among merchants and other wise and noble men whom he often encounters. He also needs to understand the worth of the merchandise at different times. And having become a merchant, he has to exhibit the greatest loyalty and trustworthiness whatever he sells, and wherever he is, he must know how to recognize the currency and the false merchandise so that he cannot be tricked. He must not dally in womanizing, gambling or other amusements and many other vain things but live virtuously so that he doesn’t hurt his reputation or drag others under suspicion. And above all else he must love and fear God and give a tenth of what he earns to the good of the poor for love of God, and watch himself so as not to offend God in any way and attend Church so that God gives him profits and even if he were to lose money, praise God hoping for his grace. (Pucci , Libro 262)¹

Pucci stresses that merchants need to master specific skills to perform their work successfully including reading, writing, and accounting in order to evaluate merchandise, exchange currencies, and participate in trade. Yet he also emphasizes that book learning alone is not sufficient because merchants also need to know how to get along with different kinds of people and, most importantly, win their trust. What we might describe today as social skills are a second set of abilities essential for merchants. In addition, he emphasizes that merchants need to avoid any public amusements, such as gambling, that could be interpreted as immoral and cast suspicion on them. Unlike other professions that Pucci describes, merchants’ success depends to a great extent on their ability to collaborate with different social and ethnic groups, and on their reputation within those networks. The academic skills necessary for commercial communication and record keeping need to be augmented by a talent to communicate well and a pristine reputation. By extension, the focus on merchants’ learning how to work with “all manner of people” as Pucci phrases it, suggests that fathers raising sons involved in commerce should also emphasize how to create and maintain strong social bonds. One of the premises of this book is that mercantile values did indeed influence notions of an active father who created emotional attachments with his children, usually sons, in order to encourage the kinds of social connections that would allow them to be trusted by and work with many different kinds of people.

The emphasis on a pristine reputation, which Pucci stresses for merchants more than for other professions, derives from a stigma attached to those who work with money, which continues throughout the period covered in this study. In an earlier volume that I edited with Diane Wolfthal, we examined how an ambivalence toward economic and social changes created by a growing monetary economy led to multi-media debates about how to determine value and authority in a society that allowed more exchange and less rigid boundaries.² In certain religious environments, particularly those influenced by the mendicant orders, money represented the fears associated with the inability to separate clearly the material from the sacred, and in more humanist spaces, the questioning of professional and emotional identities connected to powerful men. Two examples of this attitude toward money in different centuries and in different contexts that I analyze in the next two chapters are the legendary depictions of St. Francis’s refusal to even touch money and Leon Battista Alberti’s defense of pecuniary professions, still often considered inferior, secondary, and even fraudulent or dirty occupations, in his fifteenth-century I libri della famiglia: “some people, moreover, think that these professions, which we shall call mercenary, are never quite clean, never untainted by considerable fraud” (Neu Watkins 142).³ These attitudes encouraged men who worked with money to construct spotless public identities as charitable Christian citizens.⁴

As Pucci suggests by mentioning the importance of tithing for “the good of the poor for love of God,” another way in which the merchants protected their standing and distanced themselves from their “mercenary” profession was to engage actively and publicly in forms of charity that underlined their assistance to poor women and children, portraying themselves as civic fathers who used their earnings to protect the most vulnerable members of the Christian community. Such mercantile charitable practices are well illustrated by the picture on the cover of this volume, which was created for the façade of the oratory and residence of the Florentine confraternity, the Compagnia di Santa Maria della Misericordia (Fig. 1.1); entitled The Consignment of Abandoned Children and Orphans to Natural and Adoptive Mothers, Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, collaborating with Ambrogio di Baldese, produced it in 1386 in order to publicize the charitable work of the confraternity whose captains included important Florentine merchants (Levin , Advertising 232).⁵

Fig. 1.1

Niccolò di Pietro Gerini and Ambrogio di Baldese, The Consignment of Abandoned Children and Orphans to Natural and Adoptive Mothers, c. 1386, Museo del Bigallo, Florence, courtesy of ASP Firenze Montedomini, photographed by Antonio Quattrone

The large fresco originally appeared on the north façade of the building, that is, facing the baptistery, and so it served as part of the decoration of the most important religious space in the city: the piazza of the Duomo (Levin , Advertising 221). The left side of the fresco shows the confraternity’s captains welcoming vulnerable children to the residence, while the right side depicts them reuniting children with biological or adopted mothers. The religious and civic institution provided short-term care for children who were orphans as well as assistance to children whose parents (often mothers) abandoned them, due to various reasons such as poverty, illness, disability, and the stigma of illegitimacy (Levin , Advertising 230–23, Gavitt 190–95). Positioned over the main entrance to the oratory, the work communicated to the public how the members of the confraternity played the role of civic fathers to all the children who passed through that door.

The fresco celebrates the “fruitful” philanthropic mission of the confraternity members by depicting the mothers and children on both sides of the work as peaceful, affectionate, and content as they share fruit, probably pomegranates (a fruit that was often used to symbolize fertility and the Christ child in religious works),⁶ with the children they are touching or holding. The charitable billboard, though, does not portray the trauma of mothers leaving behind small tokens with their children so that they could identify and reunite with them in the future, the poverty created by the Florentine textile industry in which many women worked, the debt economy that offered advantages to the wealthy (such as the captains of the Misericordia) and particularly punished the most vulnerable, and the regularity with which wealthy men conceived and then abandoned children with both household domestics and slaves.⁷ It encourages the public to understand the economic and spiritual value of the merchants’ earnings according to how they redistribute a portion of their wealth as civic fathers rather than focusing any ethical attention to how they created it. The merchants display themselves as civic fathers temporarily taking on the nurturing responsibilities associated with mothers by imitating the role of the Virgin Mary who is sculpted in a fourteenth-century relief over the door of the same facade. The extant relief portrays the bond between mother and child through Christ’s gesture as he affectionately slips his hand under the neck of his mother’s dress to express his desire to nurse, and is represented in the self-reflexive fresco (Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2

Niccolò di Pietro Gerini and Ambrogio di Baldese, The Consignment of Abandoned Children and Orphans to Natural and Adoptive Mothers, detail, c. 1386, Museo del Bigallo, Florence, courtesy of ASP Firenze Montedomini, photographed by Antonio Quattrone

The familial bond is in turn echoed in the self-reflexive fresco where the viewer witnesses the relationship between the civic fathers of the Misericordia and the renounced children of Florence. Although both works on the façade of the confraternity focus on the joy of corporeal maternal affection, the fresco depicts historical practices that existed because communal economic and social structures deprived many children of that connection. This pattern of analyzing monetary transactions in ethical terms, yet focusing on how some of the wealth is redistributed to the poor rather than how it is produced by them, still today often defines a “moral economy” of charity in ways that continue to aid the wealthy (both in political and spiritual or emotional ways) and to subjugate the vulnerable recipients of the charity (Berman 15; Muehlebach 8).⁸

This book examines fourteenth- and fifteenth-century representations of merchants, such as that of Antonio Pucci’s text and Gerini and Baldese’s fresco, as contemporary debates about ethical monetary practices and fatherhood. Merchants, humanists, and mendicant preachers all believed that this topic was worthy of their attention, and renewed a discussion that had existed from classical times about the best parenting strategies for fathers to assure that children, and ultimately their families, would present themselves as pious, active, and beneficial forces in their communities. By focusing on this issue, the volume not only examines why the role of the father was such an important point of contention during this period, but also how the growing mercantile economy affected paternity and the portraits of ideal fatherhood. Many different voices participated in the discussion about how fathers should be portrayed, their role in the community, and the dangers that the new market economy presented to them. Texts examined include both canonical works such as Leon Battista Alberti’s I libri della famiglia and Boccaccio’s Decameron as well as lesser known dialogues, sermons, stories, letters, poems, and religious plays. In particular, the next three chapters highlight a clear emphasis on the cultural and social benefits of creating emotional bonds between fathers and children; early modern Italian...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Fertile Fathers of the Poor
• 3. Emotion and the Art of Fatherhood
• 4. Passion and Paternity: Debates About Fictional Fathers
• 5. Paternal Pedagogy and the Palate
• 6. In Bed with the Infidel: Fathers, Slaves, and Children
• Back Matter