Abstract
Rome, January 1646. In the darkness of a winter evening, a mother and a boy moved toward the sounds of soldiers and the flickering lights in piazza Campo de’ Fiori (Figure 0.1) — a lively market square by day, a convenient meeting point at night — for it was near the home the two had just abandoned. Either the cold or the weight of the secret the boy carried must have overwhelmed him, because although already 11 years old, he arrived in the piazza in the arms of his mother. His two older brothers and older sister trailed alongside their father, who was disguised in hunter’s dress. All the children wore the garments of pages, but if the mother also wore a costume, no one has recorded it. Perhaps the bulk of a child long past the age to be carried was enough to mask that she was Anna Colonna (1601–58), descendant of one of Italy’s oldest noble families, wife of the former pope’s nephew (now disguised beside her as a lowly hunter), and mother of the four children making their way toward the carriages waiting for them in the piazza.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For these details, see Giacinto Gigli, Diario Romano (1608–1670), ed. Giuseppe Ricciotti (Rome, 1958), pp. 274–5. The Barberini family had built a magnificent palace on the Quirinal hill, but Anna, Taddeo, and the children subsequently relocated to an older palace on the via dei Giubbonari, near Campo de’ Fiori.
See Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 154, 242–4;
John Beldon Scott, Images of Nepotism: The Painting Ceilings of the Palazzo Barberini (Princeton, 1991), pp. 198–9.
For the place of women in the Roman aristocratic family, see the bibliography in note 20 below. Critics of powerful seventeenth-century women charged that Roman women in general exercised too much power. See Marina D’Amelia, “La nuova Agrippina. Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphilj e la tirannia femminile nell’immaginario politico del Seicento,” in I linguaggi del potere nell’età barocca, vol. 2, Donne e sfera pubblica, ed. Francesca Cantù (Rome, 2009), pp. 45–95, esp. pp. 56–7. I am grateful to Françoise Hamlin for conversations on the difficulties of tracing women’s political activities in the past and to Paula Findlen for her insights on writing early modern women’s lives. Audiences at the following institutions and conferences sharpened my thinking on early modern women, politics, and society: University of California at Los Angeles; Sixteenth-Century Studies; and Renaissance Society of America.
Giulia Calvi, “‘Cruel’ and ‘Nurturing’ Mothers: The Construction of Motherhood in Tuscany (1500–1800),” L’Homme 17.1 (2006): 75–92. Early modern motherhood is now receiving greater scrutiny as a historical topic.
See Marina D’Amelia, “La presenza delle madri nell’Italia medievale e moderna,” in D’Amelia, Storia della maternità (Rome, 1997), pp. 3–52.
For a wideranging set of essays on motherhood in literature and art history, see Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh, eds., Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in Early Modern Period (Burlington, 2000), especially the introductory essay by Naomi J. Miller: “Mothering Others: Caregiving as Spectrum and Spectacle in the Early Modern Period,” ibid., pp. 1–25;
Caroline Castiglione, “Mothers and Children,” in The Renaissance World, ed. John Martin (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 381–97.
On matriarchy, see Helen Nader, ed., Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain (Urbana, 2004), pp. 3–4. On the beginning of women’s political lives in motherhood, see Calvi, “‘Cruel’ and ‘Nurturing’ Mothers,” esp. pp. 79–80; 90–1.
On the ideal behavior for women in the family, see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 57–64.
For a more recent summary, see Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, 2008), especially chapter 1: “Ideas and Laws Regarding Women.”
For a comparison of humanist discourse and familial practice, see Stanley Chojnacki, “‘The Most Serious Duty’: Motherhood, Gender, and Patrician Culture,” in Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore, 2000), pp. 169–82.
The edition of Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier by Daniel Javitch (New York, 2002) offers valuable insight on its gender politics, interpreted alternatively as pro- and anti-women, depending on the scholar. See pp. 281–400. For an insightful synthesis of gender attitudes in Renaissance culture, see Elissa B. Weaver, “Gender,” in A Companion to The Worlds of the Renaissance, ed. Guido Ruggiero (Malden, MA and Oxford, 2002), pp. 188–207.
Jeffrey Merrick, “Fathers and Kings: Patriarchalism and Absolutism in Eighteenth-Century French Politics,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 308 (1993): 281–303.
Paolo Prodi, The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls: The Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe, trans. Susan Haskins (Cambridge, 1987);
Mario Caravale and Alberto Caracciolo, Lo Stato pontificio da Martino V a Pio IX (Turin, 1978).
The larger European pattern of maternal advocacy is emerging in a growing European historiography. Its roots are in the Middle Ages, when women, especially widows, demonstrated a pattern of seeking redress in the courts. On the continent, beyond Italy, the best known case is France. See Harry A. Miskimin, “Widows Not So Merry: Women and the Courts in Late Medieval France,” in Upon My Husband’s Death: Widows in the Literature and Histories of Medieval Europe, ed. Louise Mirrer (Ann Arbor, MI, 1992), pp. 207–19.
For the early modern dynamic in France between women and courts, see Sarah Hanley, “Social Sites of Political Practice in France: Lawsuits, Civil Rights, and the Separation of Powers in Domestic and State Government, 1500–1800,” American Historical Review 102: (1997): 7–52.
For an analytical synthesis of women’s writing in Italy, including their contribution to the querelle, see Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore, 2008).
Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: wherein is clearly revealed their nobility and their superiority to men, ed. and trans. Virginia Cox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). In her introduction to Fonte’s text, Virginia Cox underscores its deviation from its more formulaic predecessors, but reminds the reader that it is difficult to assess the radicalness of its call for change. See pp. 1, 15–17.
On the weakness of maternal versus paternal love in the Renaissance, see the discussion of Montaigne and Alberti in Calvi, Il contratto morale: Madre e figli nella Toscana moderna (Rome, 1994), pp. 30–1.
Giulia Calvi has proposed the seventeenth-century judicial origins of the matrifocal family. Magistrates and mothers collaborated in casting mothers as the superior parents. See Il Contratto morale, esp. pp. 28–32; 130–4. On the alliance between ecclesiastical authorities, state institutions, and women, see Joanne M. Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (New York, 2001).
Microhistory as elaborated by Carlo Ginzburg has inspired the method employed here. Microhistory is a groundbreaking subcategory of the larger genre of the case study and has greatly influenced cultural history. I have employed it for its attention to dissonance, difference, and confusion about meanings among historical actors in order to explore the history of mothering in Rome. An early exemplar is Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980).
Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington, 1985), esp. pp. 2–3.
Barbara McClung Hallman, Italian Cardinals, Reform, and the Church as Property (Berkeley, 1985), pp. 158–62, 167.
The combination of male and female efforts to the family was first elaborated by Renata Ago, “Giochi di squadra: Uomini e donne nelle famiglie nobili del xvii secolo,” in Signori, patrizi, cavalieri in Italia centro-meriodionale nell’età moderna, ed. Maria Antonietta Visceglia (Rome, 1992), pp. 256–64 (esp. pp. 260–3). For an overview of this argument in English see her “Ecclesiastical Careers and the Destiny of Cadets,” Continuity and Change 7 (1992): 271–82. Ago elaborated the argument further in Carriere e clientele nella Roma barocca (Rome: Laterza, 1990); see pp. 67–71 for a specific treatment of the clerical brother in this familial configuration.
The model is further confirmed in Marina d’Amelia, “Becoming a Mother in the Seventeenth Century: The Experience of a Roman Noblewoman,” in Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modem Europe, ed. Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi (Kirksville, MO, 2001), pp. 223–44. D’Amelia underscored that both the cardinal brother and the women were important in marriage negotiations (pp. 225–6). Benedetta Borello tracked the interplay of women’s and men’s efforts and networks through their correspondences in Trame sovrapposte: La socialità aristocratica e le reti di relazioni femminili a Roma (XVII–XVIII secolo) (Naples, 2003). Several politically active mothers figure in the collection of essays, I linguaggi del potere nell’età barocca, Vol. 2, Donne e sfera pubblica, ed. Francesca Cantù (Rome, 2009). Specific case studies from that volume are cited in subsequent chapters.
On the bilinearity of families in Rome, see note 20. For the Venetian case, see Stanley Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore, 2000), pp. 14, 96, 129, 140, 149.
Guendalina Ajello Mahler, “The Orsini Family Papers at the University of California, Los Angeles: Property Administration, Political Strategy, and Architectural Legacy,” Viator 39.2 (2008): 297–321.
Maura Piccialuti, L’Immortalità dei beni: Fedecommessi e primogeniture a Roma nei secoli xvii e xviii (Roma, 1999), pp. 12, 81, 99.
Richard Ferraro persuasively argued that the terms of fedecommesso meant that the holder “could freely alienate only earnings, and was supposed to preserve in good condition the capital inherent in all property under entail …” He notes that in theory male members of a family could split entailed holdings and each marry under the terms of fedecommesso. Primogeniture was a “specialized form of entail” which designated family holdings for a single heir. For primogeniture’s increasing popularity in the seventeenth century and its synonimity with the term fedecommesso, see Richard Ferraro, “The Nobility of Rome, 1560–1700: A Study of Its Composition, Wealth, and Investments” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1994), pp. 139–42.
Renata Ago, “Maria Spada Veralli, la buona moglie,” in Barocco al Femminile, ed. Giulia Calvi (Rome, 1992), pp. 51–70. On pregnancy and the diplomatic work of women, see Borello, Trame sovrapposte, pp. 31–2.
For women’s general rise in literacy and the changes in its character, see R. A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modem Europe: Culture and Education 1500–1800 (New York, 2002), pp. 144–6.
On women as letter writers, see Gabriella Zarri, ed., Per Lettera: La scrittura epistolare femminile tra archivio e tipografia secoli XV–XVII (Rome, 1999) and
Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb, eds., Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700: Form and Persuasion (Burlington, 2005). See the recent bibliography on women and letter writing in Giovanna Benadusi, “The Gender Politics of Vittoria della Rovere,” in Medici Women: The Making of a Dynasty in Gran Ducal Tuscany, ed. Giovanna Benadusi and Judith Brown (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, forthcoming). For the evolution of women as letter writers, see Adriana Chemello, “Il codice epistolare femminile. Lettere, ‘Libri di lettere,’ e letterate nel Cinquecento,” in Zarri, Per Lettera, pp. 43–78. On female letter writing in Rome, see Marina D’Amelia, “Lo scambio epistolare tra Cinque e Seicento: scene di vita quotidiana e aspirazioni segrete,” in Zarri, Per Lettera, pp. 79–110;
and Barbara Scanzani, “Camilla e Costanza Barberini: lettere a Urbano VIII,” in Scritture di donne: La memoria restituita, ed. Marina Caffiero and Manola Ida Venzo (Rome, 2004), pp. 167–83.
Zarri insists upon the paramount influence on women’s writing of mystics in general and of Saint Teresa in particular. See “Introduzione,” in Per Lettera, pp. xiv–xv, xxiv. See Elisabetta Marchetti, “Le Lettere di Teresa di Gesù: Prime traduzioni ed edizioni italiane,” in ibid., pp. 263–84. For the earlier influence of Catherine of Siena, see Adriano Prosperi, “Spiritual Letters,” in Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, ed. Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri (Cambridge, MA, 1999), pp. 113–28.
Marilyn Dunn, “Piety and Patronage in Seicento Rome: Two Noblewomen and Their Convents,” Art Bulletin 74.4 (1994): 644–64 (p. 652).
Raymond Grew, “Finding Social Capital: The French Revolution in Italy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History XXIX (1999): 407–33, esp. pp. 413–14.
Hanns Gross, Rome in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1990), p. 48. His precise numbers are 1,200 lawyers in a city of 166,000.
For more on Roman notaries, see Laurie Nussdorfer, Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (Baltimore, 2009).
On the legal literacy of late medieval and Renaissance cities, see Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1991), especially chapters 8–10, on the legal activities involving women. On the legal constraints imposed by gender (and their circumvention),
see Kuehn, “Person and Gender in the Laws,” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (New York, 1998), pp. 87–106; “Daughters, Mothers, Wives, and Widows: Women as Legal Persons,” in Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anne J. Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi, (Kirksville, MO, 2001), pp. 97–115. On the legal activities of widows seeking custody of their children, see Calvi, Il contratto morale.
On the legal status of Roman women, see Simona Fed, Pesci fuor d’acqua: Donne e Roma in età moderna (diritti e patrimoni) (Rome, 2004).
Donna Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul (Washington, DC, 2001), pp. 143–8.
For a judicial overview, see Irene Fosi, Papal Justice: Subjects and Courts in the Papal State, 1500–1750, trans. Thomas V. Cohen (Washington, 2011).
See Laurie Nussdorfer, Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (Princeton, 1992), pp. 46–9;
Maria Grazia Pastura Ruggiero, Le Reverenda Camera Apostolica e i suoi archvi (secoli XV–XVIII) (Rome, 1984), pp. 211–17.
For more on the Congregation of the Barons, see Chapter 2; Jean Delumeau, Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1957–1959), 2 vols (vol. 1: pp. 457, 471, 475; vol. 2: 817).
On Marianna as letter writer and diplomat, see Marianne Cermakian, “La Princesse des Ursins: Sa vie et ses lettres” (PhD diss., University of Paris, 1969).
For a fuller account of her Roman years and activities, see Caroline Castiglione, “When a Woman ‘Takes’ Charge: Marie-Anne de la Trémoille (1642?–1722) and the End of the Patrimony of the Dukes of Bracciano,” Viator 39.2 (2008): 363–79.
The Palazzo di Pasquino was approximately where the current Palazzo Braschi is located today. See Carlo Pietrangeli, Palazzo Braschi (Rome, 1958), pp. 7–21. For the recovery of the Orsini of Bracciano archive by the Orsini of Gravina, see OFP, Box 46 (papal chirograph of 5 September 1729).
On the Tuscan widows, see Calvi, Il contratto morale. On servants, see Giovanna Benadusi, “Investing the Riches of the Poor: Servant Women and Their Last Wills,” American Historical Review 109.3 (June 2004): 805–26. On exits from bad marriages, see Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice.
Caroline Castiglione, Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640–1760 (New York, 2005), p. 13.
Wayne Te Brake, Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500– 1700 (Berkeley, 1998), p. 6.
Edward Muir, “The Sources of Civil Society in Italy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29.3 (Winter, 1999): 379–406.
Elizabeth S. Cohen, “The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: A Rape as History,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 31.1 (2000): 47–75.
Carlo Ginzburg, “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1989), pp. 156–64, esp. pp. 159–63.
For an overview of issues related to microhistory, see Edoardo Grendi, Carlo Ginzburg, and Jacques Revel, “Sulla microstoria,” in a special section of Quaderni storici 86.2 (1994): 511–75.
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), esp. pp. 135, 156–7, 164–6. On the relation of the hidden transcript to resistance and moments of rebellion, see pp. 191, 223.
See Armando Petrucci, Scrivere lettere: una storia plurimillenaria (Rome, 2008), pp. 109, 119–20. I thank Professor Irene Fosi for her insights and bibliography on this important issue.
For other European examples of male ambivalence, see Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715 (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 69, 73–4, 77. For more on this theme, see Chapter 4 and the Conclusion of this volume. Anne Jacobson Schutte emphasizes that the study of epistolary sources in familial archives may be the key sources for understanding change in the patrilinear family.
See Anne Jacobson Schutte, By Force and Fear: Taking and Breaking Monastic Vows in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, 2011), esp. pp. 254–5.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York, 1999), pp. 198–9.
Thomas Kuehn, “Reading Microhistory: The Example of Giovanni and Lusanna,” Journal of Modern History 61.3 (1989): 512–34, esp. p. 522.
Family history today encompasses a variety of methodologies and approaches. This study engages with specific works on motherhood and the family that have emerged in recent decades within the vast research enterprise on the family, women, and gender. The history of the family in Europe still contends with some of the earliest conclusions of its first professional researchers. Among such works was the path-breaking volume by Philippe Ariès, L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (originally published in Paris in 1960; English translation, 1962). Ariès almost singlehandedly invented family history and the history of childhood, at a time when a generation of historians trained in the emerging methodology of quantitative history explored household size and kinship, and historians of various methodological inclinations began to examine marriage and sexuality, childhood and adolescence. Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York, 1977) was one of the more controversial interventions that is still widely cited even if its conclusions have been largely refuted. Stone drew a sharp contrast between the family of the Middle Ages and the modern family, positing without much evidence that prior to modernity parents were relatively indifferent to their children. This interpretive leap along with a confused chronology of change (but an insistence upon positive change in the family unit over time) gave way to many subsequent studies aimed at debunking its conclusions. The research of Linda Pollock offered insightful correctives. See especially her essay “Parent-Child Relations,” in Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500–1789, ed. David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli, vol. 1 The History of the European Family (New Haven, 2001), pp. 191–220. Recent family history has focused on more limited chronological periods; incorporated more fully gender and class analysis; and explored the links between the history of the state and the development of the family. The outcome of such investigations has produced greater interest in understanding the forces of change in familial relations, problems that Ariès located in the clergy and the school, and which Stone neglected to discuss at all. A useful critique of the long enduring and much criticized theoretical model of European family development is Arland Thornton, Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life (Chicago, 2005).
Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 3–4.
Lynn Hunt, “The Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights,” in Human Rights and Revolutions, ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Lynn Hunt, and Marilyn B. Young (Lanham, MD, 2000), pp. 3–17. Linda Pollock stresses the importance of examining emotions in historical context in “Anger and the Negotiation of Relationships in Early Modern England,” The Historical Journal 47.3 (2004): 567–90. See the lucidly written and extensively researched dissertation by Tiziana Plebani, “Un Secolo di sentimenti: Amori e conflitti generazionali nella Venezia del Settecento” (PhD diss., Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, 2008). Some historians remain skeptical about the extent to which emotions such as love can ever be incorporated into the study of history.
See Renata Ago, “Young People in the Age of Absolutism: Paternal Authority and Freedom of Choice in Seventeenth-Century Italy,” in A History of Young People in the West, Vol. 1, Ancient and Medieval Rites of Passage, ed. Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt and trans. Camille Naish (Cambridge, MA, 1997), pp. 283–322, esp. p. 322. Or historians issue extreme calls for caution in such study: Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, “Les faux-semblants d’une histoire des relations affectives: L’exemple italien,” in The Household in Late Medieval Cities: Italy and Northwestern Europe Compared, ed. Myriam Carlier and Tim Soens (Leuven, 2000), pp. 147–63.
Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, 1988);
Lieselotte Steinbrügge, The Moral Sex: Woman’s Nature in the Enlightenment trans. Pamela E. Selwyn (New York, 1995).
I was inspired here by similar insights on the impact of early arguments for capitalism by Albert O. Hirschman in The Passion and the Interests (Princeton, 1977), esp. pp. 129–30.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Caroline Castiglione
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Castiglione, C. (2015). Introduction. In: Accounting for Affection. Early Modern History Society and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315724_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315724_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-30114-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31572-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)