Provincial Families of the Renaissance

Provincial Families of the Renaissance PDF

Author: James S. Grubb

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2019-12-01

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 1421431734

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Grubb's comprehensive analysis of his subjects' compelling, if inconspicuous, lives investigates every significant aspect of private experience during the Renaissance: marriage, birth, death, household relations, work, land, social status, and spirituality. Winner of the Society for Italian Historical Studies's Howard R. Marraro Prize Originally published in 1996. Historical writing on the Renaissance has usually focused on the social extremes that co-existed in the great metropolitan centers—on either elites or the underclass. As a result, the world of the middling families and provincial societies remains largely unexplored. Daily experiences in the lesser cities are, however, no less rich and revealing than those of Florence, Venice, and Milan. In addition, writes historian James Grubb, these experiences offer new perspectives from which to reassess familiar assumptions about domestic life in the fifteenth century. Based on memoirs and other records left by thirteen merchant families from the Veneto cities of Verona and Vincenza, Provincial Families of the Renaissance is an engrossing study of daily lives that have until now been overlooked by scholars. Grubb examines the attitudes and experiences of families undistinguished in their modest means and local ambitions from the majority of their compatriots, uncovering a detailed historical landscape rich in social obligations, commercial activities, and religious beliefs. Grubb's comprehensive analysis of his subjects' compelling, if inconspicuous, lives investigates every significant aspect of private experience during the Renaissance: marriage, birth, death, household relations, work, land, social status, and spirituality. In reconstructing provincial life in the Veneto, Grubb discovers in his subjects an independence of mind that mediated their reception of metropolitan ideologies far more than the historiography of the Renaissance might suggest. These "unremarkable" provincials were agents of their own destiny, influenced in equal measures by prevailing attitudes, local customs, and personal convictions. "James Grubb is exploring new terrain in this book. Distinguished by its clarity and eloquence, this is a superior work of historical writing and analysis that merits comparison with the best monographs on the social history of Renaissance Italy."—Gene Brucker, University of California at Berkeley

Old Women and Art in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior

Old Women and Art in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior PDF

Author: Erin J. Campbell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 131708604X

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Though portraits of old women mediate cultural preoccupations just as effectively as those of younger women, the scant published research on images of older women belies their significance within early modern Italy. This study examines the remarkable flowering, largely overlooked in portraiture scholarship to date, of portraits of old women in Northern Italy and especially Bologna during the second half of the sixteenth century, when, as a result of religious reform, the lives of women and the family came under increasing scrutiny. Old Women and Art in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior draws on a wide range of primary visual sources, including portraits, religious images, architectural views, prints and drawings, as well as extant palazzi and case, furnishings, and domestic objects created by the leading artists in Bologna, including Lavinia Fontana, Bartolomeo Passerotti, Denys Calvaert, and the Carracci. The study also draws on an array of historical sources - including sixteenth-century theories of portraiture, prescriptive writings on women and the family, philosophical and practical treatises on the home economy, sumptuary legislation, books of secrets, prescriptive writings on old age, and household inventories - to provide new historical perspectives on the domestic life of the propertied classes in Bologna during the period. Author Erin Campbell contends that these images of unidentified women are not only crucial to our understanding of the cultural operations of art within the early modern world, but also, by working from the margins to revise the center, provide an opportunity to present new conceptual frameworks and question our assumptions about old age, portraiture, and the domestic interior.

Family and Gender in Renaissance Italy, 1300–1600

Family and Gender in Renaissance Italy, 1300–1600 PDF

Author: Thomas Kuehn

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-03-24

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 1108138594

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This book studies family life and gender broadly within Italy, not just one region or city, from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Paternal control of the household was paramount in Italian life at this time, with control of property and even marital choices and career paths laid out for children and carried out from beyond the grave by means of written testaments. However, the reality was always more complex than a simple reading of local laws and legal doctrines would seem to permit, especially when there were no sons to step forward as heirs. Family disputes provided an opening for legal ambiguities to redirect property and endow women with property and means of control. This book uses the decisions of lawyers and judges to examine family dynamics through the lens of law and legal disputes.

Women, Art, and Architecture in Northern Italy, 1520–1580

Women, Art, and Architecture in Northern Italy, 1520–1580 PDF

Author: Katherine A. McIver

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-29

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1351871706

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Expanding interdisciplinary investigations into gender and material culture, Katherine A. McIver here adds a new dimension to Renaissance patronage studies by considering domestic art - the decoration of the domestic interior - as opposed to patronage of the fine arts (painting, sculpture and architecture). Taking a multidimensional approach, McIver looks at women as collectors of precious material goods, as organizers of the early modern home, and as decorators of its interior. By analyzing the inventories of women's possessions, McIver considers the wide range of domestic objects that women owned, such as painted and inlaid chests, painted wall panels, tapestries, fine fabrics for wall and bed hangings, and elaborate jewelry (pendant earrings, brooches, garlands for the hair, necklaces and rings) as well as personal devotional objects. Considering all forms of patronage opportunities open to women, she evaluates their role in commissioning and utilizing works of art and architecture as a means of negotiating power in the court setting, in the process offering fresh insights into their lives, limitations, and the possibilities open to them as patrons. Using her subjects' financial records to track their sources of income and the circumstances under which it was spent, McIver thereby also provides insights into issues of Renaissance women's economic rights and responsibilities. The primary focus on the lives and patronage patterns of three relatively unknown women, Laura Pallavicina-Sanvitale, Giacoma Pallavicina and Camilla Pallavicina, provides a new model for understanding what women bought, displayed, collected and commissioned. By moving beyond the traditional artistic centers of Florence, Venice and Rome, analyzing instead women's artistic patronage in the feudal courts around Parma and Piacenza during the sixteenth century, McIver nuances our understanding of women's position and power both in and out of the home. Carefully integrating extensive archival

The History of Families and Households: Comparative European Dimensions

The History of Families and Households: Comparative European Dimensions PDF

Author: Silvia Sovic

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-11-30

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 9004307869

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This is a wide-ranging presentation of the state of research in European family history. It considers what European families have in common as well as their regional and local characteristics, and illustrates the variety of approaches currently being adopted.

A Companion to the Medieval World

A Companion to the Medieval World PDF

Author: Carol Lansing

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2012-12-26

Total Pages: 610

ISBN-13: 111842512X

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Drawing on the expertise of 26 distinguished scholars, this important volume covers the major issues in the study of medieval Europe, highlighting the significant impact the time period had on cultural forms and institutions central to European identity. Examines changing approaches to the study of medieval Europe, its periodization, and central themes Includes coverage of important questions such as identity and the self, sexuality and gender, emotionality and ethnicity, as well as more traditional topics such as economic and demographic expansion; kingship; and the rise of the West Explores Europe’s understanding of the wider world to place the study of the medieval society in a global context

How to Do It

How to Do It PDF

Author: Rudolph M. Bell

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 9780226042008

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This collection of from manuals that were staples in the households of middlebrow Italians during the 16th century provides a refreshing and surprisingly fun look at social history. Illustrations.

Memory, Family, and Self

Memory, Family, and Self PDF

Author: Giovanni Ciappelli

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2014-04-10

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 9004270752

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The family book, a kind of diary written by and about the family for its various members, was established by scholars as a genre in Italy in the 1980s. Although initially regarded as an Italian genre, the family book can also be found in other parts of Europe. Nevertheless, the genre can be traced back to Florence, where it first emerged and consequently flourished with the lavish production of such documents. This abundance springs from the social structure of the city, where such texts were essential for establishing and cultivating the basis for the social promotion of Florentine families. This book presents a reconstruction of the evolution and persistency of Tuscan family books, as well as a study of several aspects of social history, including: reading and private libraries, domestic devotion, and the memory of historical events. Starting with the Renaissance, the investigation then broadens to the 17th-18th centuries and considers other forms of memory, such as private diaries and autobiographies. A final section is dedicated to the issue of memory in the egodocuments of early modern Europe. This book was translated by Susan Amanda George.

Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800

Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800 PDF

Author: Judith M. Bennett

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-02-01

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 0812200217

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When we think about the European past, we tend to imagine villages, towns, and cities populated by conventional families—married couples and their children. Although most people did marry and pass many of their adult years in the company of a spouse, this vision of a preindustrial Europe shaped by heterosexual marriage deceptively hides the well-established fact that, in some times and places, as many as twenty-five percent of women and men remained single throughout their lives. Despite the significant number of never-married lay women in medieval and early modern Europe, the study of their role and position in that society has been largely neglected. Singlewomen in the European Past opens up this group for further investigation. It is not only the first book to highlight the important minority of women who never married but also the first to address the critical matter of differences among women from the perspective of marital status. Essays by leading scholars—among them Maryanne Kowaleski, Margaret Hunt, Ruth Mazo Karras, Susan Mosher Stuard, Roberta Krueger, and Merry Wiesner—deal with topics including the sexual and emotional relationships of singlewomen, the economic issues and employment opportunities facing them, the differences between the lives of widows and singlewomen, the conflation of singlewomen and prostitutes, and the problem of female slavery. The chapters both illustrate the roles open to the singlewoman in the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries and raise new perspectives about the experiences of singlewomen in earlier times.