Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Chojnacka, Monica Elena

Titel

City of women: Gender, family, and community in Venice, 1540-1630

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

1994

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation offers a new picture of women's lives in early modern Venice by considering their responses to social, religious, and economic developments within the context of their family and community life. Using a wide range of archival sources, both qualitative and quantitative, I argue that in this period women of the popular classes confronted a greater variety of options than they had previously, and found themselves increasingly integrated into the larger community of the city. Some of the factors at play were the shift from an economy based primarily on trade to one grounded in manufacturing; a growing concern among the Venetian elites with the city's poor; and the multifaceted impact of the Counterreformation. All of these developments directly affected the lives of Venetian women of the popular classes, or popolane. By showing how these women responded to and participated in the changes taking place around them, I suggest new ways to evaluate women's status in early modern Europe. The material studied here sheds light on the relations between family, parish, and city in early modern Venice, the ways in which those relations were changing in this period, and the implications of such changes for women of the popular classes. Above all, the documents, which include parish censuses, Inquisition trial records, and civil petitions, suggest that popolane women found themselves in an increasingly uncertain world in early modern Venice. Traditional communities became more temporary as immigrants, many of them women, poured into the city, both to escape the plague on the mainland and later to fill jobs left vacant by Venice's own bout with the Black Death. These immigrants changed the nature of neighborhood and family life by introducing an element of instability as well as possibility into the local communities. Family members, especially the young, left their home parish, and sometimes the city altogether, for work or personal reasons. The establishment by the city of central institutions for the poor meant that the role of the parish--traditionally the center of female society--would diminish. At the same time, the Inquisition, which began hearing cases in 1547, provided an infinitely more dramatic and satisfying means of settling a local dispute than could a more traditional neighborhood confrontation. In these ways, both men and women began to develop a new and wider set of allegiances and networks, different from the family and neighborhood circles of the past. While women remained grounded in their family community, they now had more options in those moments when that community broke down. In this way, popolane women participated in the emergence of a wider, more modern urban environment.