The Captain's Concubine. Love, Honor, and Violence in Renaissance Tuscany. (Reviews).

Donald Weinstein, The Captain's Concubine. Love, Honor, and Violence in Renaissance Tuscany

Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xix + 220 pp. $39.95. ISBN: 0-8018-6475-5.

Donald Weinstein has provided a thoroughly enjoyable and instructive microstoria, based on court records. The starting point is a street fight in Pistoia involving two knights of the Order of San Stefano, from leading Pistoiese families, on Holy Thursday 1578, as the more faithful were gathering indulgences and preparing to attend the bishop's washing-of-the feet ceremony in the Duomo. Fabrizio Bracciolini, wounded seriously in the nose, accused sword-wielding Mariotto Cellesi, allegedly backed by four others, of dishonorably ambushing him without any formal challenge. Of course the truth was not that simple, and Donald Weinstein takes us through the inquisitorial processes of various courts in Pistoia and Pisa (home of the Order of San Stefano), as a trial about physical assault becomes, secondarily, a trial about honor. It emerges that young brazen Fabrizio had amorously besieged, and almost certainly bedded, Chiara the concubine of Captain Lanfredino Cellesi, Mariotto's gouty and largely bed-ridden father. Chiara, from a mountain village and married, had been the widowered Lanfredino's mistress for about 17 years, producing two children. Mariotro had resented this liaison, and his father's favoring of the bastards, but, seemingly, was eventually provoked by Fabrizio's public behavior to defend his father's honor, after warning Fabrizio to leave Chiara alone. Whether a challenge was given or anyone helped in the fracas remains fuzzy, given the suborning or confusion of witnesses, and the different partialities of investigating officials. To avoid pro-Bracciolini attitudes in Pistoia, Lanfredino got the Grand Duke to move the investigation and the final verdicts were given by San Stefano officials, which meant that considerations of honorable behavior, when dueling was banned, interacted with the issue of criminal violence. Mariotto was fairly lightly punished for wounding Fabrizio, but as Weinstein argues, the latter lost the conflicts over honor. Fabrizio (himself married with children) argued that cavalieri s hould not fight over a whore (the puttana Chiara), and that Mariotro was honor-bound instead to persuade Lanfredino to separate from her. "Pistoiese opinion" seemed to side with Mariotto in defending Chiara and his house-bound father against the indiscreet young lover. In the event the Captain did send her back to her husband in the mountains, (though she was in Pistoia when she died in 1612).

In unraveling the stories Weinstein reveals much about Pistoiese and Tuscan society, about domestic violence (from jealous Lanfredino against Chiara after she had gone masquerading, or in the strange killing of a Turkish slave-servant [note 13, 184-851), about unreformed attitudes to concubines and bastards, and about Duke Cosimo de'Medici's knightly order and chivalric attitudes (which were shared by non-noble levels of society). More broadly, this book very valuably exemplifies and elucidates the inquisitorial processes of secular courts. It instructively shows the way a clever notary-lawyer could indirectly control the situation for his clients, through the interrogatori (questions) submitted to the court and his choice of witnesses. Thus Giovanni Politi effectively helped Mariotto, and Asdrubale Cellesi, a priest and supposed supporter in the assault. Weinstein provides valuable comments on legal processes, problems of suborned witnesses, court notaries doctoring witnesses' evidence (and challenged by fei sty women witnesses), on the role of "gossip" and "opinion" in testimony, on the problems of official peace-making and establishing sureties. Weinstein provides lengthy translated quotations from court records and other sources (and a little of the original in the notes). He translates six love letters (five florid ones from Fabrizio, and one more circumspect but encouraging from Chiara), which Mariotto dramatically produced in the end-game, and which were copied into the record, along with a crude priapic drawing illustrating Fabrizio's frustration. This raises the issue of how much the mountain-born Chiara could have read and understood her younger lover's letters with classical allusions (based on letter-writing guides); Weinstein presupposing limited female literacy postulates a clerical interpreter, fra Bartolomeo. But one would like to know more of her life and possible education in 17 years as Lanfredino's mistress. This asking for more, as on Chiara or Politi, must not detract from the verdict that th is admirably researched and glossed study should assist, instruct and caution those of us using inquisitorial court records (secular or ecclesiastical); and join the work of, say, Elizabeth and Tom Cohen on Rome's Governor's court, in seminar teaching.