Time, Space, and Women's Lives in Early Modern Europe.

Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi, eds. Time, Space, and Women's Lives in Early Modern Europe.

(Sixteenth-Century Essays and Studies, 57.) Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001. xviii + 336 pp. index. illus. $34.95. ISBN: 0-943549-90-6.

The Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico at the University of Trento has become a leader in Italy of the study of women and gender in early modern Europe. This essay collection is the proceedings of an international conference held in October 1997 under the sponsorship of both the Istituto and the Diparrimento di Scienze Filologiche e Storiche. Overall the contributors explore women's history between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries through the female life cycle. The sixteen essays are organized under five themes: historical periodization, ideology and law, religious life, marriage, and gendered constructions of identity. In part one, Merry Wiesner offers an historiographical survey of capitalism, patriarchy, and the problem of periodization, demonstrating why women's history does not fit with the grand narratives of Western history or with terms such as "Renaissance" and "early modern." Literary scholars, however, find the term "Renaissance" a useful category of periodization, as exemplified in the study of Margarete Zimmermann, which traces the voice of women from the querelle des femnies to twentieth-century feminism. Historian Silvana Seidel Menchi's magisterial analysis of art and literature, on the other hand, is more in line with Wiesner's argument. She concludes that the imagery depicting stages in womens lives, like historical periodization, is conceived by men, and it is largely absorbed with the female reproductive cycle. She further argues that the normative literature and societal expectation that women reproduce preempted their destinies and encouraged passivity and dependence on males. The iconographical analysis makes this one of the most fascinating essays in the volume.

Parts two through four take up the question of women's agency, each from different perspectives. Three of the papers assess women's powers of decision in the patriarchal worlds of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence and Venice. Here we are on legal and fiscal terrain, and the dowry is the center of study. Stanley Chojnacki finds that Venetian husbands made provisions to return their wives dowries to encourage them not to remarry and to remain in their homes and raise their children. Thomas Kuehn, adjusting Cristiane Klapisch Zuber's conclusions for Florentine women through scrutiny of the civic statutes, finds that they acquired greater legal responsibilities and activities over the course of their lives. Julius Kirshner, studying the case of a woman who married a man from another city, points out ambiguities in the laws of citizenship that permitted women a degree of maneuverability. The three authors find some flexibility for women within the patriarchal framework.

Perhaps where the newest findings for women's agency are emerging are in the realm of marriage. Marina d'Amelia has uncovered remarkable documentation for married women's relationships with their natal families: the correspondence of the noblewoman Eugenia Spada with her mother Maria Veralli Spada. Despite the fact that Eugenia lived under her mother-in-law's stern tutelage, she enjoyed a warm partnership with her husband and a continuous connection with a caring mother that gave her the latitude to make important decisions concerning both her health and the welfare of her son. Both her husband and her personal maid kept her mother informed of her health and welfare. Later as a widow, ceding to her father's wish that she remarry, she was able to maintain her relationship with her children by her first marriage. This is clearly a case where close, micro-historical analysis sheds light on practices and social reality, adjusting the restricted visions of women emanating from legal and prescriptive literature. Li kewise, the piece by Francesca Medioli on enclosure and forced monachization clearly separates religious ideals from practice: women unwilling to be imprisoned found a way out. Moreover, while theologians at Trent had intended to cloister women from the social sphere, Medioli argues, convents continued to perform their social and economic functions as before. She concludes, "... a norm can provide the structure for order, but does not automatically guarantee order" (180).

Two essays assess married women's experience outside the Italian context, giving the volume a comparative dimension. In both cases women were found to exercise more agency than once believed. Barbara Harris' aristocratic wives in Yorkist and Early Tudor England assisted their husbands as guardians, agents, and executors, and Gunda Barth-Scalmani's peasant, artisan, and bourgeois wives in Salzburg were involved in joint decision making over marital property.

The two theoretical pieces in part five do not fit into the theme of women's life cycles. Rather, they are methodological models for gender analysis. Both deal with how the gendered subject is created in early modern identity. Although they use men as models, presumably women did this, too. Heide Wunder explores how Hans von Schweinichen, a member of the Silesian lesser nobility, gave meaning to his own personal development from childhood through adulthood. Wunder argues that his personal self confession, set within the background of Christianity, has broader significance: piety like his helps historians of early modern Europe define the world of the gentry but also offers light on the development of the subject over the long term.

Space prevents treatment of all the essays in this valuable work. Overall the volume demonstrates that one of the more useful ways to explore women's agency in early modern Europe is through micro-historical analysis. The new case histories offered here enrich our understanding of the variety of women's experience.