Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy.

Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xi + 250 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-8018-5309-5.

Dennis Romano. Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400-1600. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xxvi + 333 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-8018-5288-9.

Two new additions to the history of the laboring classes have recently emerged with the publication of Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.'s work on the Florentine state and Dennis Romano's study of Venice. While Cohn seeks to highlight women's experience, Romano focuses on the ties between masters and servants. Both authors examine the role institutional powers and patriarchal ideals played in shaping the social realities of the subjects under study. Taken together, these two contributions offer Renaissance historians new opportunities for reflection and debate.

It comes as no surprise to learn that patriarchal institutions disadvantaged women of the laboring classes of central Italy during the Renaissance. Samuel Cohn's work on the Florentine state, a collection of essays based on quantitative studies, charts their declining status over the period from the 1362-63 plague to the Counter-Reformation of the 1570s. Cohn explores the experience of artisans and propertied peasants through elaborate analysis of court records and testamentary evidence. His initial essay concludes that women's opportunities to redress their grievances in the criminal courts of fifteenth-century Florence diminished. While he acknowledges the need for further exploration of family history to explain fully the direction in which his statistics lead us, he suggests that Florentine tightening of political power, through the centralization of the structures of criminal justice and police surveillance, restricted the latitude of laboring women.

Meanwhile in the mountain hamlets of the Tuscan hinterland, the location of another study, fifteenth-century prosperity was predicated on control of household size, and women paid a dismal price through such family-limiting methods as infanticide, child abandonment, and the outmigration of older widows. Elsewhere outside Florence, Cohn concludes, high politics and the growth of the territorial state disadvantaged women in areas where the capital city's control was more tenuous and insurgency proliferated. Thus, "in the northern, politically hot mountain zones, prosecutions against sexual mores were light, while in the southern, politically cold mountain zones, prosecutions for sexual crimes were high" (135).

Three essays in the collection track changes in testamentary practices, identifying values with gender. Male values prioritized lineage and were tied to earthly fame and worldly goods; women's values favored mendicant charity that helped other women. Cohn asserts that the plague of 1362 constituted a watershed for property transmission practices, though the reason for this is not readily apparent. In Florence and elsewhere in Tuscany women's control of both dotal and testamentary property escaped their grasp where customs of descent privileged the male line. Pious bequests plummeted, giving way to the earthly concerns of patriliny throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. By the late sixteenth century, however, women and the Counter-Reformation church formed a new alliance against the patrilineal bequests that had disadvantaged them during the previous century. The church provided new outlets for the pious donations of Tuscan and Umbrian women by creating institutions that addressed the needs of distressed members of their sex. Moreover, women sponsored charitable organizations that favored the cloistered life over marriage.

In this combination of narrative history and quantitative analysis, Cohn challenges purely micro-historical methodology. He interprets select tales of sex, violence, and revolution within a statistical analysis of hundreds of ordinary cases. Cohn prudently offers a thoughtful discussion of the data's limitations. Some readers may not want to go as far as Cohn does with the statistical samples. My inclination, however, is to focus less on the numbers and to evaluate the work's contribution to women's history. This study of property and public institutions offers few opportunities to rethink women's past. Those readers led by the title to assume that the book examines women as agents will be disappointed to find them mainly as victims of the courts, the law, and patriarchy. Secondly, one might argue that this laudable attempt to bring the history of laboring women into the picture be given a framework other than that offered by Jacob Burkhardt. Haven't the nineteenth-century historian's assertions of gender equality already been disproved by more recent advances in the historiography of women and gender theory? Still, the book is rich with material that will stimulate discussion about women's agency, particularly the relationship between their religious attitudes and their choices in property transmission.

In another work underlining the ways in which patriarchal ideals touched the daily lives of laboring subjects, Dennis Romano gives us a synthetic history of servitude in Renaissance Venice. For some time now historians of women have asserted that the public and private spheres of European society were connected in important ways. Romano's study of housecraft and statecraft exemplifies how scholars might examine connections that blur neat divisions of public and private, though it is not gender but rather class hierarchy that occupies the central stage of the book. The subject is elite management of household servants in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice. Drawing on prescriptive writings, Romano connects the Venetian ruling class's organization of domestics with that of the polity, viewing one as the mirror of the other. He also relies on evidence from Venetian administrative procedures and from legislative and judicial actions to exemplify the links between housecraft and statecraft, while using contracts, testaments, and court cases to explore the contractual and economic dimensions of the master-servant relationship. Romano ultimately proposes that relations between masters and servants can be used as a barometer to trace changes in Venetian social organization and ideology. He employs his data to assert that Venice as a polity experienced an increasing sense of social stratification in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, paralleling the overall aristocratization that swept over the Italian peninsula's elites in the twilight of the Renaissance.

There is ample material to exemplify how master-servant interaction signified patriarchal and hierarchal relationships of power, but one questions, as Romano concludes (239) whether housecraft and statecraft were inseparably linked for servants, or whether "servants shared with masters the same complex vision of master-servant ties" (xxv). The balance of Romano's sources still gives more voice to elite ideals than to popular attitudes and behavior, while the snapshots of servant resistance effectively suggest there was no singular vision of the relationships between masters and servants. Moreover, Romano's thesis does not fully integrate women's perceptions or experience of servitude. He finds that masters viewed servants in paternalistic terms. Does this conceptualization apply to mistresses as well?

Though Romano's thesis that housecraft in actuality mirrored statecraft is debatable, it does plausibly capture the patrician shift to aristocratic ideals. In this respect it may also have been fruitful to explore servant-keeping practices in the patrician estates of the hinterland. Still, linking housecraft with statecraft provides an organizational framework for a body of informative research on the economic and social realities of service, the composition of Venetian households, the demographics of the servant population, and the servant life cycle.

JOANNE M. FERRARO San Diego State University