Material culture, marriage and gender in Renaissance Italy
Joseph Atkinson
Many historians have suggested that the repeated visitations of the plague which ravaged Italy during the 14 th century were key in emphasizing the role of the family as a constant, which was crucial to the foundation of society. 1 The boom in treatises, sermons and government decrees concerning family indicate the increasing interest in family and children as the future of a lineage. 2 However, perhaps the most obvious evidence for the increasing emphasis on family and lineage was the establishment of elaborate wedding ceremonies. Marriages developed as a time for the exchange of extravagant gifts, not least the dowry, which signified the woman being transferred from her kin into a new lineage. 3 Therefore, marriage is a central time for historians of Renaissance Italy to analyse, with the grandiose nature of the various ceremonies providing a range of evidence whether literary, notarial or material. Moreover, these marriage ‘rituals’ often served to dictate roles in the familial structure, which would serve as a private sphere in which women were often confined, meaning that they are critical to understanding the position of women in Renaissance Italian society. 4 In his essay on Material Culture and Cultural History , Grassby suggests that historians subject goods to both ‘etic and emic analysis – the study of their objective attributes and their significance to those who used them’. 5 Using this model as a basis, cassoni, wedding chests, and rings will be analysed both for their objective attributes and for their social significance, especially for the contemporary female observer. Through this analysis, the extent to which material history can enhance our understanding of marriage and gender in Renaissance Italy will be assessed in comparison to the established historical consensus, largely built on documentary sources. The initial stages of the marriage involved the impalmamento, 6 in which family members from both sides of the proposed marriage would come together to negotiate, which was then followed by the giuramento grande. 7 In these meetings the dowry, and the date and nature of the marriage festivities were agreed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, who has produced some of the most authoritative work on women and family in the Italian Renaissance, made use of the Florentine catasto of 1427, a land survey to serve as the basis of taxation in Florence, to reach statistical conclusions about the marriages negotiated in thesemeetings, such as establishing that womenmarried on average eight to fifteen years earlier than their husbands. 8 She also used the economic evidence of inflated dowries and literary
1 Cohn 2012. 2 Hay and Law 1989: 35. 3 Klapisch-Zuber 1985: 240. 4 Diefendorf 1987. 5 Grassby 2005. 6 Klapisch-Zuber 1985: 217-219. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 210-211.
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