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Maddalena Nerli and Cosimo Tornabuoni: A Couple's Narrative of Family History in Early Modern Florence*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Giulia Calvi
Giulia Calvi*
Affiliation:
University of Siena
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Extract

Trying to trace seventeenth-century Florentine family memoirs, I came upon a manuscript journal entirely written by a woman. Its frontispiece bore a date, 1623, and a heading: “In the name of God, the glorious Virgin Mary and all the saints of the Heavenly Court of Paradise, this book is the journal of signora Maddalena Nerli Tornabuoni, and in it she will keep a record of all her daily accounts starting from this very day in March 1623.“

As the title specified, it was mainly an account book that covered twenty years of Maddalena's widowed life up to her death in 1641. Going carefully through its pages made me begin to perceive the boundaries of a domestic world organized and governed by a middle-aged urban patrician woman. It shed light on the social world she lived in, one of children, servants, close relatives, and sharecroppers; on the concrete material objects she was surrounded by—linens, foodstuffs, furniture, clothes, devotional items; and on the physical space she occupied—city and country homes, the district of S. Maria Novella and S. Giovanni in Florence.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , Summer 1992 , pp. 312 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1992

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Footnotes

*

I presented the first version of this paper at the Gauss Lectures in Criticism in November 1989 at Princeton University.

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