Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Charity, Discipline, and State-Building in Cinquecento Florence
- 2 Gender, Lineage Ideology, and the Development of A Status Culture
- 3 Law And the Majesty of Practice
- 4 Innocence and Danger: Pedagogy, Discipline, and the Culture of Masculinity
- 5 From Putte to Puttane: Female Foundlings and Charitable Institutions in Florence
- 6 Unruly Nuns: Clausura And Confinement
- Conclusion: The Honor of God, of the City, and of Their Own Houses
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
2 - Gender, Lineage Ideology, and the Development of A Status Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Charity, Discipline, and State-Building in Cinquecento Florence
- 2 Gender, Lineage Ideology, and the Development of A Status Culture
- 3 Law And the Majesty of Practice
- 4 Innocence and Danger: Pedagogy, Discipline, and the Culture of Masculinity
- 5 From Putte to Puttane: Female Foundlings and Charitable Institutions in Florence
- 6 Unruly Nuns: Clausura And Confinement
- Conclusion: The Honor of God, of the City, and of Their Own Houses
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
The following two chapters place the proliferation of institutions to assist unmarried women in the sixteenth century in the context of an inevitable tension and conflict between the prevailing inheritance system (as the material expression of medieval and early modern lineage ideology) and the economic and demographic realities of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century families. To use terminology borrowed from the social sciences, the family and inheritance systems of sixteenth-century Italy, and to an even greater extent, sixteenth-century Florence, were functional only to the extent that they defined the norms for transmission of property from one generation to another. Systems of inheritance defined in Roman law, their resurgence in the twelfth century, and their codification in communal statutes rested on assumptions that were too narrow to accommodate the economic and social realities of the early modern Tuscan marriage market. How successfully one could respond to such exigencies depended in part on the flexibility of the system itself and in part on the creativity of those who would circumvent it, as well as of those whom it served most successfully. Thus, this chapter first examines the relationship between gender and lineage ideology in the development of a specifically and self-consciously aristocratic culture in sixteenth-century Florence and argues that the primary force driving the developing status culture of consumption (and its attendant social crises of abandonment) was not the ideology of gender but the ideology of lineage. The following chapter then discusses the relationship between law and practice and specifically how, given the exigencies of the law, families worked charitable institutions into their marital and lineage strategies.
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- Information
- Gender, Honor, and Charity in Late Renaissance Florence , pp. 67 - 92Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011