Patrician Women in Early Renaissance Venice

Abstract

LMOST a century ago,* the Venetian archivist and t,>i% historian Bartolomeo Cecchetti undertook to discover > what he called 'the general concept that Venetians 0X/)kK pa had of women'.l Though he called his study 'Woman in the Middle Ages in Venice', nearly all his documentation came from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the early Renaissance. His conclusions after a long and wideranging survey of various aspects of the feminine experience during the period were pretty forthright. 'Neither works of imagination', he declared, 'nor high intellectual attainments, nor flights of poetrr adorn the figure of woman in Venice's earliest epoch. Modest, domestic [casalinga], she is swept up in the great whirlwind of life; and she appears to us only in her weaknesses, or in the splendor of her lDeauty, or in the context of one of the high off1ces of her missionher children, her family.'2 Cecchetti's characterization contrasts with some other writers' pictures of women in the Middle Ages. Some forty years ago Eileen Power asserted that 'taking the rough with the smooth and balancing theory against practice, the medieval woman played an active and dignified part in the society of her age'. And more recently7 David Herlihy concluded that 'woman comes to play an extraordinary role in the management offamily property in the early Middle Ages, and social