Ties That Unbind: Proximities, Pizzochere, and Women’s Social Options in Early Modern Venice

Abstract

THE EARLY MODERN MAXIM “either a husband or a convent wall” (aut maritus, autmurus), or its Venetian variant, omonacarsi, o maritarsi, seemingly defined the options available to respectable women by the establishment of social and spatial proximities. Those relationships were intended to delimit and defend a woman’s honor and, by extension, that of her family. Historians, however, have increasingly recognized the permeability of both boundaries, particularly the convent wall. Scholarship has also shown that a third respectable space for women existed well before and after the Council of Trent’s claustration of all female religious, in the form of a lay religious life. Bound by the profession of simple vows, usually