Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780226439266)

Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, a brilliant historian of the Annales school, skillfully uncovers the lives of ordinary Italians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Tuscans in particular, young and old, rich, middle-class, and poor. From the extraordinarily detailed records kept by Florentine tax collectors and the equally precise ricordanze (household accounts with notations of events great and small), Klapisch-Zuber draws a living picture of the Tuscan household. We learn, for example, how children were named, how wet nurses were engaged, how marriages were negotiated and celebrated. A wealth of other sources are tapped--including city statutes, private letters, philosophical works on marriage, paintings--to determine the social status of women. Klapisch-Zuber reveals how women, in their roles as daughters, wives, sisters, and mothers, were largely subject to a family system that needed them but valued them little.


Author: Christiane Klapisch-Zuber
ISBN-10: 0226439267
ISBN-13: 9780226439266
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 06/15/1987
Pages: 354
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.96h x 5.89w x 0.80d