Negotiating the Art of Fatherhood in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy

__Negotiating the Art of Fatherhood in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy__ examines contested notions of fatherhood in written and visual texts during the development of the mercantile economy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy. It analyzes debates about the household and community management of wealth, emotion, and trade in luxury “goods,” including enslaved women, as moral questions. Juliann Vitullo considers how this mercantile economy affected paternity and the portraits of ideal fatherhood, which in some cases reconceived the role of fathers and in others reconfirmed traditional notions of paternal authority. Acknowledgments 7 Contents 9 List of Figures 10 Chapter 1: Introduction 12 Chapter 2: Fertile Fathers of the Poor 23 Economic Sterility and Fecundity 24 Wealth and Mercantile Mercy: The Redistribution of “Fruits” in the Debt Economy 39 Chapter 3: Emotion and the Art of Fatherhood 75 Chapter 4: Passion and Paternity: Debates About Fictional Fathers 110 Chapter 5: Paternal Pedagogy and the Palate 139 Chapter 6: In Bed with the Infidel: Fathers, Slaves, and Children 157 Domestic Slavery and the Christian Household 158 Slavery As a Threat to the Household 167 The Patriarchal Appetites of Slavery 177 The Mythologies of Grafted Family Trees: Christian Fathers and Infidel Mothers 190 Afterword 200 Works Cited 202 Index 218 Front Matter ....Pages i-xii Introduction (Juliann Vitullo)....Pages 1-11 Fertile Fathers of the Poor (Juliann Vitullo)....Pages 13-64 Emotion and the Art of Fatherhood (Juliann Vitullo)....Pages 65-99 Passion and Paternity: Debates About Fictional Fathers (Juliann Vitullo)....Pages 101-129 Paternal Pedagogy and the Palate (Juliann Vitullo)....Pages 131-148 In Bed with the Infidel: Fathers, Slaves, and Children (Juliann Vitullo)....Pages 149-193 Back Matter ....Pages 195-215