Women, family, and ritual in Renaissance Italy

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. English Translations Of The Author's Most Important Articles. State And Family In A Renaissance Society: The Florentine Catasto Of 1427-30 -- Demographic Decline And Household Structure: The Example Of Prato, Late Fourteenth To Late Fifteenth Centuries -- A Une Pane E Uno Vino: The Rural Tuscan Family At The Beginning Of The Fifteenth Century / With Michel Demonet -- Kin, Friends, And Neighbors: The Urban Territory Of A Merchant Family In 1400 -- Childhood In Tuscany At The Beginning Of The Fifteenth Century -- The Cruel Mother: Maternity, Widowhood, And Dowry In Florence In The Fourteenth And Fifteenth Centuries -- Blood Parents And Milk Parents: Wet Nursing In Florence, 1300-1530 -- Female Celibacy And Service In Florence In The Fifteenth Century -- Zacharias, Or The Ousted Father: Nuptial Rites In Tuscany Between Giotto And The Council Of Trent -- The Griselda Complex: Dowry And Marriage Gifts In The Quattrocento -- An Ethnology Of Marriage In The Age Of Humanism -- The Mattinata In Medieval Italy -- The Name Remade: The Transmission Of Given Names In Florence In The Fourteenth And Fifteenth Centuries -- Holy Dolls: Play And Piety In Florence In The Quattrocento. Christiane Klapisch-zuber ; Translated By Lydia Cochrane. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Christiane Klapisch-zuber ; Translated By Lydia Cochrane. Foreword By David Herlihy. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.