Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy

Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy PDF Author: Roisin Cossar
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674978668
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Roisin Cossar brings a new perspective to the history of the Christian church in fourteenth century Italy by examining how clerics managed efforts to reform their domestic lives in the decades after the arrival of the Black Death. Priests at the end of the Middle Ages resembled their lay contemporaries as they entered into domestic relationships with women, fathered children, and took responsibility for managing households, or familiae. Cossar limns a complex portrait of daily life in the medieval clerical familia that traces the phases of its development. Many priests began their vocation as apprentices in the households of older clerics. In middle age, priests fully embraced the traditional role of paterfamilias—patriarchs with authority over their households, including servants and, especially in Venice, slaves. As fathers they endeavored to establish their illegitimate sons in a clerical family trade. They also used their legal knowledge to protect their female companions and children against a church that frowned on such domestic arrangements and actively sought to stamp them out. Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy refutes the longstanding charge that the late medieval clergy were corrupt, living licentious lives that failed to uphold priestly obligations. In fashioning a domestic culture that responded flexibly to their own needs, priests tempered the often unrealistic expectations of their superiors. Their response to the rigid demands of church reform allowed the church to maintain itself during a period of crisis and transition in European history.

Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy

Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy PDF Author: Roisin Cossar
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674978668
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Roisin Cossar brings a new perspective to the history of the Christian church in fourteenth century Italy by examining how clerics managed efforts to reform their domestic lives in the decades after the arrival of the Black Death. Priests at the end of the Middle Ages resembled their lay contemporaries as they entered into domestic relationships with women, fathered children, and took responsibility for managing households, or familiae. Cossar limns a complex portrait of daily life in the medieval clerical familia that traces the phases of its development. Many priests began their vocation as apprentices in the households of older clerics. In middle age, priests fully embraced the traditional role of paterfamilias—patriarchs with authority over their households, including servants and, especially in Venice, slaves. As fathers they endeavored to establish their illegitimate sons in a clerical family trade. They also used their legal knowledge to protect their female companions and children against a church that frowned on such domestic arrangements and actively sought to stamp them out. Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy refutes the longstanding charge that the late medieval clergy were corrupt, living licentious lives that failed to uphold priestly obligations. In fashioning a domestic culture that responded flexibly to their own needs, priests tempered the often unrealistic expectations of their superiors. Their response to the rigid demands of church reform allowed the church to maintain itself during a period of crisis and transition in European history.

The Fruit of Her Hands

The Fruit of Her Hands PDF Author: Sarah Ifft Decker
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271093773
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
In the thriving urban economies of late thirteenth-century Catalonia, Jewish and Christian women labored to support their families and their communities. The Fruit of Her Hands examines how gender, socioeconomic status, and religious identity shaped how these women lived and worked. Sarah Ifft Decker draws on thousands of notarial contracts as well as legal codes, urban ordinances, and Hebrew responsa literature to explore the lived experiences of Jewish and Christian women in the cities of Barcelona, Girona, and Vic between 1250 and 1350. Relying on an expanded definition of women’s work that includes the management of household resources as well as wage labor and artisanal production, this study highlights the crucial contributions women made both to their families and to urban economies. Christian women, Ifft Decker finds, were deeply embedded in urban economic life in ways that challenge traditional dichotomies between women in northern and Mediterranean Europe. And while Jewish women typically played a less active role than their Christian counterparts, Ifft Decker shows how, in moments of communal change and crisis, they could and did assume prominent roles in urban economies. Through its attention to the distinct experiences of Jewish and Christian women, The Fruit of Her Hands advances our understanding of Jewish acculturation in the Iberian Peninsula and the shared experiences of women of different faiths. It will be welcomed by specialists in gender studies and religious studies as well as students and scholars of medieval Iberia.

The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy

The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy PDF Author: Abigail Brundin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192548476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy explores the rich devotional life of the Italian household between 1450 and 1600. Rejecting the enduring stereotype of the Renaissance as a secular age, this interdisciplinary study reveals the home to have been an important site of spiritual revitalization. Books, buildings, objects, spaces, images, and archival sources are scrutinized to cast new light on the many ways in which religion infused daily life within the household. Acts of devotion, from routine prayers to extraordinary religious experiences such as miracles and visions, frequently took place at home amid the joys and trials of domestic life — from childbirth and marriage to sickness and death. Breaking free from the usual focus on Venice, Florence, and Rome, The Sacred Home investigates practices of piety across the Italian peninsula, with particular attention paid to the city of Naples, the Marche, and the Venetian mainland. It also looks beyond the elite to consider artisanal and lower-status households, and reveals gender and age as factors that powerfully conditioned religious experience. Recovering a host of lost voices and compelling narratives at the intersection between the divine and the everyday, The Sacred Home offers unprecedented glimpses through the keyhole into the spiritual lives of Renaissance Italians.

Sex, Gender, and Illegitimacy in the Castilian Noble Family, 1400–1600

Sex, Gender, and Illegitimacy in the Castilian Noble Family, 1400–1600 PDF Author: Grace E. Coolidge
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496233638
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Sex, Gender, and Illegitimacy in the Castilian Noble Family, 1400–1600 looks at illegitimacy across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and analyzes its implications for gender and family structure in the Spanish nobility, a class whose actions, structure, and power had immense implications for the future of the country and empire. Grace E. Coolidge demonstrates that women and men were able to challenge traditional honor codes, repair damaged reputations, and manipulate ideals of marriage and sexuality to encompass extramarital sexuality and the nearly constant presence of illegitimate children. This flexibility and creativity in their sexual lives enabled members of the nobility to repair, strengthen, and maintain their otherwise fragile concept of dynasty and lineage, using illegitimate children and their mothers to successfully project the noble dynasty into the future—even in an age of rampant infant mortality that contributed to the frequent absence of male heirs. While benefiting the nobility as a whole, the presence of illegitimate children could also be disruptive to the inheritance process, and the entire system privileged noblemen and their aims and goals over the lives of women and children. This book enriches our understanding of the complex households and families of the Spanish nobility, challenging traditional images of a strict patriarchal system by uncovering the hidden lives that made that system function.

Patrimony and Law in Renaissance Italy

Patrimony and Law in Renaissance Italy PDF Author: Thomas Kuehn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131651353X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Family was a central feature of social life in Italian cities. This wide-ranging volume explores patrimony in legal thought and how family property was inherited, managed and shared legally and its central role in Renaissance Italy.

The Office of Ceremonies and Advancement in Curial Rome, 1466–1528

The Office of Ceremonies and Advancement in Curial Rome, 1466–1528 PDF Author: Jennifer Mara DeSilva
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004506993
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This study explores the careers of Agostino Patrizi, Johann Burchard, and Paris de’ Grassi, who served in Rome’s Office of Ceremonies (c.1466-1528). Amid heightened competition, their diverse strategies achieved personal and institutional successes and lasting impacts on the Catholic Church.

The Art of Paper

The Art of Paper PDF Author: Caroline Fowler
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300246021
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
The untold story of how paper revolutionized art making during the Renaissance, exploring how it shaped broader concepts of authorship, memory, and the transmission of ideas over the course of three centuries In the late medieval and Renaissance period, paper transformed society--not only through its role in the invention of print but also in the way it influenced artistic production. The Art of Paper tells the history of this medium in the context of the artist's workshop from the thirteenth century, when it was imported to Europe from Africa, to the sixteenth century, when European paper was exported to the colonies of New Spain. In this pathbreaking work, Caroline Fowler approaches the topic culturally rather than technically, deftly exploring the way paper shaped concepts of authorship, preservation, and the transmission of ideas during this period. This book both tells a transcultural history of paper from the Cairo Genizah to the Mesoamerican manuscript and examines how paper became "Europeanized" through the various mechanisms of the watermark, colonization, and the philosophy of John Locke. Ultimately, Fowler demonstrates how paper--as refuse and rags transformed into white surface--informed the works for which it was used, as well as artists' thinking more broadly, across the early modern world.

Scandal in the Parish

Scandal in the Parish PDF Author: Karen E. Carter
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773557679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
In 1770, the priest Nicolas Vernier was accused of neglecting church services, inappropriate behaviour in the confessional, financial improprieties, and affairs with the village schoolmistresses. In a contentious church court case, parishioners described all of their priest's wrongdoings, and in turn, he detailed many of theirs. Ultimately, Vernier finished his career as a cathedral canon in another diocese. Scandal in the Parish recounts Vernier's story and many similar eighteenth-century cases. In fascinating detail that reveals essential facets of rural religion during the Catholic Reformation period, Karen Carter considers French lay people's relationship with their parish curé, who governed and influenced so much of their religious practice. Although the priest's role as purveyor of God's grace through the sacraments was secure as long as he performed his duties appropriately, priests who were unable to navigate the pressures and high expectations put on them by their superiors and parishioners risked broken relationships, public disturbances of the peace, and even prosecution. These scandals, Carter demonstrates, tell us much about rural parish life, the processes of negotiation and accommodation between curés and their parishioners, and ongoing religious reforms and enforcement throughout the eighteenth century. An engaging venture into the world of the parish that highlights the centrality of the priest-parishioner relationship, Scandal in the Parish reveals the attitudes and practices of ordinary people who were active agents in their religious and spiritual lives.

Venice and the Dalmatian Hinterland

Venice and the Dalmatian Hinterland PDF Author: Lena Sadovski
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900471376X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
This volume offers a source-based analysis of the complex interactions between the Venetian administration of the coastal town Spalato (Split) and its hinterland under Venetian, Hungarian, and Ottoman rule. Employing a microhistorical approach, Sadovski studies the military importance, economic dynamics, and social changes in the Dalmatian hinterland in the later medieval period. This book also explores multilingualism, highlighting how Slavic languages as well as local laws and customs were integrated into the Venetian administration. In doing so, it broadens our understanding of the Venetian maritime empire and proposes a new way of thinking about hinterlands – in cultural, social, linguistic, and legal terms alongside economic and political aspects.

City of Men

City of Men PDF Author: Laurie Nussdorfer
Publisher: Viella Libreria Editrice
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
This is the untold story of the men who fed, dressed, protected and advised the cardinals and great nobles of Baroque Rome. Against the background of demographic crisis and a Europe gripped by plague, war and famine, the papal capital lured ambitious gentlemen and hungry commoners to work in service. Mirroring a city where men far outnumbered women, elite households provided jobs for thousands of male immigrants from all over Italy and beyond. Footmen, secretaries, stable boys, cooks and accountants composed an all-male world that fit awkwardly within the paradigm of early modern patriarchy. A gender ideology dependent on the idea that men were innately superior to women had to navigate a society without women and justify the subordination of most men to the few. Rigid domestic hierarchies imposed by employers and implemented by gentlemen servants yielded only the barest subsistence to the robust but unskilled majority. The vagaries of the patron-client relationship doomed even the gentlemen to insecurity. In this context the streets, churches and squares of Rome offered richer, if sometimes dangerous, opportunities than the palaces to enjoy masculine privilege and the experience of egalitarian fraternity. This book mobilizes census records, trials, family account books and household manuals to show both the contradictions and the tenacity of patriarchy in a city of men.