Elizabeth S. Cohen

The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: A Rape as History

Lately rediscovered and celebrated as a talented female artist in the great tradition of European painting, Artemisia Gentileschi continues to be represented as strongly defined by her sexuality. Incomplete and anachronistic readings of the records from the 1612 trial for her rape have underpinned an image of Artemisia as, in the older treatments, a flirt and vamp or, in more recent ones, a feminist and resister of male violence. Here a more historical interpretation of the documents restores the painter to her seventeenth-century context and adjusts our understanding of both her behavior during this youthful episode and her later achievements.

To Pray, To Work, To Hear, To Speak: Women in Roman Streets c. 1600

Using pictures, city regulations, and judicial records, this essay claims a place for women of varying rank and status in the street life of early modern Rome. It revises the conventional binary of male public realms and female domesticity that, reinforced by scholarly expectations of Mediterranean gendered seclusion, obscures a necessary female presence in the city. In urban spaces outside their homes beggars, prostitutes, servants, working wives, nubile daughters, and even gentlewomen faced risks, but also cadged opportunities. Though excluded from government and corporate decision-making, women routinely ventured into the streets in pursuit of many goals: heavenly salvation, earthly livelihood, neighborly support, vital information, or momentary pleasure. While Romes patterns of physical and demographic growth distinguished it in important respects from other Italian cities, it is nevertheless likely that, as in Venice, these female uses of urban space had analogues elsewhere.

Endangered history: character and narrative in early American historical writing

Italy in the Renaissance Society: Who Was Who Dangers Family and Other Solidarities Hierarchies Moralities: Honor and Religion Keeping Order Media, Literacy, and Schooling Spaces Time Life Cycles: From Birth Through Adolescence Life Cycles: From Marriage Through Death Houses, Food, and Clothing Disease and Healing Work Play Last Words Notes Resources and Bibliography

She Said, He Said: Situated Oralities in Judicial Records from Early Modern Rome

Abstract In practice, early modern culture was for most Europeans more oral than written. Yet spoken words, especially those of ordinary people, are, for scholars, tantalizingly elusive. Testimonies, recorded verbatim, in judicial proceedings for the city of Rome and other Italian jurisdictions offer rich repositories of oral expression uttered by women and men of diverse ages and social positions. Yet to explore these documents as terrains of speech and oral culture, we must attend closely to the processes by which these words were assembled and transcribed. Everyday talk that we hear in the trials was deeply situated: in the intricate hybridity of oral/written cultures that characterized much of the early modern world; in the layered oral and written formats of judicial process; and in the social and gendered circumstances of the speakers. These frames shaped the orality that we see in the trials, but did not obliterate individual agency in speech.

Open City: An Introduction to Gender in Early Modern Rome

The article discusses concepts of gender, gender roles, and the activities of women in Early Modern Rome, Italy. Topics discussed include the initiatives and social roles of women in Rome during this time, intersections between patriarchal beliefs and individual beliefs of men in Rome during this period, and political and religious structures in Rome at this time.

Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families, and Masculinities (review)

the transformations of global capitalism. Given the continued significance of the themes discussed in the symposium, Calichman has done an enormous service by making the statements of participants available to a wider audience. The book is not only essential reading for scholars of Japanese intellectual and political history, but also of interest to anyone concerned with the crisis of modernity and various reactions to it.

Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome: Trials before the Papal Magistrates

The social historian, searching for the basis of a culture, often turns to a study of ordinary people. Perhaps one of the most revealing places to find them is in a court of law. In this presentatoin of nine criminal trials of sixteenth-century Rome (1540-75), where magistrates kept verbatim records, Thomas and Elizabeth Cohen paint a lively portrait of a society, one that is reminiscent of Boccaccio. These stories, however, are true. Each trial transcript is followed by an essay that interprets the beliefs, codes, everyday speech, and personal transactions of a world that is radically different from our own. The people on trial include assassins, a spell-caster, an exorcist, an adulterous wife, several courtesans, and the peasant cast of a bawdy, sacrilegious play. Out of their often pognant troubles, and their machinations, comes a vivid revelation of not only the tumultuous street life of Rome but also rituals of honour, the power and weakness of women, and the realities of social and economic hierarchies. Like cinema-verite, Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome gives us an intimate glimpse of a people and their world.