Sandra Cavallo

Bachelorhood and Masculinity in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy

‘Out of eight male children, none of us ever had a wife or offspring’. This is one of the last entries that Bartolomeo Masi, a Florentine coppersmith, included in his Ricordanze, a book of memoirs that details the most important private events in the lives of the members of his family. The entry was made in 1526, when he was already 50-years old, and just four years before his death, which occurred, as testified by the burial register of his guild, in 1530. The high level of male celibacy in one family, signalled by this case, is probably unusual but definite or protracted bachelorhood, this article will argue, was far from a rare occurrence in Renaissance and early modern Italy. If among the patricians being a bachelor was regarded as anomalous, despite being frequent, and the husband and father as the ideal type, the attitude to male celibacy seems to have been much more relaxed among the artisan classes. For example, it neither seems that bachelor artisans, in Italian cities, suffered the exclusion from office-holding experienced by their counterparts in German and Northern European towns, nor the confinement to the less prestigious offices that characterized, in Venice, the career of patricians who did not marry. Bachelorhood and public life are often depicted as being alternative in patrician society, and the choice not to marry as dictated by the desire to devote oneself entirely to contemplation and scholarship, away from political commitments. The lack of marital status though does not seem to have involved similar restrictions for the artisans. Within the Masi family we see that both Bartolomeo and his brothers repeatedly held offices in the locksmith guild (as console, consigliere and camerlengo) as well as in the numerous confraternities they belonged to. Moreover, they were selected to run for election to city offices, as representatives of their guild or the city district (gonfalone). They also seem to have been quite active in community life and social networking: Bartolomeo, for european history quarterly 

Book Review: Medici e comunità: esempi dalla terraferma veneta dei secoli XVI e XVII

This is the most complete study to date of “the town physician” (medico condotto), the medical practitioner paid by the municipality to treat free of charge the citizens of the locality, who was a key figure in the provision of medical services of many Italian and European communities in the late medieval and early modern period. Drawing on an impressive range of sources, the author reconstructs the development of the medico condotto in the north-eastern part of the Venetian state, an area which stretches from the lagoon (Mestre) to the Prealps (Belluno, Feltre) and therefore includes both mountain and lowland regions. The position of town physician appeared in the middle ages but, by the early modern period, it had disappeared from the major urban centres, superseded by the development of hospitals and confraternities (which often employed doctors “for the poor”), and, more generally, by the expansion of the medical profession. In contrast, the post became increasingly common in small and medium sized localities and, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, most communities in the area under consideration boasted one or more condotte. The book highlights the power of initiative of local governments, which sent councillors to recruit physicians and surgeons in Venice and Padua, levied taxes to provide the community with essential services (the schoolteacher, the lawyer, the organist, as well as the condotto) and paid grants to the local young people wishing to undertake medical studies. Thus the common assumption that small, mountainous communities lagged far behind urban centres in their provision of medical services appears misconceived. Far from being isolated and economically marginal, these highlands were part of the trade routes between Venice and the empire; moreover they were socially stratified and actively engaged in timber and woollen-cloth production. Not only were these small communities willing to pay their doctors stipends equivalent to those offered by provincial towns, they also often chose the more expensive “foreign” candidate over a local man in order to boost the honour of the commune. Far from being simply determined by financial considerations, the selection of candidates was influenced by political motivations and by reasons of civic pride. Payment of the medico condotto was not standard but negotiated on an individual basis, and the fame of the candidate was often capable of securing him a good income. Indeed, another unexpected finding of this study is the appeal that the position of condotto exercised upon distinguished practitioners—court physicians for example, or those with prestigious jobs in the Venetian colonies. The possibility of having a private practice in parallel with public duties was another attraction of the post: nothing prevented the community doctor from treating private patients for part of the day and in nearby villages. Hence the professional activities of condotti covered a rather wide geographical area. This shows that it can be misleading to take the number of resident practitioners as evidence of the availability of medical services in a given locality. Even the smallest communities appear much better equipped with licensed and learned practitioners than is often assumed. A community doctor, therefore, was not just employed to guarantee the stable presence of a practitioner in remote, unattractive locations. A condotto was above all a sort of sanitary official, who was expected to act informally as local Protophysician, checking the ingredients used by pharmacists and the quality of spring waters, authorizing other practitioners to practise locally, and performing autopsies if a death was suspicious. He acted as a legal expert in court and could proclaim the state of contagion. At times the book is loosely structured and encumbered with excessive detail. A conclusive section, bringing together the various strands of the argument, would have been welcome. These are minor blemishes, however, in a study that provides a mine of material and new perspectives to advance our understanding of the complex figure of the town physician.

Charity and Power in Early Modern Italy: Benefactors and Their Motives in Turin, 1541-1789.

Introduction 1. Sixteenth-century municipal plans for poor relief 2. Civic charity in the age of state formation 3. Motivations for charity 4 Charity and gender 5. Hospitals and poor relief in the age of absolutism 6. The state system of relief Conclusion Bibliography.