Thomas Kuehn

Heirs, kin, and creditors in Renaissance Florence

Preface: the ambivalence of inheritance Introduction: inheritance and kinship 1. Family and inheritance 2. Florentine laws regulating inheritance and repudiation 3. Repudiation and inheritance 4. Profile of Florentine repudiation and inheritance 5. Repudiations and household wealth 6. Repudiation as an inheritance practice 7. Repudiations in dispute.

Marriage in the Archives : A Review Essay

Coniugi nemici: La separazione in Italia dal xii al xviii secolo. Ed. Silvana Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglioni. I processi matrimoniali degli archivi ecclesiastici italiani. Bolo gna: I1 Mulino, 2000. 584 pp. E34.00. ISBN: 978-88-15-07590-1. Matrimoni in dubbio: Unioni controverse e nozze dandestine in Italia dal xiv al xviii secolo. Ed. Silvana Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglioni. I processi matrimoniali degli archivi ecclesiastici italiani. Bologna: I1 Mulino, 2001. 580 pp. C37.00. ISBN: 978-88 15-10902-6. Trasgressioni: Seduzione, concubinato, adulterio, bigamia (xiv-xviii secolo). E d. S i 1 vana Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglioni. I processi matrimoniali degli archivi eccle siastici italiani. Bologna: II Mulino, 2004. 686 pp. p40.00. ISBN: 978-88-15-08643-3. I tribunali del matrimonio (secoli xv-xviii). Ed. Silvana Seidel Menchi and Diego Qua glioni. I processi matrimoniali degli archivi ecclesiastici italiani. Bologna: I1 Mulino, 2006. 848 pp. C44.00. ISBN: 978-88-15-09045-4.

Family and Gender in Renaissance Italy, 1300-1600

This book studies family life and gender broadly within Italy, not just one region or city, from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Paternal control of the household was paramount in Italian life at this time, with control of property and even marital choices and career paths laid out for children and carried out from beyond the grave by means of written testaments. However, the reality was always more complex than a simple reading of local laws and legal doctrines would seem to permit, especially when there were no sons to step forward as heirs. Family disputes provided an opening for legal ambiguities to redirect property and endow women with property and means of control. This book uses the decisions of lawyers and judges to examine family dynamics through the lens of law and legal disputes.

Property of Spouses in Law in Renaissance Florence

Historians of Florence typically treat the family patrimony as a single entity under the control of the male head of household. That included the dowry and other property his wife brought to him. In so doing these historians follow the cues offered by normative sources. However, in law there were, in fact, several types of property a wife could bring to a marriage, and she had rights to manage some of those herself. And dowry was a charge on the patrimony that husbands swore to uphold. They could not easily alienate dowry, and certainly not without consent of their wives. A closer look at household accounts demonstrates that husbands managed their property with an eye to obligations they had to preserve and return dowry and other spousal property on dissolution of marriage. And examination of cases by means of consilia illustrates how jurists interpreted spousal legal property rights and wives’ and widows’ disposal of their holdings.

Materia Est Valde Periculosa: Interpreting Testaments in Quattrocento Florence

In one of his many consilia concerning a testament, the noted Sienese jurist Bartolomeo Sozzini declared the matter before him dangerous (periculosa). The testament before him had in fact established a line of succession in trust (fideicommissum) through a daughter, in the absence of sons. That was a relatively unusual situation, but not so much so that a solution could not be found. A comparison with some other consilia shows that the danger in this case arose in interpreting the intent of the testator from amidst the uncertain terms employed in the text of the testament, coupled with the lack of a line of direct agnatic descent (such that the meaning of the term familia became uncertain, for example). A disinheritance in a line of agnatic descent further muddied the waters, though Sozzini was intent on reestablishing the claims of that line. Above all, there was the danger that Sozzini might not be able to muster sufficient authoritative references to bolster his opinion and persuade the court.

Retour à la Cité: Le Magnats de Florence 1340-1440 (review)

discursive bibliography organized by chapter and an index of proper names complete the volume. Aware that Savonarola was the most prolific Italian author of the Quattrocento, Dall’Aglio charts his course through the rocky waters of Savonarolism on the portolano of the publishing industry, carefully following the friar’s excellent use of the printing press as an agent for change in the reform of morals and culture. The friar’s sermons, for example, were published in record time and with high pressruns. This, plus their low price and their having been written in the vernacular, guaranteed their immediate diffusion and their success among a vast general public. Their message, however, was not always quietly embraced, but gave rise to heated controversies that engaged not only his fellow religious, but also laymen, who took pen in hand to accuse or defend the friar, as the case might be. Analyzing these debates with a keen eye firmly fixed on contemporary political events, Dall’Aglio chronicles the printing war between the Piagnoni and Arrabbiati well into the sixteenth century, providing the reader with a thorough, systematic history of the movement and its members. Dall’Aglio’s beautifully written volume is a pleasure to read for the clarity of its narrative voice and the thoroughness of its scholarly research. While the brevity of the volume (only 190 pages of text) might leave some readers hungering for more, it also ensures that the history of Savonarolism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can be made readily available to a more general public of scholars and students. Because of this, the work will quickly find its place on the shelves of college and university libraries. KONRAD EISENBICHLER Victoria College, University of Toronto.

Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance (review)

censors: William Allen, Robert Bellarmine, and Pietro Galesini. Their suggested revisions to Platina’s text and frequent disagreements reveal the dynamic role of the censor and the intricate workings of the Counter-Reformation Church. Their criticisms of Platina were centered on issues of morality and Church tradition. Platina often balances his praise for the early pontiffs with quips about the materialism, corruption, moral laxity, and arrogance of the Renaissance Church. Allen calls these kinds of comments “insults to the Church,” but Bellarmine asserts that the Church’s survival despite such blemishes demonstrates God’s continued protection. The censors also condemn Platina’s humanistic and ultimately Aristotelian idea of the bona fortunae as being too pagan. Allen further complains that Platina writes nothing about the Donation of Constantine and that he denies the emperor’s miraculous curing of leprosy at baptism. Other points of contention are the numerous places in which Platina asserts the power of church councils over popes. Pius II’s bull of 1460 formally banned it, but conciliarism lived on and gained new life in the hands of Protestant reformers. Among others, the deposition of Pope John XII in 964 served as a precedent for a council’s authority over a pope. No one defended the corrupt pontiff: instead, Bellarmine, Baronio, and Allen denied the legitimacy of the council. These proposals for censoring Platina, however, were never implemented in Latin editions. Bauer is justly puzzled by this, though it demonstrates that even the censorship of this potentially damaging text was not straightforward. A similar mystery is the censored Italian translation of 1592. The censors had access to the 1587 proposals of Allen, Bellarmine, and Galesini, but for the most part did not follow them. Bauer’s scholarship is admirably supported by extensive evidence. In addition to including ten to fifteen pages of documents after each chapter, Bauer has appended a lengthy documentary appendix. The Lives of the Popes was a bestseller. Between 1479 and 1664 there were over twelve Latin editions. Between 1519 and 1685 it was translated into French, Italian, German, Dutch, and English. It carried so much authority as the official history of the papacy that in 1588 Bellarmine had to deny this status publicly. It was so popular that (unusually) four censors were hired to expurgate it. In describing the censors’ struggle to make this influential humanist history orthodox, Bauer’s book illuminates the complexity of the Counter-Reformation Church and its sense of the past. ANTHONY F. D’ELIA Queen’s University

Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297-1797 (review)

writer Hubert Butler.” Michael Cleary and his in-laws (the Kennedys) are presented as being sentenced to “federal prison” (there was no such thing in the United Kingdom; the authors must be thinking of the United States) or to “English prison.” This would have surprised the convicted, since they spent their time in Clonmel, Kilmainham, Maryborough, and Mountjoy. Most misleading is their notion that the guilty were the victims of “English justice.” In fact, they were tried before an Irish judge and an Irish jury, and that Michael Cleary received only a twenty-year sentence for torturing and burning his wife to death (he served just afteen years) is hardly imperialism. The locals showed that they agreed with the guilty verdicts by burning out the various Kennedys who had participated in torturing their kinswoman. Bourke’s book is a fascinating contrast. Her verbal craft is impeccable; she has perfect pitch in listening to Irish voices; she is an expert in Irish folklore; and she has the (again, stereotypical) laziness of the Dublin academic in doing research in rural Ireland. She uses only the newspapers from the big provincial centers and does none of the hard graft on local print sources that Hoff and Yeates do. One wishes that Bourke had written her book with the beneat of their material but, alas, the sequence of publication was the other way around. Neither volume provides anything approaching an explanation of the actual case in hand. Hoff and Yeates arst suggest that the tragedy occurred because of almost everything that was happening in Tipperary society at the time: the nationalist movement, the rise of Archbishop Thomas Croke, and the frustration of the peasantry. Then they decide that the story is about how simple beliefs can shape big events. In essence, they explain that Bridget Cleary was killed for fairy possession because people believed in fairy possession. Bourke hardly does better. She has a postlude that asserts that this was a case of domestic abuse. It certainly was. But one would like to know why domestic abuse in this case involved a killing and engaged a belief system in other-world creatures. Michael Cleary was paroled in 1910 and almost immediately shipped to Liverpool and thence to Montreal, Quebec. From there he merged invisibly into North American society.