HIST 2271

Family Life in Renaissance Italy

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2015-2016.

How did women and men experience family life in the literate, urban society of Renaissance Italy? What did it mean to belong to a family? Focusing primarily on Venice and Florence, the seminar begins by exploring the institutions of marriage and the dowry, relations between wives and husbands, childbirth, wet-nursing, the education of children, and prevailing notions of motherhood and fatherhood. The intervention of government in many of these aspects of family life will also be investigated. Attention then shifts to several different senses of the wider family (patrilineal, matrilineal, and marital), to the assemblage of those who shared a common surname, their sumptuous townhouses ("palazzi"), conflicts within families, and the role of families in politics. The study of these topics is made possible by the survival in large numbers of letters, memoirs, medical treatises, literary works, advice books, legal documents, and government legislation and record-keeping concerning family life. The seminar's meetings will consist of discussion based on the close reading of examples of such primary sources and a selection of studies by modern historians.

When Offered Fall.

Breadth Requirement (HB)
Distribution Category (HA-AS)

View Enrollment Information