Notes to Rudolph M. Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)

For sixteenth-century books I consulted, the publisher is included for better identification. Names of printer/publishers have been standardized using listings from Rhodes, Silent Printers, and Ascarelli and Menato, La tipografia del ’500 in Italia (see note 1-17). For works lacking publication information, I give the name of the library (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze [BNF]) and the shelf mark for readers who may wish to locate the originals.

1-1. Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (New York, 1936), 233.

1-2. See Luigi Balsamo, Bibliography: History of a Tradition, trans. William A. Pettas (Berkeley, 1990), 46–51, on the publishing context of Possevino’s work. On pedagogical matters, see Susanna Peyronel Rambaldi, "Educazione evangelica e catechistica: da Erasmo al gesuita Antonio Possevino," in Ragione e "civilitas," ed. Davide Bigalli (Milan, 1986), 73–92. On the Index of Prohibited Books, see J. M. De Bujanda, Index des livres interdits, esp. vol. 8, Index de Rome 1557, 1559, 1564 (Sherbrooke, 1990).

1-3. See Gabriella Zarri, ed., Donna, disciplina, creanza cristiana dal XV al XVII secolo: Studi e testi a stampa (Rome, 1996), 397–732, for the listing of 2,626 vernacular works addressed to women and an explanation of how it was compiled. This is a wonderful source for what it contains, but how I wish the team had kept better track of items they saw and excluded as insufficiently religious or not clearly enough directed at women. Many of the advice manuals we shall consider in the chapters that follow are missing entirely from the Zarri list. While some, like Orazio Lombardelli’s Dell’ uffizio della donna maritata, indeed may no longer be available in any Italian library, others, for example, Mrs. Isabella Cortese’s I secreti are ubiquitous. Admittedly not a very Christian text, nonetheless I secreti was enormously popular and must have been read by a goodly number of Italian housewives; so while its exclusion by the Zarri team is entirely understandable, in this instance good logic does not aid cumulative scholarship. Even a computer-readable version of the rejects would be most helpful.

1-4. On the scribal culture, see Armando Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture, ed. and trans. Charles M. Radding (New Haven, 1995), 169–235. The earlier classic study and starting point for all scholars engaged in this field is Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979).

1-5. J. Rawson Lumby, Bernardus de cura rei famuliaris, with some Early Scottish Prophecies (London, 1870), provides a wonderful example of how a Latin text might become the source for vernacular literary efforts. St. Bernard’s original text also may be found here.

1-6. For the "art of love" work, see Leon Battista Alberti, Hecatomphila de misser Leon Battista Alberto. Hecatomphila che ne insegna l’ingeniosa arte d’amore; Deiphira che ne mostra fuggir il mal principiato amore, pur hora venuta ne le mani de gli huomini (Venice: Francesco Bindoni & Maffeo Pasini, 1534). Other editions of this work, or of the Deiphira section alone, were published in 1524, 1528, 1534, and 1545, and there were translations into French in 1534, and into English in 1598. The latest edition I know of is 1863, rather unfortunate since this is an important work in the genre of courtly love and its popularity in the sixteenth century is of significance. For the text on household economy, see Xenophon, La economica di Xenofonte, tradotta di lingua greca in lingua toscana, dal S. Alessandro Piccolomini, altrimenti lo Stordito Intronato (Venice: Comin da Trino, 1540).

For works that did not find a publisher, see Paolo da Certaldo, Libro di buoni costumi, ed. Alfredo Schiaffini (Florence, 1945). An earlier edition by Salomone Morpurgo (1921), iii–xxxix, provides what little is known about this manuscript and includes the ironic circumstance that in the same hand that transcribed Certaldo’s writings at the Riccardiana library in Florence, there is a copy of St. Bernard’s epistle "De cura rei famuliaris."

The publishing history of Alberti’s book on family governance is summarized in Renée Neu Watkins, ed. and trans., The Family in Renaissance Florence: A translation . . . of I libri della famiglia by Leon Battista Alberti (Columbia, S.C., 1969). In some ways Alberti’s I Libri suffered an even more unkind fate than Paolo da Certaldo’s work. When the third part (the one adapted from Xenophon) reached print for the first time in 1734, it appeared under another name, that of the fifteenth-century Florentine Agnolo Pandolfini, a mistake that went uncorrected until a second edition appeared in Naples in 1843, still incomplete. There was another incomplete edition in 1845, and not until 1908, when a new version became an instant classic used in Italian schools, did the book achieve a wide audience. For intellectual reasons why Alberti’s work may not have had much popularity in the sixteenth-century, see Giovanni Ponte, "Etica ed economia nel terzo libro ‘Della famiglia’ di Leon Battista Alberti," in Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi, eds., Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (Florence, 1971), 283–309; however, Ponte’s argument cannot account for the success of Piccolomini’s translation of Xenophon.

The list of works completely neglected in the sixteenth century could be extended quite a bit, but none can have been as obscure as Francesco da Barberino, Reggimento e costumi di donna, ed. Giuseppe Sansone (Rome, 1995), which was thought to be lost entirely until it was rediscovered in 1667. It is a wonderfully humorous collection of advice for women from all stations in life, and demonstrates clearly that the themes I shall explore in my book are by no means unique to the sixteenth century—but the fact remains that absolutely no one in the sixteenth century could have read it!

1-7. Horatio F. Brown, The Venetian Printing Press 1469–1800 (Amsterdam, 1969, rpt. of 1891 ed.), 73–92; 77 and 79, respectively, for the quotations. Claudia di Filippo Bareggi, Il mestiere di scrivere: Lavoro intellettuale e mercato librario a Venezia nel Cinquecento (Rome, 1988), is essential on relations between intellectual endeavor and the market realities of sixteenth-century publishing. On the economic conditions, privileges, and censorship attending incunabula production in Venice, see Leonardas Vytautas Gerulaitis, Printing and Publishing in Fifteenth-Century Venice (Chicago, 1976), 1–56. On privileges and prohibition, see William A. Pettas, The Giunti of Florence: Merchant Publishers of the Sixteenth Century (San Francisco, 1980), 153–84.

1-8. Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 1983), follows a life-cycle structure similar to the way I organize my chapters, going from marriage to childbearing to child rearing; in turn, this is how the original books themselves understood things. Suzanne W. Hull, Women according to Men: The World of Tudor-Stuart Women (Walnut Creek, 1996), does the same, with chapters on rules for wives, conception, care of babies, and raising daughters. This book rests on Hull’s meticulous scholarship over many years, reflected also in her earlier Chaste Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475–1640 (Huntington Library, 1982).

1-9. William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, 1994), 4, for the how-to qualities of these books, 94–96, on the impact of print culture on books of secrets, and 234–35, on print and how-to tracts.

1-10. Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana, 1978, rpt. of 1956 ed., includes a foreword by Katharine Rogers).

1-11. Nowhere is such a life-cycle approach more explicit than in the writings of the influential humanist Matteo Palmieri. He composed Della vita civile (On Civic Life) in 1439. Among the half dozen treatises he wrote, it was the only one to appear in print in the sixteenth century. This quite erudite text, with its primary concern being civic government, probably did not appeal to many householders as a book to consult about their everyday needs. Still, he wrote in Italian precisely so that his friends who did not read Latin or Greek might benefit from his knowledge of classical pedagogy and of philosophers who had treated politics and ethics. In book 1 of Della vita civile, Palmieri begins at the beginning, so to speak, with the conception, breast-feeding, and parental care appropriate for a future good citizen. He tells us that human life is divided roughly by age into six parts. The first is called infancy and goes from birth until the baby begins to speak. The second is childhood, which continues until the boy or girl reaches the age of discretion. The third is adolescence, which lasts until twenty-eight years of age and is marked by corporal growth and strengthening. There follows until age fifty-six the stage known as virility, during which time the natural forces are sustained and even prosper. Then comes the fifth part of the life cycle, known as old age, that lasts until age seventy. Finally, there is decrepitude, from seventy until death. Palmieri notes that other philosophers have divided human life into only two stages—the period of ignorance and the period of cognition—but he himself follows the more complex, multistage model as he gives advice on how parents should handle infancy, childhood, and adolescence.

For an excellent introduction to Palmieri’s writings and career, see George Carpetto, The Humanism of Matteo Palmieri (Rome, 1984). For the first printed edition, see Matteo Palmieri, Libro della vita civile (Florence: Li heredi di Filippo Giunta, 1529, which was followed by a 1534 ed. in Venice). I used one of several more readily available modern editions, Felice Battaglia, Della vita civile di Matteo Palmieri e De optimo cive di Bartolomeo Sacchi detto Il Platina (Bologna, 1944), 25–26, for the life-cycle material.

1-12. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, 1994), 5, for the quotation, and 1–23, for relevant theoretical propositions on premodern reading. Also see David D. Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst, 1996), 1–14.

1-13. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1987), 4, explains her handling of pardon tales in a way that closely parallels what I intend to do with advice manuals:

"My historian’s eye will not focus on morphologies of the tale, on production from a universal grammar, or on arrangements of functions, ‘indices,’ and propositions that might be found in any time or place. Rather I am after evidence of how sixteenth-century people told stories (albeit in the special case of the pardon tale), what they thought a good story was, how they accounted for motive, and how through narrative they made sense of the unexpected and built coherence into immediate experience. . . . My method here will in part resemble that recommended by Barbara Hernstein-Smith, attending closely to the means and settings for producing the stories and to the interests held by both narrator and audience in the storytelling event. But I will also be conceiving of ‘structures’ existing prior to that event in the minds and lives of the sixteenth-century participants: possible story lines determined by the constraints of the law and approaches to narrative learned in past listening to and telling of stories or derived from other cultural constructions."

Analogously, I shall try to summarize what authors wrote and people read, attempting to portray the advice given primarily from the perspective of a sixteenth-century householder. I shall try to discern and give due weight to authorial intent, and I shall attempt to reach conclusions about probable audience based on mundane factors such as the book’s size and likely cost, as well as its content. I shall note Greco-Roman precedents, biblical teachings, and works by church fathers, seeing these less as inexorable determinants of the advice given than as constraints and inspirations in a broad and varied historical legacy. When I insert myself and my twentieth-century experience into the telling, it will be more to question or maybe to poke fun at modern-day received wisdom and political correctness than to castigate sixteenth-century people for not being "with it," whatever that "it" might have been.

Even more problematic than my presumption to read texts on behalf of people long dead is whether reading advice meant following it in some fashion. A good starting point for considering the impact of reading in premodern societies is the chapter titled "Do Books Cause Revolutions?" in Robert Darnton’s Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1995), 169–246. Darnton’s answer is a very cautious "not no," at least to judge by the proposed third volume of his trilogy on reading. That planned study of how contemporaries saw events in the months immediately preceding Bastille Day, based upon minute investigation of what they wrote down and printed for others to read, would make no sense unless the answer, somehow, is "yes—books do cause revolutions." Hardly less exasperating than Darnton in its ambiguity is Roger Chartier’s iffy answer to his earlier and very similar question—"Do Books Make Revolutions?"—in his Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, 1991), 67–91. Indeed, Chartier suggests that it might be better to reverse the causal arrow and consider how the Revolution "made" books (89). (In the original, "En un sens, c’est donc bien la Révolution qui a ‘fait’ les livres, et non l’inverse" [112–13])

One must be chastened by such scholarly hesitation in addressing well-established historical questions. When it comes to interrogating sixteenth-century-advice manuals, I feel most confident about conveying to you what people read, rather more speculative in asserting on how they read, and least sure in suggesting the impact of reading on daily comportment. I do not believe that popular-advice manuals were "made" by people’s behavior, but who knows for sure? And exactly what people "made" of what they read in advice manuals is probably unknowable, although on occasion I shall ruminate.

This rather old-fashioned way of looking at things past has contemporary practitioners. See, for example, Margaret R. Sommerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early-Modern Society (London, 1995), 5–6, for the method, and the rest of her fine book concentrating on the English scene for its application.

1-14. Paul F. Grendler, Books and Schools in the Italian Renaissance (Aldershot, 1995), conveniently collects several of Grendler’s essays on these issues. See especially, "Form and Function in Italian Renaissance Popular Books," Renaissance Quarterly 46, no. 3 (1993): 451–85. Grendler in turn cites Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard (London, 1976), 87–90, and Rudolf Hirsch, Printing, Selling, and Reading, 1450–1550 (Wiesbaden, 1974), on how to recognize a popular book.

1-15. See the essay titled "Aldus Manutius: Humanist, Teacher, and Printer," in Grendler, Books and Schools, 5, for an evocative description of the book-selling scene in Venice: "By 1501, Venice had published almost twice as many books as Paris, her nearest rival, and nearly one-seventh of all the books printed in Europe. Sixteenth-century tourists did not come to Venice to visit a glass factory and to buy glass trinkets; they came to buy books." For a detailed exploration of why Venice dominated book production on the Italian peninsula, see Luigi Balsamo, "The Origins of Printing in Italy and England," Journal of the Printing Historical Society 11 (1976–77): 48–63. For the actual process, see Martin Lowry, Nicholas Jenson and the Rise of Venetian Publishing in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 1991), 173–206. The chapter titled "The Printer, the Reader, and the Market" includes an analysis of sales by category of books (196), but even the author cautions against making too much of such quantitative exercises, a warning that would be even more applicable to later periods when sales were much higher. On the decline of printing in Venice after 1600, see Ivo Mattozzi, "‘Mondo del libro’ e decadenza a Venezia (1570–1730)," Quaderni Storici 72 (1989): 743–86. For a more general discussion of books as commodities, see Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York, 1996), 135–80.

1-16. See Balsamo, Bibliography: History of a Tradition, 31, for the particular lament, and 1–60, more generally, for the bibliographic scene from the Middle Ages through the sixteenth century.

1-17. Fernanda Ascarelli and Marco Menato, La tipografia del ’500 in Italia (Florence, 1989), 10, provides the overall number and in a text of over four hundred pages summarizes what is known about individual printers and editors. For the Venetian scene in particular, see Dennis E. Rhodes, Silent Printers: Anonymous Printing at Venice in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1995), and Bareggi, Il mestiere di scrivere. On Florence, see Pettas, The Giunti of Florence. Also see Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 147. For information on average print runs for Europe generally, see Rab Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Culture and Education 1500–1800 (London, 1988), 156–62. Also see the estimates, generally quite conservative because they do not attempt to measure the circulation of books among multiple readers, by Paul Slack, "Mirrors of Health and Treasures of Poor Men: The Uses of the Vernacular Medical Literature of Tudor England," in Charles Webster, ed., Health, Medicine, and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), 237–73. Slack’s analysis of the probable readership for medical works of different sizes, formats, and subjects influenced my thinking about the Italian publishing scene as well.

1-18. Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470–1600 (Cambridge, 1994), 91, on competition, and generally, for printing in Venice and Florence.

1-19. Grendler, "Aldus Manutius," 5–23. On Aldus Manutius, also see Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1979), 257–99, for an estimate that this single publisher, admittedly an important one with contacts throughout Europe, may have reached a total output of between 100,000 and 120,000 books. For a valuable, although fleeting, ray of light on the question of sales of individual items, see Rudolf Hirsch, "The Art of Selling Books: Notes on Three Aldus Catalogues, 1586–1592," in his Printed Word: Its Impact and Diffusion (Primarily in the 15th–16th Centuries) (London, 1978), part 30. Also see the discussion of octavo sizes and prices in Harry George Fletcher, New Aldine Studies: Documentary Essays on the Life and Work of Aldus Manutius (San Francisco, 1988), 88–91. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 239, reports that charlatans sold books of secrets, often little more than pamphlets, for "a few soldi apiece," necessarily a bit vague and yet overall in keeping with the point I am making about accessibility.

1-20. A high level of literacy among nuns is suggested in Elissa Weaver, "Spiritual Fun: A Study of Sixteenth-Century Tuscan Convent Theater," in Mary Beth Rose, ed., Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives (Syracuse, 1986), 173–205. For further discussion of literacy rates in Europe generally, see Carlo Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West (Baltimore, 1969), 45–61, and Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe. Houston estimates that as many as two hundred million books and chapbooks were published in Europe in the sixteenth century (166). On readership in city and country in France, and by class, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), 189–226. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 94–105, is excellent on the German scene, and see 126–33, on pre-1550 best-sellers. For an estimate that 45 to 60 percent of Florentine boys may have attended school and therefore presumably grew to be literate adults, see Peter Burke, "The Uses of Literacy in Early Modern Italy," in Peter Burke and Roy Porter, eds., The Social History of Language (Cambridge, 1987), 22. Also see Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987), 110–31, and in particular 112, for the conclusion that literacy rates in northern Italy were the highest in Europe from about the year 1000, until the seventeenth century, when efforts were made in the Dutch Republic and Sweden to achieve virtually universal literacy. Somewhat lower estimates for literacy and for the vibrancy of the Italian publishing scene may be found in Harvey Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington, 1987), 121–23. Still, Graff concludes that a "veritable avalanche of treatises aimed at a variety of forms of self-help and improvement, from praying to singing and accounting, rolled from sixteenth-century presses." On religious books and a wide readership, see the introduction to Anne Jacobson Schutte, Printed Italian Vernacular Religious Books, 1465–1550: A Finding List (Geneva, 1983), 1–3. On elementary schooling, see Paul F. Grendler, ed., "Education in the Renaissance and Reformation," Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 4 (1990): 774–823.

1-21. Pettas, The Giunti of Florence, 11–12, includes the disdain for printing among Florentine humanists and the Medici family as a major factor in Venetian dominance of this new industry.

1-22. Grendler, "Form and Function in Popular Books," 453. Also see his "Chivalric Romances in the Italian Renaissance," Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 10 (1988): 59–60, 83–89.

1-23. The reverse also is true in that writing in Latin often was a socially or politically charged choice. See the insightful essay by Peter Burke, "Heu domine, adsunt Turcae: A Sketch for a Social History of Post-medieval Latin," in Peter Burke and Roy Porter, eds., Language, Self, and Society: A Social History of Language (Cambridge, 1991), 23–50. Cecil Grayson, A Renaissance Controversy: Latin or Italian? (Oxford, 1960), 14, persuasively points to the printing press’s dependence on a wide audience as the most important factor in determining the triumph of vernaculars over Latin in scholarly as well as in popular writing. On the specific reluctance of physicians to publish in the vernacular, see Richard J. Durling, "A Chronological Census of Renaissance Editions and Translations of Galen," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 24, no. 3–4 (1961): 240–41, and note 55.

1-24. Maria Luisa Altieri Biagi, Clemente Mazzotta, Angela Chiantera, and Paola Altieri, eds. Medicina per le donne nel Cinquecento: Testi di Giovanni Marinello e di Girolamo Mercurio (Turin, 1992), 12. Biagi et al. ascribe to Mercurio other medical works, including a commentary in Latin on Hippocrates and another on syphilis. However, there may be some confusion here between Girolamo Mercurio who died in 1615, and certainly wrote the La commare book, and the more famous Girolamo Mercuriale who died in 1606, and is best known for Latin works on children’s diseases and on gymnastic exercises. Friar Girolamo Mercurio wrote another big treatise in the vernacular that we shall return to, De gli errori popolari d’Italia. Libri sette (Venice: Giovanni Battista Ciotti, 1603), and in this work he frequently refers back to his La commare. But there are no specific references by title in either of these two vernacular books to any of the other writings ascribed by Biagi to Mercurio. The National Union Catalog clearly identifies Mercuriale, not Mercurio, as the author of the Hippocrates commentary and the syphilis treatise but misascribes La commare to Mercuriale (vol. 377, p. 23). Of the two books I am certain Mercurio wrote, La commare was the resounding success.

In subsequent citations of Mercurio, I shall give the book and chapter of the original La commare. If the material cited is included in the selections of Biagi et al., then in parentheses I shall give the page numbers for the readily available Biagi edition. For material not in Biagi, I shall give the page numbers from the 1601 edition of La commare (Venice: Giovanni Battista Ciotti), which I used. This edition contains a book 3 on the care of young children that Mercurio completed in 1600, and integrated into the updated version of La commare. According to Felice La Torre, Mercurio’s book went through at least eighteen editions during the next century or so; see La Torre, L’utero attraverso i secoli: Da Erofilo ai giorni nostri (Città di Castello, 1917), 102–3.

1-25. Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Athens, 1981), 50–75, provides a wonderful example of common sense brought to bear on important historical issues concerning literacy and readership. See also the fundamental essay by Roger Chartier, "Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France," in Steven L. Kaplan, ed., Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Berlin, 1984), 229–53. On female book ownership, well before the use of printing in Europe, see Susan Groag Bell, "Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture," in Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds., Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Athens, 1988), 149–87.

1-26. Anne Jacobson Schutte, "Teaching Adults to Read in Sixteenth Century Venice: Giovanni Antonio Tagliente’s Libro Maistrevole," Sixteenth Century Journal 17, no. 1 (1986): 3–16. For a thorough assessment of early books on how to read, one that suggests learning to read may not have been as simple as Tagliente suggests, see Piero Lucchi, "La santacroce, il salterio e il babuino: Libri per imparare a leggere nel primo secolo della stampa," Quaderni Storici 38 (1978): 593–630.

2-1. For a thorough introduction to premodern biological understanding of reproduction see Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (London, 1984), and Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1980), 28–46, and specifically 37, on sex determination. Also essential is Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, 1992), 25–62. The many parallels between what I present throughout this chapter and what McLaren finds for England suggest a European-wide understanding of biology, rather than language-specific knowledge, even at the level of popular manuals on topics as diverse as herbals, anatomy, and witchcraft.

For an uncompromising indictment of Aristotle as "antifeminist to the core," see Maryanne Cline Horowitz, "Aristotle and Woman," Journal of the History of Biology 9 (fall 1976): 183–213. On the political implications of Aristotelian biology, see Sommerville, Sex and Subjection, 16–23. Also see Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, 1990), 29–34, 259, for the suspicion that the Greek philosopher did not get along very well with his wife.

2-2. On Aristotelian dominance in popular-advice manuals, see Daniela Frigo, Il padre di famiglia: Governo della casa e governo civile nella tradizione dell ‘economica’ tra Cinque e Seicento (Rome, 1985), 11–12. For an excellent introduction to Greco-Roman and Christian texts on the physiology of conception and motherhood, see Clarissa W. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1991), 23–63. Also see Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," Representations 14 (spring 1986): 1–41, particularly on Galen. An excellent introduction to medieval texts on female reproductive biology is Claude Thomasset, "The Nature of Woman," in Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ed., Silences of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992), 43–69; and see Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Princeton, 1988), esp. 48–138. Also of fundamental importance is Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge, 1993), which thoroughly documents the presence in medieval texts of virtually every belief and prescription, popular or otherwise, found in the sixteenth-century books considered throughout this chapter; and see also Monica H. Green, "Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe," Signs 14 (1989): 434–73.

2-3. See Biagi et al., Medicina per le donne, 7–15, for a thorough discussion of the significance of the choice to write in the vernacular. Parallel findings for England may be found in Alison Sim, The Tudor Housewife (Montreal, 1996), 78–93.

2-4. Lorenzo Gioberti, La prima parte de gli errori popolari. Nella quale si contiene l’eccellenza della medicina, & de’ medici, della concettione, & generatione; della gravidezza, del parto, e delle donne di parto; & del latte, e del nutrire i bambine. Tradotta di franzese in lingua toscana dal mag. M. Alberto Luchi da Colle (Florence: Filippo Giunta, 1592), hereafter cited as Errori popolari, except when Mercurio’s original reference was to Errori populari. For the publishing history of the original, and for a superb English translation, see Laurent Joubert, Popular Errors, trans. and annotated by Gregory David de Rocher (Tuscaloosa, 1989). De Rocher is also the translator and annotator of two other works by Joubert: Treatise on Laughter (University, 1980), and The Second Part of the Popular Errors (Tuscaloosa, 1995).

2-5. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 224–25, 258–67. Also see pages xiii–xxvi, of the de Rocher translation of Popular Errors, and Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 162, 259–62. Eamon views "popular errors" books as elitist, and I certainly agree that they belong at the quality end of the advice-manual spectrum, while de Rocher emphasizes Joubert’s great respect for popular traditions, a reading I share. Beyond matters of tone and style, the errors Joubert denounces come overwhelmingly from Greco-Roman scientific treatises. On how readers may remake what they read, see Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980), esp. 28–54.

2-6. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 64–66.

2-7. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 73. The exploration of a "one sex, two genders" biology by Laqueur, Making Sex, 25–62, is immediately relevant here.

2-8. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 70–73.

2-9. Francesco Tommasi, Reggimento del padre di famiglia (Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, 1580), 89. This quarto tome of 561 pages joins extended treatments on family relations with advice on agricultural methods. The intended readership was probably gentlemen who owned country estates; they received a heavy dose of moralizing along with the advice about what to plant. For bio-bibliographical information and an introduction to Italian books in this "country-estate" genre, see Marino Berengo, "Un agronomo toscano del Cinquecento: Francesco Tommasi da Colle Val D’Elsa," in aa.vv. Studi di storia medievale e moderna per Ernesto Sestan, vol. 2 (Florence, 1980), 495–518. Also see Frigo, Il padre di famiglia, 40–41; 49, note 5, in which she concludes that in Tommasi the primacy of knowledge (sapere) is so submerged that the book in essence "becomes one of the instruments in the strategy of the post-Tridentine church to control and influence daily life and its values."

2-10. Roberto Ridolfi, Vita di Girolamo Savonarola, 6th ed. (Florence, 1981), 4–6, 492. On Avicenna, see Nancy G. Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities after 1500 (Princeton, 1987), and also her chapter, "The Changing Fortunes of a Traditional Text: Goals and Strategies in Sixteenth-Century Latin Editions of the Canon of Avicenna," in A. Wear, R. K. French, and I. M. Lonie, eds., The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), 16–41. Especially strong on the connections between Greco-Roman and Arabic medicine related to conception is Marcia C. Inhorn, Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions (Philadelphia, 1994), 55–67.

2-11. We are most fortunate in having the carefully edited and complete text of Luigi Belloni, Il trattato ginecologico-pediatrico in volgare: Ad mulieres ferrarienses de regimine pregnantium et noviter natorum usque ad septennium di Michele Savonarola (Milan, 1952), which is the edition I shall cite throughout my work. The thorough introduction (v–xxxv) provides an account of Savonarola’s life and writings. Among Savonarola’s printed works is Trattato utilissimo di molte regole, per conservare la sanità, dichiarando qual cose siano utili da mangiare, & quali triste . . . (Venice: Gli heredi di Giovanni Padovano, 1554), which I was able to consult at length in Rome. It does not include the "Degli atti venerei" section that turns up as pages 261–75 of the later and better-known revision, Libro della natura et virtù delle cose, che nutriscono, et delle cose non naturali, con alcune osservationi per conservar la sanità, et alcuni quesiti bellissimi da notare, raccolto da diversi autori greci, et latini, et arabi, prima per M. Michel Savonarola medico padoano, poi di nuovo con miglior ordine riformato, accresciuto, et emendato, et quasi fatto un altro per Bartolomeo Boldo, medico bressano (Venice: Domenico & Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1575). The one from 1554, a sextodecimo of 84 leaves in tiny print, grew in the later version to 299 more elegant quarto pages divided into twenty-five chapters as follows: cereals, herbs, tubers, citrus fruits, sweet fruits, birds, fresh water fish, eggs, dairy, wine, water, salt, oil, honey, spices, fragrances, air, exercise, rest, sleep, vigils, intake and evacuation, sexual intercourse, conservation of good health, and further reflections on conservation of health. Although much of what these early manuals convey about diet and good health is covered in my next chapter in the section on diet and lifestyle during pregnancy, they also contain a wealth of interesting material that space precludes me from discussing here. For a modern edition of a copy of the handwritten original, see Jane Nystedt, Libreto de tutte le cosse che se magnano: Un’ opera di dietetica del sec. XV / Michele Savonarola (Stockholm, 1988). A photostatic reprint (Padua, 1991) of the 1515 printed edition also exists.

2-12. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 55–58.

2-13. Giovanni Marinello, Delle medicine partenenti all’ infermità delle donne. Scritte per M. Giovanni Marinello, & divise in tre libri: Nel primo de’ quali si curano alcuni difetti, che possono sciogliere il legame del matrimonio; nel secondo si rimove la sterilità; & nel terzo si scrive la vita della donna gravida, sino che sia uscita del parto, con l’ufficio della levatrice (Venice: Francesco de’ Franceschi, 1563). A small selection of its chapters can be found in Medicina per le donne, edited by Maria Luisa Altieri Biagi et al., which also contains excerpts from Mercurio. However, since that edition includes only five chapters from Marinello’s original forty-nine, I shall cite the original throughout. Marinello’s book on beauty aids, Gli ornamenti delle donne (Venice: Francesco de’ Franceschi, 1562), also may be consulted in a selected modern edition by Luigi Pescasio (Verona, 1973).

Lucrezia Marinella’s book, La nobiltà et l’eccellenza delle donne co’ diffetti e mancamenti de gli uomini (Venice: Giovanni Battista Ciotti, 1600), contains a series of citations and recitations about famous women from Greco-Roman antiquity, some real and some not, with many lifted directly from Plutarch. The presentation is a mirror image reversal of the format used by misogynist texts of the era, especially the work of Giuseppe Passi to which it is a direct response. See Plutarch’s essay "Concerning the Virtues of Women," in Moralia, bk. 3, 242E, for passages heavily borrowed by Marinella. I use the Loeb Classical Library translation by Frank Cole Babbitt (London, 1927) throughout. For a modern assessment of Marinella, see Patricia Labalme, "Venetian Women on Women: Three Early Modern Feminists," Archivio Veneto 5, no. 152 (1981): 93. Even her charitable view allows that Marinella’s style is a bit overwhelming and that she can be "tendentious, even tiresome to a modern reader." For biographical details and a good introduction to the corpus of Marinella’s work, see the entry on her by Paola Malpezzi Price in Rinaldina Russell, ed., Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographic Sourcebook (Westport, 1994), 234–42. As a translation of Marinella’s book is promised in the University of Chicago Press’s series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, you will soon be able to make your own judgment. On Plutarch’s essay, see Philip Stadter, Plutarch’s Historical Methods: An Analysis of the Mulierum virtutes (Cambridge, 1965).

2-14. Lodovico Domenichi, La nobiltà delle donne (Venice: Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1549), quoted in Piero Camporesi, Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic Significance of Blood, trans. Robert Barr (New York, 1995), 93. See William Barker, ed., The Nobility of Women by William Bercher 1559 (London, 1904), 44–62, for a thorough exploration of the plagiarism from Agrippa, and 74–75, for further plagiarism from the work of Galeazzo Flavio Capra. Paul F. Grendler, Critics of the Italian World, 1530–1560: Anton Francesco Doni, Nicolò Franco, and Ortensio Lando (Madison, 1969), 67, specifically includes La nobiltà delle donne as one of Domenichi’s original works, a conclusion with which I do not concur.

2-15. For an English translation of Agrippa, preceded by an excellent introduction, see Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, trans. and ed. Albert Rabil Jr. (Chicago, 1996). See Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 122–26, on Agrippa and Domenichi as male feminists, but then 149, on Domenichi as a misogynist. Domenichi might better be characterized as an opportunist, which would account both for the Agrippa plagiarism and his several editions of poetry by women, on which see Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago, 1992), 302, note 90.

2-16. Marinello, Delle medicine, 243–48.

2-17. Marinello, Delle medicine, 70.

2-18. Marinello, Delle medicine, 243–48; for a repetition of many of the same points, with references to the ancient Greeks but not to sixteenth-century authors, see Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chap. 13 (Biagi et al., 95–97).

2-19. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 10; Marinello, Delle medicine, 70. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 69, warns that God punishes husbands who are unfaithful while away on a business trip by rendering their semen too weak to produce legitimate heirs.

2-20. Castore Durante da Gualdo, Il tesoro della sanità (Milan, 1982), 34, for an edition by Elena Camillo of the 1586 original published in Rome. Camillo’s excellent bibliographic introduction discusses the medieval origins of the regimens contained in this work. Also see Tiziana Pesenti’s entry on Durante in the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 42 (Rome, 1993), 105–7.

2-21. Bartolomeo Boldo, Libro della natura, 263. For full bibliographic information, see note 11.

2-22. Ugo Benzi, Regole della sanità et natura de’ cibi, di Ugo Benzo, senese. Arricchite di vaghe annotationi, & di copiosi discorsi, naturali, e morali dal sig. Lodovico Bertaldi. Et nuovamente in questa seconda impressione aggiontovi alle medeme materie i trattati di Baldasar Pisanelli, e sue historie naturali; & annotationi del medico Galina (Turin: Li heredi di Giovanni Domenico Tarino, 1620), 714, for the specific reference to the dangers of too much sex. Benzi’s commentaries on Hippocrates (Ferrara, 1493) and Galen (Venice, 1517) also were printed. For complete biographical information, see Dean P. Lockwood, Ugo Benzi: Medieval Philosopher and Physician, 1376–1439 (Chicago, 1951), esp. 382–98, for the publication record.

2-23. Michele Mercati, Instruttione sopra la peste. Nella quale si contengono i piu eletti e approvati rimedij, con molti nuovi e potenti secreti cosi da preservarsi come da curassi (Rome: Vincenzo Accolti, 1576), 112.

2-24. Marinello, Delle medicine, 4–7.

2-25. Cicalamenti del Grappa intorno al sonetto ‘Poi che mia spreme è lunga à venir troppo’ dove si ciarla allungo delle lodi delle donne et del mal francioso (Mantua: [Venturino Ruffinelli], 1545), 14. This work is a sexually explicit lampoon of Dante’s ethereal La vita nuova.

2-26. Cherubino da Siena, Regole della vita matrimoniale (Bologna, 1969, rpt. of 1888 ed. by Francesco Zambrini and Carlo Negroni), 97. Plutarch, Moralia, bk. 2, "Advice to Bride and Groom," 139A. The rotten fish analogy repeated by Francesco Barbaro is most easily found in the excerpt provided in Benjamin Kohl and Ronald Witt, with Elizabeth Welles, eds., The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society (Philadelphia, 1978), 198. The sixteenth-century translation by Alberto Lollio that I consulted is Prudentissimi et gravi documenti circa la elettion della moglie; dello eccellente & dottissimo M. Francesco Barbaro, gentilhuomo venitiano al molto magnifico et magnanimo M. Lorenzo de Medici, cittadin fiorentino (Venice: Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1548). For a modern assessment of Barbaro, see Margaret L. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton, 1986), 92–98. See also my chapter 6.

2-27. Biblical citations are from the New Oxford Annotated Bible, which uses the text of the New Revised Standard Version.

2-28. Bartolomeo de Medina, Breve instruttione de’ confessori. Come si debba amministrare il sacramento della penitentia (Venice: Bernardo Basa, 1600), 155. This is a translation of the Spanish original by Bartolomé de Medina, Breve instrucción de como ha de adminitrar el sacramento de la penitencia (Salamanca, 1580), cited in Romeo De Maio, Donna e Rinascimento (Milan, 1987), 239, note 48, which was itself preceded by a Spanish 1579 edition at Çaragoça. Other Italian editions appeared in Venice, 1584 and 1587, and in Rome, 1588. De Maio identifies Bartolomeo de Medina as a "virulent antifeminist."

2-29. Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago, 1982) , 90ff., for this and other accounts of married saints.

2-30. Theodore Buckley, trans., The Catechism of the Council of Trent (London, 1852), pt. 2, chap. 8, question 34. Subsequent citations will use the following format: 2.8.34.

2-31. Tommasi, Reggimento del padre, 95; Bartolomeo de Medina, Breve instruttione de’ confessori, 164.

2-32. Cherubino da Firenze, Confessionario (Florence: Filippo Giunti, 1563), 48–54. On earlier vernacular confessionals for laymen and laywomen, see Anne Jacobson Schutte, "Consiglio spirituale e controllo sociale: Manuali per la confessione stampati in volgare prima della Controriforma," in Convegno Internazionale di Studi Lucca (Lucca, Italy, 1983), Città italiane del ‘500 tra Riforma e Controriforma: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Lucca, 13–15 ottobre 1983 (Lucca, 1988), 45–59. Schutte highlights clearly the economic pressures of publication ("Il loro scopo principale era far denaro" [47]) and the attempt to control secular behavior evident in pre-Tridentine confessional manuals, characteristics that became even more pronounced after 1550.

2-33. Lynne Lawner, I modi: The Sixteen Pleasures, An Erotic Album of the Italian Renaissance (Evanston, 1988), provides a wickedly spirited English translation of the sonnets, copies of the original illustrations and some later versions of them, and a scholarly introduction.

2-34. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 23.

2-35. Bartolomeo de Medina, Breve instruttione de’ confessori, 78; Bernardo Trotto, Dialoghi del matrimonio, e vita vedovile (Turin: Francesco Dolce, 1578), 90; Boldo, Libro della natura, 265. Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 157, classifies Trotto as a "feminist," but apparently his feminism did not extend to permitting women to initiate sexual foreplay.

2-36. Hull, Women according to Men, 96–97, takes a far darker view than I do of the consequences for women of the assertion that a woman is more likely to conceive if she experiences orgasm, a notion found in many advice manuals. She cites Jane Sharp, a female writer who, in her 1671 midwifery book, "repeated the same misconceptions about orgasmic conception that male writers were promoting." The male writer she highlights is Nicholas Culpeper, whose 1675 book made the startling assertion that "there never comes conception upon rape," from which Hull immediately reaches the following conclusion: "For the woman, pregnant from a rape, the law was no protection. Confused, bewildered, fearful of public humiliation, such a woman would fail to bring charges. Not surprisingly, few rape cases were recorded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." Blaming the victim for rape clearly has a long history. However, Culpeper, like all the Italian writers I know, elsewhere held only that orgasm made conception more likely, not that it was a requirement, a distinction Hull is fully aware of. She sees the same words I do—"The greater the woman’s desire of copulation is, the more subject to conceive she is"—and concludes that "the belief in orgasmic conception became one of the most devastating and confusing misconceptions for many unfortunate women." My understanding, equally beyond proof or refutation, is that advice manuals told fathers who wished to conceive a son to become tender, caring lovers with their wives. Perhaps some female readers were emboldened enough to ask their husbands sweetly for improved performance! Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, 93–104, thoroughly explores medieval treatises on sexual pleasure and conception.

2-37. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 41–43; Palmieri, Della vita civile, 17.

2-38. See my "Telling Her Sins: Male Confessors and Female Penitents in Catholic Reformation Italy," in Lynda L. Coon, Katherine J. Haldane, and Elisabeth W. Sommer, eds., That Gentle Strength: Historical Perspectives on Women in Christianity (Charlottesville, 1990), 118–33.

2-39. Cherubino da Siena, Regole, v–xxii, for the publication history. For biographical data, see Roberto Rusconi’s entry on Cherubino da Spoleto in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 24 (Rome, 1980), 446–53. Also see the appraisal by Anne Jacobson Schutte in "Printing, Piety, and the People in Italy: The First Thirty Years," Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 71 (1980): 13–15, which concludes that on sexual behavior between married couples Brother Cherubino could "find extenuating circumstances to excuse almost any transgression." For a recent treatment, see Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago, 1992), 40–41. In my judgment, King inverts the meaning and context of Cherubino’s advice by seeing it as restricting a wife’s sexual expression when in fact Cherubino consistently assumed, rightly or wrongly, it was husbands who sought payments of the conjugal debt and wives who wished to refuse.

On fifteenth-century editions, see Maria Doglio, ed., Galeazzo Flavio Capra. Della eccellenza e dignità delle donne (Rome, 1988), 115. The folksy, down-to-earth, forgiving quality of Brother Cherubino’s book may well account in large part for its success in early print culture. At least that is my editorial judgment when I compare it with the turgid prose of more respected works (never published in the sixteenth century) addressed to women, such as St. Antoninus of Florence’s Opera a ben vivere. Although written in the vernacular, this advice became available only in the nineteenth century in Francesco Palermo, ed., Opera a ben vivere di Santo Antonino, Arcivescovo di Firenze (Florence, 1858).

2-40. Cherubino da Siena, Regole, 7–25.

2-41. For a thorough analysis of the variety of Catholic teaching on "sex and the married penitent," see Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, 1977), 186–232. For more recent scholarship on the pre-Reformation confessional, see Pierre J. Payer, "Confession and the Study of Sex in the Middle Ages," in James A. Brundage and Vern L. Bullough, eds., Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York, 1996), 3–31. This essay builds upon Payer’s two authoritative earlier works, Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code 550–1150 (Toronto, 1984), and The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto, 1993). For an insightful assessment of the increasing use of the confessional in post-Tridentine Catholicism, and especially on the feminization of confession, see Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned (New York, 1996), 7–41, esp. 34–35. Also see Jean-Louis Flandrin, Sex in the Western World: The Development of Attitudes and Behaviour, trans. Sue Collins (Chur, 1991), 117–28, although care must be taken when the author’s anticlerical outrage exceeds his scholarly caution, for example, in the unqualified assertion on page 184 that a wife could not use menstruation as a reason to refuse payment of the conjugal debt; the issue was much more complex and in fact theologians came to differing conclusions. Tentler mentions some vernacular tracts from Germany, France, and England but omits the Italian scene, and in any event is more concerned with differences of approach among serious thinkers who wrote for each other in Latin than with how theological disputes reached actual married penitents through the medium of print. He recognizes clearly, however (184–85), that as the clerical message widened its focus to include the laity, it tended to become must less insistent about careful examination of conscience and motivations for initiating sexual intercourse. For a thorough treatment of the Italian scene, see Pino Trombetta, La confessione della lussuria: Definizione e controllo del piacere nel cattolicesimo (Genoa, 1991).

2-42. Cherubino da Siena, Regole, 50.

2-43. Cherubino da Siena, Regole, 60.

2-44. Cherubino da Siena, Regole, 80–88. I shall not consider Bernardino da Siena directly since his sermons did not find a publisher in sixteenth-century Italy, although he did have an influence through popular writers like Cherubino da Siena. See Roberto Rusconi, "St. Bernardino of Siena, the Wife, and Possessions," in Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, eds., Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, trans. Margery Schneider (Chicago, 1996), 182–96.

2-45. On St. Bonaventure, see Emma Thérèsa Healy, Women according to Saint Bonaventure (New York, 1955). On St. Thomas Aquinas, see Kari Elisabeth Børrensen, Natura e ruolo della donna in Agostino e Tommaso d’Aquino, trans. Liliana Lanzarini (Città di Castello, 1979).

2-46. Cherubino da Siena, Regole, 92–97. For a lively survey of "situational" sin, see G. R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth Century England (New Brunswick, 1979), 165–85. The standard authority on all this is Albert the Great, to whose views Cherubino adds nothing, but the way in which he expresses the accepted admonitions so that laypersons can understand and obey is just wonderful. On Albert the Great, see Tentler, Sin and Confession, 189–90.

2-47. Cherubino da Siena, Regole, 98ff.

2-48. Actually, the citation by Mercurio is wrong. Where Augustine does write about Jacob’s sheep raising, it is only to say that he caused sheep of different colors to be born, not how he did it. Still, the actual account in Genesis 30:37–39 says that Jacob was able to produce striped, speckled, and spotted flocks by setting peeled rods of poplar, almond, and plane in front of the drinking water where the animals bred, thereby presumably altering their states of mind.

2-49. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chap. 12 (Biagi et al., 92–95).

2-50. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 82; Anonymous, Thesoro di secreti naturali. Raccolti per fedel honostij (Genoa and Florence, n.d., ca. 1600), no pagination, BNF shelf mark Palat. (14) X.4.1.67; Marinello, Delle medicine, 57–60. See Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 239–59, for a general discussion of these anonymous books of secrets. On Galenic tests for fertility and a variety of elaborations, see Thomas Rogers Forbes, The Midwife and the Witch (New Haven, 1966), 37–38.

2-51. Charles Estienne, L’agricoltura et casa di villa Carlo Stefano, gentil’huomo francese, nuovamente tradotta dal Cavaliere Hercole Cato (Venice: Aldo Manuzio, 1581), 378, for the chickpeas. Among his major works are an important anatomical study, De dissectione partium corporis humani (Paris, 1545), and a thousand-page classical dictionary/encyclopedia, Dictionarium historicum, geographicum, poeticum, that went through twenty revisions and editions (all in Latin) from its original publication in 1553, to the last revised edition in 1693. The most readily available version of the Dictionarium is a New York, 1976 reprint of the Paris, 1596 edition.

2-52. Estienne, L’agricoltura, 137, 299.

2-53. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 168–93, brings this great "professor of secrets" to English language readers. Also see pages 249–50, for Fioravanti’s full awareness of the power of print in undermining classic medical authority. In Italian, see Domenico Furfaro, La vita e l’opera di Leonardo Fioravanti (Bologna, 1963). Ample selections and summaries from Fioravanti’s texts are provided, and herein I cite Furfaro’s page numbers for easy reference, as well as the original chapter locations for readers who have access to them. The cure is taken from La cirugia (Venice: Gli heredi di Melchiorre Sessa, 1570), bk. 3, chap. 57 (Furfaro, 75–76). The case against anatomy is from the preface to book 2 of the same work (Furfaro, 57). The praise of chickens’ lifestyle is from Il tesoro della vita humana (Venice: Gli heredi di Melchiorre Sessa, 1570), bk. 4, chap. 78 (Furfaro, 131). See Capricci medicinali (Venice: Lodovico Avanzi, 1568), bk. 1, chap. 51 (Furfaro, 152), for the resuscitation claims. An earlier and harsher assessment of Fioravanti may be found in Andrea Corsini, Medici ciarlatani e ciarlatani medici (Bologna, 1922), 77–81.

2-54. Isabella Cortese, I secreti della signora Isabella Cortese ne’ quali si contengono cose minerali, medecinali, arteficiose, e alchimiche. Et molte de l’arte profumatoria, appartenenti a ogni gran signora. Con altri bellissimi secreti aggiunti (Venice: Giacomo Cornetti, 1584), 89, for the erection remedy, 124–25, for the toothpaste, and 197, for the skin cream. The biographical information and the commandments come from the opening of book 2. A 1995 Milan reprint makes this rare work readily available. Also see Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 137, 194.

2-55. A thorough modern assessment of Dioscorides is in John M. Riddle, Dioscorides on Pharmacy and Medicine (Austin, 1985). Briefly, Dioscorides gathered his remedies while spending some forty years observing plant life, and it is likely that he had access to Egyptian medical literature which, drawing as it did from millennia of funerary science, was far more advanced than anything known in Europe. His influence on Galen and on generations of Arab scientists was enormous, and his reputation increased over time. In fact, one of the early books published by Aldus Manutius, who may be remembered as the Venetian printer I used partially as a yardstick for estimating book prices, was a 1499 Greek edition of Dioscorides.

The Mattioli edition I used is De i discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli sanese,medico cesareo et del Serenissimo Principe Ferdinando Arciduca D’Austria etc. Nelli sei libri di Pedacio Dioscoride anazarbeo, della materia medicinale parte prima. La quale contiene il primo & secondo libro. Dal proprio autore innanzi la sua morte ricorretta, ampliata, & all’ ultima perfettione ridotta. Con le figure grandi, tirate dalle naturali & vive piante, & animali, & in numero molto maggiore, che le altre per avanti stampate. Con due tavole copiosissime spettanti l’una à ciò, che in tutta l’opera si contiene: e l’altra alla cura di tutte le infirmità del corpo humano (Venice: Felice Valgrisi, 1585). It runs to 1,527 numbered pages plus over 100 pages of introductory materials and indexes, as well as an appendix. Vernacular editions appeared as early as 1544.

2-56. On books of herbs and the extraordinary popularity they enjoyed, see the introduction by Erminio Caprotti to Apuleius Barbarus, Herbarium Apulei 1481; Herbolario volgare 1522 (Milan, 1979), xlix–liv. For a modern introductory dictionary on herbals, see George Hocking, A Dictionary of Terms in Pharmacognosy and Other Divisions of Economic Botany (Springfield, 1955). Especially useful on toxicity questions is James A. Duke, CRC Handbook of Medicinal Herbs (Boca Raton, 1985). Also see Margaret B. Freeman, Herbs for the Mediaeval Household for Cooking, Healing, and Divers Uses (New York, 1943), 17–32; William R. Thomson, Herbs That Heal (New York, 1976); and Rosetta E. Clarkson, Herbs: Their Culture and Uses (New York, 1942), 123–99.

On the printing history of Mattioli’s edition of Dioscorides, see John Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1992), 149. More generally on the printing of books of herbals, see Karen Reeds, Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities (New York, 1991), especially the annexed essay titled "Publishing Scholarly Books in the Sixteenth Century." On Mattioli and pharmacology, see Richard Palmer, "Pharmacy in the Republic of Venice in the Sixteenth Century," in A. Wear et al., eds., The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, 100–17; also see Palmer’s "Medical Botany in Northern Italy in the Renaissance," Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 78 (February 1985): 149–57; also see Frank J. Anderson, An Illustrated History of the Herbals (New York, 1977), 163–72. Still of general interest is the classic work by Agnes Arber, Herbals, Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany 1470–1679 (Cambridge, 1953, rpt. of 1938 rev. of 1912 ed.), 92–103, for the Italian scene.

2-57. Mattioli, Discorsi, section on Membra virili; Estienne, L’agricoltura, 193, 244–45, 251, on reducing sexual desire; Marinello, Delle medicine, 17–20, on combating nocturnal emissions by taking icy baths or sitting on a cold rock.

2-58. Castore Durante, Herbario nuovo di Castore Durante, medico e cittadino romano (Rome: Bartolomeo Bonfadini & Tito Diani, 1585). For biographical and bibliographic information, see Durante, Il tesoro della sanità, which also provides a modern edition of this work (Venice: Andrea Muschio, 1586). Anderson, An Illustrated History of the Herbals, 187–92, notes Durante’s adherence to the rather dated alphabetical format of Mattioli but fails to credit Durante with an efficient indexing system. In my judgment, it was the functional indexing, identifying which diseases are cured by what herbs, that kept the Herbario nuovo in print with many editions over the next 130 years.

2-59. Durante, Herbario, 68, on betel, and 450, for the negative opinion on truffles. However, the same author in Il tesoro, 97–98, says that truffles do excite the appetites of Venus and multiply sperm production, so one should not expect consistency in these recommendations. Just as an aside, readers willing to pay ten times as much for a white truffle may be amused to know that according to Durante, black truffles, which he considers "male," are better than the "female" white truffles.

2-60. Durante, Herbario, 32, 51, 62, 100, 154, 155, 179, 196, 198, 202, 212, 252, 261, 285, 338, 361, 400, 415, for things that produce sperm and aid coition; 68, 86, 245, for herbs that inhibit sperm production; and 289, for retarding ejaculation.

2-61. Christoforo Acosta, Trattato di Christoforo Acosta africano medico, & chirurgo della historia, natura, et virtu delle droghe medicinali, e altri semplici rarissimi, che vengono portati dalle Indie Orientali in Europa. Nuovamente recato dalla spagnuola nella nostra lingua (Venice: Francesco Ziletti, 1585), 316–18. The original was published at Burgos in 1578, as Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de la Indias Orientales.

2-62. Marinello, Delle medicine, 20–21.

2-63. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 9, 11, agrees, adding the wisdom from Aristotle that snakes curl up before coition in order to keep their sperm warm on its long journey.

2-64. Marinello, Delle medicine, 51–54, 62–70; he draws heavily from Savonarola.

2-65. Marinello, Delle medicine, 22.

2-66. Marinello, Delle medicine, 23.

2-67. Marinello, Delle medicine, 23, on bathing; 25, on ogling young women; and 35, on the grub rub. On the use of love potions sufficiently illicit or scandalous to attract the attention of church authorities in Marinello’s city of Venice, see Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York, 1993), 88–129.

2-68. Girolamo Menghi da Viadana, Minore Osservante, Compendio dell’arte essorcistica et possibilita delle mirabile, et stupende operationi delli demoni et de’ malefici. Con li rimedii opportuni alle infermità corporali (Macerata: Sebastiano Martellini, 1580), 297–300, on devout female exorcists. Just as a passing irony, readers may enjoy knowing that this publisher specialized in popular little editions of jokes and riddles, according to Ascarelli and Menato, La tipografia del '500 in Italia, 205. The earliest edition is Bologna, 1576; editions from 1582 onward are greatly expanded and feature the marginal content summaries typical of popular advice manuals. Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, 212, asserts that "only the clergy could exorcise," a theoretical prohibition I believe Menghi’s readers violated freely, nor do I agree with Burke’s assessment that Menghi was purposefully vague on "how to do it" (258, note 11). Mary R. O’Neil, "Sacerdote ovvero strione: Ecclesiastical and Superstitious Remedies in Sixteenth-Century Italy," in Kaplan, ed., Understanding Popular Culture, 54–55, recognizes that Menghi aimed to reach several different audiences, ranging from "elevated intellects" to people who resorted to unauthorized practitioners of the magical arts. For her fuller assessment, see Mary R. O’Neil, "Discerning Superstition: Popular Errors and Orthodox Response in Late Sixteenth-Century Italy," PhD dissertation (Stanford University, 1981), esp. 304–77, for which reference I thank Jeffrey Chajes. For biographical material on Menghi, see A. Vacant and E. Mangenot, eds., Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, vol. 10, part 1 (Paris, 1928), 550–51, but note that some of the bibliographic details given therein are incorrect. On exorcism more generally, see Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London, 1994), esp. 188–92, on exorcism and sexual dysfunctions in men, and the magisterial Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997).

2-69. Menghi, Compendio, 121–26.

2-70. Menghi, Compendio, 263–67.

2-71. Marinello, Delle medicine, 4; Mercurio, La commare, bk. 2, chap. 25 (Biagi, et al., 109–10).

2-72. Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo piacevole di Messer Lodovico Dolce. Nel quale Messer Pietro Aretino parla in difesa d’i male aventurati mariti ([Venice]: Curzio Troiano Navò, 1542), 19 octavo leaves. Unlike Boccaccio’s Decameron stories, this work is very hostile to women, who are characterized as being by nature unfaithful and covetous.

2-73. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 75–79. De Rocher’s translation, Popular Errors (299, note), examines just what Joubert originally meant by "un quarton de son," but for our purposes it is sufficient to note that he clearly meant an amount easy to lift.

2-74. Prospero Borgarucci, Della contemplatione anatomica, sopra tutte le parti del corpo humano, libri cinque. Composti in lingua italiana dall’ eccellente medico Prospero Borgarucci. Ne’ quali ciascuno potrà facilmente apprendere l’ordine, et il vero modo di far l’anatomia. Et di conoscere tutte l’infermità, che ne’ nostri corpi per diversi accidenti possono avvenire. Co’ nomi di ciascuna parte dichiarati, per commune utile, in dodici linguaggi. Con molte altre cose, da altri anatomici, per avanti non più trattate (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1564). The quotation on conscious diffusion of knowledge is from Luigi Firpo’s article on the Borgaruccis in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 12: 566. Katharine Park, Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1985), 193–94, notes that even before the printing press, books in merchants’ libraries were mostly in Italian, whereas physicians collected Latin medical texts almost exclusively. Felice La Torre, L’utero attraverso i secoli, 279, comments that Borgarucci, even though he conducted anatomical research, did so without perspicacity and that he wrote in an infantile manner, describing trivial things in great detail and not dealing with truly consequential matters. All quite true I think, and very telling for assessing how Borgarucci thought laypersons should be informed about their anatomies.

2-75. Borgarucci, Della contemplatione anatomica, 120–26.

2-76. Giuseppe Liceti, Il Ceva, overo dell’ eccellenza, et uso de’ genitali. Dialogo di Gioseppe Liceti, medico chirugo genovese. Nel quale si tratta dell’ essenza, & generatione del seme humano; delle somiglianze dell’ huomo, e lor cagioni; della differenza del sesso; della generatione de’ mostri, e d’altre cose non meno utili; che dilettevoli (Bologna: Giovanni Rossi [per] Simon Parlasca, 1598). The earlier work is his La nobiltà de’ principali membri dell’ huomo. Dialogo . . . cavato da Aristotele, Platone, e Galeno . . . (Bologna: Giovanni Rossi [per] Paolo Meietto, 1590).

2-77. See Jean Delumeau and Daniel Roche, Histoire des pères et de la paternité (Paris, 1990), 71–89, for evidence that male impotence increasingly became a subject of ridicule in the seventeenth century.

2-78. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 73, on tenderness after lovemaking, and 84, on "chaos."

2-79. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 82; the original wording is "che si dicano calde come cagne," so I believe I have not resorted to excessive rhetorical flourish in this translation. Certainly de Rocher’s translation in Popular Errors, 122, shows that the original French was even more offensive than the Tuscan version.

2-80. Ortensio Lando, Paradossi cioe sententie fuori del comun parere, novellamente venute in luce. Opra non men dotta che piacevole, e in due parti separata (Venice: [Bernardino Bindoni?], 1544), 32–37.

2-81. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 44–45.

2-82. Marinello, Delle medicine, 55–85. On fumigation tests for fertility, see Forbes, The Midwife and the Witch, 43–45.

2-83. Borgarucci, Della contemplatione anatomica, 127–32. For further commentary on this especially misogynous point, see Biagi et al. ed., Medicina per le donne, 28, who take it indirectly from Borgarucci through Felice La Torre, L’utero attraverso i secoli, 275. The "hidden" genitalia argument found in Borgarucci and others is a variant of the pro-woman stance taken by Agrippa in praising the "marvelous decency" of women whose sexual parts are "concealed in a secret and secure place"; see Agrippa, On the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, 54.

2-84. Giovanni Valverde, Anatomia del corpo umano (Rome: Antonio Salamanca & Antoine Lafréry, 1560), 91. This book of 154 folio-sized, illustrated pages clearly was more of a medical text than an advice manual, and its influence was through physicians rather than directly to the reading public. It is a translation by Antonio Tabo, made under the author’s personal supervision, of his Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano which had appeared in 1556. Italian translations also appeared in 1558 and 1559, followed by several Latin translations. The work plagiarizes most of the illustrations and much of the text of the 1543 classic by Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica. Both Borgarucci and Valverde are included in the sweeping survey of Julia O’Faolain and Lauro Martines, Not in God’s Image (London, 1973), 121–22.

2-85. Gabriele Falloppio, Secreti diversi e miracolosi . . . raccolti dal Falloppia e approbati da altri medici di gran fama (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1570), 1–149, on ointments; 150–212, on waters and wines; and 213–366, on alchemy. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 166–67, suggests that Fioravanti may have been the author of a preceding work with a similar title published in 1563. I have not had an opportunity to examine the 1563 work, but if the two are essentially the same, then our Agato was both a ghostwriter and a plagiarist, not at all unlikely.

2-86. Anonymous, Secreti naturali et medicinali per il rimedio di molte infermità. De i quali lo autore ne ha fatto più volte experienze. Nuovamente pale fati à benefizio del corpo humano. Dal M.R. (Florence, n.d., ca. 1600), BNF shelf mark Palat. (14) X.4.1.67.

2-87. Estienne, L’agricoltura, 70, 157, 178, 190.

2-88. Mattioli, Discorsi, section on the Matrice. Renaissance people who preferred a more explanatory approach than Mattioli’s listings could have consulted Marinello, Delle medicine, 123–234, for more than a hundred leaves on uterine disturbances.

2-89. Marinello, Delle medicine, 97, 113. See John M. Riddle, "Oral Contraceptives and Early-Term Abortifacients during Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages," Past and Present 132 (1991): 3–32, for a pharmacological assessment showing the efficacy in terminating pregnancy of medicinals made from plants such as ferule, pomegranate, juniper, rue, pennyroyal, and wild carrot, all of which appear prominently in popular-advice manuals on herbals. The full story is told in Riddle’s Contraception and Abortion, 144–57, for the Renaissance period. Also see Wolfgang Jöchle, "Menses-Inducing Drugs: Their Role in Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Gynecology and Birth Control," Contraception 10 (October 1974): 425–39.

2-90. Ida Magli, Gesù di Nazaret: Tabù e trasgressione (Milan, 1982), 87–91.

2-91. Camporesi, Juice of Life, 111–21, provides interesting background on traditions concerning the powers of menstrual blood and includes the quotation from Innocent III. Popular menstrual taboos also are treated in Jacques Gélis, History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy, and Birth in Early Modern Europe, trans. Rosemary Morris (Boston, 1991), 13–14. I highly recommend this book for its treatment from an anthropological perspective of a wide range of childbirth issues.

2-92. Agrippa, On the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, 59.

2-93. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 9; Marinello, Delle medicine, 97.

2-94. Marinello, Delle medicine, 56, 67; Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 24. See Ottavia Niccoli, "‘Menstruum quasi monstruum’: Parti mostrousi e tabù menstruali nel '500," Quaderni Storici 44 (1980): 402–28, available in English translation by Mary M. Gallucci in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective (Baltimore, 1990), 1–25. On male menstruation, see Gianna Pomata, "Uomini mestruanti: Somiglianza e differenza fra i sessi in Europa in età moderna," Quaderni Storici (1992): 51–103.

2-95. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chap. 16, 72–76.

2-96. Mattioli, Discorsi, 1,489, in either the 1568 edition (published when Mattioli was still alive) or the posthumous 1585 edition.

2-97. Marinello, Delle medicine, 3, 96.

2-98. Fioravanti, La cirugia, bk. 3, chap. 67 (Furfaro, 77); Estienne, L’agricoltura, 130, 144, 151, 158, 165, 173, 175, 206, 320, 321.

2-99. Marinello, Delle medicine, 97–99.

2-100. Marinello, Delle medicine, 99, 107–8, 122.

2-101. Palmieri, Della vita civile, 17.

2-102. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 47–49.

2-103. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 50–52; Gioberti, Errori popolari, 108–12.

2-104. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chap. 10, 55.

2-105. Marinello, Delle medicine, 241–42.

2-106. Marinello, Delle medicine, 53.

3-1. Marinello, Delle medicine, 241.

3-2. Marinello, Delle medicine, 235-40; Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 61.

3-3. Lorenzo Cantini, Legislazione toscana, vol. 2 (Florence, 1800), 171, for the legislation. On infanticide, see Richard C. Trexler, "Infanticide in Florence: New Sources and First Results," History of Childhood Quarterly 1 (summer 1973): 98–116.

3-4. Anonymous, Thesoro di secreti naturali, no pagination; Anonymous, Segreti bellissimi non piu dati in luce. Ritrovati da me Carlo detto Il Franzolino (Viterbo: Girolamo Discepolo, 1603), no pagination; Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 59–60. According to Forbes, The Midwife and the Witch, 38, the aristolochia and honey test appears in the authoritative printed Latin medical text by Antonio Guainerio, De egritudinibus matricis (1500).

3-5. Palmieri, Della vita civile, 17.

3-6. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 113–15. See Forbes, The Midwife and the Witch, 54–58.

3-7. Marinello, Delle medicine, 243–45. The baking test is reported in a seventeenth-century-Irish manuscript as well; see Patrick Logan, Irish Country Cures (New York, 1994, rpt. of 1981 ed.), 12–13, for which reference I thank Mary DeMeo.

3-8. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chaps. 9–11, 46–58. Mercurio speculates that the mother’s imagination may cause her child to be male or female, and he further allows that the Galenic two-seed theory that he thinks may be correct also must somehow affect the child’s sex, but he admits to some uncertainty about how these factors might relate to each another.

3-9. Jacopo Berengario, Carpi commentaria cum amplissimis additionibus super Anatomia Mundini (Bologna, 1521); see also the readily available L. R. Lind, ed. and trans., Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, A Short Introduction to Anatomy (Chicago, 1959), 3–29, for biographical and bibliographical information, and 76–83, for Carpi’s treatment of the uterus, including the illustration shown here, in Isagogae breves (1523 and 1525). The illustration is included in Harold Speert, Iconographia Gyniatrica: A Pictorial History of Gynecology and Obstetrics (Philadelphia, 1973), 11, along with the reference to Berengario’s "Tamen est purum mendatium dicere quod matrix habeat septem cellulas" dismissal of prior scholarship. In addition, see Felice La Torre, L’utero attraverso i secoli, 199, which also discusses Mondino dei Luzzi (165–75). An Italian version of Mondino dei Luzzi’s Anatomia first appeared in 1494, and may be found in a modern edition by Luigi Firpo, Medicina medievale (Turin, 1972). More recently, on Berengario, see R. K. French, "Berengario da Carpi and the Use of Commentary in Anatomical Teaching," in Wear et al., The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, 42–74. Also see Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, 1990), 95–96. Laqueur, Making Sex, 79, includes this illustration but I think misses its original point, which was not primarily the inversion of male genitalia in the female but rather that the uterus was unified and did not have seven compartments; otherwise, stomping on the medical books makes no sense.

3-10. Marinello, Delle medicine, 249–50. Also see Gioberti, Errori popolari, 88–98, for a long discourse with exotic examples to show that women can carry up to nine children at once. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chap. 14 (Biagi et al., 97–101), cites up to 366 children in one birth for Countess Margaret of Ireland, and several other exaggerated reports, starting with those given in Aristotle. The way Mercurio treats these reports leads me to believe that he does not trust them entirely.

3-11. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 99–107.

3-12. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chaps. 7–8, 36–45.

3-13. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chap. 6 (Biagi et al., 91).

3-14. Anonymous, Thesoro di secreti naturali. On classical writers who recommended lapidary amulets to prevent miscarriage or ease childbirth, see Forbes, The Midwife and the Witch, 64–79.

3-15. Marinello, Delle medicine, 259–66.

3-16. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 82–87.

3-17. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 2, chap. 20 (Biagi et al., 34–35); also see bk. 1, chap. 19, 85–87. Mercurio again takes up the crusade against physicians who assist in abortions and in particular associates Jewish physicians with this practice in his De gli errori popolari d’Italia, 134–42, 159–62. In this work, he also rails against physicians who prescribe sexual intercourse and masturbation as medical cures for overcoming an imbalance of bodily humors due to sperm retention (579–82).

3-18. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 62.

3-19. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 125; Marinello, Delle medicine, 285–89.

3-20. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 2, chap. 27 (Biagi et al., 113–16).

3-21. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 2, chaps. 28–29 (Biagi et al., 116–24). Readers who wish to know more about this subject will find an outstanding scholarly treatment enhanced with illustrations in Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski’s Not of Woman Born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture (Ithaca, 1990).

3-22. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 115–31.

3-23. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 88–108.

3-24. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 66–81, 118–19.

3-25. Marinello, Delle medicine, 250–58.

3-26. Girolamo Mercurio, De gli errori popolari d’Italia (Verona: Francesco Rossi, 1645), is the edition I used. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first reprint of the 1603 original, so clearly it did not have the success of La commare. Another reprint followed in 1648, but again to the best of my knowledge, the work was not translated into other languages.

3-27. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 2, chap. 26 (Biagi et al., 110-12). 

3-28. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chaps. 2–3 (Biagi et al., 69–85). Among Aranzi’s own publications, De humano foetu libellus (Bologna: Joannis Rubrii, 1564), went through several editions.

3-29. Biagi et al., Medicine per le donne, 25.

3-30. Biagi et al., Medicine per le donne, 23.

3-31. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 137. Notwithstanding his very influential work La commare, which was meant to educate midwives to do their job, Mercurio, De gli errori popolari d’Italia, 373–75, shares Gioberti’s negative opinions about midwives. The disparagement with which physicians in western Europe looked upon midwifery, at least until men fully took over this profession in the eighteenth century, is shown convincingly in Jean Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men: A History of Inter-Professional Rivalries and Women’s Rights (New York, 1977), 1–21. For popular attitudes toward the midwife, see Gélis, History of Childbirth, 103–11. Also see Merry E. Wiesner, "Early Modern Midwifery: A Case Study," in Barbara A. Hanawalt, ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington, 1986), 94–113, and all the essays in Hilary Marland, ed., The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (London, 1993); see also Forbes, The Midwife and the Witch.

3-32. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 2, chap. 18 (Biagi et al., 100–1). Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men, 7–8, concedes that printed books may have assisted midwives with advice but believes this would have been more likely in the city than in the countryside. Yet even the 1545 preface of a translation of Rösslin that she quotes claims that gentlewomen carried the book with them and read it, presumably to less literate and certainly less wealthy midwives, a means of dissemination applicable in rural areas no less than in cities.

3-33. During stays in four Italian villages while doing research for my Fate and Honor, Family and Village (Chicago, 1979), as well as during many summers spent in the Istrian village of Skvaranska, I witnessed firsthand as the local midwife lost her role in assisting at childbirth, since everyone now gives birth in the local hospital, but continued to practice as nurse and medical consultant of first resort, and in several places was the person called in to wash and dress the corpses of villagers who died at home. The midwife’s role in preparation for burial is also attested to in John Henderson, Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (Oxford, 1994), 158–59. On this side of the Atlantic, Laurel Ulrich’s wonderful A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, based on her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York, 1991), recounts an equally wide variety of medical and social activities for the midwife. For present day functions of midwives, see Yvonne Lefèber, Midwives Without Training: Practices and Beliefs of Traditional Birth Attendants in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Assen, 1994).

3-34. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 2, chap. 18 (Biagi et al., 100–105).

3-35. Mercurio, De gli errori popolari d’Italia, 390. On magical uses of the caul, see Forbes, The Midwife and the Witch, 94–111.

3-36. For an excellent introduction to the Latin medical literature, see Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, esp. 104–14, on the subject of procreation. Beryl Rowland, ed., Medieval Woman’s Guide to Health: The First English Gynecological Handbook (Kent, 1981), provides both an easy-to-read modern edition of Trotula and an excellent general introduction to early vernacular works on gynecology. Trotula’s De mulierum possionibus ante in et post partum was published in Venice as early as 1547, but I know of no sixteenth-century Italian translation.

3-37. The Spanish work is Damián Carbón, Libro del arte de las comadres o madrinas, del regimiento de las preñadas y paridas, y de los niños (Mallorca: Hernando de Cansoles, 1541), cited in Teresa Ortiz, "From Hegemony to Subordination: Midwives in Early Modern Spain," in Marland, ed., The Art of Midwifery, 95–114. It is readily available in a 1995 reprint from the Universidad de Alicante.

3-38. Figure 3.5 is an adaptation by Mercurio of the well-known and much-discussed drawing of the uterus in Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543). The story goes that Vesalius obtained the corpse from which it was extracted when a local monk’s mistress died and he and his pupils snatched the body from its tomb. But the monk and the girl’s parents complained of the outrage to the city magistrates; to hide their crime, the Vesalius group skinned the body to make it unrecognizable and carved out in very hasty fashion the female genitalia they most wished to study. What you see is what they thought they saw, pace Sigmund Freud. For further information, see J. B. de C. M. Saunders and Charles D. O'Malley, The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (Cleveland, 1950). Also see Laqueur, Making Sex, 70–93.

3-39. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chap. 2 (Biagi et al., 69–80).

3-40. The vituperative quality of Mercurio’s attack on Rösslin is rather uncharitable considering how much the friar copied wholesale from Rösslin. Compare the treatment in Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, 101–21, with what I am presenting here. Rösslin himself also copied without acknowledgment from earlier writers, probably from Avicenna and Soranus and possibly from the Italian Michele Savonarola as well, again clearly evident in a comparison of Ozment’s renderings of sources on childbearing and child rearing with mine in the following chapters. Coler’s Haussbuch, also heavily cited by Ozment, was published only in 1604, years after every popular tract I discuss had been published, often in several languages, so one can assume Coler’s familiarity with at least some of these works as well. The point here is not that one or another author was a plagiarist, since such a concept of intellectual property did not even exist, but how widely similar ideas were diffused both geographically and across class and religious divides. Hilda Smith, "Gynecology and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England," in Berenice A. Carroll, Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (Urbana, 1976), 97–114, provides an example of the pitfalls of particularism. The essay raises entirely sensible issues but except for the endnotes and a few details in the examples, it could as well be dealing with sixteenth-century Italy or third-century Rome.

3-41. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chap. 3 (Biagi et al., 81–83).

3-42. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 139.

3-43. Mercurio, De gli errori popolari d’Italia, 382.

3-44. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 120.

3-45. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 136.

3-46. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 120; Biagi et al., Medicine per le donne, 17.

3-47. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 109–10.

3-48. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 120–24. For slight variations on what to do to ease a long labor, see Marinello Delle medicine, 268–69.

3-49. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 112.

3-50. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 126–27.

3-51. Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men, 21–22, who cites W. Radcliffe, The Secret Instrument (London, 1947), 38–39.

3-52. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 113–16.

3-53. Marinello, Delle medicine, 270–80, 284–85. The incantation is identified by Forbes, The Midwife and the Witch, 80–81, as coming from Arnald of Villanova (ca. 1235–1311), the Spanish physician and theologian whose writings are specifically dismissed by Mrs. Isabella Cortese in her book of secrets.

3-54. Burke, "The Uses of Literacy in Early Modern Italy," 32, and note 51, cites the Legenda et oratione di Santa Margherita (Venice, ca. 1550).

3-55. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 2, chaps. 2–16, 125–55. By contrast, I believe herbal books, especially the carefully illustrated and indexed ones, were consulted on the spot as part of a good sales pitch by wholesale and retail merchants in herbs and spices.

3-56. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 2, chap. 25 (Biagi et al., 105–9).

3-57. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 2, chap. 26 (Biagi et al., 110–12).

3-58. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chap. 1 (Biagi et al., 67–69); Biagi et al., Medicine per le donne, 68, supplies the offending quotation from Maffei da Solofra’s work, Scala naturale overo Fantasia dolcissima intorno alle cose occulte, e desiderate nella Filosofia (Venice, n.d., dedicated 1564), chap. 21, c. 471: "Né vo’ lasciar di dirvi, che generandosi la femina, come ben disse Aristotele, si genera il mostro perché la principale intentione della natura è di produrre sempre il maschio come cosa più perfetta."

3-59. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chap. 1 (Biagi et al., 67–69).

3-60. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 132–59.

3-61. Marinello, Delle medicine, 248–49.

3-62. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 157ff.

3-63. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 127–29; Marinello, De medicine, 289–96.

3-64. Marinello, De medicine, 279.

3-65. Marinello, De medicine, 296–311; Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 127–30.

3-66. Mercurio, De gli errori popolari d’Italia, 394–96.

3-67. The content here is primarily from Savonarola, whose ordering of tasks is followed by later writers; for similar advice, see, for example, Mercurio, De gli errori popolari d’Italia, 396–99, and La commare, bk. 1, chap. 26, 113–18.

3-68. Marinello, Delle medicine, 271.

3-69. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 135–43.

4-1. Plato, The Republic, bk. 5, 460d. This reference and a wealth of interesting material are found in Valerie A. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh, 1986), 21, for the Plato reference. A more general survey is Valerie A. Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (London, 1988), 15–30, for the classical background.

4-2. This is as good a place as any to note Jay E. Mechling’s "Advice to Historians on Advice to Mothers," Journal of Social History (fall 1975): 44–63. His admonitions, although cast in a context of recent American social history in which the rhetoric of advice manuals can be tested against sociological survey data (equally unreliable in my judgment, although for different reasons), apply to historians of the sixteenth century as well. In a nutshell, he argues that people do not actually do what advice manuals tell them to do. In one sense, this argument hardly is new; we all know that laws forbidding certain behavior are a good indicator that the behavior occurred. Analogously, advice to do this or that probably means that people were not doing this or that, both before and after reading recommendations to the contrary. The problem is very complex, and there are no quick solutions. Certainly I have none.

4-3. Plutarch’s most influential essays on questions of child rearing are De liberis educandis, which no one in the sixteenth century imagined to be the work of a pupil or close associate rather than of Plutarch himself, as modern scholars contend, and De amore prolis, both traditionally included in the Moralia and both published in Italian translations in the sixteenth century, as was Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria.

4-4. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 160–73.

4-5. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chap. 24, 104–8. He repeats the same arguments in De gli errori popolari d’Italia, 399–405.

4-6. Anonymous, Indovinelli, riboboli, passerotti, et farfalloni. Nuovamente messi insieme, e la maggior parte non piu stampati, parte in prosa & parte in rima, & hora posti in luce per ordine d’alfabeto. Con alcune cicalate di donne di sententie, & proverbi posti nel fine. Opera molto piacevole, & bella da indovinare, & da far ridere nelle veghie per passar il tempo (n.p., n.d., but certainly sixteenth-century Italy), BNF shelf mark Landau-Finaly 535.7. More graceful poetic works make the same general argument and carry all the venom of Mercurio’s admonitions; see for example Luigi Tansillo, "La Balia" (Bologna, 1969 rpt.). Since this work remained unpublished between the time of its writing around 1565 until it was rediscovered and printed in 1767, we cannot say that it influenced anyone in the sixteenth century. Nevertheless the hostility toward use of wet nurses is typical of opinion throughout the Renaissance. For admonitions in domestic economy treatises, see Frigo, Il padre di famiglia, 117–18.

4-7. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 147–48.

4-8. Palmieri, Della vita civile, 15.

4-9. Barbaro, "On Wifely Duties" in Kohl et al., The Earthly Republic, 221–23. According to Plutarch’s life of Marcus Cato the Elder, his wife not only gave suck to their son but often to the infants of their servants so they would grow to love the little boy. The theory that the location of breasts in humans is designed to allow easy hugging and kissing during nursing comes from Plutarch’s "De amore prolis" essay in the Moralia, bk. 6, 493A.

4-10. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 147, 153–54.

4-11. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 176–81, 199–203.

4-12. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chap. 25, 109–12. Most of his advice is repeated, although in a more scolding tone and with more classical references, in his De gli errori popolari d’Italia, 405–8. For a thorough summary table on the views of classic authors on breast-feeding and the qualities of wet nurses, see Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 60–68. The warning against baby talk is also found in Palmieri, Della vita civile, 16, and in Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, bk. 1, sec. 4–5; I used James J. Murphy, ed. and trans., Quintilian on the Teaching of Speaking and Writing (Carbondale, 1987).

4-13. Contrary evidence comes from James B. Ross, "The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century," in Lloyd deMause, ed., The History of Childhood (New York, 1974), 183–228, and particularly note 42, on Paolo da Certaldo’s admonition to visit infants put out to nurse. But as I have noted elsewhere, this author did not make it to a printed edition until the twentieth century. The experience of Florence’s Innocenti hospital for foundlings, as reported in the thorough study by Philip Gavitt, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410–1536 (Ann Arbor, 1990), 230–31, is instructive: "Neighbors rather than inspectors discovered and reported the vast majority of deaths, mistreatment, and neglect. Neighbors often traveled long distances at their own expense to make personal representations to the prior about the activities of Innocenti wet nurses. The most common abuse was the wet nurses’ failure to report the death of a child and to continue collecting payments." Gavitt readily concedes, and thoroughly documents, reports of a range of abuses by wet nurses, and yet his overall assessment of Florence’s system of paid wet nurses is far more benign than anything suggested by Ross, even though Gavitt deals mostly with infants from the poorest classes.

4-14. Ross, "The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy," 184–85.

4-15. The same is true of another work that features prominently in Ross’s citations, the treatise of Giovanni Dominici, "Regola del governo di cura familiare." The powerful Dominican achieved the status of blessed, and some of his other writings were published, but this particular tract did not find a printer until 1860, except for a possible 1496 edition with no printer or place of publication identified. Therefore, even though the Regola was addressed to a woman explicitly as an advice manual on rearing her children and was written in Italian, its influence may have been primarily among a circle of elites engaged in the debate about humanist reliance on classical texts and whether proper Christian precepts were being abandoned. The published text is Donato Salvi, ed., Regola del governo di cura familiare; compilata dal beato Giovanni Dominici, fiorentino (Florence, 1860); Arthur Coté, On the Education of Children (Washington, 1927), 9–30, provides a bio-bibliography and translates an excerpt.

4-16. Alessandro Perosa, ed., Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, vol. 1 (London, 1960), 13, is cited by Ross, "The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy," note 11, but the text says nothing about custom, only the following: Ricordovi il modo abbiate a tenere nell’allevare e’ vostri figluoli. Et prima, che la propria madre l’allatti quando fusse senza pericolo et sanza offensione della persona della madre; et se non è, togliete balia giovane, sana et lieta, di lungi dal marito e che non sia scilinguata. One could force a reading of "sanza offensione della persona della madre" to imply custom, but then there is the injunction that the wet nurse should be away from her husband, which would not be the case if the child were put out in the countryside, so overall I take this brief reference, the only thing Rucellai has to say about breast-feeding, to be a routine statement that mothers should feed their own children but if they cannot or will not, then at least they should choose a healthy young nurse of good speaking habits. The reference certainly does not support Ross’s conclusion, to which this notation is applied, that finding a wet nurse was a problem "which confronted most middle-class families."

4-17. Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York, 1982), 155–56, reports that by the mid-nineteenth century, many elite southern women sought wet nurses, both white and black. It is interesting to see how little attention slaveholders paid to concerns about the biological and moral character of the wet nurse, which abound in biblical and Greco-Roman texts that surely were familiar to educated white American southerners, even if they did not read Italian advice manuals. For a thorough discussion of all aspects of wet nursing in the American South before the Civil War, see Sally G. McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infant Rearing (Baton Rouge, 1990), 111–34. I also have learned from discussions on this matter with my colleagues Jennifer Morgan and Mia Bay.

4-18. Ross, "The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy," 195, and note 64. Although I have not studied Florentine archival ricordanze, published selections reveal attitudes highly supportive of maternal care (e.g., Vittore Branca’s edition of Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli, Ricordi [Florence, 1956], esp. 202, 207, 219–20) or indicative of close ongoing relations with the wet nurse (as in Giovanni Ciappelli’s edition of Francesco di Matteo Castellani, Ricordanze [Florence, 1992], 113–14).

4-19. Charles Singleton, ed., Canti carnascialeschi del Rinascimento (Bari, 1936), 39–40. Ross’s translation, not to mention interpretation, of this song is questionable. On page 190, she provides the following: "whoever has a baby, show him to us, / male or female, it doesn’t matter." Then, on page 192, after much analysis, she resumes the quotation with, "We shall take good care of him." The original lines, however, are all within a single stanza:

"Deh, chi n’ha si ce gli mostri: /maschio o femina che sia, / tanto ben tenuto sia."

The three lines surely were meant to be sung together, not divided by two pages of academic prose, in which case they might be translated thus:

"Well, show us what you have / male or female as it may be / very well treated it will be."

So, what Ross renders as mercenary indifference to gender, I see as a hearty promise to give equally good care whether the baby is a girl or a boy.

4-20. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochraine (Chicago, 1985), 132–64, examines the account books or diaries (ricordanze) of 84 Florentine couples who gave birth to 318 infants fed by 462 wet nurses from 1300 to 1530. Between 60 and 67 percent of these couples came from the city’s governing circles, but among the others were artisans, doctors, jurists, and notaries. Exactly how many of the 84 couples were "artisans," Klapisch-Zuber does not say, and I must confess to some doubts about how many artisans had the time and knowledge to keep a diary or account book for posterity. Anyway, among babies put to a nurse other than the biological mother, she finds that a little more than half the boys and fully two thirds of the girls were sent to the countryside, about 13 percent of boys and girls stayed with a woman in town, and the remaining were fed by a live-in wet nurse.

According to Klapisch-Zuber, "the ricordanze never note, except in truly exceptional circumstances, that Florentine mothers nursed their children themselves," but in my view this is because the diaries are really annotated account books, not personal diaries, so no mention should be expected of items, such as maternal breast-feeding, that did not involve cash outlays. Notwithstanding the fragility of the evidence—account books from 84 couples, mostly elites, detailing payments for the feeding of 318 infants spread over 230 years in a total population during that span of more than 500,000 Florentine babies—Klapisch-Zuber concludes as follows: "We can state that in the large city of Florence, nursing by a salaried nurse or by a slave woman became the dominant practice, at least from the middle of the fifteenth century onward, even if we cannot for the moment trace the exact limits of the practice." Just what does "dominant" mean? I found buried in a footnote in Klapisch-Zuber’s collaborative work with the late David Herlihy on the very detailed 1427 Tuscan tax census, covering both Florence and its environs, the fact that among 35,275 babies aged zero to three years enumerated in the census, only 234 were listed as being put out with wet nurses. By my reckoning, that comes to 1 baby out of each 150, clearly not a dominant practice no matter how you define dominance or quibble about defects in one source or another. It is not reasonable to assume that 149 out of every 150 families with a small baby forgot to tell the census taker that their infants were out to nurse and that the countryside nurses in turn forgot they had all those additional hungry mouths to feed. Nor was there any obvious economic gain in lying or being forgetful. The few whiners recorded in the census because they appealed for a tax reduction based on the high costs of paying a wet nurse point only to a perception of exceptional circumstances, not to normal practices. If dominance means at least 50.1 percent, and considering that weaning occurred between eighteen and twenty-four months, then among something like 20,000 eligible babies younger than age two enumerated in the 1427 census, about 10,000 would have been away from home competing for the breasts of another baby’s mother. Surely some evidence beyond the unpublished memoirs of a few elite moralists would have survived to document so unusual a biological and cultural phenomenon.

David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven, 1985), 147, report the census findings; the same numbers are reported in the French-language original (340, note 54). In fact, we know the kind of evidence that might be generated in a European culture in which a majority of children were nourished by a wet nurse if we consult George D. Sussman, Selling Mothers’ Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France 1715–1914 (Urbana, 1982). Certainly we have little such evidence for Florence and the surrounding Tuscan countryside, and we do know that the Florentines were very good record keepers.

Gavitt, Charity and Children, 225–26, finds that even the thoroughly documented number of children—2,567 in total—who passed through the Florence’s Innocenti hospital for foundlings between 1445 and 1466, strained greatly the hospital’s ability to find qualified wet nurses, a fact that suggests how difficult it would have been to locate anything like 10,000 wet nurses in the census year of 1427.

4-21. One might start with Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York, 1977), 66–68, which reports mortality rates to the age of one in France at 15 to 30 percent, with an average of 21 percent, and suggests that actual rates were much higher due to underreporting of perinatal deaths. Similar figures are provided in André Burguière and François Lebrun, "The One Hundred and One Families of Europe," in André Burguière, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Martine Segalen, and François Zonabend, eds., A History of the Family, vol. 2, trans. Sarah Hanbury-Tenison, Rosemary Morris, and Andrew Wilson (Cambridge, 1996), 14. All other reports I know of also confirm that the 15 to 18 percent mortality rate calculated by Klapisch-Zuber for Florentine infants given to a wet nurse is a low number, one indicating good care and above-average health. No doubt Florentine patricians thought more about maternal beauty and convenience than infant health, in the process fashioning what Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York, 1997), 49–104, so perceptively calls the shift from the sacred breast to the erotic breast, but this parental selfishness did babies no measurable harm as a health choice. On mothers abandoning their babies only to reclaim them as paid wet nurses, see Gavitt, Charity and Children, esp. 227. Infant mortality rates for foundlings in eighteenth-century Spain, where half of all boys and girls did not survive, were far higher than anything reported for fifteenth-century Florence; see Joan Sherwood, Poverty in Eighteenth-Century Spain: The Women and Children of the Inclusa (Toronto, 1988), 139.

4-22. On Machiavelli, see Hanna Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Berkeley, 1984), esp. 217–29. Also see Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Women in the History of Political Thought: Ancient Greece to Machiavelli (New York, 1985), 151–73. Bernardo Machiavelli, Libro di ricordi, ed. Cesare Olschki (Florence, 1954), details thousands of expenditures but makes no mention of wet nurses employed by Bernardo for Niccolò or any of his siblings.

4-23. Michael P. Carroll, Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy (Baltimore, 1996), 242–46.

4-24. The classic works are Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962); Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household, and Sexuality, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge, 1979); David Hunt, Parents and Children in History: The Psychology of Family Life in Early Modern France (New York, 1970); and Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 , esp. 85–119. A reasoned retreat from Ariès’s view may be found in Henri Bresc, "Europe: Town and Country (Thirteenth–Fifteenth Century)," in André Burguière et al., eds., A History of the Family, vol. 1, 458–61. For a refreshingly iconoclastic review of this literature, see Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge, 1983). Persuasive in an entirely different way is the conclusion by Steven Ozment in Magdalena and Balthasar: An Intimate Portrait of Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe Revealed in the Letters of a Nuremberg Husband and Wife and Illuminated by Steven Ozment (New York, 1986), 161–64. A balanced approach is Barbara Diefendorf, "Family Culture, Renaissance Culture," Renaissance Quarterly 40 (winter 1987): 661–81.

4-25. Both Boccaccio’s introduction to the Decameron, with its description of the social disintegration caused by the plague, and Plutarch’s "In Consolation to his Wife" (in Italian translation) were published on several occasions in the sixteenth century, just two examples to illustrate that maudlin sentimentality and grief over the deaths of young children were not invented in the eighteenth century. On painting, see Margaret R. Miles, "The Virgin’s One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture," in Susan R. Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, 1986), 193–208.

4-26. Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, esp. 121, 126. Readers willing to sift through a fair amount of paternalistic cultural baggage also will find valuable nuggets in the classic study of Giovanni Tamassia, La famiglia italiana nei secoli decimoquinto e decimosesto (Milan, 1911), for example, 253–56, on maternal responsibility for breast-feeding and for their full participation in child rearing and discipline. Yalom, A History of the Breast, 75, states that 90 percent of European women functioned as milk bearers, while only 10 percent declined to breast-feed, although elsewhere she cites sources claiming a much higher percentage of children sent to wet nurses.

4-27. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 1, chap. 26, 113–14; also see his De gli errori popolari d’Italia, 408–11.

4-28. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 173, 204, 211–18.

4-29. I make no attempt here to introduce the complexities of Augustine’s thought and the varieties of his influence over the centuries, on which topics one might begin with George Howie, Educational Theory and Practice in St. Augustine (New York, 1969), and his edition of relevant writings in St. Augustine: On Education (South Bend, 1969). As a quick refresher, however, allow me to insert here a quotation (translation by Howie) from Augustine’s Confessions, bk. 1, sec. 6:

4-30. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 148–51.

4-31. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 58.

4-32. Falloppio, Secreti diversi, 140ff.; Estienne, L’agricoltura, 109, 177.

4-33. Fioravanti, La cirugia, chap. 79 (Furfaro, 78).

4-34. Durante, Herbario, 13, 22, 36.

4-35. Mattioli, Discorsi, section on Mammelle.

4-36. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 3, chap. 5, 248–52.

4-37. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 3, chap. 6, 252–55.

4-38. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 3, chap. 7, 255–57; similar advice on diet is found in Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 151–52.

4-39. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 3, chap. 8, 257–59. On becoming pregnant in the bath, see La commare, bk. 1, 51–55, wherein Mercurio makes it plain that, in his opinion, this is just another instance of women fooling gullible men by offering stories to cover their libidinous behavior, in this instance having sexual intercourse in the bathtub.

4-40. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 161–64.

4-41. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 144–58.

4-42. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 159–61.

4-43. For an introduction to these Latin medical texts, see Arthur Abt and Fielding Garrison, History of Pediatrics (Philadelphia, 1965), esp. 60–68, and George Still, The History of Paediatrics: The Progress of the Study of Diseases of Children up to the End of the XVIIIth Century (London, 1965 rpt. of 1931 ed.), 94–180. Hull, Women according to Men, 117–19, discusses the paucity of vernacular guides on infant health and notes that the limited advice available tended to be appended to books on care during pregnancy rather than published in independent manuals (with the notable exception of Thomas Phaer’s 1544 Boke of Chyldren). My understanding of sixteenth-century societal concerns about children is less pessimistic and condemnatory than Hull’s, and takes more seriously the reasoning of writers such as Savonarola and Mercurio about the risks of encouraging parents to treat their children’s illnesses at home, at least once they became severe or persistent. But I also find that advice on infant care was included in books on pregnancy rather than published separately.

4-44. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 166.

4-45. Mercurio, De gli errori popolari d’Italia, 420–22.

4-46. Mercurio, La commare, bk. 3, chaps. 23–60, 298–356; similar advice is found in Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 167–91.

4-47. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 192–95.

4-48. Philip Greven, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse (New York, 1991).

4-49. See especially Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, bk. 1, sec. 3, 13–16. Also see bk. 2, sec. 2–4. Plutarch is also unequivocal, for example, in bk. 1, section 9A of De liberis educandis: "This also, I assert, that children ought to be led to honorable practices by means of encouragement and reasoning, and most certainly not by blows or ill-treatment, for it surely is agreed that these are fitting rather for slaves than for the freeborn; for so they grow numb and shudder at their tasks, partly from the pain of the blows, partly from the degradation. Praise and reproof are more helpful for the free-born than any sort of ill-usage, since the praise incites them toward what is honorable, and reproof keeps them from what is disgraceful."

4-50. For example, see the following works considered in Greven, Spare the Child, 60–72: Larry Christenson, The Christian Family (Minneapolis, 1970); James Dobson, Dare to Discipline (Wheaton, 1970); J. Richard Fugate, What the Bible Says about . . . Child Training (Garland, 1980); Jack Hyles, How to Rear Children (Hammond, 1972); Roy Lessin, Spanking: Why When How? (Minneapolis, 1979); and Larry Tomczak, God, the Rod, and Your Child’s Bod: The Art of Loving Correction for Christian Parents (Old Tappan, NJ, 1982).

4-51. Vincent J. Horkan, Educational Theories and Principles of Maffeo Vegio (Washington, 1953), provides extensive selections and valuable commentary. See 11–13, on the intellectual setting, 66–71, on Vegio’s admonitions against corporal punishment, and 73–74, on maternal indulgence. For a critical edition of the original text, see Maria Fanning, ed., Maphei Vegii Laudensis de educatione liberorum et eorum claris moribus libri sex. A Critical Text of Books I–III (Washington, 1933), and Anne Sullivan, ed., Maphei Vegii Laudensis de educatione liberorum et eorum claris moribus libri sex. A Critical Text of Books IV–VI (Washington, 1936), each of which also has useful notations and provides linkages to the classical texts used by Vegio. Nearly a century later, the renowned Erasmus gave vent to an interpretation similar to Vegio’s on the Old Testament as possibly appropriate for ancient Jews but not for Christians; see J. K. Sowards, ed., Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 26 (Toronto, 1985), 332.

4-52. Sowards, ed., Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 26, 291–346, for the translation and annotation by Beert C. Verstraete of De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis declamatio. For the early publication history, see Jean-Claude Margolin, ed., Erasme: Declamatio de pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis (Geneva 1966), 123–368, and esp. 238–66, for Italian translations. J. K. Sowards, "Erasmus and the Education of Women," Sixteenth Century Journal 14, no. 4 (1982): 86, concludes as follows: "Erasmus was concerned, indeed almost obsessed with the problem of the abuse of children, whether by flogging schoolmasters, overbearing upper classmen at school, or brutal parents." Still useful is the interpretive work of William Harrison Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus concerning the Aim and Method of Education (New York, 1964 rpt. of 1904 ed., with a foreword by Craig R. Thompson). For the condemnation of Erasmus by a committee of high prelates instructed, in 1537, by Pope Paul III to recommend church reforms, see Elisabeth G. Gleason, ed. and trans., Reform Thought in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Ann Arbor, 1981), 96: "Because it is common nowadays to read to grammar school boys the Colloquies of Erasmus, which contain many things inciting uneducated minds to impiety, it should be forbidden to read them as well as other books of their kind in the schools."

Also relevant here is Erasmus’s famous etiquette manual, De civilitate morum puerilium, published less than a year after De pueris instituendis. It is considered at length in the classic work by Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978), 169–75, and in the recent Delumeau and Roche, Histoire des pères, 58–66. For an important critique of Elias, one that places greater emphasis on the religious origins of civility prescriptions than on their political, courtly context, see Dilwyn Knox, "Disciplina. The Monastic and Clerical Origins of European Civility," in John Monfasani and Ronald G. Musto, eds., Renaissance Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice, Jr. (New York, 1991), 107–35. Also relevant are the Italian version of Knox’s essay and the essay by Gabriella Zarri, "Disciplina regolare e pratica di coscienza: le virtù e i comportamenti sociali in comunità femminili (secc. xvi–xviii)," in Paolo Prodi, ed., Disciplina dell’ anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna (Bologna, 1994), 63–99, and 257–78, respectively. On the humanist contribution to Catholic Reformation ideas about child rearing and on the influence of Erasmus, see Ottavia Niccoli, Il seme della violenza: putti, fanciulli e mammoli nell’ Italia tra Cinque e Seicento (Rome, 1995), 94–111, and "Creanza e disciplina: Buone maniere per i fanciulli nell’ Italia della Controriforma," in Prodi, ed., Disciplina dell’ anima, 929–63.

4-53. Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, 169–70.

4-54. Savonarola, Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 196–200.

4-55. Palmieri, Della vita civile, 18–20.

4-56. Catechism of the Council of Trent, 3.5.21–22.

4-57. William Harrison Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators (New York, 1973 rpt. of 1897 ed., with a useful introductory essay by Eugene Rice), 134–58, for an English selection from Piccolomini’s treatise and generally for a good selection and overview of humanist writings on education. Equally valuable is Woodward’s companion volume, Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance, 1400–1600 (New York, 1967 rpt. of 1906 ed., with a foreword by Lawrence Stone). The most accessible complete Italian edition of Piccolomini’s treatise is L’educazione dei giovani: L’Umanesimo e i suoi problemi educativi, ed. with critical commentary, Manfredi del Donno (Milan, 1960). Also see Eugenio Garin, ed., Il pensiero pedagogico dello Umanesimo (Florence, 1958), and for later humanists, Alessandro Dini, La formazione intellettuale nel Cinquecento (Turin, 1978). Niccoli, Il seme della violenza, 116–20, shows the heavy reliance on Piccolomini by post-Tridentine pedagogue Andrea Ghetti da Volterra.

The prelates at Trent surely also knew of the sternly antihumanist views of Florentine Cardinal Giovanni Dominici. Even though these did not make it to a printed edition in the sixteenth century, they were influential in Dominican circles and their rejection is significant. Dominici believed that children should be beaten frequently, whether guilty or not, reasoning that, if they were guilty, let them be thankful for justice and if they were innocent, let them acquire merit by learning the virtue of patience.

4-58. To be sure, Cardinal Borromeo did much else as well. As a start, see Grendler, "Borromeo and the Schools of Christian Doctrine," in his Books and Schools in the Italian Renaissance, chap. 10; also see John Bossy, "The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe," Past and Present 47 (1970): 51–70, who argues persuasively that the Counter Reformation church actively and successfully enforced uniform parochial practices and that in this drive Borromeo was the model for generations to come. The most comprehensive introduction is Luigi Secco, La pedagogia della Controriforma (Brescia, 1973), 43–68, 133–80, on the sections of Antoniano’s book I focus on. Also see Luigi Volpicelli, ed., Il pensiero pedagogico della Controriforma (Florence, 1960), which provides less on Antoniano but gives entry to a wider range of Catholic Reformation authors.

4-59. On Catholic Reformation pedagogy more generally, see Giovanni Maria Bertin, La pedagogia umanistica europea nei secoli XV e XVI (Milan, 1961), 297–312. The quotation from Pope Pius XI is found in Mary Laurentana Zanfagna, Educational Theories and Principles of Cardinal Silvio Antoniano (Washington, 1940), 1. This work contains useful biographical information on Antoniano and on the publication history of his book (5–27). On the actual schools, see Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore, 1989), esp. 333–402, on the Catholic Reformation schools. See also Grendler’s Books and Schools in the Italian Renaissance, in particular the essay "What Zuanne Read in School: Vernacular Texts in Sixteenth-Century Venetian Schools."

Long after recording my sense that Antoniano’s book was rather tedious, I came across a reference (Niccoli, Il seme della violenza, 133–34) showing that the author himself regarded his work-in-progress with little enthusiasm, fearing that few people would be willing to read such a long work in an age when so many books were around.

4-60. Silvio Antoniano, Tre libri dell’ educatione christiana dei figliuoli (Verona: Sebastiano Dalle Donne & Girolamo Stringari, 1584), 123–28, each of these being two-sided leaves.

4-61. Antoniano, Tre libri dell’ educatione christiana, 129–45. On schooling for girls, see Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 87–89. I agree with Ottavia Niccoli’s assessment, Il seme della violenza, 135–39, that corporal discipline was central to Antoniano’s model of how to mold good Christian boys and girls, but this discipline did not come with the rod. Indeed, precisely because Antoniano thoroughly believed in taming the flesh, his warnings against beating children take on added significance.

4-62. Bartolomeo de Medina, Breve instruttione de’ confessori, 80, 154–55. Confessional manuals to advise both simple priests and laypersons were among the earliest printed books; see Schutte, "Printing, Piety, and the People in Italy," 15–16. On confession for children, see Trombetta, La confessione della lussuria, 81–83.

4-63. Frosino Lapini, L’anassarcho del Lapino. Overo trattato de’ costumi, e modi che si debbono tenere, o schifare nel dare opera a gli studii. Discorso utilissimo ad ogni virtuoso e nobile scolara (Florence: Bartolomeo Sermartelli, 1571), 16–31, on schoolboys’ characteristics, and 83–84, on teachers’ obligations.

4-64. Tommasi, Reggimento del padre, 125–89.

4-65. Nicolò Vito di Gozze, Governo della famiglia, di M. Nicolò Vito di Gozze, gentil’huomo Raguseo, Accademico Occulto: Nel quale brevemente, trattando la vera economia, s’insegna, non meno con facilità, che dottamente, il governo, non pure della casa tanto di città, quanto di contado; ma ancora il vero modo d’accrescere, & conservare le ricchezze (Venice: Aldo [Manuzio], 1589), 86–88. Gozze also published a commentary on Aristotle and contemporary civic governance and a Platonic dialogue on beauty, both in the vernacular. Frigo, Il padre di famiglia, 37–38, provides background material on Gozze and concludes, as I do, that since this "dialogue" contains only one effective interlocutor, it should be seen as a closed instructional manual rather than an open discourse (for which Castiglione’s Courtier is the obvious model).

4-66. Gozze, Governo della famiglia, 89, 99.

4-67. Gozze, Governo della famiglia, 58–65.

4-68. Paul F. Grendler, in "What Zuanne Read in School," and in his treatment of the vernacular curriculum in Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 275–332, begins to tap the richness of this subject and point to areas for further exploration. Especially intriguing is the evidence that parents sent books they had at home to school with their children so the instructor could teach the youngsters how to read them.

4-69. All material is taken from the English translation by Nicholas Fersin, which includes facsimiles of all original woodcuts, printed by the Library of Congress (1953) as The Florentine Fior di Virtu of 1491.

4-70. Anonymous, El costume delle donne incomenzando da la pueritia per fin al maritar: La via el modo che se debbe tenere a costumarle e amaestrarle secondo la condition el grado suo, Et similmente de i fanciulli. Et e uno spechio che ogni persona doverebbe haverlo: I marime quelli che hanno figlie e figlioli over aspettano di havern. Con un capitolo de le trentatre cose che convien alla donna a esser bella (Brescia: Damiano e Iacomo Philippo Turlini, 1536). Doglio, ed., Galeazzo Flavio Capra, 124, cites a Venice, 1525 edition.

4-71. Anonymous, Il vanto e lamento della cortigiana ferrarese (Siena, n.d., sixteenth century, perhaps 1540), BNF shelf mark Landau-Finaly 535.7.

4-72. Anonymous, Barceletta nova qual tratta dil gioco, dil qual ne viene insuportabili vitii, & chi seguita ditto stile, gionge a inreparabile, e tristissima morte (Venice, 1553), BNF shelf mark E.6.6.154.I.7.

4-73. Anonymous, Frottola dun padre che haveva dua figliuoli, un buono chiamato Benedetto, & laltro cattivo chiamato Antonio (n.p., n.d., but clearly sixteenth century), BNF shelf mark E.6.5.3.I.19.

4-74. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), 215–56, 241, for the quotation.

5-1. John R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations 1770–Present (New York, 1974), 95–183.

5-2. Barbara A. Hanawalt, "‘The Childe of Bristowe’ and the Making of Middle-Class Adolescence," in Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, eds., Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England (Minneapolis, 1996), 155–78, puts a renewed emphasis on adolescence squarely in the fifteenth century for England, and this seems to be true for Italy as well. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven, 1994), 10–38, shows how popular interpretations of classical authorities reinforced notions of adolescence in early modern Europe. Also see Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996), esp. 17–61, on defining the age of youth and on youth as a "dangerous age."

5-3. Singleton, ed., Canti carnascialeschi, 240.

5-4. As a starting point on "ages of life" in Dante and on multiples of seven, see Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, 94–97. More generally, see Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, "A Flower of Evil: Young Men in Medieval Italy," and Michel Pastoureau, "Emblems of Youth: Young People in Medieval Imagery," in Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds., A History of Young People in the West, vol. 1., trans. Camille Naish (Cambridge, 1997), 173–83, 222–25, respectively. The authoritative work on Dante, which also delves into the relationship between ages of life and the balance of the four bodily humors, is Bruno Nardi, Saggi di filosofia dantesca, 2d ed. (Florence, 1967), 110–38. Humors theorists did not use divisions of the number seven, and generally posited a very lengthy adolescence, as long as thirty years beginning at birth, so their use of the term "adolescence" obviously does not convey the meaning intended by Palmieri. Also see Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, 1991) 388–89, and Niccoli, Il seme della violenza, 7–22, for some of the ambiguities in designating stages in the life cycle. By contrast, an author who clearly viewed age seven as the beginning of the "age of discretion," defined as the ability to know right from wrong, is Gozze, Governo della famiglia, 63.

5-5. Palmieri, Della vita civile, 25, 28–30. For the same ideas in Quintilian, see Institutio oratoria, bk. 2, sec. 2.

5-6. Antoniano, Tre libri dell’educatione christiana, 158.

5-7. Antoniano, Tre libri dell’educatione christiana, 164–65.

.5-8 Gozze, Governo della famiglia, 35–36.

5-9. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York, 1958 rpt. of 1929 ed.), 389–95.

5-10. Guido Biagi, Men and Manners of Old Florence (London, 1909), 148. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 94, curiously combines in a single paragraph on learned women both prostitutes such as Tullia d’Aragona and thoroughly proper matrons like Moderata Fonte. Margaret F. Rosenthal, "Venetian Women Writers and Their Discontents," in James Grantham Turner, ed., Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993), 107–32, chooses to bring together the writings of Fonte and the "honest courtesan" Veronica Franco. These pairings raise some problems. We may assume that Fonte’s and Franco’s lifestyles were very different, and I am certain that the individual qualities of their literary works, which I know firsthand, risk becoming obscured when joined in this way and viewed through an ultramodern prism. Rosenthal explicitly recognizes that Fonte surely knew of Franco’s writings and made no reference to them in her own defense of women, nor are there any allusions in her writings or in those of her intellectual circle (such as Lucrezia Marinella), suggesting that "honest courtesans" provided anything for talented women to emulate or even to use as a tool in battle-of-the-sexes warfare. In the excellent introduction to her edition (Venice, 1988) of Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne, Adriana Chemello convincingly portrays the chasm separating Franco and Fonte (xii). Rosenthal’s critical reading is one we moderns may find extraordinarily thought provoking, but I believe it was not the reading of Franco’s contemporaries. Moreover, postmodern literary theory applied to Franco may unwittingly but inevitably bring us full circle back to the idealization of prostitution found in Burckhardt and Biagi. Should that be the case, the space enclosed by such a circle would include the territory of elitist eroticism covered by Lynne Lawner, Lives of the Courtesans (New York, 1987).

For a range of feminist scholarship on problems less intractable than the honest courtesan, see Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, eds., Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1986), and Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari, eds., Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance (Ithaca, 1991).

5-11. Giovanni Antonio Massinoni, Il flagello delle meretrici, et la nobiltà donnesca ne’ figliuoli (Venice: Giacomo Antonio Somascho, 1599), 8. I was not able to locate the earlier edition alluded to in this printing, nor any identification of Massinoni or other writings by him. The Somascho printing firm deemed the work important enough to bind it with a 1599 reprint of Giuseppe Passi’s viciously misogynous I donneschi difetti.

Lawner, Lives of the Courtesans, 17, invokes the image of honest courtesans standing about on the Bridge of Tits, but I do not believe that was where Veronica Franco and other "sumptuous whores" (to use Venetian diarist Marin Sanudo’s alternative phrase) composed their poetry and letters.

5-12. Anonymous, I germini sopra quaranta meretrice della città di Fiorenza (Florence: Michelangelo, figlio di Bartolomeo [de’ Libri], 1553). Printed descriptive catalogs and prices for individually named prostitutes also exist for Venice, and these are discussed thoroughly in Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan, 274–75, and, among sources not included by Rosenthal, in Fulvio Dittico, Il catalogo delle principali e più onorate cortigiane di Venezia nel Cinquecento (Venice, 1956), 7–8. For the full text of a 1566 catalog for Venice, see Antonio Barzaghi, Donne o cortigiane? La prostituzione a Venezia: documenti di costume dal XVI al XVIII secolo (Verona, 1980), 155–67, or Rita Casagrande di Villaviera, Le cortigiane veneziane nel Cinquecento (Milan, 1968), 275–93, which also offers a thorough but romanticized view of the Venetian courtesan. See also Lawner, ed., I modi, 26–27. Rosenthal (40) asserts that Italian literary critics have seen these catalogs as "real" in the same way that analogous Flemish catalogs (with actual portraits) were real and served as practical guides for foreigners in selecting a prostitute according to their personal tastes, but I know of no historians or literary critics who make such a claim. Everyone agrees that their purpose was satirical.

5-13. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan, 127–35.

5-14. Moderata Fonte [Modesta Pozzo di Zorzi], Il merito delle donne, scritto da Moderata Fonte in due giornate. Ove chiaramente si scuopre quanto siano elle degne, e piu perfette de gli huomini (Venice: Domenico Imberti, 1600), 53. This work now is available in the modern Italian edition by Adriana Chemello cited earlier, and in an English translation (with an important introductory essay) by Virginia Cox (Chicago, 1997). Daria Martelli, Moderata Fonte e Il merito delle donne: biografia e adattamento teatrale (Venice, 1993), is a theatrical adaptation of the original work and also contains a biographical essay. Also see Cox’s essay "The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice," Renaissance Quarterly 48 (autumn 1995): 513–81. Under the same pseudonym, Fonte also wrote Tredici canti del Floridoro, di Mad. Moderata Fonte. Alli Sereniss. Gran Duca, et Gran Duchessa di Thoscana (1581), now available in a modern edition by Valeria Finucci (Modena, 1995). A good bio-bibliographical introduction may be found in Paola Malpezzi Price’s entry on Moderata Fonte in Russell, ed., Italian Women Writers, 128–37.

On Venetian women writers more generally, see Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 94–95, and Patricia Labalme, "Venetian Women on Women: Three Early Modern Feminists," Archivio Veneto 5, no. 117 (1981): 81–109. Fundamental is Adriana Chemello, "La donna, il modello, l’immaginario: Moderata Fonte e Lucrezia Marinella," in Marina Zancan, ed., Nel cerchio della luna: Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo (Venice, 1983), 95–170. Also see Adriana Chemello, "Donna di palazzo, moglie, cortigiana: Ruoli e funzioni sociali della donna in alcuni trattati del Cinquecento," in Adriano Prosperi, ed., La corte e il "Cortegiano" (Rome, 1980), 113–32.

One of Moderata Fonte’s main targets was the famous dialogue of Galeazzo Flavio Capra, Della eccellenza e dignità delle donne (Rome: Francesco Minizio Calvo, 1525). His defense of women was subtle enough to persuade the modern scholar Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 72–73, to classify his work as a "feminist critique," but Fonte knew better and explicitly refuted Capra (and Castiglione) concerning the female sex drive and any number of other matters. On the relationship between Fonte and Capra, see Chemello, "Donna di palazzo," and on Capra, see the excellent introduction in Maria Luisa Doglio, ed., Galeazzo Flavio Capra: Della eccellenza e dignità delle donne (Rome, 1985). Jordan describes Capra’s treatise as telling readers "to see in the status quo the result of attempts by men to gain and retain power by limiting the field of choice for women," but Fonte certainly did not read things that way, and I doubt that sixteenth-century men did either. Capra’s proof that women have more capacity for faith than men is in how many women had recently been burned as witches rather than recant; for proof of women’s greater fortitude, he gives us Cleopatra putting an asp to her breast; and for proof of modesty, the fact that women’s genitals are tucked invisibly in their bodies instead of hanging out, so that God won’t see them when we all go naked to paradise. In my view Capra’s book was popular because sixteenth-century men found it wickedly humorous, and probably so did quite a few (but absolutely not all) women. See Pamela J. Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England (University Park, 1992), 66–73, for an insightful analysis of this text.

My reading of Girolamo Ruscelli, Lettura di Girolamo Ruscelli, sopra un sonetto dell’ illustriss. signor marchese Della Terza alla divina signora marchesa del Vasto, ove con nuove et chiare ragioni si pruova la somma perfettione delle donne . . . (Venice: Giovanni Griffio, 1552), similarly differs from Jordan’s. Where she finds a philosophical position consciously in support of women (160–62), I see mostly a "professor of secrets" (to use William Eamon’s apt phrase) and a professional writer out to entertain and sell books. Were it not rooted in their superior heads, Ruscelli reasons (20–21), women’s hair would turn into serpents, like Medusa’s did, and that is why women seldom go bald. Maybe there is logical insight in this explanation, but in my judgment what we have here is an attempt at clever humor in which the logic is incidental, the audience is male, and the target is female.

More generally, see Patricia Labalme, ed., Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past (New York, 1984), especially the essays by Labalme and by Margaret King. For fifteenth-century works in a scribal culture, see Margaret King and Albert Rabil, eds., Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and about the Woman Humanists of Quattrocento Italy (Binghamton, 1983). Also see Romeo De Maio, Donna e Rinascimento (Milan, 1987), 147–83. A good listing of relevant texts may be found in Conor Fahy, "Three Early Renaissance Treatises on Women," Italian Studies 11 (1956): 30–55, esp. 47–55, for forty-one titles on the equality or superiority of women that were written or published in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Among these forty-one titles, only five are in Latin (two of them not published), suggesting that intended readers were women educated in Italian but perhaps not in Latin.

In what has been termed "battle-of-the-sexes" literature, bashing of women often takes place within the context of an advice manual, and shortly I shall consider several sixteenth-century spoofs. However, among books in defense of the equality or even the superiority of women, of which the total number surely is far less than the quantity of antifeminist popular texts, I have not come across any that use an advice-manual format. Pro-women texts tend to be vague and flowery, nothing one could pick up and act on; for example, see Nicolò Liburnio, Le occorrenze humane (Venice: De’ figliuoli di Aldo [Manuzio], 1546), 33–36, on chastity and modesty. Nor does popular poetry in praise of the female sex include advice, in contrast to the equally bad verses that ridicule women. Typical examples of woman-on-a-pedestal poetry are Giacomo Beldando, Lo specchio de le bellissime donne napoletane (Naples: Giovanni Sultzbach, 1536), and Luigi Dardano, La bella e dotta difesa delle donne in verso e prosa (Venice: Bartolomeo L’Imperatore, 1554). Cornelio Lanci, Esempi della virtu delle donne. Ne’ quali si vede la bellezza, prudenza, castità e fortezza delle vergini, maritate e vedove (Florence: Francesco Tosi, 1590), is in the style of Plutarch’s well-known essay "Concerning the Virtues of Women" (Moralia, bk. 3, 242E), and contains hundred of names and brief vignettes about classical Greco-Roman and early Christian women who preserved their virginity, forgave their philandering husbands, or offered insightful counsel, all of which might be useful in an elite salon debate, but none of which could be construed as a guide for proper daily behavior. The same must be said of Scipione Vasolo, La gloriosa eccellenze delle donne, e d’amore (Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, 1573), which extends the survey of outstanding women to some rather fabulous native North American examples. He also makes a brief foray into biology, asserting on page 11 that women have fewer teeth than men, because they are less biting and devouring. In sum, there is a pro-women literature here that merits close study, but I have reluctantly foregone the pleasure since it falls so far outside the advice-manual rubric.

For an excellent survey of battle-of-the-sexes literature in sixteenth-century England, see Katherine Henderson and Barbara McManus, Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640 (Urbana, 1985), 3–46. Also see Francis Utley, The Crooked Rib: An Analytic Index to the Argument about Women in English and Scots Literature to the End of the Year 1568 (Columbus, 1944). For the Italian scene, the best introduction is Francine Daenens, "Superiore perché inferiore: Il paradosso della superiorità della donna in alcuni trattati italiani del Cinquecento," in Vanna Gentili, ed., Trasgressione tragica e norma domestica: Esemplari di tipologie femminili dalla letteratura europea (Rome, 1983), 11–50, which has an especially useful bibliographical appendix. Also see the rich bibliography provided by Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, 326–462. Still, I agree with Virginia Cox’s recent assessment that "there does not yet exist a comprehensive study of the debate on women in Italy" (514, note 4, of her Renaissance Quarterly article cited above). In the interim, a good starting point for placing Fonte and Marinella in context is Cox’s translation of The Worth of Women, 12–17. Provocative insights on several aspects of querelle des femmes literature may be found in Juliana Schiesari, "In Praise of Virtuous Women? For a Genealogy of Gender Morals in Renaissance Italy," Annali d’Italianistica 7 (1989): 66–87.

5-15. The collection of women’s lives, 104 in all, by Giovanni Boccaccio is readily available in a modern English translation with a useful introduction by Guido Guarino, Concerning Famous Women (New Brunswick, 1963). Also see the comments in Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman, 9–31. Sixteenth-century readers had available an Italian translation by Vincenzo Bagli of the Latin original as early as 1506, and another by Giuseppe Betussi, in which the translator added material on famous women who postdated Boccaccio, titled Libro di m. Gio. Boccaccio delle donne illustri / tradotto per messer Giuseppe Betussi; con una additione fatta dal medesimo delle donne famose dal te[m]po di m. Giovanni fino a i giorni nostri, & alcune altre state per inanzi; con la vita del Boccaccio (Venice: Comin da Trino [per] Andrea Arrivabene, 1545). On the "illustrious-women" genre more generally, see Beatrice Collina, "L’esemplarità delle donne illustri fra Umanesimo e Controriforma," in Zarri, ed., Donna, disciplina, creanza cristiana, 103–19.

5-16. Giovanni Michele Bruto, The Necessarie, Fit, and Convenient Education of a Yong Gentlewoman (London: Adam Islip, 1598), no pagination, also available in an Amsterdam, 1969 facsimile edition. For biographical information, see Domenico Caccamo’s entry in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 14 (Rome, 1972), 730–34. The Italian and French editions, (Antwerp: Chez I. Bellere [per] C. Plantain Anvers, 1555) and (Paris: Jean Ruelle, 1558), respectively, carried the title La institutione di una fanciulla nata nobilmente = L’institution d’une fille de noble maison traduicte de langue tuscane en françois. Thomas Salter, A Mirrhor Mete for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens, Intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie, No Lesse Profitable and Pleasant, then Necessarie to bee Read and Practised (London: Edward White, 1579), as Ruth Kelso determined, is a translation of Bruto’s 1555/1558 work rather than the original it claims to be. On the reception of Salter in England, see Janis Butler Holm, "The Myth of a Feminist Humanism: Thomas Salter’s "The Mirrhor of Modestie," Soundings 67 (winter 1984): 443–52.

5-17. See Eric Cochrane, "The Renaissance Academies in their Italian and European Setting," in The Fairest Flower: The Emergence of Linguistic National Consciousness in Renaissance Europe (Florence, 1985), 21–39, for an excellent assessment of the place of these academies. Also see Thomas Crane, Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century and Their Influence on the Literatures of Europe (New York, 1971 rpt. of 1920 ed.), 142–44, which reports that women occasionally participated in some academy activities.

5-18. Orazio Lombardelli, Il giovane studente (Venice: La Minima Compagnia, 1594), 38–39.

5-19. Nicoletta Maraschio, ed., Trattati di fonetica del Cinquecento (Florence, 1992), 81–90, presents all that is known about Lombardelli.

5-20. Orazio Lombardelli, De gli ufizii e costumi de’ giovani (Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, 1579), 26–34, for the ten reasons why young men behave as they do, and 120, 124, for advice to converse with old people but not with women. Secco, La pedagogia della controriforma, 58–66, treats Il giovane studente as a straightforward, serious text, which is entirely reasonable, but he does the same for the 1579 book, a reading I do not share. The earlier work is unabashedly rhetorical and polemical, whereas the latter carries sobriety to the point of turgidity. Nevertheless, Secco pondered the same ten causes of youthful bad habits that I did and never cracked a smile, which may just reflect his clerical views versus my liberal skepticism, but I do believe the addition of a "What’s the problem?" index in the revised edition unmasks a spoof. Volpicelli, ed., Il pensiero pedagogico della controriforma, 598–99, takes the same approach as Secco.

In Il seme della violenza, 129–33, and in "Creanza e disciplina," 956–60, Ottavia Niccoli offers a more complex reading. She shows persuasively Lombardelli’s intellectual debt to Erasmus’s De civilitate morum puerilium (see Sowards, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 25, 269–89, for the English translation and annotation by Brian McGregor), while pointing out the Italian’s absurd expansion of detailed advice on trivia such as how to spit, sit, and position one’s hands. With understandable exasperation, Niccoli concedes that reading all this stuff is "insupportable" to modern people, but she does not question how sixteenth-century men and women read the text. My sense, obviously beyond proof or disproof, is that even the Catholic Reformation did not suppress completely Italian peoples’ legendary appreciation of humor. Reading Lombardelli as a spoof that mimicked Erasmus’s own capacity for evoking the comic (as in the Eulalia/Xanthippe colloquy I consider in chapter 6) relieves the text of boredom. And for me, at least, allowed a few good laughs.

5-21. Artur Michel, "The Earliest Dance-Manuals," Medievalia et Humanistica 3 (April, 1945): 127, treats Zuccolo’s book as a "polemical treatise against dancing" that nonetheless realistically portrays the sixteenth-century ballroom scene as well as the individual dances of the time.

5-22. Simeon Zuccolo, La pazzia del ballo (Padua: Giacomo Fabriano, 1549).

5-23. Alessandro Arcangeli, ed., Rinaldo Corso: Dialogo del ballo (Verona, 1987), provides the text from the Venice, 1555 original. In the introduction (20), he considers the relationship between the works of Zuccolo and Corso. Hostility to dancing flourished in some Protestant circles and found literary expression in Christopher Fetherstone, A Dialogue agaynst Light, Lewde, and Lascivious Dauncing: Wherein are Refuted all those Reasons, which the Common People Use to Bring in Defence Thereof (London, 1582), available in an Ibstock, 1973 reprint. Fetherstone also published an abridged translation of John Calvin’s Institution of Christian Religion (1585), and The Brutish Thunderbolt (1586), an antipapal tract. Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, 420, also cites Pietro Vermigli (Peter Martyr), A Briefe Treatise, Concerning the Use and Abuse of Dauncing (London, 1580?), but I have not seen this work.

5-24. See Julia Sutton’s edition and translation (Oxford, 1986) of the 1600, Venice printing (itself a revised edition of the 1581, Venice, Il ballarino) of Fabritio Caroso’s Nobiltà di dame, esp. 134–50, for twenty-four notes on proper deportment at the ball.

5-25. Palmieri, Della vita civile, 30. On cross-dressing more generally, see Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender (Philadelphia, 1993), 74–112.

5-26. Fausto Sebastiano da Longiano, De lo istituire un figlio d’un Principe da li X in fino a gl’anni de la discretione (Venice, 1542), no pagination.

5-27. Sabba da Castiglione, Ricordi, overo ammaestramenti di Monsignor Sabba Castiglione, Cavalier Gierosolimitano, ne’ quali con prudenti, e christiani discorsi si ragiona di tutte le materie honorate, che si ricercano à un vero gentil’huomo (Venice: Giovanni Bonadio, 1565), 10. The earliest edition of the 1565 reprint is 1554, a substantial revision of the 1546 original. The two successive editions (1549 and 1554) became increasingly apocalyptic in tone according to Mario Pozzi, "I trattati di saper vivre fra Castiglione e Guazzo," in Alain Montandon, ed., Traites de savoir-vivere en Italie (Clermont-Ferrand, 1993), 157–58. On publication matters, see Claudio Scarpati, Studi sul Cinquecento italiano (Milan, 1982), 83–90. For biographical information, also see Franca Petrucci’s entry in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol 22 (Rome, 1979), 100–106.

5-28. Piccolomini, L’educazione dei giovani, 119.

5-29. Gozze, Governo della famiglia, 78–81.

5-30. Panfilo Fenario, Discorsi di P. F. sopra i cinque sentimenti; ne i quali si dimostrano le varie lor potenze, e effetti e fin dove per lor menzo arriva l’intelletto humano (Venice: Giovanni Battista Somascho, 1587), 89, on touching.

5-31. Gozze, Governo della famiglia, 82–85.

5-32. Sabba da Castiglione, Ricordi, 10–14.

5-33. Annibale Guasco, Ragionamento del sig. Annibal Guasco a d. Lavinia sua figliuola, della maniera del governarsi ella in corte; andando per dama (Turin: L’herede di [Nicolò] Bevilacqua, 1586), 11, 22. On conduct books for women at court, with specific attention to this text, see Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 (Bloomington, 1990), 15–20.

5-34. Innocentio Ringhieri, Cento giuochi liberale, et d’ingegno (Bologna: Anselmo Giaccarelli, 1551), 118, for a game in which the object is to match a classical or biblical defender of her chastity with the instrument or characteristic by which she protected her honor.

5-35. No further definition of sodomy is given. I surmise from the text as a whole that the author understood sodomy to include oral or anal sex between two males, possibly also between heterosexual couples, but probably not sexual relations between females, even though all these acts denied procreation. The reticence to write down the words here is noteworthy, since the manual’s explicit purpose is to explain everything in plain language. Bestiality is not mentioned at all. On Mediterranean attitudes concerning sodomy and on silence concerning this sin, see Richard Trexler, Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca, 1995), 38–60. Also see Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1996), 3–16, which acknowledges that sodomy was the unmentionable vice even as the book proceeds to explore in brilliant and thorough fashion just how clear it is that sodomy was talked about and practiced.

5-36. Lodovico Gabrielli da Ogobbio, Methodo di confessione (Venice: Gabriel Giolito De’ Ferrari, 1572), 217–35.

5-37. Gaspar Loarte, Avisi di sacerdoti et confessori (Parma, 1584), BNF shelf mark Magliabechiana 12.N.9.214, 187–92.

5-38. Catechism of the Council of Trent, 2.8.33, for the admonition about using proper words, and 3.7.1, 3.7.5, for the injunctions not to say too much and to keep proscriptions general. For relevant theoretical insights, see Marjorie K. McIntosh, "Finding Language for Misconduct: Jurors in Fifteenth-Century Local Courts," in Hanawalt and Wallace, Bodies and Disciplines (Minneapolis, 1996), 87–122.

5-39. Bartolomeo de Medina, Breve instruttione de’ confessori, 79, 144.

5-40. We all remember Boccaccio for his wonderfully salacious stories, which were widely read in the sixteenth century as well. What the friar probably had in mind, however, were items like the hugely popular and very wicked barzellette of Poggio Bracciolini, several about priests involved in ménages à trois with simple-minded parishioners, published in a variety of editions throughout the sixteenth century. For a selection, see Francesco Capriglione, ed., Le facetiae di Poggio Bracciolini (Poggia, 1978), or Bernhardt J. Hurwood, ed. and trans., The Facetiae of Giovanni Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (New York, 1968); each contains a brief bio-bibliography on this apostolic writer at the Papal Curia who found sufficient creative energy in his old age to craft the book of jokes condemned a century later by the church on grounds of obscenity, insolence, and impertinence. Tale number 237 (English edition) or 239 (Italian edition) provides a sidesplitter on explaining incest in proper Tuscan dialect while confessing in Rome, one that highlights as only humor can the difficulties of recounting sins properly.

5-41. Cherubino da Firenze, Confessionario, 47–50. On the tension in confessional manuals between the traditional injunction to have every detail of desire drawn out in the penitent’s discourse and the modern preference for modest vagueness, see Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1980), 18–21.

5-42. Girolamo (Brother Silvano) Razzi, Della economica christiana, e civile di don Silvano Razzi i due primi libri, ne i quali da una nobile brigata di donne, & huomini si ragiona della cura e governo famigliare: secondo la legge christiana, e vita civile (Florence: Bartolomeo Sermartelli, 1568), 126–39, on mortal sin, 135, specifically on lust.

5-43. Daniela Frigo, "Dal caos all’ ordine: Sulla questione del ‘prender moglie’ nella trattatistica del sedicesimo secolo," in Zancan, ed., Nel cerchio della luna, 57–93, surveys a wide range of literature on the "taking-a-wife" question, including not only advice manuals but also dialogues and courtesy books.

5-44. Giovanni Maria Bonardo, Le ricchezze dell’ agricoltura. Nelle quali sotto brevità si danno molti novi ammaestramenti, per accrescer le rendite de’ campi, e insieme bellissimi secreti, si in materia di piantar, & inestare alberi, e viti, come di vini, & aceti, e come si sanno le colombaie col governo e l’augmento di quelle, e medesimamente alcuni ricordi per chi tiene fatori, castaldi, lavoratori. Cose per lo più non insegnate anchora d’alcuno scrittor di quest’ arte antico, o moderno, mandate in luce da Luigi Groto cieco d’Hadria (Venice: Fabio & Agostino Zoppini, 1589). Also by the same author, see La minera del mondo nella qual si tratta delle cose piu secrete, e piu rare de’ corpi semplici nel mondo elementare, e de’ corpi composti, inanimati, & animati d’anima vegetativa, sensitiva, e ragionevole (Venice: Fabio & Agostino Zoppini, 1585); La grandezza, larghezza, e distanza di tutte le sfere ridotte a nostre miglia: cominciando dall’ inferno fin’ alla sfera, dove stani beati; e la grandezza delle stelle (Venice: Francesco Rocca, All’ insegna del Castello, 1563); and Madrigali (Venice: Fabio & Agostino Zoppini, 1587).

5-45. Giovanni Maria Bonardo, Della miseria et eccellenza della vita humana, ragionamenti due, nel quale con infiniti essempi, cavati da piu famosi scrittori, s’ impara quali siano i travagli, & quali siano le perfettioni di questo mondo (Venice: Fabio & Agostino Zoppini, 1586), 35–37. For the opinions on Bonardo’s discourse, see Giorgio Stabile’s entry in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 11 (Rome, 1969), 573–75.

5-46. Anonymous, Della famosissima Compagnia della lesina: dialogo, capitoli, ragionamenti: Con l’assotigliamento in tredici punture della punta d’essa lesina, 67, for the small-wife satire; this edition (Venice: L’Armanni, 1666) runs to over four hundred octodecimo pages. The earliest edition I have seen (Mantua, 1591), BNF shelf mark Palat. 12.B.B.4.1.35, contained only sixty-three leaves and did not have the small-wife advice. On the publication of these chapbooks and the attribution of authorship to either Francesco Maria Vialardi or Tommaso Buoni, see the National Union Catalog, vol. 138, 216–17.

5-47. Angelo di Forte, Dialogo de gli incantamenti e strigarie con le altre malefiche opre, quale tutta via tra le donne e huomini se esercitano, piacevole e molto utile a qualunque persona (Venice: Agostino Bindoni, 1533), no pagination. Similar advice may be found in Bartolomeo Arnigio, Le diece veglie di Bartolomeo Arnigio, de gli ammendati costumi dell’ humana vita, nelle quali non sol si tratta di quelle vertù, ch’ à viver nella luce de gli huomini, & di Dio bisognevoli sono (Brescia: Francesco & Pietro Maria Marchetti, 1576), 231–32. After much discourse about the pitfalls of marrying a beautiful woman, however, Arnigio’s interlocutor suddenly becomes aghast at the implications of what he is saying and assures his audience that he does not mean a man should flee from beauty. Being stuck with a truly ugly or deformed wife is like being half in hell, and it will make you nauseous for life. Arnigio seems to be a two-seed thinker, since he gives as a further excuse for seeking beauty in a wife that her offspring will be of her size, shape, look, and complexion.

5-48. Anonymous, Stanze in lode della donna brutta (Florence: Anton Francesco Doni, 1547), BNF shelf mark E.6.6.154.III.n.17.

5-49. Anonymous, Giardino di virtu. Nel quale si contiene alcuni particolari, e maravigliosi secreti. Non più da persona alcuna dati in luce. E con diligenza, e spese di Zan Fritella ritrovati (Florence, n.d., ca. 1600), BNF shelf mark Palat. (14) X.4.1.67. See Camporesi, Juice of Life, 43, 127–29, for background on this literary tradition. On standards of beauty, see Yalom, A History of the Breast, 52–55.

5-50. Ciro Spontone, Hercole difensore d’Homero. Dialogo del Sig. Cavalliere Ciro Spontone; nel quale oltre ad alcune nobilissime materia, si tratta de’tiranni, delle congiure contro di loro, della magia naturale; & dell’officio donnesco (Verona: Girolamo Discepolo, 1595), 192. Federico Luigini, Il libro della bella donna (Venice: Plinio Pietrasanta, 1554), now available in a Milan, 1974 reprint, covers much of the same ground but at far greater length, with more pseudoerudition and less humor. On this genre, see Naomi Yavneh, "The Ambiguity of Beauty in Tasso and Petrarch," in Turner, Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 133–57. Now easily accessible in an excellent translation is Agnolo Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women (Philadelphia, 1992, Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray, trans., of the original completed in 1541), which includes an informative introduction with an analysis of why Firenzuola should be read as a feminist.

5-51. Lando, Paradossi, 42–46. Stories of adulterous wives were very popular in this period; works that today are almost entirely forgotten were big sellers then, for example, the imitation of Boccaccio, with less literary talent exhibited but lots of sex, by Tommaso Costo, Il fuggilozio. Diviso in otto giornate ove da otto gentilhuomini e due donne si ragiona delle malizie di femine e trascuragini di mariti (Venice: Barezzo Barezzi, 1601).

5-52. Giuseppe Passi, I donneschi difetti (Venice, 1595), with reprintings in 1599, 1601, and 1618. The edition (Venice: Vincenzo Somascho, 1618) that I examined runs to nearly four hundred pages, and in the text I have translated only the chapter titles as an indication of the character of this work. The Aristotle reference and related historical examples begin on page 344. In this work, Passi proclaims himself "Nell Illustrissima Academia de Signori Riccovrati di Padova, e Infermi di Ravenna l’Ardito."

5-53. Lucrezia Marinella, La nobiltà et l’eccellenze delle donne. Labalme, "Venetian Women on Women," 91–93, sees some merit in this work but rightly implies that Marinella stooped to the polemical level of Passi. Chemello, "La donna, il modello, l’immaginario," 103, concludes that Marinella’s work is an explicit and specific response to Passi. Beatrice Collina, "Moderata Fonte e Il merito delle donne," Annali d’Italianistica 7 (1989): 142–43, makes the same point and adds that, had it not been for the market created by Passi’s perverse tract, Fonte’s work also might well have remained unpublished. I agree.

Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 250–51, makes no connection between Passi and Marinella, possibly because she may have been unaware of the 1595 and 1599 editions of Passi when she cited the 1601 reprint that appeared after Marinella’s tract apparently had boosted sales for both polemicists. The reliance on a later edition also may have affected Jordan’s reading of Passi’s subsequent work, Dello stato maritale. While she duly notes his continued adherence to misogynist stereotypes, Jordan tries valiantly to tease from Passi’s warnings against marrying a woman who is richer than yourself some sort of concession to a woman’s ability to use property to undermine natural male superiority. In a later essay, "Renaissance Women and the Question of Class," in Turner, ed., Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 91, Jordan very consciously sets aside authorial intention and again credits Passi with the same insight or concession. My focus is more historical, I suppose, and my judgment is that no one living at the time Passi wrote could possibly have seen in his work any concession to anything feminist. He was a misogynist with a wicked sense of humor and a certain gift for words who deeply offended Lucrezia Marinella and other intellectual women of her time.

5-54. Giuseppe Passi, Dello stato maritale. Trattato di Giuseppe Passi Ravennate Nell’ Academia de’ Signori Informi di Ravenna. L’Ardito. Nel quale con molti essempi antichi e moderni non solo si dimostra quello che una donna maritata deve schivare ma quello ancora che fare le convenga se compitamente desidera di satisfare all’ ufficio suo. Opera non meno utile che dilettevole a ciascheduno (Venice: Giacomo Antonio Somascho, 1602), 2, 81, 83, 123, 132, 144, for the particular bits of advice. Frigo, "Dal caos all’ ordine," 73, accepts at face value Passi’s statement that in this work he hopes to mitigate the harsh judgments of his previous tirade (I donneschi difetti), but in my view her reading is far too kind. His subsequent volume on male defects, La monstruosa fucina delle sordidezze de gl’ huomini (Venice: Giacomo Antonio Somascho, 1603), which Frigo accepts as yet a further sign of remorse, I take as an attempt to cash in again on public interest in this genre by going one up on Marinella, all in good fun, of course. Equally, I ascribe the decision of his colleagues at the Accademia degli Informi to write poems in praise of women to appease public outrage over Passi’s invectives more to condescension than contrition. And I certainly do not accept the conclusion that Passi’s decision to become a hermit had anything to do with penance over the furor stirred by his misogynous writings. Maria Fubini Leuzzi, "Vita coniugale e vita familiare nei trattati italiani fra XVI e XVII secolo," in Zarri, Donna, disciplina, creanza cristiana, 258–61, follows Frigo’s charitable interpretation.

5-55. Anonymous, Le malitie delle donne, con la superbia, e pompa, che usano. Et insegna alla gioventù a trovar buona moglie con un’ essempio a maritati di attender a casa sua. Opera nuova, e piacevole, honesta, e da ridere (Bassano, n.d., but surely sixteenth century), BNF shelf mark E.6.6.154.III.n.1; the title page indicates that there were earlier editions in Bologna, Venice, and Padua. For the publication history of this work, and the possibly related Governo de fameglia, see Salmore Morpurgo, "Il governo de famiglia e le malattie delle donne," Miscellanea Rossi 34, no. 14 (Florence, 1893): 5–57, esp. 55–57. Doglio, ed., Galeazzo Flavio Capra, 116–20, shows eleven editions published between 1487 and 1528.

5-56. Marcia Colish, "Cosmetic Theology: The Transformation of a Stoic Theme," Assays 1 (1981): 3–14, traces the shift by early Christian writers from Stoic condemnation of cosmetics for both genders to attacks on women almost exclusively, so Agnelli is traditional in his focus on women alone. On the gender imbalance in sumptuary legislation, see Ronald Rainey, "Dressing Down the Dressed-Up: Reproving Feminine Attire in Renaissance Florence," in Monfasani and Musto, eds., Renaissance Society and Culture, 217–37. Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 38, mentions condemnation of male ostentation, but overall the evidence does not show this to have been a major concern. Episodes of transvestism also were reported only infrequently.

5-57. Peter Green, ed. and trans., Ovid: The Erotic Poems (Harmondsworth, 1982), 264–66, for "On Facial Treatment for Ladies." Ovid was widely available in vernacular translations in printed sixteenth-century editions, and his amorous poems appear prominently on lists of works women should not be reading. The same themes appear in humorous dialogues, such as Giuseppe Orologgi, L’inganno (Venice: Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1562), 131, for the presumed exchange between Lodovico Dolce and Girolamo Ruscelli, two prolific authors. Dolce complains that "women continuously apply polishes, white lead, fats, and alum to their faces, using infusions, masks, pastes, alembic waters, sublimations, and oils; all these disgusting things they plaster on at bedtime so that their poor husbands who think they have slept with a wife find themselves with a piece of stucco, having kissed a [facial] mask." And Ruscelli responds wisely that "the worst is that husbands wake up in the morning with their beards caked and discolored. Women don’t realize that this falsification earns them cursing and hatred rather than affection or praise."

5-58. Cosmo Agnelli, Amorevole aviso circa gli abusi delle donne vane. Utili per vergini, vedove, & maritate. Accioche ciascheduna viva honoratamente, secondo il grado loro (Bologna: Giovanni Rossi [per] Giovanni Francesco Rasca & Gasparo Bindoni, 1592), 6–24.

My editor has given permission to include advice on walking in high heels that comes from a manual on dancing surely meant only for elites and therefore having no proper place in this book on popular manuals, but it is just too funny to resist as a contrast to Agnelli. The quote is from Caroso, Nobiltà di dame, 141.

 "Some ladies and gentlewomen slide their chopines along as they walk, so that the racket they make is enough to drive one crazy! More often they bang them so loudly with each step, that they remind us of Franciscan friars. Now in order to walk nicely, and to wear chopines properly on one’s feet, so that they do not twist or go awry (for if one is ignorant of how to wear them, one may splinter them, or fall frequently, as has been and still is observed at parties and in church), it is better for [the lady] to raise the toe of the foot she moves first when she takes a step, by raising it thus, she straightens the knee of that foot, and this extension keeps her body attractive and erect, besides which her chopine will not fall off that foot. Also, by thus raising it she avoids sliding it along [the ground], nor does she make any unpleasant noise. Then she should put it down, and repeat the same thing with the other foot (which follows). In this way, and by observing [this rule], she may move entirely with grace, seemliness, and beauty, better than the way one walked before; for a natural step is one thing, but a well-ordered step is another. By walking this way, therefore, even if the lady’s chopines are more than a handbreadth-and-a-half high, she will seem to be on chopines only three fingerbreadths high, and will be able to dance flourishes and galliard variations at a ball, as I have just shown the world this day."

5-59. The quotation is from King and Rabil, eds., Her Immaculate Hand, 79–80. For an alternative translation, as well as a thorough introductory essay, which became available only after my book was in press, see Diana Robin, trans. and ed., Laura Cereta: Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist (Chicago, 1997), 84–85, for this passage. On Cereta’s life and works, also see Albert Rabil Jr., Laura Cereta, Quattrocento Humanist (Binghamton, 1981), esp. 6, on her desire for eternal fame through her literary efforts, and 29, for an earlier letter conveying the same theme. Although Cereta’s letters were not published in the sixteenth century, references to her correspondence do appear in various places, for example, Arnigio, Le diece veglie, 244. Also see Margaret L. King, "Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance," in Labalme, Beyond Their Sex, 71–73. Although Christine de Pisan’s now famous Treasure of the City of Ladies did not obtain an Italian (or a French) printing in the sixteenth century, readers will note instantly the similarities between Cereta’s condemnation of ostentatious dress and that by Christine de Pisan. For rejection of pomp and vanity by a female author with a dramatically different lifestyle, see the analysis of the honest courtesan Veronica Franco’s writings by Rosenthal, in "Venetian Women Writers," 118–19, and The Honest Courtesan, 58–110.

All the more remarkable, then, is the vigorous defense of women’s right to dress as they please found in Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne, a matter insightfully discussed in Cox, "The Single Self," 552–57.

5-60. Catechism of the Council of Trent, 2.8.13–14.

5-61. Fioravanti, La cirugia, bk. 2, chap. 24 (Furfaro, 63–64).

5-62. Tommasi, Reggimento del padre, 44–55. On domestic economy tracts more generally, see Manuela Doni Garfagnini, "Autorità maschili e ruoli femminili: le fonti classiche degli ‘economici’," in Zarri, ed., Donna, disciplina, creanza cristiana, 237–51.

5-63. Annibale Romei, Discorsi del Conte Annibal Romei, gentilhuomo ferrarese. Divisi in cinque giornate (Venice: Francesco Ziletti, 1585), 44–45. The book went through several editions, and the dialogue grew from five days to seven in an expanded version (Ferrara, 1586), so at least some readers must have enjoyed this book more than I did. It was translated into English in 1598.

5-64. Sabba da Castiglione, Ricordi, 214–23. The chart is my construction of the narrative in the original text. On the Catholic Reformation context of this work, and for bio-bibliographical matters, see Scarpati, Studi sul Cinquecento italiano, 27–121.

5-65. Leonardo Fioravanti, Dello specchio di scientia universale, dell’ eccellente medico, & cirugico M. Leonardo Fioravanti bolognese, libri tre (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1564), 209–16.

5-66. Gioberti, Errori popolari, 181. More generally, see O’Faolain and Martines, Not in God’s Image, 142–43.

5-67. Anonymous, Lamento de una gioveneta la quale fu volunterosa de esser presto maridata. Et una frottola del gallo. Et uno esordio sponsalitio (n.p., n.d., but surely sixteenth century), BNF shelf mark E.6.5.3.II.2. Doglio, ed., Galeazzo Flavio Capra, 123, cites a Venice, 1524 edition. For the previously cited despairing commentary of Michele Savonarola, see his Ad mulieres ferrarienses, 192–95.

5-68. Marinello, Delle medicine, 1–2.

5-69. Gozze, Governo della famiglia, 24–26, 40.

5-70. Torquato Tasso, "The Father of the Family," in Carnes Lord and Dain Trafton, trans. and eds., Tasso’s Dialogues: A Selection with the Discourse on the Art of Dialogue (Berkeley, 1982), 83–85. For a more playful variant on similar themes, see the dialogue between young Maddalena and the worldly wise Coppina in Bartolomeo Gottifredi, Specchio d’amore (Florence: Anton Francesco Doni, 1547), and in the more readily available Giuseppe Zonta, ed., Trattati d’amore del Cinquecento (Bari, 1968 rpt. of 1912 ed.), 249–302.

5-71. Domenico Bruni, Difese delle donne, nella quale si contengono le difese loro (Florence: Filippo & Jacopo Giunta, 1552), 80–85. My colleague William Connell provided me with a reference from Jacopo Maria Fioravanti, Memorie storiche della città di Pistoja (Bologna, 1986 rpt. of 1758 ed.), 430, stating that Difese delle donne goes by the name "Involatore," which would suggest that this eighteenth-century local expert surmised, or had evidence, that the book was used to seduce women with flattery. More conventional views may be found in Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 167–70, and Cox, "The Single Self," 519.

5-72. Marinello, Delle medicine, 2.

5-73. Fioravanti, Dello specchio di scientia universale, 206.

5-74. Fioravanti, Dello specchio di scientia universale, 206–9.

5-75. Enciclopedia italiana, vol. 13 (Milan, 1932), 97.

5-76. Grendler, Critics of the Italian World, 65–69; the point is explored with even more explicit reference to market economics by Peter Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy 1420–1540 (New York, 1972), 60–61, 104–5.

5-77. In fact, Marie-Françoise Piejus, "Venus Bifrons," in Josè Guidi, Marie-Françoise Piejus, and Adelin-Charles Fiorato, eds., Images de la femme dans la littérature italienne de la Renaissance: Préjugés misogynes et aspirations nouvelles (Paris, 1980), 154–55, notes a considerable increase during the decade from 1540 to 1550, of books in the genre of Dolce’s and Vives’s treatises on and for women. For Dolce’s publication activities, see especially Bareggi, Il mestiere di scrivere, 285–90, and graph 33, which documents his extensive work for other printing firms as well.

5-78. In the notes that follow, the page references will be to Lodovico Dolce, De gli ammaestramenti pregiatissimi, che appartengono alla educatione, & honorevole, e virtuosa vita virginale, maritale, e vedovile (Venice: Barezzo Barezzi, 1622); included in the same volume is Agnolo Firenzuola, Le bellezze le lodi, gli amori & costumi delle donne. Con lo discacciamento delle lettere di Agnolo Firenzuola, et di Alessandro Picolomini. On Vives, I will use Juan Luis Vives, De l’ufficio del marito, come si debba portare verso la moglie. De l’istitutione de la femina christiana, vergine, maritata, o vedova. De lo ammaestrare i fanciulli ne le arti liberali (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1546).

5-79. For extensive selections from Vives, see Foster Watson, ed., Vives and the Renascence Education of Women (New York, 1912); also see Foster Watson, ed., Vives: On Education. A Translation of the De Tradendis Disciplinis of Juan Luis Vives (Totowa, 1971 rpt. of 1913 ed. with a forward by Francesco Cordasco). For a more recent and sympathetic appraisal of Vives on women, along with brief samples of his writings, see Susan Groag Bell, ed., Women from the Greeks to the French Revolution (Belmont, 1973), 181–90; see also Melinda K. Blade, Education of Italian Renaissance Women (Mesquite, 1983).

Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 117–19, is much harsher about Vives, but she fails to note the connection between Vives and Dolce; that may explain her ambiguous treatment of Dolce, 69–70. In my opinion, what Jordan sees as Dolce’s "concession to feminist claims" that "woman is as intelligent as a man" is just a rhetorical device on his part to pave the way for even stricter control over women’s lives. Gloria Kaufman, "Juan Luis Vives on the Education of Women," Signs 3 (summer 1978): 891–96, exposes Vives’s antifeminist views. Also see Valerie Wayne, "Some Sad Sentence: Vives’ Instruction of a Christian Woman," in Margaret Hannay, ed., Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, 1985), 15–29, and Jones, The Currency of Eros, 22.

5-80. Dolce, Ammaestramenti, 7–49. On margins, see William W. E. Slights, "The Edifying Margins of Renaissance English Books," Renaissance Quarterly 42 (winter 1989): 682–716.

5-81. Henderson and McManus, Half Humankind, 73–74, make the important observation that English manuals on choosing a spouse, written somewhat later in the sixteenth century, are addressed directly to the young people making the choice, not to their parents.

5-82. Dolce, Ammaestramenti, 50–54.

5-83. Dolce, Ammaestramenti, 56–60.

6-1. Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 144, cites Nicolò Gozze, whom we have considered before, and Paolo Caggio; other writers easily could be added. The subtext in these familial-advice manuals is not political theory in defense of monarchy but a pervasive misogyny, exemplified nicely in Caggio, Iconomica del Signor Paolo Caggio, gentil’huomo di Palermo. Nella quale s’insegna brevemente per modo di dialogo il governo famigliare, come di se stesso, della moglie, de’ figliuoli, de’ servi, delle case, delle robbe, & ogn’altra cosa a quella appartenente (Venice: Al segno del pozzo [Andrea Arrivabene], 1552). A two-page table of contents promises answers to problems such as, "Why did nature make men robust and valorous and women weak and of little spirit," and further along gives advice on, "What damages are caused by wives who are pompous, proud, and domineering."

6-2. Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville, 1992), 97–139, provides an excellent treatment of the marital-inversion literary genre. Works in Italian have not been as thoroughly considered, although my sense is that they were less common, at least in the sixteenth century. Still, the theme appears prominently in Italian art; see Anne Jacobson Schutte, "‘Trionfo delle donne’: Tematiche di rovesciamento dei ruoli nella Firenze rinascimentale," Quaderni Storici 44 (1980): 474–96.

6-3. Barbara B. Diefendorf, "Widowhood and Remarriage in Sixteenth-Century Paris," Journal of Family History 7 (winter 1982), 386, makes this very point: "The fact that widows as well as widowers could retain control over the estate of a deceased spouse is very important. It demonstrates that the basis for laws that subjected wives to the legal authority of their husbands lay less in the supposed incompetence of women than in the belief that each family should have one and only one head." The more conventional feminist view is expressed succinctly in Joan Kelly, "Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes, 1400–1789," in her posthumously published book, Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago, 1984), 83: "To reduce women to subjection to husbands, however, and to deny them any other mode of life, women had to be, and were, regarded as rationally defective. They could not govern, nor could they be learned."

6-4. Giuseppe Falcone, La nuova, vaga, e dilettevole villa (Brescia: [Tommaso] Bozzola, 1599), 19. The earliest edition I know of is 1592; later editions followed in 1602, 1612, 1619, 1628, and 1691.

6-5. Camillo Fanucci, Trattato di tutte le opere pie dell’alma città di Roma (Rome: Lepido Faci & Stefano Paolini [per] Bastiano d’ Franceschi, 1601), 173–75. More generally, see Sherrill Cohen, "Asylums for Women in Counter-Reformation Italy," in Sherrin Marshall, ed., Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe (Bloomington, 1989), 166–88; on Tuscany, see Sherrill Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums Since 1500: From Refuges for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women (New York, 1992). Evidence that battered women had at least limited access to legal redress may be found in the important recent article by Joanne M. Ferraro, "The Power to Decide: Battered Wives in Early Modern Venice," Renaissance Quarterly 48 (autumn 1995), 492–512.

6-6. Arnigio, Le diece veglie, 256–57, makes the most extended use of the ship metaphor that I have come across.

.6-7 King, Women of the Renaissance, 35–44, gives an excellent summary of the contemporary feminist view. Ruth Mohl, The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (New York, 1933), 351–52, notes a marked increase in misogynous literature toward the end of the thirteenth century, well before the period under primary consideration by Joan Kelly and the feminist scholars who expanded her challenge. R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago, 1991), vigorously and astutely pushes the exploration of European misogyny back to its Judeo-Christian origins.

A powerful portrait of affectionate, trusting marriage among patriarchal Venetian patricians may be found in Stanley Chojnacki, "The Power of Love: Wives and Husbands in Late Medieval Venice," in Erler and Kowaleski, Women and Power in the Middle Ages, 126–48. On the substantial influence of women in the Venetian patriciate, see his "Patrician Women in Early Renaissance Venice," Studies in the Renaissance 21 (1974), 176–203. For a useful overview on patriarchal authority, see Barbara B. Diefendorf, "Give Us Back Our Children: Patriarchal Authority and Parental Consent to Religious Vocations in Early Counter-Reformation France," Journal of Modern History 68 (June 1996): 271–74. On the extent and limits of wifely subjection, see Sommerville, Sex and Subjection, 84–89.

6-8. I found this set of rules in Diane Bornstein, The Lady in the Tower: Medieval Courtesy Literature for Women (Hamden, 1983), 63, who translated them from Pietro Gori, ed., Dodici avvertimenti che deve dare la madre alla figliuola quando la manda a marito (Florence, 1885). How the original twelve rules of the title became thirteen in Bornstein’s translation I am not sure. Especially incisive on the relationship between verbal expression and sexual freedom is Jones, The Currency of Eros, 15–35.

6-9. For an excellent introduction to the genre of parent-to-child advice in medieval literature, see Tauno F. Mustanoja, ed., The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter & The Good Wyfe wold a Pylgremage & The Thewis of Gud Women (Helsinki, 1948), esp. 161, for similar advice from a mother to her daughter:

6-10. Plutarch, Moralia, bk. 2, 138–146A.

6-11. King, Venetian Humanism, 93. Also see King, "Caldiera and the Barbaros on Marriage and the Family," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1976): 19–50. In this article, King holds that, although "Francesco [Barbaro] relies heavily on classical sources, displaying his recently acquired knowledge of Greek, the De re uxoria is an original work" (32).

6-12. John Martin, "Out of the Shadow: Heretical and Catholic Women in Renaissance Venice," Journal of Family History 10 (spring 1985): 21–33, uses inquisition records to show that Venetian patriarchal ideology was widely diffused among artisans in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Style apparently mattered. Whereas Barbaro’s treatise was translated and printed, that of his contemporary, Giovanni Caldiera, never found a publisher. On his thought, see Margaret King, "Personal, Domestic, and Republican Values in the Moral Philosophy of Giovanni Caldiera," Renaissance Quarterly 28 (winter 1975): 535–74.

6-13. King, "Caldiera and the Barbaros," 34, sees Francesco Barbaro as something of a defender of women: "Barbaro gives a lot of credit to women. See Gothein’s discussion of the medieval antifeminist tradition and Barbaro’s departure from it." Kohl et al., eds., The Earthly Republic, 179–87, share King’s assessment of Barbaro and anticipate little of the feminist critique about to befall this humanist.

6-14. The translation is from Kohl et al., eds., The Earthly Republic, 202, 204. On Christian justifications for prescriptions on public behavior, which place great emphasis on the relationship between exterior appearances and interior reality, see Giovanni Pozzi, "Occhi bassi," in Edgar Marsch and Giovanni Pozzi, eds., Thematologie des Kleinen: Petits thèmes littéraires (Fribourg, 1986), 161–211.

6-15. Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 41–47, 47, for the quotation; Kathleen Casey, "The Cheshire Cat: Reconstructing the Experience of Medieval Women," in Carroll, Liberating Women’s History, 225–27; and Stanley Chojnacki, "‘The Most Serious Duty’: Motherhood, Gender, and Patrician Culture in Renaissance Venice," in Migiel and Schiesari, eds., Refiguring Woman, 133–54. Also see Ann Rosalind Jones, "Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women’s Lyrics," in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds., The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality (New York, 1987), 52–63.

6-16. Kohl et al., eds., The Earthly Republic, 208–9.

6-17. Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, 78–135, is particularly relevant to "wifely duties" literature. The quotation concerning her restraint about imposing a comparative framework is found on page 280. Her bibliography of 891 items "for the lady" is found on pages 326–424. While not a complete listing, it certainly is a good start.

6-18. Palmieri, Della vita civile, 135. Sarah Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (New York 1975), 79–80, provides a glimpse of Xanthippe’s relationship with Socrates, from which we may imagine that being married to the great man was not easy.

6-19. Dialogo Erasmico di due donne maritate, in nel quale luna mal contenta del marito si duole, laltra la consiglia, e con esica ci esempi la induce a ben vivere, opera molto utile per le donne maritate. Tradotta per Andronico Collodio di latino in vulgare (Venice: Ad instantia di Damonfido pastore detto il Peregrino, 1542). This edition—printed as a single "dialogue" or colloquy running to twenty-one octavo leaves—surely was meant as a nice little gift, not too expensive but very thoughtful, perhaps from a husband to his wife or perhaps among married women. It opens with a woodcut of two women engaged in dialogue, a powerful visual affirmation of the worth of women’s talk.

6-20. The idea of sex as "medicine" to relieve male anxieties was ubiquitous; Marinello, Delle medicine, 34–35, even offers ointments to be rubbed on the genitals explicitly to reduce marital quarreling rather than solely for enhancement of physical performance.

6-21. Craig R. Thompson, ed. and trans., The Colloquies of Erasmus (Chicago, 1965), 114–27. For a convenient collection of Erasmus’s writings most directly related to women, see Erika Rummel, ed., Erasmus on Women (Toronto, 1996).

6-22. Aldo Landi, ed., Antonio Brucioli: Dialogi (Naples, 1982), 553–88, provides excellent biographical and bibliographical information. In English, one might start with Paul F. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press (1540–1605) (Princeton, 1977).

6-23. De Bujanda, Index de Rome 1557, 1559, 1564, 155.

6-24. Landi, ed., Antonio Brucioli: Dialogi, 49–56.

6-25. Pietro Belmonte, Institutione della sposa del cavalier Pietro Belmonte ariminese, fatta principalmente per Madonna Laudomia sua figliuola nelle sue nuove nozze (Rome: Gl’ heredi di Giovanni Osmarino Gigliotto, 1587), 14, 32, 39, 41, for the specific recommendations. Leuzzi, "Vita coniugale e vita familiare," 260–61, ignores unpleasantries such as the recommendation of live entombment in her benevolent treatment of Belmonte.

6-26. Orazio Lombardelli, Dell’ uffizio della donna maritata. Capi cento ottanta (Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, 1583). The opening letter to Delia is dated October 6, 1574. The closing letter to his uncle is dated June 14, 1577. This work is extremely rare; I know of no copies in the United States, and the copy listed in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze catalog was lost in the 1966 flood; neither is it at the Riccardiana or any other reasonable place in Florence. The copy I used is from the British Library, shelf mark 524.b.12.(2.), bound with the unrelated Tommaso Buoni, I problemi della bellezza, di tutti gli affetti humani (Venice, 1605). The title page gives a publication year of 1584, but the back page clearly says 1583. Either way, his wife had been dead for at least six years, and the most likely occasion for publishing this work was in connection with Marescotti’s reprinting of Lombardelli’s De gli ufizii e costumi de’ giovani. On reading between the lines, see Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, 95–96.

6-27. Anonymous, Della famosissima Compagnia della lesina, 74–76.

6-28. Catechism of the Council of Trent, 2.8.16–33. It is noteworthy that the catechism makes no parallel injunction against excessive female sexuality, obviously not because the clerics were protofeminists but because they did not accept the "daughters-of-Eve" view of women as creatures of insatiable lasciviousness. The catechism, as well as virtually all serious texts for laypersons, consistently identifies male lust as the drive that needs to be checked. Unlimited female sexual drive is a theme for humorous tracts, not for advice manuals and books presenting church teachings. Edmund Leites, "The Duty to Desire: Love, Friendship, and Sexuality in Some Puritan Theories of Marriage," Journal of Social History (spring 1982): 383–408, is excellent on the Tridentine background for Puritan emphasis on the sensuous pleasures of marriage.

6-29. Catechism of the Council of Trent, 2.8.2, 21, 27.

6-30. Bartolomeo de Medina, Breve instruttione de’ confessori, 156–63.

6-31. Anonymous, El costume delle donne.

6-32. Tommasi, Reggimento del padre, 81–83, 102–7.

6-33. Sabba da Castiglione, Ricordi, 262–66. Martin, "Out of the Shadow," 25–26, emphasizes the importance of the confessional for Catholic women seeking counsel in dealing with brutish husbands.

6-34. Agostino Valerio, Instruttione delle donne maritate (Venice: Bolognino Zaltieri, 1575), 9–35. In the same year, 1575, the Zaltieri firm also published two other little vernacular works by him, Ricordi lasciati alle monache nella sua visitatione fatta l’anno 1575, and Institutione d’ogni stato lodevole delle donne christiane.

6-35. Agnelli, Amorevole aviso, 25–55.

6-36. Cherubino da Siena, Regole, 3–40.

6-37. Tommaso Garzoni, Le vite delle donne illustri della scrittura sacra . . . (Venice: Giovanni Domenico Imberti, 1588), 165, 173–74; this is a revised edition of the 1568 original. See Grendler, Critics of the Italian World, 191–93, for a brief general assessment of Garzoni and some specifics on his contribution to craniognomy. For a good introduction to Garzoni’s most famous work, see John Martin, "The Imaginary Piazza: Tommaso Garzoni and the Late Italian Renaissance," in Samuel K. Cohn Jr. and Steven A. Epstein, Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living: Essays in Memory of David Herlihy (Ann Arbor, 1996), 439–54. The definitive Italian edition of several of Garzoni’s works, with a useful commentary and thorough bibliography, is Paolo Cherchi, ed., Tomaso Garzoni: Opere (Ravenna, 1993), but this does not include Le vite delle donne illustri.

6-38. Hull, Women according to Men, 38, cites Francis Meres, Gods Arithmeticke (1597), D1 verso. He is better known as the author of a collection of apothegms for use in grammar schools titled, Wits Common Wealth. On the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions, see Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, 1979), 15–96, and Saxonhouse, Women in the History of Political Thought, esp. 37–91. On spiritual equality, see Sommerville, Sex and Subjection, 43–51.

6-39. Giacomo Lanteri, Della economica trattato di m. Giacomo Lanteri gentilhuomo bresciano, nel quale si dimostrano le qualità, che all’ huomo et alla donna separatamente convengono pel governo della casa (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1560), 111–49, for the section on honestà feminile. On Lanteri’s career, see Frigo, Il padre di famiglia, 58. Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 147, includes Lanteri’s dialogue among those that served to undermine patriarchal structures, certainly an incidental and unintended consequence if, in fact, it had that consequence at all. More generally on the farmer’s almanac genre, see Elide Casali, Il villano dirozzato: Cultura società e potere nelle campagne romagnole della Controriforma (Florence, 1982); it contains an excellent glossary of difficult agricultural terminology and good explorations among the primary sources.

6-40. Gozze, Governo della famiglia, 44–51.

6-41. Fioravanti, Dello specchio di scientia universale, bk. 3, chap. 24, 299–301. The facetiae of Poggio Bracciolini, published widely in the sixteenth century, were the sort of thing Fioravanti surely had in mind, along with Boccaccio’s Decameron. I am persuaded by the horrified admonitions of writers such as Fioravanti that a fair number of honest matrons probably did enjoy reading this wicked, forbidden humor.

6-42. Sarah B. Pomeroy, ed. and trans., Xenophon: Oeconomicus, A Social and Historical Commentary (Oxford, 1994), 74–87; on Xenophon’s popularity as a historian, see Peter Burke, "A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1450–1700," History and Theory 5 (1966): 135–52.

6-43. Pomeroy, ed. and trans., Xenophon, 87–90, for Pomeroy’s commentary, and 139–63 (chaps. 7–10), for Xenophon’s text. Also see Ruth H. Bloch, "Untangling the Roots of Modern Sex Roles: A Survey of Four Centuries of Change," Signs 4 (winter 1978): 237–52, esp. 238, for the finding that "traditional horizontal and qualitative sex distinctions, attributing to each sex a separate sphere of activity, were eclipsed by a vertical, hierarchical definition that stressed qualitative similarities. . . . Then, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the rise of romantic evangelical Protestantism and industrialism, the cultural definition again shifted, with differences in kind subsuming differences in degree."

6-44. Falcone, La nuova, vaga, e dilettevole villa, 18–20.

6-45. See my Fate and Honor, Family and Village, especially the treatment of the village of Albareto in Emilia Romagna, and also my "Transformation of a Rural Village: Istria, 1870–1972," Journal of Social History (spring 1974): 243–70. Supporting observations abound in Patrizia Audenino, Un mestiere per partire: Tradizione migratoria, lavoro e comunità in una vallata alpina (Milan, 1990), passim.

6-46. Bonardo, Le ricchezze dell’ agricoltura, 25–26.

6-47. Agostino Gallo, Le vinti giornate dell’ agricoltura. Et de’ piaceri della villa. Di M. Agostino Gallo, nuovamente ristampate. Con le figure de gl’ instromenti pertinenti. Et con due tavole, una della dichiaratione di molti vocaboli, & l’altra delle cose notabili . . . (Venice: Camillo Borgominieri, 1584), 346–48. The National Union Catalog shows editions of the ten-day version in 1565 and 1566, the thirteen-day variant also in 1566, and then thirteen printings of the twenty-day version, eleven of them by 1629, one in 1674, and a straggler in 1775. There may well have been others that did not find their way to U.S. libraries, and there is a 1571 French translation.

6-48. Paolo Rigoli, "Pietanze in tavola," in Paola Marini, ed., Cucine, cibi, e vini nell’ età di Andrea Palladio (XVI sec) (Vicenza, 1981), 27–28, cites G. A. Cibotto, Teatro veneto (Parma, 1960), 277, for this excerpt. The Venetian mariazo (maritaggio in Italian) was a type of popular farce, usually in rustic Padovan dialect, common in the repertoire of mountebanks and featuring the themes of love, matrimony, and domestic relations.

6-49. For a parallel conclusion, see Henderson and McManus, Half Humankind, 78–79.

6-50. Fonte, Il merito delle donne, 15–21. See Cox, "The Single Self," 529ff., for the suggestion that Venice’s elite women in fact experienced a growing threat to their status and identity in the late sixteenth century and that Il merito delle donne should be read at least in part as a response to that threat. In addition to the previously cited works of Adriana Chemello, Beatrice Collina, and Patricia Labalme, see Paola Malpezzi Price, "A Woman’s Discourse in the Italian Renaissance: Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne," Annali d’Italianistica 7 (1989): 165–81, which is insightful in analyzing the garden where this discourse proceeds; and Constance Jordan, "Renaissance Women Defending Women: Arguments against Patriarchy," in Maria Ornella Marotti, ed., Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present: Revising the Canon (University Park, 1996), 55–67, which includes a brief commentary on Marinella as well. The significance of the garden, as well as several other important themes, are considered in Stephen D. Kolsky, "Wells of Knowledge: Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne," Italianist 13 (1993): 57–96. These critics suggest that the protagonist in Il merito delle donne who is best seen as Fonte’s alter ego is Corinna, the young interlocutor determined never to marry, who carries the intellectual burden of the dialogue. I would offer a different reading: Fonte as the polemical feminist Leonora—whose widowhood thereby transfers to her husband the impending death Fonte feared in real life—and the educated Lucrezia Marinella (in real life aged 21 and unmarried in 1592), or someone like her, as Corinna. This reading is congruent with what I believe were the publication circumstances surrounding Fonte’s dialogue, to which I return in chapter 7.

Margaret Rosenthal, "Venetian Women Writers," 127, attributes the "I would rather drown" passage to the elder widow Adriana, rather than to Leonora, as I have it in my translation. Her version strikes me as contradictory to the sense of empowerment I believe Fonte intended in the text’s sequence of words, kisses, and libations. Cox’s translation, which became available only after I had done mine from the 1600 Italian original, shares my reading.

Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan, 74–75, also provides some acute observations on inheritance practices among Venetian women, although the tantalizing suggestion that women more often than men designated inheritors beyond the family, so as to incorporate personal friends, cannot be pursued directly since the relevant endnote (39, on pp. 292–93) refers to an entirely different subject. Even Chojnacki’s detailed studies, cited below, do not reveal a pattern of women making substantial bequests to friends. In any event, there is no hint in Fonte’s dialogue that Leonora’s acquaintances have any such hopes.

6-51. I want to thank this colleague, Martha Howell, for sharing with me early drafts of several chapters and the bibliography of her book, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1500 (Chicago, 1998).

6-52. For a general overview that is rather pessimistic in assessing the economic and social power of widows, see King, Women of the Renaissance, 56–62. By contrast, Diane Owen Hughes, "From Brideprice to Dowry in Mediterranean Europe," Journal of Family History 3 (fall 1978): 262–96, finds substantial legal protection for the control of wives and widows over their dowries (282). Nonetheless, daughters and younger brothers received less as property inheritance became more lineal in the sixteenth century, as shown in Diane Owen Hughes, "Representing the Family: Portraits and Purposes in Early Modern Italy," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (summer 1986): 7–38. Also offering a positive assessment of women’s ability to control property, in this instance in thirteenth-century Siena, is Eleanor S. Riemer, "Women, Dowries, and Capital Investment in Thirteenth-Century Siena," in Marion A. Kaplan, ed., The Marriage Bargain: Women and Dowries in European History (New York, 1985), 59–79.

Chojnacki, "The Power of Love," 136, details the formidable legal position of Venetian widows in the late fifteenth century. Further evidence on the power of Venetian widows, who appear prominently as testators and guarantors, may be found in the following essays by Stanley Chojnacki, "Dowries and Kinsmen in Early Renaissance Venice," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5 (spring 1975): 571–600; "Kinship Ties and Young Patricians in Fifteenth-Century Venice," Renaissance Quarterly 38 (summer 1985): 240–70; and "Patrician Women in Early Renaissance Venice," 185–93. Dennis Romano, "Charity and Community in Early Renaissance Venice," Journal of Urban History 11 (November 1984): 63–81, ascribes the dominance of women among testators to wills made by pregnant women who feared for their survival (p. 66 and note 10), whereas I would place more emphasis on widows, but either way the evidence documents women exercising meaningful control over assets. Chojnacki’s sample in the "Dowries and Kinsmen" essay shows 120 wills by wives and 76 by widows (p. 585). John C. Davis, A Venetian Family and Its Fortune 1500–1900: The Donà and the Conservation of Their Wealth (Philadelphia, 1975), 106–7, confirms that widows in this wealthy family sometimes left their dowry assets only to their daughters, presumably to offset the male linearity of their late husbands’ bequests.

David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, 1985), 154–55, explains the less favorable situation of a widow in Florence, where the law did not recognize her rights to conjugal property. Still, other evidence suggests that Florentine widows did cope; see David Herlihy, "Mapping Households in Medieval Italy," Catholic Historical Review 58 (1972): 17. Julius Kirshner, "Pursuing Honor While Avoiding Sin: The Monte Delle Doti of Florence," Quaderni di "Studi Senesi" 41 (1978): 7–8, esp. note 23, emphasizes limitations on widow’s rights. The Florentine scene is thoroughly explored in the collected essays of Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1991), 238–57, on widows. Also see his "Law, Death, and Heirs in the Renaissance: Repudiation of Inheritance in Florence," Renaissance Quarterly 45 (autumn 1992): 484–516, on problems with estates carrying substantial liabilities. See Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, 117–31, for the "Cruel Mother" essay, which uncompromisingly portrays male fights over female property. Ann Morton Crabb, "How Typical Was Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi of Fifteenth-Century Florentine Widows?" in Louise Mirrer, ed., Upon My Husband’s Death: Widows in the Literature and Histories of Medieval Europe (Ann Arbor, 1992), 47–68, presents a nuanced account of a patrician widow’s exercise of love and power. Recently available in English is the fine translation and commentary by Heather Gregory, ed. and trans., Selected Letters of Alessandra Strozzi: Bilingual Edition (Berkeley, 1997). Also see Francis Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai (Princeton, 1977), 107–8, on how women divided their mass offerings between natal and conjugal kin. Sharon T. Strocchia, "Remembering the Family: Women, Kin, and Commemorative Masses in Renaissance Florence," Renaissance Quarterly 42 (winter 1989): 649–50, finds that women were "autonomous agents" who used the structural complexity of their familial situations to make meaningful choices about which family members would execute their wills and upon whom their blessings would be bestowed. A subtle balance is struck in Elaine G. Rosenthal, "The Position of Women in Renaissance Florence: Neither Autonomy nor Subjection," in Peter Denley and Caroline Elam, eds., Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein (London, 1988), 369–81. On the plight of poor widows in Florence, where a welfare system encouraged them to care for their children, see Richard Trexler, "A Widows’ Asylum of the Renaissance: The Orbatello of Florence," in Peter N. Stearns, ed., Old Age in Preindustrial Society (New York, 1982), 119–49. On the rituals of widowhood, see Isabelle Chabot, "‘La sposa in nero.’ La ritualizzazione del lutto delle vedove fiorentine (Secoli XIV–XV)," Quaderni Storici 86 (1994): 421–62.

James S. Grubb, Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life in the Veneto (Baltimore, 1996), 91–93, documents a complex reality in which at least some widows seem to have chosen to exercise less than the full rights accorded to them by law and in the intentions of their dead husbands. Grubb draws careful comparisons with both Florence and Venice, but his most suggestive insights come from the provincial records he has explored, which reveal tensions among male siblings who grappled against their mothers to exercise financial independence.

For an earlier period in Genoa we know that husbands, who themselves frequently remarried if their wives died, sometimes placed severe penalties meant to discourage their widows from taking second husbands, a pattern that may have continued into the sixteenth century. See Steven Epstein, Wills and Wealth in Medieval Genoa, 1150–1250 (Cambridge, 1984), 108–117. Also see Diane Owen Hughes, "Struttura familiare e sistemi di successione ereditaria nei testamenti dell’ Europa medievale," Quaderni Storici 33 (1976): 929–52.

For England, see the excellent introduction in Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993), 73–81, 103–9. Also see Judith M. Bennett, "Public Power and Authority in the Medieval English Countryside," in Erler and Kowaleski, eds., Women and Power in the Middle Ages, 18–29, esp. 23, describing the empowerment of widowhood for women. Also on England, see Michael M. Sheehan, Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies, ed. James K. Farge (Toronto, 1996), especially the essay entitled, "The Wife of Bath and Her Four Sisters," 177–98; and see Sue Sheridan Walker, Wife and Widow in Medieval England (Ann Arbor, 1993), especially Barbara Hanawalt’s essay, 141–64, for its treatment of remarriage as an "option," albeit a circumscribed option. Also see Cicely Howell, "Peasant Inheritance Customs in the Midlands 1280–1700," in Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson, eds., Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800 (Cambridge, 1976), 141–45. Important essays by Barbara Hanawalt and by Judith Bennett on lower- and middle-class widows may be found in Mirrer, ed., Upon My Husband’s Death, 21–46, 69–114, respectively. Barbara Hanawalt, "La debolezza del lignaggio. Vedove, orfani e corporazioni nella Londra tardo medievale," Quaderni Storici 86 (1994): 463–86, shows that generous dower provisions and preferences for appointing widows as guardians for their children gave surviving wives considerable power and respect.

For France, Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, 1983), 30–31, provides an enlightening example or two on divergences between custom and contract for the Languedoc region. For comparative, theoretical perspectives on women and control over property, see Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (Cambridge, 1976). See his Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983), 60–68, for church teachings concerning widows. More generally, see the essays in Klapisch-Zuber, ed., Silences of the Middle Ages, esp. 308–11, of Claudia Opitz’s "Life in the Late Middle Ages." Turning now to Germany, for problems and restrictions faced by widows who might have carried on their husbands’ businesses, see Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals, in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, 1989), 49–54. For Poland, Hungary, and Russia, see various essays collected in Simonetta Cavaciocchi, La donna nell’economia secc. XIII–XVIII (Florence, 1990). The complexities of assessing remarriage strategies by widows are nicely introduced in David Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1990), 233–34, 243–44. On the increased rights of widows to conjugal property in a French-speaking, Reformation district of Switzerland in the sixteenth century, see Jeffrey R. Watt, The Making of Modern Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Neuchâtel, 1550–1800 (Ithaca, 1992), 111–12. On the continued authority of widows over children who received some (but almost never all) of the familial property at the time of their father’s death, see Sherrin Marshall Wyntjes, "Survivors and Status: Widowhood and Family in the Early Modern Netherlands," Journal of Family History 7 (winter 1982): 396–405. On variations in the circumstances of widowhood shaped by production forces, see Martha Howell, "Women, the Family Economy, and the Structures of Market Production in Cities of Northern Europe during the Late Middle Ages," in Hanawalt, Women and Work, 198–222.

On reasons that society, more precisely men, might restrict a widow’s freedom to remarry, see Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300–1840 (London, 1986), 231–37. Macfarlane then takes on the exceedingly difficult question of whether precipitous remarriage indicated lack of affection for the first spouse or perhaps exactly its opposite and concludes tentatively that the latter is more often true than the former. If this speculation has good foundation, then I suppose that the reluctance of widows to remarry should be taken as evidence that their first marriages were not all that happy, a notion fully in keeping with the thoughts of the ladies assembled in Moderata Fonte’s dialogue.

Finally, and yet further afield, historians might broaden their concerns to consider questions such as those raised by anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers in "La veuve andalouse," in Georges Ravis-Giordani, ed., Femmes et patrimoine dans les sociétés rurales de l"Europe Méditerranéene (Paris, 1987), who argues that widows might either assume the authority formerly held by their husbands or, especially if they were indigent, suffer a dangerous fall in status and come under suspicion of deviancy and witchcraft.

6-53. Samuel K. Cohn Jr., Death and Property in Siena, 1205–1800: Strategies for the Afterlife (Baltimore, 1988), 198–209. Also see his Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore, 1996), for insightful analysis of issues ranging from the sexual behavior of widows to their plight in the Tuscan countryside.

6-54. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families, 211–22, 217, for the quotation. Also see David Herlihy, "Vieillir à Florence au Quattrocento," Annales E.S.C. 24, no. 6 (1969): 1338–52. Anthony Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge, 1994), 217–21, draws important comparisons between the Catasti of 1427 and 1480, but the reported drop in widows over time cannot be taken at face value, because the latter census omitted very poor families, thereby excluding a disproportionate number of widows. Also see 245–46, on other evidence of the pressure on widowers to remarry.

6-55. Giulia Calvi, Il contratto morale: madri e figli nella Toscana moderna (Rome, 1994), 16–19; also see her "Diritti e legami. Madri, figli, stato in Toscana (XVI–XVIII secolo)," Quaderni Storici 86 (1994): 487–510.

6-56. Vincenzo Maggi, Un brieve trattato dell’ eccellentia delle donne, composto dal prestantissimo philosopho (il Maggio) & di latina lingua, in italiana tradotto. Vi si e poi aggiunto un’ essortatione a gli huomini perche non si lascino superar dalle donne, mostrandogli il gran danno che lor e per sopravenire (Brescia: Damiano Turlino, 1545), 47–48.

6-57. A. Burguière, "Réticences théoriques et intégration pratique du remariage dans la France d’Ancien Régime—dix-septième—dix-huitième siècles," in J. Dupâquier, E. Hélin, P. Laslett, M. Livi-Bacci, and S. Sogner, eds., Marriage and Remarriage in Populations of the Past (London, 1981), 41–48. In the same volume, see Louis Henry, "Le fonctionnement du marché matrimoniale," 191–98, for the preference of remarrying widowers for celibate women; Guy Carbourdin, "Le remariage en France sous l’Ancien Régime (seiziéme - dix-huitième siècles)," 273–86, for data on typical ages of widowhood; David Gaunt and Orvar Löfgren, "Remarriage in the Nordic Countries: The Cultural and Socio-economic Background," 49–60, for the emphasis on class, and Sune Åkerman, "The Importance of Remarriage in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," 163–75, for an opposing conclusion; Roger Schofield and Edward A. Wrigley, "Remarriage Intervals and the Effect of Marriage Order on Fertility," 211–28, for the English parish findings; and Arthur E. Imhof, "Remarriage in Rural Populations and in Urban Middle and Upper Strata in Germany from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century," 335–46. On the village of Abingdon, see Barbara J. Todd, "The Remarrying Widow: A Stereotype Reconsidered," in Mary Prior, ed., Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London, 1985), 54–92. Also see Alain Bideau, "A Demographic and Social Analysis of Widowhood and Remarriage: The Example of the Castellany of Thoissey-en-Dombes, 1670–1840," Journal of Family History 5 (spring 1980): 28–43, for more findings that widowers remarried sooner and more often than widows. On changes in residence by widows, see Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun, The Birth of Intimacy: Privacy and Domestic Life in Early Modern Paris, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Philadelphia, 1991), 70.

6-58. Chilton Powell, English Domestic Relations 1487–1653: A Study of Matrimony and Family Life in Theory and Practice as Revealed by the Literature, Law, and History of the Period (New York, 1917), 158, on the specific point, and generally, for his sensible treatment of English writers on wifely duties.

6-59. Cicero, On Old Age and On Friendship, ed. and trans. Harry Edinger (Indianapolis, 1967), 3–39, is the modern edition I used. Cicero’s writings were printed in several Italian translations in the sixteenth century.

6-60. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Charles Forster Smith (London, 1928), bk. 2, sec. 45, 341.

6-61. Agnelli, Amorevole aviso, 29.

6-62. Vives, De l’istitutione de la femina christiana, 184–95; Dolce, De gli ammaestramenti, 109–45. Selections from Vives, along with useful commentary, may be found in Joan Larsen Klein, Daughters, Wives, and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500–1640 (Urbana, 1992), 97–100, 119–22. See also Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, 127–29.

6-63. Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai (London, 1983), 94–95.

6-64. Select Letters of St. Jerome, trans. F. A. Wright (Cambridge, 1963 rpt. of 1933 ed.), 161, for letter 38 to Marcella; 233, for letter 54 to Furia. Jerome’s letters were published in a Tuscan translation in 1562, but this was a high-quality edition probably meant for reading by monks and nuns in their monasteries and convents rather than by laypersons in their homes.

6-65. Bernardo Trotto, Dialoghi del matrimonio, e vita vedovile (Turin: Francesco Dolce, 1578), 44–45; Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 154–60; and Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, 100, 108. The 1583 edition published with Gl’Heredi del Bevilacqua (the same firm that did Guasco’s letter to his daughter Lavinia) touts itself as greatly expanded and corrected.

6-66. Henderson and McManus, Half Humankind, 75–77, make parallel observations about the English scene.

6-67. Carlo Dionisotti, "L’Italia del Trissino," in Neri Pozza, ed., Convegno di studi su Giangiorgio Trissino (Vicenza, 1980), 11–22, agrees with the factual material presented here but reads the Epistola very differently than I do. He believes the text undermines the assertion by scholars who link Trissino’s Epistola with Margarita Pia Sanseverina’s decision to enter a convent. I see vindictive misogyny already in the Epistola, spurred by Margarita’s rejection and years before Bianca had eaten into his fortune. Moreover, I see further hostility to women with whom he has been intimate in his exclusion of Bianca from his I ritratti delle bellissime donne d’Italia (Rome: Ludovico Degli Arrighi, 1524). Again, Dionisotti takes a more defensive line and suggests that the admitted exclusion only means than everyone already knew how beautiful Bianca was; he further speculates that she may have been included in an earlier manuscript version. To his credit, Dionisotti at least confronts the unhappy details of Trissino’s life, which go unmentioned by virtually all other modern literary critics. For example, Beatrice Corrigan, ed., Two Renaissance Plays (Manchester, 1975), which includes the Sofonisba, tells only that he "survived two wives and all his children except a son by each marriage," and writes that "Trissino’s literary activity continued throughout his life and may have hastened his death" (9).

6-68. Giovan Giorgio Trissino, Epistola del Trissino de la vita, che dee tenere una donna vedova (Rome: Ludovico Vicentino [Degli Arrighi] e Lautizio Perugino, 1524), BNF shelf mark Palat. 2.10.2.33.II, where this work is bound together with I ritratti. To the best of my knowledge, neither work is available in a modern edition, nor are they included in the 1729 edition of Trissino’s works. Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 71–72, is the only modern literary critic who discusses the Epistola.

6-69. Giulio Cesare Cabei, Ornamenti della gentil donna vedova. Opera del signor Giulio Cesare Cabei, nella quale ordinatamente si tratta di tutte le cose necessarie allo stato vedovile, onde potrà farsi adorno d’ogni habito virtuoso, & honorato (Venice: Cristoforo Zanetti, 1574), 43–45, on external appearances. Cabei’s message, which runs to 133 dull octavo pages now available only in a few rare-book rooms, is amply captured in Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, 130–31.

6-70. Horatio Fusco Monfloreo D’Arimini, La vedova del Fusco (Rome: I Dorici, 1570), 30, for the quotation, and 31–39, for the characteristics of bad and good widows. I have been unable to locate any copies of this work in the United States or England. The shelf mark for the copy I used is BNF Palat. 7.5.1.59, and the author is cataloged as Fusco, Monflorio Orazio. Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, 367, lists the author as Fusco, Horatio. She recognized that Fusco’s voice is very different from the ones heard in other texts on widows but did not examine the content deeply or explore the possibility that the author was a woman. Other scholars (for example, Benson, Jordan, King, and Rabil) make absolutely no mention of Fusco, while Zarri et al. list the work but did not actually see it. The obscurity is undeserved.

My sense that the author is female, based on how the text reads, was reinforced when I subsequently learned that one Lucrezia Dorico was among the heirs who entered the Dorici publishing house, between 1566 and 1572, as "stampatrice alli Coronari." See Ascarelli and Menato, La tipografia del '500 in Italia, 107, and Francesco Barberi, "I Dorico, tipografi a Roma nel Cinquecento," La Bibliofilia 67, no. 2 (1965): 225.

6-71. Savonarola’s "lo amico de’ pazzi diventa simile a loro" is a lively rendition of the Vulgate original I assume he may have used: qui cum sapientibus graditur sapiens erit amicus stultorum efficientur similis.

6-72. Girolamo Savonarola, Libro della vita viduale. I used the edition in Mario Ferrara, ed., Edizione nazionale delle opere di Girolamo Savonarola: Operette spirituali, vol. 1 (Rome, 1973), 12–62. The publication history is on pages 299–317.

7-1. Fioravanti, Dello specchio di scientia universale, bk 1, chap. 25, 62. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, esp. 249–62, insightfully explores the issues raised by Fioravanti. Fioravanti was by no means unique in realizing the democratizing possibilities of the printing press; related ideas appear in Garzoni’s La piazza universale, in Mercurio’s epilogue to De gli errori popolari d’Italia, and in the prefaces to his La commare and to Marinello’s Delle medicine. Cox, "The Single Self," 524, suggests that Moderata Fonte in Il merito delle donne also intended to convey "that women might one day be in a position to engage in the same kind of professional activities as men."

7-2. Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (University Park, 1995), esp. 43–45, for the quoted material, and 158–162, for the editions and translations.

7-3. Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge, 1992), 70–113. Also see Valerio Vianello, Il "giardino" delle parole: Itinerari di scrittura e modelli letterari nel dialogo cinquecentesco (Rome, 1993), 11–12. On the "courtesy-manual" genre more generally, see the insightful essay by Daniela Romagnoli, "Cortesia nella città: Un modello complesso. Note sull’ etica medievale delle buone maniere," in her edited La città e la corte: Buone e cattive maniere tra medioevo ed età moderna (Milan, 1991), 21–70, as well as other contributions in this volume.

7-4. Jones, The Currency of Eros, 36.

7-5. See Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, 60–61, 104–5, on Dolce and the rise of a market for books.

7-6. On China, see Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford, 1994), 29. For an assertion that European publishers were ahead of their Chinese counterparts in exploiting the commercial and social possibilities of mass literacy, see Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York, 1983), 142.

7-7. Weaver, "Spiritual Fun," 173–76. More generally on cloistered women and artistic creativity, see the essays in Craig A. Monson, ed., The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (Ann Arbor, 1992). On the pressures against publication by nuns, see Francesca Medioli, L’ "Inferno monacale" di Arcangela Tarabotti (Turin, 1990), 159–62.

7-8. Luciana Borsetto, "Narciso ed Eco. Figura e scrittura nella lirica femminile del Cinquecento: Esemplificazioni ed appunti," in Zancan, ed., Nel cerchio della luna, 171–264, esp. 254–64, for the listing of published Italian female authors.

7-9. On memorial volumes specifically and also more generally on female authors, see Anne Jacobson Schutte, "Irene di Spilimbergo: The Image of a Creative Woman in Late Renaissance Italy," Renaissance Quarterly 44 (spring 1991): 42–61. Also see De Maio, Donna e Rinascimento, 147–83. An English translation of Tullia d’Aragona, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love (Chicago, 1997), with a good introduction by Rinaldina Russell, makes this work readily available; a translation of selected writings by Veronica Franco also is forthcoming. Also see Fiora A. Bassanese, "Selling the Self; or, the Epistolary Production of Renaissance Courtesans," in Marotti, ed., Italian Women Writers, 69–82.

7-10. On the literary activities of religious women who were not saints, see Katherine Gill, "Women and the Production of Religious Literature in the Vernacular, 1300–1500," in E. Ann Matter and John Coakley, eds., Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance (Philadelphia, 1994), 64–104. For the sixteenth century, see Elisabetta Graziosi, "Scrivere in convento: Devozione, encomio, persuasione nelle rime delle monache fra Cinque e Seicento," in Zarri, ed., Donna, disciplina, creanza cristiana, 303–31. In the same collection of essays, Tiziana Plebani, "Nascita e caratteristiche del pubblico di lettrici tra Medioevo e prima età Moderna," 27, makes the astute observation that women writers in the scribal culture generally "dictated" their works or wrote to family members, thus staying within the boundaries established for female discourse. On the significance of medieval women as owners of manuscript books, see Susan Groag Bell, "Medieval Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture," in Erler and Kowaleski, Women and Power in the Middle Ages, 149–87.

7-11. Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, ix–xlvi, contains an excellent introduction by Valeria Finucci and lists the only two works Fonte published thereafter in her lifetime, one in 1581, and the other in 1582. I believe La Resurrettione di Giesù Christo . . . , published in 1592, was posthumous.

7-12. Stephen D. Kolsky, "Wells of Knowledge: Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne," 92, note 20, catches this phrase but suggests that it may result from Doglioni’s revision, in 1600, of his original 1593 text. I am doubtful, if only because there are no other signs of attempts to bring the biographical material up-to-date, for example, to record Filippo’s death or even the progress of her children. Indeed, the very next lines treat Fonte’s devotion to housekeeping and child rearing with a tone of immediacy suggesting that her death was fresh. The addition to the published work of the brief pieces from two of Fonte’s children in my judgment only stresses her role as a mother, while leaving backstage the reality that she had also been a wife.

7-13. See earlier citations for bio-bibliographic details on Fonte, all of which rest primarily on Doglioni’s 1593 biography. Modern critics Chemello, Collina, Cox, Labalme, and Malpezzi Price all mention the delay in publication but either make little of it or else emphasize only the enhanced market for querelle des femmes literature in the wake of Passi’s misogynous I donneschi difetti. Cox, "The Single Self," 561–62, states that "the undesirability of marriage is a constant theme of Il merito delle donne . . . one of the elements in her argument [that] seems most clearly to derive from experience rather than literary tradition." Being in wholehearted agreement, I am emboldened to suggest that Messer Zorzi also got the message and did what he could to make sure the world did not find out how it was to be his wife. Elsewhere, Cox suggests that Zorzi was sympathetic to his wife’s writing (p. 4 of her translation, The Worth of Women), but I remain skeptical, at least once Fonte strayed from the subject of Christ’s resurrection.

Doglioni’s biographical sketch, written in 1593, may be found in the 1600 edition of Il merito delle donne (1–7) and in Cox’s translation (31–40). Collina, "Moderata Fonte e Il merito delle donne," 142–43, highlights the importance of the twin publications by Marinella and Fonte but does not pursue reasons for the delay in publishing Il merito delle donne.

7-14. Bill Gates, with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson, The Road Ahead, rev. ed. (New York, 1996).