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Educated women, writers, poets, and orators, became a feature of the Italian cultural landscape in the 15th century, a phenomenon which was recognized Europe-wide as an aspect of the Italian Renaissance. This chapter examines the extreme variability of women's access to education between one state and another. It discusses the social context of Renaissance humanism, and the barriers it offered to women's participation. Women and scribal publication are considered. The chapter includes separate sections on women and the universities, particularly the medical school of Salerno and the law school of Bologna, particularly Novella d'Andrea; women and humanism, Latin as an aspect of demonstrating fitness to rule and woman as Latin orators; the Nogarola family and its connections among male and female Latinists in the Veneto, particularly Isotta Nogarola; Costanza Varano and educated women connected with Urbino; Veronica Gàmbara, the Gonzagas, and the Sforzas. Absence of evidence for Latin verse production in 15th-century convents is pointed out.

This chapter explores what clothing represented in early modern Italy, why it was that women were overwhelmingly the target of clothing laws, and why the laws were expressed, at times, with such misogynist venom. It examines further efforts of women to mitigate these lawsthat further curtailed an already highly regulated and restricted life. Before exploring issues of gender in relation to clothing, this chapter considers clothing in general and what it signified in medieval and Renaissance Italy. It explains that the great increase in legislation against women was brought by concerns such as societal structures and theoretical underpinnings. It adds that Renaissance Italy was a patriarchal society in which women were legally, politically, economically, and socially excluded from the public sphere.

The foundation myths of late medieval cities and states were never simply about origins: they were above all about destiny. In the fifteenth century, the combination of humanist methods and models, newly available source materials, and changing domestic and international political circumstances provided the impetus for the continued development of these myths as well as the creation of new ones. Yet even in Italy, not all eyes looked to Rome. The Carolingian foundation myth of Florence, in which Charlemagne’s supposed rebuilding of the city was used to explain the pro-French orientation of the commune and its Guelph elite, is perhaps the most well-known of these myths, but also an example of an Italian city defining itself in relation to a foreign power. This essay focuses on another element of Quattrocento myth-making culture: the treatment of northern Italy’s Gaulish past in the writings of some of the region’s humanists (e.g. (Antonio Cornazzano and Alberto Cattaneo), and the role of these writings in Franco-Milanese relations before and during the outbreak of the Italian Wars and the French domination of Milan.

Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries some of the most conspicuous remains of antiquity in the Italian peninsula were found in the Kingdom of Naples. These included not only Roman ruins, but also pre-Roman ones, such as Greek and, Italic relics, which testified to the diverse and very ancient origins of many of its centres. Magnificent ruins, such as temples or tombs, marked the landscape of cities and countryside and were regarded as traces of a glorious local past. Ancient remains were, furthermore, constantly unearthed across southern Italy either through chance findings or as a result of purposeful excavation and antiquarian research. Examining literary and artistic evidence, this essay considers local antiquity as a central theme of Southern Italian antiquarianism, for example in Capua and Venosa. It will also question the nature and perception of a diverse body of Southern Italian ‘antiquities’, which could include medieval monuments, imported classical works, or forgeries.

This chapter discusses how men of the town of Borgo San Sepolcro tackle directly the question of self-fashioning by carefully describing the universe of available roles and options through which an ordinary citizen of the town might establish an identity for himself. A method is proposed that is apt for delineating the Italian Renaissance form of identity. An examination of the myths and symbols of the town of Borgo San Sepolcro is also presented. The revival of knowledge of classical culture provided a second program for life that was newly available for the men of Borgo San Sepolcro in the Quattrocento. It may be argued that most men in provincial Renaissance Italy passively accepted the family's religion, occupational traditions, and town loyalty. Men and women of the Renaissance possessed a wide variety of choices whose combinations conferred specific identities.

This chapter explores anticlerical verse in the fifteenth century, which appears to have been written principally by Florentines. Since the great wealth of early Renaissance manuscripts reveals that Italian poetry circulated and was often anthologized, writers who took the trouble to compose anticlerical verse clearly desired to convey their views to a select public. In the course of the fifteenth century, the power of the papal monarchy expanded dramatically. The main voice of criticism on the social history of anticlericalism in Renaissance Italy belonged to well-placed, educated men. The poems cited often pivot on accusations that seem to be commonplaces; and the metaphor of prostituting the church had biblical roots, to be sure. Literary anticlericalism appears to have been Tuscan preeminently.

The importance of the Italian Renaissance home as a fundamental unit of society and a dynamic site of cultural activity is often acknowledged. This book turns instead to consider the religious dimensions of domestic life. The introduction discusses the pre-existing scholarship out of which The Sacred Home has grown, paying particular attention to the divergent historiographies relating to the early modern household in Protestant and Catholic Europe. Here the rationale behind the chronological and geographical framework of the book is explained, and the nature of its interdisciplinary approach is outlined. By drawing on a wide range of textual, visual, and material sources, The Sacred Home explores domestic devotion across the spectrum of Italian Renaissance society.

As was the case with other politically significant unions, the early years of the marriage of Francesco Gonzaga and Isabella d’Este were dominated by the expectation that the couple would quickly produce an heir. While this pressure was most acutely felt by Isabella, the lack of a son represented a significant source of worry for a ruler who sought to secure a dynastic legacy. This chapter explores the struggle of a newly married couple to develop trust and to become sexually comfortable with each other, a process that proved far from straightforward. Francesco was known for his ribald humour and frank sexuality, while Isabella married with little awareness of what to expect in relation to her duty to bear a son. By piecing together evidence relating to their early relationship, the chapter traces the emotional discomfort the marital partners experienced in the initial stage of their union, the lengths to which Isabella’s parents and members of her own household went to resolve them, and the public scrutiny to which the marchioness was subject in the lead up to the birth of her first child.

Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga together navigated the highs and many lows of the first conflicts of the Italian Wars, their cooperation underpinned by a mutual devotion to their children and concern for the future of the Gonzaga regime. But this study has shown that it was difficult to agree about the terms of that collaboration, a situation that the richly nuanced sources permit us to understand within the terms of premodernity. The couple’s acrimonious epistolary negotiations during the last years of their union over the extent to which the conventional marital hierarchy should be observed provide evidence of the powerful influence of gendered norms, but also of how prescriptive social rules might at times be modified or ignored by individuals when pragmatic issues overtook ideology.

While historians have acknowledged the importance of dynastic marriages to political strategy and diplomacy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, little attention has been paid to how individuals were readied for such marriages by their families. The Este-Gonzaga match was a neighbourly one. The close proximity of Ferrara and Mantua and a decade-long betrothal permitted the two families to try to establish familiarity between their betrothed children in order to reap the political fruits that a harmonious marital relationship would provide. This chapter provides an insight into what contemporaries believed to be the foundations for a successful marriage and uncovers the very different journeys towards wedlock of a young, strictly cloistered, aristocratic girl and a mature bachelor prince.

This chapter examines the tensions and strategies at play in the last years of the Gonzaga-Este marriage, when Isabella demanded greater physical mobility and diplomatic autonomy on the grounds that she had proved both her political competence and utter loyalty to Gonzaga interests. But as his illness worsened and undermined the physical virility on which his vision of masculinity so relied, Francesco’s conviction in his status as the dominant partner found expression in a greater desire to be seen publicly to command a wife who had acquired a reputation for wilfulness. The acrimonious divergence of views between the pair about how their marriage ought to work in its mature phase, documented in their correspondence and that of Isabella’s secretary, Capilupi, is analysed here alongside episodes of reconciliation, in which Isabella and Francesco recognized the bonds that still united them. The evidence reveals the emotional complexities of a relationship in its third decade.

An earlier generation of historians claimed that medieval and early modern parents often withheld love from their children for fear they would die, or treated those who survived as ‘little adults’. Recent research has shown that many mothers and fathers formed close bonds with their offspring, whom they cared for in ways that were entirely age appropriate. The correspondence of Isabella and Francesco shows that children could bring parents closer together and improve a relationship that was initially emotionally quite distant. Through close analysis of archival documentation, this chapter explores how the Gonzaga children were monitored and guided through their infancy and childhood by parents who reacted with delight to their developmental milestones, but also made sure they were rigorously prepared for the dynastic roles they would assume in adulthood.

Sacramental confession kept a place for ‘counsel’, whereby the priest, before absolving the penitent, advised him or her on the moral aspects of the acts confessed, and might use the occasion to give instruction in moral theology. Because the whole procedure was secret, historians cannot know much about how this part of it worked in practice. But deductions are possible, and they are confirmed by the scraps of evidence we have. A priest, after all, might have to produce at almost no notice ‘tailor-made’ advice for penitents he hardly knew. Especially in the better-educated societies of the late Middle Ages, misjudgements were possible, and may have contributed to a crescendo of unease about confession which ‘justification by faith’, as a doctrine, was well-calculated to soothe.