Love and Death in Renaissance Italy
Family relations were a rough game in Renaissance Italy: a man pressures his dying sister to exclude other siblings from her will; a mother participates in the seduction of her daughters; a suitor rapes a girl to increase his chances of marrying her. Cohen tells six such fascinating stories, pulled from court cases in the State Archive in Rome. The attitudes revealed about love, marriage, family and feelings are strikingly different both from modern concepts and from modern misconceptions of Renaissance love. Cohen, a historian at York University (Daily Life in Renaissance Italy), sorts through these often painful dramas, in particular exploring women’s agency (it’s substantial) and social relations across classes. He makes sense of some oddities by suggesting how people fit their lives into expected conventions: testifying under torture gives a woman’s testimony authority; sex is judged rape by neighbors because they heard the girl cry out; a mother hopes to win a marriage portion for her daughter by allowing a social superior to take the daughter as a mistress. While Cohen’s passion for the subject is apparent, he inserts his own voice and annotations a bit too often. But the stories speak out from the page: while historians may struggle with the pitfalls of microhistory, readers can happily immerse themselves in the unfolding dramas. 11 b&w; photos, 1 map.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.