Monday, April 7, 2008
Monday, April 7, 2008
We look here at a number of texts concerning private life, although marriage negotiations are hardly an exclusive property of the private realm. The Diary of Gregorio Dati, a Florentine merchant, is one of our best opportunities to get a glimpse of what life might have been like for a prosperous family of the middle class in the Renaissance. King's textbook can acquaint us with statistics about maternal and infant mortality, but this first-hand account brings a whole new dimension to our understanding.
The following comments and questions are for your written homework. The presenters will be talking about the Dati readings and marriage negotiations, which you should all review as well.
Machiavelli, in addition to being a political philosopher, was also a playwright. La Mandragola is the story of a love potion made from the roots of a mandrake, believed to have aphrodisiac properties. Here we have a young wife who cannot get pregnant, and the plot to correct the problem. Question 1: What can you discern about the attitudes and beliefs of the characters in the small segments we have here?
Castiglione, a contemporary of Machiavelli, is famous for a work entitled The Book of the Courtier, in which he sketches the portrait of an ideal courtier through the vehicle of a conversation among a group of noblemen in Urbino. The two who engage in this selection are Il Magnifico, a champion of women, and Gasparo, who takes on the role of the misogynist of the company. During this time there was a lively literary quarrel over the nature of women, in which we find displayed the range of beliefs that Renaissance intellectuals held about women. Are they capable of virtue, intellectual challenges, and other accomplishments, or are they truly the weaker sex, fit only for childbearing and in need of rigorous supervision by their betters? The discussion in this work has to do with noblewomen in the context of court life, in contrast with the female humanists you have already encountered, whose background is more of the middle class. Question 2: According to Magnifico, what potential is there for women to express themselves, develop their talents, and contribute to a court that values excellence? What can you gather about Gasparo's opinion on the subject?
Finally, I have some review questions (not part of the homework) for the King reading:
Presenter Questions:
First, try to unravel from the two excerpts from Dati's diary, one on his marriages and the other on his children, a timeline for Dati's adult life. How long did his marriages last? How often were his wives pregnant? What seems to have been the long-term survival rate of his children? You should also look for evidence of Dati's attitude toward his life's experiences. Where do personal reflections work their way into what is otherwise a rather bland chronology? What indications do we have of how Dati made sense of the mortality of his family members? And is there any evidence of King's contention that legitimate infants were welcomed into their households?
Next, look at the three accounts of marriage negotiations. What are the concerns of the men organizing the marriage contracts, and what is the evidence for those concerns? What kind of role did women seem to play in the negotiations for marriage recorded here? Do their wishes figure into the proceedings at all? What seem to be the criteria for a good match?
There are two other documents in this section, one concerning illegitimacy and the other describing a marriage gone bad. What is the nature of the narrator's relationship to the illegitimate Agnola, and what are his motives for undertaking to care for her? What challenges does this relationship present for him? Why does he have her become a tertiary at the end of the account? In the second, tragic case, what do we learn about the intersections of social class, family, and the city government?
Laurel Carrington carringt@stolaf.edu
Most recent update: April 4, 2008