Accounting for Affection: Mothering and Politics in Early Modern Rome by Caroline Castiglione (review)

On the whole, Caroline Castiglione’s Accounting for Affection is innovative and important. She examines five aristocratic Roman mothers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: Anna Colonna Barberini (1601–58); Olimpia Giustiniani Barberini (Anna’s daughter-in-law, 1641–1729); Eleonora Boncompagni Borghese (1642–95); Ippolita Ludovisi Boncompagni (Eleonora’s sister-in-law, 1663–1733); and Teresa Boncompagni Ludovisi Barberini (Ippolita’s daughter, 1672–1744). In her introduction, the author advances two arguments. First, she asserts that these women were examples of an early modern Italian (and particularly Roman) aristocratic type. The mater litigans (familial advocate) worked in “family meetings or congregazioni, in consultation with agreed-upon mediators, ... by epistolary negotiations with the contesting party” (214) and—seldom and reluctantly, if all else failed—in the courts to defend herself and her children against the “absolute power” of primogenitors. Second, she claims that these wives loved their husbands.

The second contention amounts to a throw-away observation. With all quotations translated into English and no attempt to analyze words like affection (affetto) and love (amore) as used in various early modern contexts, it cannot possibly become a provable thesis. Making it one, an arduous endeavor, would require an entirely different sort of study.

In contrast, Castiglione’s first argument emerges as a well-developed thesis, abundantly supported by evidence drawn mainly from the women’s correspondence. Building on previous scholarly work, including her own, she amplifies the picture of the noble Roman casa delineated from the 1990s on by Renato Ago and Marina D’Amelia: an extended family captained by cardinal members. Women who married into case (not mere “passing guests,” Christiane Klapisch-Zuber’s term for elite Florentine wives in earlier centuries) fulfilled essential functions. Their dowries shored up crumbling financial foundations, a grave problem for practically all noble families in this period. The sons they bore—provided that they survived infancy and early childhood—enabled the survival of the house, often in jeopardy. In an era when primogeniture had become universal in the uppermost sectors of the population, passing the lion’s share of the patrimony to a single male heir necessitated eliminating as many of his siblings as possible from the inheritance stream. On the female side, thrusting most or even all of his sisters into religious life, thus obviating the necessity of costly marital dowries and any subsequent claims on the patrimony, constituted the simplest solution. Because her cases do not require it, Castiglione does not pay attention to the fact that, especially in Rome, directing “surplus” brothers into the secular clergy provided the additional advantage of establishing links between the casa and the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

The Church had long proclaimed that free choice was the essential precondition of both marriage and religious life. Most fathers and other male relatives, particularly among the elite, ignored this proviso. On the contrary, Castiglione’s familial advocates upheld it. These mothers insisted on the right of their children, when they were mature enough to make an informed choice, to decide for themselves whether to enter religion or marry. In advancing their forward-looking views, understandably unpopular among males in the case of which they were subordinate members, women had to tread a fine line. On the one hand, they needed to express their views clearly, persuasively, and often. On the other, they had to maintain appropriate deference so that their arguments would not be scornfully and summarily dismissed.

Surviving sources do not permit Castiglione to reconstruct what transpired in oral exchanges, nor have the several archives she has consulted yielded a complete two-way correspondence. She has plausibly reconstructed the tug of war between familial advocates and their antagonists from the women’s letters, notably in two dramatic confrontations concerning the destiny of daughters. Here is one of them, recounted in chapter 4. After the demise of two short-lived sons, Ippolita Ludovisi Boncompagni gave birth to six daughters. Chagrined by...