Gender, Honor, and Charity in Late Renaissance Florence (review)

Philip Gavitt here aims to recast how studies of early modern charitable and religious enclosed institutions (e.g., orphanages, women’s shelters, convents) have framed the problem of gender. He argues that the underlying issue is not the ideology of gender, but rather the ideology of lineage. Lineage subsumes gender, and historians must set both into the broader context of discipline as framed within the humanist and catholic reform movements. “[T]he relationship of discipline to charity is at the center of this book” (p. 3). This is not Foucault’s discipline as a social and institutional order encroaching on the prerogatives and behavior of individuals, but Norbert Elias’s civilizing process in which a discipline of perfectibility links the individual to family and state. The order of the household is the order of the state, and discipline and education are a combined project of church and state.

The core of the book is a study of Florence’s foundling home of the Innocenti, which Gavitt first explored in Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence (1990). While that volume discussed the Innocenti as a republican and communal-guild institution, this study moves the examination forward into the period of early modern state formation. Gavitt uses archival sources to explain the operation of the Innocenti and of a series of other enclosures for abandoned women, and sets this into the context of more abstract and prescriptive sources that spell out lineage ideology. He focuses on how competition for patrilineal inheritances limited the sphere allowed to women (and also to some extent men), such that Tuscany became populated with self-enclosed charitable and conventual communities that reflected a monastic vision of discipline.

Dowries and the laws framing them both supported and undermined systems of patrilineal inheritance. Gavitt argues that the demands of dowry drove the abandonment of legitimate and illegitimate children in charitable institutions. There humanist assumptions about family life, gender, and lineage were introduced via the pedagogy used when training boys in particular. A vocational curriculum prepared boys for paid work and integrated them into it. Gavitt moves between prescription and actual life when dealing with the lives of boys and families and includes a compelling exchange of letters on a boy who is misbehaving, giving us the correspondence between father and prior, and also between father and son. He also expands on two particular Innocenti wards. Andrea Nacchianti, son of a deceased Innocenti notary, arrives at age seven, gets an excellent education from the prior, and becomes a Dominican friar, later rising to the office of bishop thanks to the pope’s patronage. He’s a restless character, expelled from the Dominicans, suspected of Lutheran sympathies, and controversial in later life. Costantino Anti-nori, an illegitimate child from a storied family, overcomes a rough childhood and youth and also rises to positions of great importance, helping Grand Duke Francesco de Medici drain funds from the Innocenti before going on to get a doctorate in theology. These two alumni disrupt our expectations of what would happen at the Innocenti and illustrate how thoroughly the Innocenti is drawn into Florentine social and political life.

With regard to girls, Gavitt first looks at and then beyond the Innocenti to a few other charitable enclosures for women in sixteenth century Florence in order to explore Florentine perceptions of marginality and the material realities of those marginalized women who “represented a problematic that drove straight to the heart of the central values and gender constructs of premodern Mediterranean systems of honor and shame” (p. 160). We move again into the Innocenti and learn more of the work that the girls perform there in internal workspaces given over to tapestry production and also as staff. While this section works with a range of primary sources, the following section on four other charitable enclosures for abandoned girls, repentant prostitutes, and unhappily married women works primarily with statutes, which Gavitt himself acknowledges is problematic.

Gavitt focuses particularly...