Refiguring woman: perspectives on gender and the Italian Renaissance (review)

Reviews 141 Migiel, Marilyn and Juliana ASSdkdmgnSchiesari, eds, Refiguring woman: perspectives on gender and the Italian Renaissance, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1991; cloth/paper; pp. x, 285; 35 illustrations; R.R.P. US$36.95 (cloth), $12.95 (paper) + 1 0 % overseas. The papers collected in this volume stem from a symposium held at Cornell University in 1988 to reconsider gender in the context of the Italian Renaissance, the bastion of humanist thought and discourse. While the essays in the volume are clustered under three headings, The heumeneutics of gender, The political economy of gender, and Women and the canon; as in all such collections, the papers vary widely in their subject matter, in this case from the patriarchal refiguration of the image of Judith in art and literature over the centuries to studies of the many and varying relationships between gender, ideology, and praxis in the particular contexts of Renaissance Florence, Rome, and Venice. As the editors point out in their Introduction, reading the Renaissance with a sensitivity to the exclusion of women has led to the overturning of a host of assumptions about that period and revealed the implicit and explicit misogyny of many Renaissance social and discursive practices. The motivation behind this volume is the belief that what is now needed are the perspectives of gender studies on the construction of the political, cultural and textual systems that held sway in Renaissance Italy and on the construction of difference and the figure(s) of woman. For the historian, the most interesting essays are still those that focus on women in the historical context and that deal with the relationship of women to the Renaissance literary canon. In his '"The most serious duty": motherhood, gender and patrician culture in Renaissance Venice', Stanley Chojnacki examines the roles of patrician men and women in family marriage strategies as a means of exploring the degree of conespondence between such roles and the gender principles of Venetian society, patriarchal, patrilineal and patrimonial. While formally and prescriptively, it was men who were responsible for the family strategies that reinforced social status, wealth and political power, Chojnacki argues that in the course of the fifteenth century, women came to play an increasing role in these strategies. The growing class exclusivity of the patriciate gave a new importance to the antecedents of wives and to their kin networks. The growth in the size of dowries also enhanced the opportunities for women to have a voice in determining the future destinies of their children. Chojnacki has, of course, to acknowledge what is always the stumbling block for those wishing to uncover and emphasise the opportunities for independent action and power that did exist for women in heavily patriarchal societies, that is, the distinction between power and authority. The discursive framework of Venetian society accorded authority only to men, authority that no amount of 142 Reviews female influence, wealth, and power could dislodge. What work such as Chojnacki*s does istoreveal the asymmetry between principle and practice. If Chojnacki finds that, at least in practice, Venetian patrician w o m e n had more opportunities for influence and action as the fifteenth century progressed, Sharon Strocchia proposes the reverse position for their Florentine sisters. In her essay, 'Funerals and the politics of gender in early Renaissance Florence', she argues that death and mourning rites were modified in the early fifteenth century, modifications that she attaches to Gene Brucker's model of the transformation of the Florentine political world from corporate to elitist and to the development of civic humanism. These developments reinforced and extended patriarchal principles and practices and served to further marginalise women. In the late fourteenth century the overwhelming concern in funerary rites was the establishment of status through showy and conspicuous display. Women's funerals as well as those of men offered opportunities to establish status. Showy funerals tended to be restricted to adults, and whereas women attained adult status on marriage and thus at a young age, men's emancipation usually had to await the attainment of a recognised political and economic profile. Thus i t was likely that married women who died in their early twenties might be more honoured...