The Renaissance Man and His Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Florence, 1300-1600 (review)

The Renaissance Man and His Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Florence, 1300-1600. By Louis Haas (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1998) 319 pp. $49.95

Resting on literary sources, ricordi and ricordanze, this book promises an examination of the attitudes and practices of fathers from Florence's elite vis-à-vis their children. The title, however, is misleading; some of Haas' more cogent points do not involve fathers at all. An informative chapter on the birth process, for instance, relies on ricordanze kept by fathers, but reveals more about mothers and midwives.

This book has several strengths. Haas reviews the historiography of Renaissance childhood, pointing out the considerable revision in the field since the publication, forty years ago, of Philippe Ariès' Centuries of Childhood (Paris, 1960). He offers a sharp critique of intemperate historical psychoanalyzing of childhood--for example, Stone's suggestion that swaddling created emotionally warped children. ¹ The author makes sensitive use of ricordanze, many of them unpublished, from the Florentine archives. He presents fascinating evidence that adoption was not as rare as previously thought; given the acceptance of adoption in ancient Rome, one wonders why humanists did not propagate the practice. He also offers the provocative idea that humanist critiques of wetnursing were sexist, since a mother who sent her child to a balia was dangerously "free" (91).

Yet, some of what Haas seeks to prove is, literally, already textbook knowledge. A typical recent Western civilization text notes that, in the late Middle Ages, parents loved their children and mourned them if they died. Haas takes pains to establish these same points. ² Herlihy showed a connection between the rising interest, during the twelfth century, in Jesus' childhood and a more tender view of children in general, but Haas does not explore whether family life became idealized as a result of the rise of the cult of Mary and her mother, St. Anne. ³ Nor is there commentary on what effect the many depictions of Mary breastfeeding her infant may have had on elite Florentines' attitudes toward maternal breastfeeding versus wetnursing. Haas places significance on the fact that fathers kept "meticulous records" about wetnurses, but writers of ricordanze kept meticulous records of all income and outgo, from real-estate transactions to the cost of weekly shaves (95). The book has, unfortunately, no illustrations.

Haas quotes Alberti's character Gianotto as telling his wife that their children would belong to both of them equally (22). ⁴ Legal records suggest that this joint relation was sometimes true only as long as the marriage lasted. By the mid-sixteenth century, courts heard many bitter complaints on behalf of father- or motherless children that basic sustenance was being denied them by their surviving parent or by his or her kin. Haas himself cites examples of the kin of deceased fathers removing sons from their mothers. In pointing out that Francesco and Margherita Datini were criticized for their childlessness, he does not prove whether they had failed in the "civic duty" of having children or whether Francesco's lack of children by his wife threw his virility into question (29).

A question never raised in this book concerns its use of humanist sources. As Brown, among others, has shown, humanist rhetoric had many purposes, including the attempted restraint of the behavior of those whom it extolled by holding them to classical models. ⁵ Moreover, Haas, though not unreasonably limiting his study to the Florentine "elite," needs to define this "elite." Is he using intellectual, economic, political, or other criteria, or are "elite" fathers those for whom he could find source material? Finally, though this work covers three centuries, it does not address whether attitudes toward childhood changed in response to, say, the political upheavals of the 1490s, or the relative stability of the reign of Cosimo I.

The book rests on...