Letters to Her Sons (1447–1470) by Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi (review)

This excellent book contains a very full introduction, as well as the seventy-three surviving letters of Alessandra Strozzi, with notes for each letter, ten photographs illustrating the context of the letters, an up-to-date bibliography, and an index. The cover illustration appropriately depicts the biblical boy Tobias being escorted home by the angel Raphael, from a painting by Verrocchio's workshop.

In the introduction, Judith Bryce considers female literacy, adding to her previous investigation of the subject in At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy, ed. Stephen Milner (2005). Alessandra Strozzi was literate to a moderate degree, and she penned her own letters, except for a few that she had her youngest son Matteo write, to prepare him for a merchant career. Bryce points out that female education is difficult to trace, as it was mostly informal, but she concludes that it was more widespread than sometimes thought. The introduction also reviews Alessandra's life, shaped by her early widowhood, by her position as a member of the Florentine mercantile elite, and by political difficulties with the Medici, who had exiled her husband. It looks at the genre of the familiar letter, to which Alessandra's letters belong, a genre that had practical rather than literary concerns.

All of Alessandra's letters, save one, are addressed to her sons; her role as mother pervades them. They reveal much about her maternal concerns, but little about the rest of her life, although they make clear that she had a wide network of acquaintances, which she used to help her children. The focus on her sons makes it hard to know about her relationship with her daughters, who lived nearby while her sons lived far away. There is no doubt that her view of the family was patrilineal, but the letters show that the daughters were also an important part of her everyday life.

These letters, written over twenty-three years, cover several periods in the family's life. Those written between 1447 and 1453 come from the years when Alessandra was establishing in the world her five children, then aged eleven to nineteen. She was finding husbands for her two daughters, Caterina and Alessandra, and arranging careers for her three sons, Filippo, Lorenzo, and Matteo, in the overseas merchant banking businesses of her husband's cousins. She sent her youngest son Matteo, the last remaining at home, to Naples with great reluctance. After a gap of five years, the letters resume and continue from 1458 to 1464. They reveal Lorenzo's temporary misbehavior in Bruges, Filippo's increasing success in Naples, and, one of the saddest events of Alessandra's life, the death of Matteo in Naples, aged twenty-three, which elicited her most heart-felt passages.

By 1464 Filippo and Lorenzo were running a business together, becoming very rich as bankers at the court of Naples. Alessandra had two main concerns: finding Florentine wives for them and improving their political situation in Florence. The Medici regime had in 1458 extended the earlier bans of 1434 to the next generation, including Filippo and Lorenzo, but after the death of Cosimo de' Medici there was hope the sentences of exile would be repealed.

The political ramifications of Alessandra's letters from 1464–66 caught the attention of historians of Florence, starting with the transcription that Cesare Guasti published in the nineteenth century, a transcription that still stands up well and forms the basis of Bryce's translation. Alessandra provides many insights into Florentine society at a time when the Medici government was under threat. Women were formally outside the political system, but much went on behind the scenes. Alessandra's observations became part of the general Florentine history of the era, and are of value to those not specifically interested in women's history. As Alessandra herself said, she only...