Cherchez la Femme: Finding Renaissance Women’s Lives in Italian Archives

I have been cognizant of the existence of archives from around the age of four, when Olwen Hufton, my historian mother, would combine research with our family summer holiday. She selected French towns that had depart-mental archives where she could examine tax and indigent records, subsequently compiled and analyzed in her Poor of Eighteenth-Century France (Clarendon Press, 1974). Such towns also tended to have a church of sufficient architectural interest to please my father, and for me, a piscine municipale. My father and I would visit the church and the pool, and in the afternoon we would collect her in front of the archives, invariably 19th-century edifices adorned with big doors and brass plaques. To me, whose worldview had been limited to home-counties Maidenhead, these were clearly very grand and important buildings, obviously vessels for exciting activities. Why couldn’t I go in with her, I wanted to know. Because, came the reply, children aren’t allowed, only grown ups go into archives. That interdict, along with the imposing façade, was all it took to cement firmly in my mind the idea of the archive as a place of infinite glamour and allure. I promptly determined that visiting archives was yet another exclusive activity of adult life in which I, too, would one day participate, like staying up late to watch Kojak.

Thirty-five years later, Kojak is off the air. But I have kept good on the other resolution made by my four-year-old self; I have spent a great deal of time in archives, burrowing through 16th-century documents in Italy, in contrast to my mother’s pre-Revolutionary French ones. If the archives are not quite replete with the kind of glamorous mystique I once imagined was the province of the adult world, they have offered up something equally intriguing: a world of Italian Renaissance women, all willing, with some coaxing and perseverance, to come back to life by way of dusty documents. As valuable a resource as the archive is to any number of historical disciplines, it takes on an especial preciousness for those scholars involved in any aspect of gender history. In reconstructing the lives of women in early modern Europe—their tastes, activities, ambitions—one can rarely find what one is looking for in printed sources, primary or secondary. Instead, such undertakings require the need to find the original manuscripts, in which threads, fragments, and sometimes entire narratives of female existence are contained in letters, wills, account books, and property inventories.

All the same, archival retrieval is never as easy as one optimistically imagines it is going to be. In 1994 I embarked upon the primary research of a Ph.D. dissertation dedicated in large part to exploring the relationship between the 16th-century Bolognese painter Lavinia Fontana—whom I identified as Western Europe’s first truly professional woman artist—and her female patrons. I had learned that the Archivio di Stato in Bologna contained papers belonging to the city’s noble families, and I rather naively imagined I would find contracts with the artist and inventories containing precisely referenced paintings. However, I soon discovered that one of the idiosyncrasies of Bologna’s archive was that registers of documents listed under one family name might turn out to be for another one entirely, the result of familial and business mergers and acquisitions in subsequent centuries. Moreover, Bolognese families seemed profoundly uninterested in preserving their cultural patrimony; I would eagerly thumb through a volume claiming it contained “inventories,” only to be presented with detailed records of cherry tree holdings planted in the fertile Emilian countryside surrounding Bologna.

From Laura M. Ragg, The Women Artists of Bologna (Methuen and Company, 1907).

Two weeks of plowing what was from my perspective fallow ground might have convinced me that this was the wrong approach to conducting research for an art history Ph.D. Perhaps I should turn away from the archive, concentrating instead on perusing secondary sources and visual and iconographic analysis? But there was a matter of family pride...