Honor and Gender in the Streets of Early Modern Rome

Abstract

Honor and Gender in the Streets of Early Modern Rome Historians of early modern Europe have recently turned to the notion of honor to help account for the mentality and behavior of ordinary people. Honor has long been given a major role in the moral codes of medieval chivalry and later in those of aristocracies which carried on the ideal of knightly virtue. Scholars-including Davis, Burke, Amelang, and Farrhave described how honor also shaped lives well down the social scale, among aspiring bourgeois and even artisans.1 This article elaborates upon this discussion of honor among common citydwellers and extends it to the lives even of the socially marginal, especially the prostitutes and the rootless bachelors who patronized them. It focuses on house-scorning, a form of ritualized revenge practiced in late sixteenthand early seventeenth-century Rome by a variety of men and women, including, notably, these more peripheral members of society. The term is of my coinage. It denotes a complex of behavior described frequently in the records of the criminal courts. Early modern legal and popular discourse appeared to recognize this group of actions and gestures as coherent, even though they did not assign to it a single, consistent word. This sense of coherence rested on the linkage of patterned behavior with a realm of symbolic meaning associated with honor; in that way house-scorning was a secular ritual.