Patrician Women in Early Renaissance Venice

Abstract

Almost a century ago, the Venetian archivist and historian Bartolomeo Cecchetti undertook to discover what he called ‘the general concept that Venetians had of women’. Though he called his study ‘Woman in the Middle Ages in Venice’, nearly all his documentation came from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the early Renaissance. His conclusions after a long and wideranging survey of various aspects of the feminine experience during the period were pretty forthright. ‘Neither works of imagination’, he declared, ‘nor high intellectual attainments, nor flights of poetry adorn the figure of woman in Venice's earliest epoch. Modest, domestic[casalinga],she is swept up in the great whirlwind of life; and she appears to us only in her weaknesses, or in the splendor of her beauty, or in the context of one of the high offices of her mission—her children, her family.’