This article focuses on the idea of domestic education in sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century Italy. Drawing on the cross‐reading of a selection of two different sets of printed sources – pedagogical tracts, and art tracts which largely intersected with Catholic aims of religious reform and the creation of a confessional state and society – the article discusses the educational value that was attributed to the home environment, in its private, public and political dimensions, and the relevance which was attached to domestic visual and material culture and to the senses as learning tools to be used by children of different gender, age and class. Debates about education uncover less‐known aspects of domesticity while suggesting the possibility to explore the continuities that might have existed between pre‐modern notions of education and modern ones.
In recent years, the life of unmarried men and women has attracted the attention of scholars from different disciplines, such as sociologists, demographers, and historians. 1 Singles of both sexes are now an important part of the historians' agenda. Demographers and historians have provided data on lifelong singles as well as on life-cycle singles, attesting that in pre-industrial Europe consistent sections of the population never married, or they were unmarried for a significant part of their life. Unmarried men and women have been, therefore, a familiar presence throughout the history of Western Europe, in some contexts more numerous than today. In the light of this, the focus on singles is most important, not simply in order to explore the past, but also for understanding the peculiarities of the present.Whenever we engage with the study of singles, we are immediately faced with the fact that men and women did not attract the interest of scholars in equal proportions. Indeed, we observe a clearly unbalanced pattern, since until recently interest in single women -which developed in particular within the field of women's and gender history -has been greater than that in single men. 2 A similar priority features in the proliferating and now well-established literature on religious celibacy in the Catholic world. In particular in the last decade, the literature on the history of religious women has outnumbered that on religious men, and we now seem to know more about female religious celibacy than male religious celibacy, even though the study of the latter has a longer tradition. 3 However, no matter how unbalanced in favour of women the scholars' interest has been, they have contributed to this topic from a variety of points of view: the history of marriage and the family; 4 the study of the political and patrimonial strategies of the elites; 5 the history of adolescence and youth; 6 the history of european history quarterly European History Quarterly domestic service; 7 the history of guilds and crafts; 8 the history of illegitimacy; 9 the history of charities for lone women; 10 the history of prostitution; 11 the history of homosexuality. 12 Moreover -following the ongoing debate in the field of gender history -scholars have recently paid greater attention to the role of marriage and/or celibacy in the construction of female identity and also of male identity. 13 Drawing on such a solid body of studies the three articles included in this special issue examine the life of single women and men from the perspective of gender. They consider three different social groups: nuns, servants, and artisans (in this case barber-surgeons). They primarily focus on Italy, although Sarti's work, in particular, addresses the wider European context. Her article has a longterm perspective (mainly sixteenth-nineteenth centuries, but it provides the readers with some information on the twentieth, too) whereas Evangelisti focuses on the late sixteenth-early seventeenth century and Cavallo on the seventeentheighteenth centuries....
No abstract
. Two main alternative paths structured the lives of women in early modern Italy : marriage and the convent. Historians have analysed the disciplinary and economic functions, and the legal, religious and symbolic meaning of these paths, from a variety of perspectives. However, studies of marriage and the convent have mainly developed as two separate fields of historical research. My article reviews these two series of studies in the context of the historiography of early modern Italy, and suggests some of the possible connections between them.
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