Remembering the Family: Women, Kin, and Commemorative Masses in Renaissance Florence^*

Abstract

In August 1465 Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, mother of the art patron and builder Filippo Strozzi, arranged for an annual set of masses in the parish church of Santa Maria Ughi. Her purpose, as she said, was to commemorate the souls of “all our dead,” “tutti enostri passati”(sic). In her record of the commission, Alessandra carefully outlined the conditions of the bequest. She noted, for example, the location of the land donation whose proceeds subsidized the masses and the day the ten masses were to be performed, and made alternate arrangements should the priests of Santa Maria Ughi fail to uphold their obligations. Yet within this context of legal specifications and formulae, Alessandra remained curiously vague about one of the program's essential clauses: namely, the precise identity of “all our dead.“

Dowry or Inheritance? Kinship, Property, And Women's Agency in Lisbon, Venice, and Florence (1572)

“…29 Others have analyzed women as heads of household during times of crisis, 30 and as active participants in the process of agnatic identity formation through commemorative bequests. 31 Portuguese women's agency, by contrast, has been located independently, even outside, of marriage, in the forging of professional identities of fishmongers, bakers, weavers, and wet-nurses, 32 in concubines' manipulation of their lovers' estates and inheritance, even of entailed crown goods, 33 or in the evidence of single mothers' law suits for their lovers' alimony payments to their children (see below). In both cases, women "agents," be they married or not, have been cast as property owners-some actual, some virtual.…”

“…I decided to pay attention to both agents and beneficiaries, since on the one hand, women could be awarded property in contracts initiated by men, and, on the other, much of women's notarial agency consisted of surrendering rights by assigning men as proxies in business dealings. In fact, of those 97 contracts that feature women, 43.3% were transfers of power-of-attorney, which women most often gave away (31), but which they also received in 13 cases, i.e. 6.5% of the entire sample (double entries in 2 cases).…”