Willing Patronesses: Choosing, Loosing, and Binding in Venetian Noblewomen’s Wills

Chojnacki, Stanley (2014) Willing Patronesses: Choosing, Loosing, and Binding in Venetian Noblewomen’s Wills. In: Venice and the Veneto during the Renaissance: the Legacy of Benjamin Kohl. Reti Medievali E-Book (21). Firenze University Press, Firenze, pp. 119-139. ISBN 978-88-6655-663-3

[thumbnail of Legacy_Kohl-Chojnacki_Willing.pdf]
Preview
Text
Legacy_Kohl-Chojnacki_Willing.pdf

Download (300kB) | Preview
Official URL: https://books.fupress.com/catalogue/venice-and-the...

Abstract

This essay is inspired by Ben Kohl’s 2001 article on Fina Buzzacarini da Carrara as wife, mother, and art patron in fourteenth-century Padua. Ben examined Fina’s collaboration with her husband, Francesco il Vecchio da Carrara, her bequests to her children and other persons, and her expenditures for the construction of a tomb for herself and her husband in Padua’s Baptistery. He showed the many ways in which a woman of substance, in this case the wife of the lord of Padua, could use her wealth to give expression to her loyalty to family, church, and city. Shifting the focus from signorial Padua to republican Venice, this essay will survey the benefactions of a sample of patrician women from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. While all such bequests can be gathered under the umbrella of patronage, the different kinds of benefactions and the different categories of legatees were expressions of different motivations: piety, family loyalty, personal disposition. As with Fina da Carrara, drawing up a testament confronted women, as it did men, with the need to sort out their hierarchies of affection, loyalty, responsibility, and encouragement. They thus provide a measure of shifting loyalties as women moved from natal to marital family; in the cases of women who wrote wills at different stages of their married and widowed lives, they also display the evolution of the women’s social and religious preferences over time. The argument is that, as Ben Kohl showed, patronage was protean and selective. In the case of Venetian patrician women writing their wills, it also reflected the effects of time, changing social environments, and personal choice.

Item Type: Book Section
Additional Information: Nella sezione: "Government and Society in Venice".
Uncontrolled Keywords: Middle Ages; 14th-16th century; Venice; Patricians; Kinship; Female wills; Society; Patronage
Subjects: D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D111 Medieval History
Depositing User: dr Vincenzo De Luise
Date Deposited: 13 Apr 2019 14:14
Last Modified: 01 Oct 2024 11:23
URI: http://www.rmoa.unina.it/id/eprint/5001

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item