Casualty Essay Six Woman

While property values rose and population was stabilized, the human cost was dear indeed. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online.One valuable habit of mind in Cohn's writing is his continual suggestions for new areas in which historical inquiry could be fruitfully focused. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [email protected]

While property values rose and population was stabilized, the human cost was dear indeed. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online.One valuable habit of mind in Cohn's writing is his continual suggestions for new areas in which historical inquiry could be fruitfully focused. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [email protected]

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To deal with increased taxation, from 1402, some inhabitants simply fled, some participated in peasant uprisings, older women were forced to "out-migrate," and, ultimately desperate to limit family size and survive, many households practiced female infanticide.

Cohn's sophisticated reading of the statistics suggests that from the early 1400's onward, an extremely skewed sex ratio is evident in tax records, peaking in 1427 at 100 female infants to 180 male, but still hovering at 100 female to 145 male as late as 1460. id=4219 Copyright © 2000 by H-Net, all rights reserved.

Here, the author divides the territory into politically "hot" and "cold" zones, giving evidence that sexual deviance from social mores was more aggressively policed in "hot" areas, and given more leeway in the "cold".

And finally, the last essay, entitled "Prosperity in the Countryside: The Price Women Paid," ends this collection by living up to what author Cohn promised at the outset: that is, to document "the darker side of the Renaissance and, in particular, the decline in Italian women's status from the late fourteenth century until the Counter-Reformation..." (p.1) The author stays in the Florentine contado to explore the tax records from nineteen villages over roughly a 100-year time span (from 1365 to 1460), which show at what cost "prosperity" was bought.

Where mendicant ideals and preaching HAD changed testamentary practices however (in the towns of Siena, Assisi, and Pisa), he found that women's power over property was stronger.

With the third essay, "Women and the Counter Reformation in Siena," Cohn moves in space and time; geographically southwest from Florence to Siena, and temporally ahead from the late medieval period to the era of the Counter Reformation.Instead, this demographic data predictably charts the radical diminution of women's rights over time. 20, "these records chronicle the deterioration of women's status and power....", which he ties ultimately to the "...development of the Renaissance state during the fifteenth century." (p.The unsurprising conclusion of all but one of these essays is that women in and around the northern Italian communes between the late 1300s and the mid 1500s, lost considerable voice in the public records. 21) What is lacking here then, is a fundamentally new conclusion; what Cohn plummets the reader into that new, are masses of bleak statistics of legal constriction.The bequests which DO increase, are legacies to dower poor girls for marriage, which would ultimately work to the propagation of the cult of remembrance; remembrance of male ancestors.That women tended to cling to the medieval mendicant ideas longer than men, Cohn, citing Martines, attributes to the inclination of women to be more conservative and traditional (p. Here, the author makes lavish use of charts and graphs to display his demographic data.They ceased being "simple cogs in the transmission of property down male family lineages, and instead, could dispose of their patrimonies more fully and freely..." (p.75) He calls for a reassessment of what he terms the "supposed analogous developments" of the age of authoritarianism ushered in by the Counter Reformation, and a more sensitive reading of what he sees as a more multifaceted era (p.74).[2] In essay number four, entitled "Nuns and Dowry Funds" and arguably his most complex, Cohn stays with last wills and testaments, but again shifts time and space, this time moving backward to 1362-63, after the first return of the Black Death of 1348.He widens his scope from Siena to include the five other northern Italian towns noted above.But one could also point to Brucker's Lusanna in 1455 as an instance where, even well into the Quattrocento, there were woman like Filippa who did still actively challenge "the system," when seriously provoked.[1] Specific instances aside however, Cohn's findings overwhelmingly suggest a general trend of enveloping patriarchy, which eventually silenced the feminine voice in Florentine tribunals.The second essay, titled simply "Last Wills," comes to a similar conclusion.This broad-scale study of hundreds of testaments to convents, aims to understand an early example of a shift in bequests, which after 1363, began to focus on earthly remembrance, and began dumping the influence of mendicant piety.Those who really suffer here are the small religious houses and independent religious women, for whom the records fall silent.