Suchergebnisse

The perscriptive threshold of adulthood among late-medieval Venetian patricians appears very different for men and for women, centering on social (i.e., public) puberty as the gauge of male adulthood, physiological (i.e., childbearing) puberty that of female. Yet in practice men did not inevitably achieve the normative patriarchal outcome of a graduated, formalized adolescence; nor did adolescence end for all women with teenaged marriage and motherhood. Non-patriarchal male adulthoods and the graduated phases of the uxorial cycle for women modify the impression of sharp gender contrast that results from viewing age at marriage as the pivot of adulthood. Graduated adulthood in both sexes gave men and women alike the possibility of varied adult identities, responding to a range of choice and circumstance.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Introduction -- Part 1 -- Women's History and Social History: Are Structures Necessary? -- The Querelle des Femmes as a Cultural Studies Paradigm -- Grammar in Arcadia -- The Girl and the Hourglass: Periodization of Women's Lives in Western Preindustrial Societies -- Part 2 -- Getting Back the Dowry: Venice, c. 1360–1530 -- Daughters, Mothers, Wives, and Widows: Women as Legal Persons -- Women Married Elsewhere: Gender and Citizenship in Italy -- Part 3 -- "Saints" and "Witches": in Early Modern Italy: Stepsisters or Strangers? -- The Dimensions of the Cloister: Enclosure, Constraint, and Protection in Seventeenth-Century Italy -- The Third Status -- Part 4 -- "Non lo volevo per marito: in modo alcuno": Forced Marriages, Generational Conflicts, and the Limits of Patriarchal Power in Early Modern Venice, c. 1580–1680 -- Becoming a Mother in the: Seventeenth Century: The Experience of a Roman Noblewoman -- Space, Time, and the Power of Aristocratic Wives in Yorkist and Early Tudor England, 1450–1550 -- Eighteenth-Century Marriage Contracts: Linking Legal and Gender History -- Part 5 -- En-Gendering Selfhood: Defining Differences and Forging Identities in Early Modern Europe -- Construction of Masculinity and Male Identity in Personal Testimonies: Hans Von Schweinichen (1552–1616) in His Memorial -- About the Contributors -- Index