Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State. David Rosand
The first generation of American historians to try to reach women took the field of Venetian Renaissance at its then current state, with its study of political and intellectual elites, and tried to hear women's voices. Stanley Chojnacki relied on the documents of the leading class; his work of twenty years is newly collected in Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore, 2000). Margaret King's definitive study of the intellectual elite, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton, 1986), led her to locate women among the humanists, as in King and Albert Rabil, Her Immaculate Hand (Binghamton, NY, 1983), and arguably has led to the University of Chicago Press' "Other Voices" series, the latter artfully used by Ferraro. However a second generation, in one case quite literally, has tried to push out from the elite center toward women on the peripheries of Venetian life and to place them in their institutional setting, whether the informal institutions of neighbor and class or the formal institutions of convent and house of refuge. Monica Chojnacka does the former in Working Women in Early Modern Venice (Baltimore, 2001), Jutta Sperling the latter in Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Chicago, 1999). This broader social context for women's lives is further expanded by Ferraro's use of mostly non-patrician documents to study the age-old institution of marriage. Ferraro's own evolution from her first book, Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580-1650: The Foundations of Power in the Venetian State (Cambridge, 1993), to Marriage Wars reflects this general trend among American Venetianists. The patriarchal archives, newly opened to scholarly access, offer many avenues of investigation. Scholars can be grateful to Ferraro for opening up a vein of documentation and showing how it may be mined. Those who have studied the Renaissance because of its high culture of humanism and art may be dismayed by a discussion of such matters; others will welcome the added dimension of humanity, with all its complexity and complexes, which Ferraro has added to our common pursuit of Renaissance studies. SALLY A. SCULLY San Francisco State University