A Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797

SOCIETY AND THE SEXES IN THE VENETIAN REPUBLIC

Anne Jacobson Schutte

Introduction

It seems to me that we should be interested in the history of both women

and men, that we should not be working only on the subjected sex any more

than an historian of class can focus only on peasants. Our goal is to under-

stand the significance of the sexes, of gender groups in the historical past.1

In the 35 years since Natalie Zemon Davis made this wise recommenda-
tion, few Anglophone and even fewer European historians have followed
it. Even when the word gender appears in the title of a book, article, con-
ference, or course syllabus, the content usually conforms to an older para-
digm, history of women. Operating as a historian of gender, I shall focus
here on two particularly suggestive aspects of society and the sexes in early
modern Venice (with some attention to cities, towns, and regions beyond
the dominant city): space and life status (“regular” or “irregular” marriage,
concubinage, widowhood, lay singlehood, and religious profession).

An Appetizer: Coryats Crudities

Let us begin by sampling a platter of cicheti prepared in the early 17th cen-
tury by an English chef. To highlight the distinctive features of Venetian
society, many scholars have drawn on published writings by foreign tour-
ists. Thomas Coryate (c.1577–1617), son of a minister in Somerset, invari-
ably figures among them.2 After spending three years at Oxford without
taking a degree and serving for some time as unofficial court jester in the
household of Prince Henry, he set off in the spring of 1608 on a five-month
tour of the Continent. An account of his travels appeared in print three

1 Natalie Zemon Davis, “ ‘Women’s History’ in Transition: The European Case,” Feminist
Studies 3 (1976), 90.
2 Robert C. Davis, “The Geography of Gender in the Renaissance,” in Judith C. Brown
and Robert C. Davis, eds., Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy (London, 1998), pp. 20,
22, 33–35, 37; Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture
and the Family (New Haven and London, 2004), pp. 1, 5, 118, 144, 153, 155–56, 159–61, 217–18,
245–47.