wayfarers in wonderland 557
woman in her early teens with none created a relationship that was in
sexual terms (and in many ways beyond the sexual) far removed from
what we think of as marriage today.27
returning to angela’s desire for the feminine Giulio, he was not the
only feminine object of her desire, for in a surprisingly explicit scene
angela’s passions open a vista on another side of renaissance sexuality
beyond marriage in the broader famiglia or household. after learning of
Giulio’s love for her and aroused by the idea of “meeting” him privately,
she goes to her servant nena’s room and starts complaining “i’m on fire
and its burning me up.” once nena understands that this is not a real fire
or a fever, she realizes that what angela needs is a man and asks “are you
thinking about some big, handsome forceful type?” But, of course, she is
not; she is thinking of the young and feminine Giulio, “no, just a man who
has the face of an angel, delicate golden features, straight from heaven.”
nena, with a more lower-class vision of an ideal sexual partner, takes a
while to see the youthful Giulio in this role, but with a sudden realiza-
tion objects, “heavens! is it that sweet boy? What do you want to do with
that sprig?”28 angela climbing into her servant’s bed and demonstrating,
makes perfectly clear what she wants, using her young female servant as
a substitute for the feminine youth.
servants as sexual objects of their master’s desire were a regular feature
of the sexual world of renaissance Venice, especially as young women
servants often lived with their upper-class masters and served at their and
their family’s pleasure.29 usually such relationships surface in reports of
pregnant servants at the hands of male heads of household or their sons,
27 in that marriage it was assumed that the male would take the sexual lead dominating
his inexperienced sexual partner, and when that was not the case, court records reveal
that occasionally surprised husbands sent their young wives back to their natal families
claiming that their actions demonstrated that they were not virgins, a troubling moment
echoed in renaissance literature, suggesting how strong was the fear of young women who
did not fit the passive ideal. for a literary example of this with a particularly insightful
historical commentary, see in lauro Martines, An Italian Renaissance Sextet: Six Tales in
Historical Context, transl. Murtha Baca (Toronto, 2004), the novella “ricciarda” (by Giovanni
Gherardi da Prato), pp. 19–24, and his historical analysis, pp. 25–38. for an actual case of
this in early 15th-century Venice, see ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, pp. 25–26.
28 La veniexiana, p. 290.
29 one area of this that still needs further study in Venice is the victimization of young
women who were adopted to serve as servants and often promised a dowry in return.
referred to as filiae animae (or figliuole d’anima), these young women suffered an unusually
high percentage of sex crimes at the hands of their masters and their families; for this see:
ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, pp. 150–52; for a brief discussion of the legal aspects, see
Marco ferro, Dizionario del diritto comune e Veneto, 2nd ed. (Venice, 1845), vol. 1, p. 48.