family and society 339
For daughters, the choice between marriage and monachization
remained open, and the outcome could not necessarily be predicted.
mothers regularly made significant bequests for their daughters’ dowries
or monachization but seemed less preoccupied than merchants’ wives
about defending their daughters’ freedom of choice. When faced with
the choice regarding their sons’ or daughters’ destiny, fathers did not
stop short even of putting their libraries up for sale: Benedetto arborsani
decided to “save” the law books for his grandsons and to sell the literature
collection, along with the books in the vernacular, in order to fund his
granddaughters’ dowries.45 the higher on the social scale, the higher the
stakes: the spouses’ respective contributions at the moment of marriage
were needed not for the formation of a mercantile capital but to confirm
and, rather, increase the family’s symbolic and social capital.
apparently, however, individual choices grew more and more difficult
to control, and we might ask ourselves whether a new model of the family,
albeit still an abstract one, was being constructed in these social, bourgeois
groups. the presence in these social sectors of learned women—able to
hold discussions with philosophers and literary figures of the age; capable,
like lucrezia marinelli, of writing and publishing treatises on the excel-
lence of the female sex; or, like “the honest courtesan” Veronica Franco,
daughter of a Venetian cittadino, works of poetry; or, like moderata Fonte,
dialogues, poised between serious and facetious in their tone, on the
role of women in Venetian society; or, yet again, like the nun arcangela
tarabotti, vehement indictments against the condition of women—was
an important signal, albeit within a family and social system in which
women had scarcely any room for autonomy. in the mid-17th century,
arcangela tarabotti, criticizing the “Ragion di Stato” [Reasons of State]
that pushed for daughters’ enclosure in convents, “for, if all were to marry,
the noble class would proliferate excessively, depleting households with the
expense of numerous dowries,” accused a system in which “political inter-
ests have obliterated the justice of sentiments”! She herself was one of
the many victims of such a system, although she was not from a patrician
family.46
45 Bellavitis, Famille, p. 184.
46 Patricia H. labalme, “Venetian Women on Women: three early modern Femi-
nists,” Archivio Veneto, 5th ser., 117 (1981), 81–109; Virginia cox, “the Single Self: Feminist
thought and the marriage market in early modern Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 48.3
(autumn, 1995), 513–81; Paola malpezzi Price, Moderata Fonte. Women and Life in Sixteenth-
Century Venice (madison and cranbury, n.J./london, 2003); margaret Rosenthal, The Hon-
est Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (chicago,