364 anne jacobson schutte
entering domestic service and branches of the textile trades, and many
more for young men in a wider variety of occupations.41 In Venice and
several of its subject cities, women—commoners, Jews, nuns in both
socially exclusive and low-status convents, and even a few patricians—
worked in the silk industry. Alone or in groups, they separated the strands
of cocoons, wound them onto bobbins, and wove inexpensive items.
Female mediators delivered the raw material to households and convents,
consigned completed work to silk-weaving shops (often purloining and
selling part of the product on their own account), and collected and dis-
tributed to workers their meager pay.42 Tax records and censuses of the
late 16th and early 17th centuries, furthermore, attest to non-elite women
(single, married, and widowed) owning property.43
Certain recreational activities of non-elite males form a violent, ago-
nistic, masculinity-reinforcing counterpart to the dignified, orderly elite
processions discussed earlier, as Robert Davis has shown. Battiglioli sui
ponti (fist-fights on bridges) in the fall pitted the Castellani (workers in
the Arsenal, located in the eastern part of the city) against the Nicolotti
(fishermen from the western sestiere of Dorsoduro). Cacce dei tori—com-
bats between oxen and large dogs, after which the bovines were paraded
around by their handlers or allowed to run through the streets—were also
held in the fall until governmental authorities shifted them to Carnival
season. At least implicitly, most of them aimed at enhancing the prestige
of one parish at the expense of neighboring ones. From a safe distance,
elite males watched the “wars of the fists”; one of them sponsored each
of the taurine contests.44 Any woman interested in viewing these bloody
encounters would have been well advised to position herself out of harm’s
way in a window above the ground floor.
41 Dennis Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice,
1400–1600 (Baltimore, 1996); Anna Bellavitis, “Apprentissages masculins, apprentissages
féminins a Venise au XVI siècle,” Histoire urbaine 15 (2006), 49–73; Bellavitis, “Le travail des
femmes dans les contrats d’apprentissages de la Giustizia vecchia (Venise, XVIe siècle),” in
Isabelle Chabot, Jérôme Hayez, and Didier Lett, eds., La famille, les femmes et le quotidien
(XIVe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 2006), pp. 181–95.
42 Luca Molà, “Le donne nell’industria serica Venezia del Rinascimento,” in Luca Molà,
Reinhold C. Mueller, and Claudio Zanier, eds., La seta in Italia dal Medioevo al Seicento: Dal
baco al drappo (Venice, 2000), pp. 423–59.
43 Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice, pp. 26–49.
44 Robert C. Davis, The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late
Renaissance Venice (New York, 1994); Robert C. Davis, “The Trouble with Bulls: The Cacce
dei Tori in Early-Modern Venice,” Histoire sociale/Social History 29 (1996), 275–90.