Accounting for Affection: Mothering and Politics in Early Modern Rome

ISBN-13: 9780230203310 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 315 str.

Caroline Castiglione

Opis

Mothering in the western world has come to be viewed as a highly politicized activity. What mothers do (or fail to do) is publicly debated and considered a measure by which political ideologies are legitimated. While this is often thought to be a product of modernity, its roots and its consequences were already evident in early modern Rome, where an elective monarchy created a politically fluid situation in which aristocratic women played critical roles in advancing their families' interests.

Accounting for Affection analyzes the symbiotic evolution of politics and mothering in Rome, where women did not hesitate to turn to the expanding judicial system during familial disputes. By examining women's legal activities, their letters, and their daily routines of caring for children, Caroline Castiglione recovers the connections between the political and the maternal. During family conflicts, a woman remained a family advocate (mater litigans) and the propagator of the dynasty of which she was a controversial part. Against the model of absolutist familial rule by men, aristocratic women proposed a consortium of interests model for the family. Such women praised the merits of love and raised maternal affection to the standard for all family members' behavior. From the religious controversies of their day, they crafted a domestic theology in which the wishes of all children had to be considered.

Accounting for Affection illuminates the multifaceted nature of early modern motherhood, tracing the porous boundaries between the political, legal, religious, and medical activities of mothers in early modern Rome.

Recenzje

"The principal theme of the book is the determination of elite women in this period to negotiate with their relatives and, if needs be, the law-courts, in support of their rights and those of their children. ... These intertwined stories form part of a grander narrative proposed by Castiglione that contributes to our understanding of the history of emotions. ... all will welcome this study of early modern motherhood based on the testimony of early modern mothers." (M. Laven, English Historical Review, Vol. 133 (560), February, 2018)

"This book traces the triumph of motherly love among the highest elites of seventeenth-century Rome. ... Accounting for Affection will be required reading for historians of the family, the early modern state, and the role of emotions in history. Castiglione has done the field a service, and successfully placed motherhood, and mothers, at the heart of the early modern political imaginary." (P. Renée Baernstein, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 89 (1), March, 2017)

"Castiglione is to be commended for her own resourcefulness in assembling a large quantity of first-person accounts of the women's range of interests and enterprises. ... her book is a valuable account of the importance of women in the family dynamics and family politics of the early modern Roman aristocracy." (Stanley Chojnacki, American Historical Review, Vol. 121 (4), October, 2016)

Spis treści

Introduction1. Practicing Motherhood When the Definition of 'Family' is Ambiguous: Anna Colonna and the Barberini Dynasty, 1627-1647 2. The Interests Common to Us All: Olimpia Giustiniani on the Governing of the Roman Aristocratic Family 3. At the Nexus of Impossibility: The Medical and the Maternal in Seventeenth-Century Rome 4. Ippolita's Wager: Letting Daughters Decide in the Early Eighteenth Century 5. Extravagant Pretensions: The Triumph of Maternal Love in the World of Rome Conclusion Appendices Bibliography

O autorze

Caroline Castiglione is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and History at Brown University, USA. She is the author of Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640–1760 (2005), winner of the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies in 2006.