Abstract
The activities of a mater litigans advanced family interests and were an integral part of the lives of Roman aristocratic women, although such deeds could disturb seventeenth-century observers, especially if they crossed the boundaries between service to the casa and freewheeling independence.1 While advocating for her natal and marital families was critical, it was scarcely a woman’s sole obligation, although it has proven easier to capture than the details of women’s domestic affairs, such as childbearing and childrearing. We know far more about aristocratic women’s public functions than we do about their maternal role in the nursery. The latter is a shadowy domain, where mothers encountered different but no less formidable adversaries — illness and death, the latter sometimes inexplicable, dreadful in its mystery and frequency. These two realms of female activity, the domestic and the political, figured prominently in the lives of aristocratic women, as the long days of Anna Colonna among the Barberini illuminated. A comparison of Roman women’s reproductive and public functions reveals that there was a domestic iteration of the mater litigans, an obscure twin of its conflicting obligations and conflicts. In neither realm was the outcome entirely within the mother’s control. In both domains, she was considered subordinate to the padrone of the dynasty.
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Notes
For health and illness as contentious familial issues, see Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey, Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 2013), p. 279.
Marina D’Amelia, “Becoming a Mother in the Seventeenth Century: The Experience of a Roman Noblewoman,” in Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi (Kirksville, MO, 2001), pp. 223–44.
On the paucity of such sources for southern Italy, see David Gentilcore, Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy (Manchester, 1998), pp. x, 177–202. On epistolary sources as materials for medical history, see Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, p. 56.
On the dilemmas of such sources, see Willemijn Ruberg, “The Letter as Medicine: Health and Illness in Dutch Daily Correspondence 1770–1850,” Social History of Medicine 23.3 (2010): 492–508. Eleonora’s letters are in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano [hereafter ASV], Archivio Boncompagni Ludovisi, busta 899 and busta 900. Busta 900 is identified as containing letters from an administrator to Ippolita Ludovisi, but it contains Eleonora’s letters as well.
See Gianni Venditti with Beatrice Quaglieri, Archivio Boncompagni Ludovisi. Collectanea Archivi Vaticani (Vatican City, 2008) vol. IV, p. 249. Busta 899 is without folio numbers, so all citations contain a date only as a reference. Busta 900 contains both folio numbers and dates for the letters.
David Gentilcore, “The Organisation of Medical Practice in Malpighi’s Italy,” in Marcello Malpighi: Anatomist and Physician, ed. Domenico Bertoloni Meli (Florence, 1997), esp. pp. 107–8;
Gianna Pomata, “Practicing Between Earth and Heaven: Women Healers in Seventeenth-Century Bologna,” Dynamis: Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam 19 (1999): 119–43, esp. pp. 121–3, 125.
On the role of surgeons in the treatment of infants through the sixteenth century, see Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford, 1988), p. 69.
On the limited attention of English physicians to children in the Middle Ages, see Valerie Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh, 1986), p. 47.
For similar limitations among Italian physicians, see James Bruce Ross, “The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century,” in The History of Childhood, ed. Lloyd De Mause, (London, 1974), pp. 183–228, esp. p. 210. Care of infants is treated in most detail in midwifery texts until the eighteenth century, when pediatric texts begin to appear. See Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies, p. 134.
Pomata, “Practicing Between Earth and Heaven,” pp. 130–1; Tessa Storey, “Face Waters, Oils, Love Magic and Poison: Making and Selling Secrets in Early Modern Rome,” in Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800, ed. Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (Burlington, VT, 2011) pp. 143–63. Storey argues that books of secrets were largely produced for and by men in Italy, in contrast to their use by women in Spain and England (p. 145). Yet, one of the more successful books of secrets in Italy seems to have been the work of a woman. Chicca Gagliardo has located eight editions of Isabella Cortese’s book: I secreti della signora Isabella Cortese ne’ quali si contengono cose minerali, medicinali, arteficiose & alchimiche et molte de l’arte profumatoria (Milan, 1995), p. 7. In the introduction to their recent volume on secrets and medical knowledge, Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin suggest that the gender identity of Cortese remains a mystery. See “Secrets and Knowledge,” in Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin, Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800 (Burlington, VT, 2011), p. 17. William Eamon concludes instead that Cortese’s identity was female and noble. See his article, “How to Read a Book of Secrets,” in ibid., esp. pp. 28–9.
A constellation of secondary work has appeared in recent decades which helps us construct the medical practices of Rome, including at its highest intellectual levels. See Richard Palmer, “Medicine at the Papal Court in the Sixteenth Century,” in Medicine at the Courts of Europe, 1500–1837, ed. Vivian Nutton (London, 1990), pp. 49–78;
Maria Pia Donato and Jill Kraye, eds. Conflicting Duties: Science, Medicine and Religion in Rome, 1550–1770 (London, 2003);
Nancy Siraisi, “Historiae, Natural History, Roman Antiquity, and Some Roman Physicians,” in Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siriaisi (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 325–54;
Elisa Andretta, Roma medica: anatomie d’un système médical au XVIe siècle (Rome, 2011). Silvia De Renzi has uncovered the world of elite Roman physicians and their clients in several recent studies: “Medical Competence, Anatomy and the Polity in Seventeenth-Century Rome,” Renaissance Studies 21.4 (2007): 79–95; “A Career in Manuscripts: Genres and Purposes of a Physician’s Writing in Rome, 1600–1630,” Italian Studies 66.2 (2011): 234–48; “Tales from Cardinals’ Deathbeds: Medical Hierarchy, Courtly Etiquette and Authority in the Counter Reformation,” in Être médecin à la cour: Italie, France et Espagne, XIII-XVIII siècles, ed. Elisa Andretta and Marylin Nicoud, (Florence, 2013). On medical knowledge among Rome’s prostitutes, see Storey, “Face Waters, Oils, Love Magic and Poison.”
For more on Eleonora’s ideas on the relations between Roman aristocratic women, wet nurses, and infants, see Caroline Castiglione, “Peasants at the Palace: Wet Nurses and Aristocratic Mothers in Early Modern Rome,” in Medieval and Renaissance Lactations — Images, Rhetorics, Practices, ed. Jutta Sperling (Burlington, VT, 2013), pp. 79–99. Early attention to wet nursing in modern scholarship includes the work of James Bruce Ross, “The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy.” The pathbreaking interpretive and archival work of Christiane Klapisch-Zuber shaped a generation of scholarship about mothering and wet nursing, even if some of her conclusions have since been contested. See “Blood Parents and Milk Parents: Wet Nursing in Florence, 1300–1530,” in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1985), pp. 132–64. The most comprehensive treatment of wet nursing is Valerie Fildes, including Breasts, Bottles, and Babies and Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present.
A shorter overview is offered by Sara Matthews Grieco, “Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing and Infant Mortality in Europe (1400–1800),” in Historical Perspectives on Breastfeeding (Florence, 1991), pp. 15–62.
For a summary of the sixteenth-century literature in the vernacular on breastfeeding, see Rudolph M. Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago, 1999), pp. 124–53.
These beliefs had been repeated since antiquity. See Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, pp. 12, 179–81. The use of animal milk was maligned due to the erroneous belief that through it the child would imbibe the qualities of the animal into her or his character. See Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, pp. 53–4, 179–82. On the substitution of human milk for animal milk, see Barbara Orland, “Enlightened Milk: Reshaping a Bodily Substance into a Chemical Object,” in Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory, ed. Ursula Klein and E. C. Spary, (Chicago, 2010), pp. 163–97, esp. p. 172. Animal milk substitutes had long been used, however, in emergency situations. See Fildes, Wet Nursing, p. 73. Eleonora remained dubious about their use. See ASV, Archivio Boncompagni Ludovisi, 899 (12 June 1686).
ASV, Archivio Boncompagni Ludovisi, 899 (19 September 1684; 17 August 1685; 24 August 1685). On not allowing the wet nurse to gain too much weight, ibid. (30 March 1685). On keeping the wet nurse covered, ibid. (9 September 1684; 19 September 1684). On the problem of fresh foods and acidic foods, which could damage the milk, ibid. (9 June 1685). On the recommended diet of wet nurses in printed sources, see Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002), pp. 151–3. For further elaborations in the eighteenth century of the connection between diet and breast milk, see Orland, “Enlightened Milk,” pp. 173–4.
Both expressions are David Gentilcore’s. See his Healers and Healing, pp. 2–3. For a description of therapeutic calculus and medical pluralism in the kingdom of Naples, see ibid., pp. 1–28. Gianna Pomata has underscored the extent to which “legal and illicit practice formed, in the eyes of the sick, a single pool of medical resources, out of which one could pick and choose at will.” Contracting a Cure: Patients, Healers, and the Law in Early Modern Bologna (Baltimore, 1998), esp. pp. 122–3. Gentilcore’s “medical pluralism” emerged when the concept of the “medical marketplace” was widely debated among historians of medicine. The marketplace approach to the history of medicine was advanced by Roy Porter but simultaneously appeared among the work of several scholars,
including Harold J. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca, 1986)
and Katherine Park, Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1985). Such an approach contributed to shifting the focus from practitioners to patients (consumers, in the marketplace model) although the patient’s perspective remains the least developed in the history of medicine, scattered as it is in archives beyond those of medical institutions.
See Roy Porter’s early call for this approach, “The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History From Below,” Theory and Society 14.2 (1985): 175–98. For a synthesis and critique of the medical marketplace concept,
see Mark S. R. Jenner and Patrick Wallis, “The Medical Marketplace,” in their edited volume, Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c. 1450–1850 (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 1–23.
Anna Esposito, “Men and Women in Roman Confraternities,” in The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modem Italy, ed. Nicholas Terpstra (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 82–97, esp. p. 90.
On Camilla Orsini Borghese, see Marilyn Dunn, “Piety and Patronage: Two Noblewomen and their Convents,” Art Bulletin 76.4 (1994): 644–63. Eleonora discusses her grandmother-in-law in ASV, Archivio Boncompagni Ludovisi, 899 (27 March 1685; 30 May 1685; 20 April 1685; 12 July 1685). A short and intriguing biography of Camilla Orsini Borghese is in BAV, Fondo Boncompagni Ludovisi, F 34.
The early modern link between health of the body and the health of the soul is summarized in Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, pp. 179–208. Gentilcore emphasizes the connection that in the “longstanding Catholic tradition … care of the soul had to accompany that of the body.” See Healers and Healing, p. 11. Medically speaking, emotions were believed to cause changes in the corporeal processes. See also Sandra Cavallo, Artisans of the Body in Early Modem Italy (Manchester, 2007), pp. 21–7.
Either Eleonora corresponded much less frequently with Gregorio, or their correspondence has been lost. A few letters from Eleonora to Gregorio surface within the collection of those of Eleonora to Ippolita. See ASV, Archivio Boncompagni Ludovisi, 899 (20 April 1685; 11 August 1685). For the engaged parenting of British and French fathers, see Lisa Smith, “The Relative Duties of a Man: Domestic Medicine in England and France, circa, 1685–1740,” Journal of Family History 31.3 (2006): 237–56. In the Italian context, the role of men’s participation in the medical care of their families can be documented since the Renaissance.
See Sandra Cavallo, “Health, Hygiene and Beauty,” in Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis (eds), At Home in Renaissance Italy (London, 2006), pp. 174–87, esp. p. 175.
On the physicians in the Borghese household, see ASV, Archivio Borghese, 3972, “Rolli della famiglia: 1682–1683” (January 1682). The importance of the quality of the physician appears throughout the correspondence. See ASV, Archivio Boncompagni Ludovisi, 900, 104v (1 September 1688). The presence of physicians is discussed in Sandra Cavallo and David Gentilcore’s introduction to Spaces, Objects and Identities in Early Modern Italian Medicine (Oxford, 2008), p. 6.
Evelyn Lincoln, “Curating the Renaissance Body,” Word and Image 17.1&2 (2001): 42–61. On addressing the fear of children, see p. 53.
Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, pp. 49, 162. Wet nurses in the Barberini family in the 1630s were paid approximately 6 scudi per month, according to Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Palaces: Use and the Art of the Plan (New York, 1990), p. 376, notes 11 and 12. Other expenses related to wet nursing are in BAV, Archivio Barberini, unarchived materials, “Giustificazioni di Taddeo Barberini (1630),” [31 May 1630] (expenses for her damask bedding); [4 April 1630] (for her shoes). These appear to be related to his child’s wet nurse. Taddeo’s records also refer to the “figlia della mia balia” [daughter of my wet nurse] whom he remembered with two annual payments. On the latter, see ibid. [5 June 1630] and BAV, Computisteria, 187 “Giornale” (1629–30) [8 June 1630]. I thank Dr Luigi Cacciaglia of the Vatican Library for assistance with these sources.
The correspondence of Madame Roland, in France, who breastfed her daughter, underscores the role that a variety of servants in the household might attempt to play in the rearing of the child. George D. Sussman, Selling Mothers’ Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France, 1715–1914 (Urbana, 1982), pp. 83–4.
Caroline Castiglione, Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640–1760 (New York, 2005), esp. pp. 147–80.
For a general picture of the upsurge in legal activity in the Papal States, see Irene Fosi, Papal Justice: Subjects and Courts in the Papal State, 1500–1750 (Washington, 2011).
Fildes chronicles the success of Van Helmont’s views in converting some English aristocrats and members of the gentry to hand feeding. He popularized new (if unfounded) concerns about breast milk. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, pp. 290–1. Skepticism against his recommended hand feeding re-emerged in the eighteenth century, when its contribution to infant mortality was eventually recognized. Ibid., p. 301. Van Helmont’s medical views circulated widely in Europe. See Guido Giglioni, Immaginazione e malattia: Saggio su Jan Baptiste van Helmont (Milan, 2000).
See Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More (New York, 2004), pp. 29–33.
Luigi Fiorani, “Monache e Monasteri Romani nell’Età del Quietismo,” Ricerche per la storia religiosa di Roma I (1977): 63–111, esp. pp. 102–6. For more on religious controversies in the lives of Roman aristocratic women, see Chapter 4. I thank John Jeffries Martin for his insights on Eleonora’s religious inclinations.
The problem of excessive love on the part of parents was a trope that appeared as early as the fifteenth century, in humanist and ecclesiastical writings. For a discussion of Renaissance precedents, see Patricia Fortini Brown, “Children and Education,” in At Home in Renaissance Italy, ed. Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis (London, 2006), pp. 136–43, esp. p. 143.
The quote from Antoniano is cited in Bernardo Piciché, Argisto Giuffredi: Gentiluomo borghese nel vicereame di Sicilia (Rome, 2006), p 135, note 334. See Silvio Antoniano, Educazione Christiana de’ Figliuoli, Libro Secondo, Verona, Capo XV, Come il padre deve ammaestrare il ftgliuolo a pensare alla morte, p. 111: “Questa troppa carnale tenerezza non si conviene a un petto cristiano.”
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Castiglione, C. (2015). At the Nexus of Impossibility. In: Accounting for Affection. Early Modern History Society and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315724_4
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