On the other hand, widowhood was also a new conceptual framework or frameworks within which the widowed individual now had to function, the fact of being no longer married, with all that this implied in terms of moral reputation, relationships to one's kin, relationships to property-ownership, and even one's potential as a future marriage partner.
He required their children to be taken to a Catholic orphanage after Maurerin's estranged husband converted from being a Mennonite to Catholicism on his deathbed. Even the case of widows who chose a life of religious devotion could give rise to tensions. How far did widowhood enable a widow to assert her own identity and chart her own waters in life, and how far were these choices constrained by the society in which she lived? Clearly, these essays conceptualise important issues such as the role of religion in a way different from the one advocated by Cowan (for example, they are not concerned solely with the impact of the Reformation and Counter Reformation) but the religious dimension is far from absent from their analysis. Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy, 1300-1550. In this context, the fury of the fifteenth-century Florentine Davizzi brothers in the face of the actions of their sister Lena, studied by Isabelle Chabot, is entirely comprehensible.
Refusal to pay resulted in rough music and vandalism. Landucci did everything possible to avoid separation from her daughters, but Giulia Calvi's essay on widows, the state and guardianship in early modern Tuscany suggests that she went much further to take control over her first husband's property. If anything, the empowerment which a woman experienced during her first marriage was enhanced by a period of widowhood and then exercised in subsequent marriages. Comparison in any case was not the prime purpose of this project. Lena Davizzi, on the other hand, a member of a powerful banking family, took advantage of her brothers' absence from Florence on business in London to arrange for her dowry to be passed to the Church rather than her natal family as part of her decision to join the nuns of Foligno. Widowhood was both the time of the greatest potential autonomy for women and a time of limits on this autonomy, of public suspicion, and often of poverty. The design depicts the principal inventions of that period, and, due to the complexity of the iconography, a special booklet to explain the details was printed for the 1838 exhibition. It is a good introduction for the researcher approaching the subject for the first time.This collection of essays is often as informative about the status of widow as about art. On the other hand, both the image presented by widows in their written claims for relief and the ideas underlying poor relief in nineteenth-century Britain show strong continuities with those which ran through the society of early modern Europe.The question still remains whether this collection has achieved one of its objectives: to provide a contribution to the history of widowhood in medieval and early modern Europe. Several cases arise from this collection.
It is hoped however that the findings and methodological perspectives presented in the volume will stimulate research in different contexts and encourage cross-cultural comparisons.Reviews in History is part of the School of Advanced Study.
After an introduction discussing the main issues, it presents excellent essays on widows in England, France, Italy, Germany and Spain, covering attitudes about widowhood, remarriage, property, religion, law courts, guardianship, and poor widows.Contains a chapter on widows, surveying the possibilities and limitations of widowhood, as revealed in studies about a range of European countries and a range of occupational groups. Custom dictated that widowers pay a sum of money to their neighbors when remarrying to compensate for disrupting the social order through their act of pseudobigamy. While Maria Maddalena was responding to the rules established by the Tuscan state to safeguard the property of orphaned children when their widowed mothers remarried, the independent actions of her German contemporary, Barbara Maurerin, took place in an entirely different context. By the time Maria Maddalena had drawn up her own will, both her daughters had died, leaving their property to her.
In spite of Maurerin's appeals and those of her two older daughters, the latter were eventually banished from the territory of their birth.