Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400-1600

Abstract

Unlike modern households, those of late medieval and early modern European societies included many individuals not related by blood or marriage. Prominent among these were domestic servants, members of the lower classes whose duties ranged from managing of the household to raising the children. Within the confines of the household, the powerful and powerless came together in complex and significant ways. In this volume, the author examines the realities and significance of domestic service in what was arguably the most important city in 15th- and 16th-century Europe - Venice. Drawing on a variety of materials, including humanist treatises on household management, books of costumes, civic statutes, census data, contracts, wills and court records, Romano paints a vivid picture of the conditions of domestic labour, the difficult lives of servants, the worries and concerns of masters and the ambivalent ways in which masters and servants interacted. He also shows how servants - especially gondoliers - came to be seen more and more as symbols of their masters' status. This study offers a perspectice on Venice and Venetian society as the city evolved from a merchant-dominated regime in the 15th century into an aristocratic oligarchy in the 16th. It traces the growth, within the elite, of a new sense of hierarchy and honour. At the same time, it illuminates the strategies that servants developed to resist the ever more powerful elite and, in doing so, demonstrates the centrality of domestic servants in the struggles between rich and poor in early modern Europe.

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