Abstract
The aim of this paper is to suggest that married life in Renaissance Italy was much more violent than the current historiography allows. A survey of recent prominent works on marriage shows that violence, if mentioned at all, is briefly alluded to as a possibility, but rarely examined as a reality. This paper uses the voluminous records of the criminal court in Bologna to remedy this. A quantitative approach first of all exposes the strikingly high rate of wife-murder in Bologna, along with the associated wife-battering. A possible explanation for this is made, using the notion of a 'Mediterranean honour code'. The judicial records also reveal, however, that domestic violence was not the exclusive province of husbands, and a qualitative approach - drawing on notions of female subjectivity and the sex-gender system - is used to explore the trials of three violent women.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 527-543 |
Journal | Renaissance Studies |
Volume | 18 |
Issue number | 4 |
Publication status | Published - 2004 |