Unlike modern households, those of late medieval and early modern European society 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 the powerless came together in complex and significant ways.
In Housecraft and Statecraft, historian Dennis Romano examines the realities and significance of domestic service in what was arguably the most important city in fifteenth- and sixteenth-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 labor, 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.
Housecraft and Statecraft offers a unique perspective on Venice and Venetian society as the city evolved from a merchant-dominated regime in the fifteenth century into an aristocratic oligarchy in the sixteenth. It traces the growth, within the elite, of a new sense of hierarchy and honor. At the same time, it illuminates the strategies that servants developed to resist the ever more powerful elite and, in so doing, demonstrates the centrality of domestic servants in the struggles between rich and poor in early modern Europe.
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"The result of careful archival study and an integrative approach to documents of diverse sorts... Romano differentiates wages, work, and opportunities with attention to gender, servant origins, and age. He even relates incidences in which masters were punished by the censori for crimes that servants had the temerity to report to authorities. It is the complexity of the model that recommends this book to historians as well as to a wide readership of interested persons." -- Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Romano examines the realities and significance of domestic service in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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