City of Men
Service and Servants in Baroque Rome
by Laurie Nussdorfer
Hardback (Published)
(December 2023)
ISBN: 9791254694787
Price: $41.00
On back order
This is the untold story of the men who fed, dressed, protected and advised the cardinals and great nobles of Baroque Rome. Against the background of demographic crisis and a Europe gripped by plague, war and famine, the papal capital lured ambitious gentlemen and hungry commoners to work in service. Mirroring a city where men far outnumbered women, elite households provided jobs for thousands of male immigrants from all over Italy and beyond. Footmen, secretaries, stable boys, cooks and accountants composed an all-male world that fit awkwardly within the paradigm of early modern patriarchy. A gender ideology dependent on the idea that men were innately superior to women had to navigate a society without women and justify the subordination of most men to the few. Rigid domestic hierarchies imposed by employers and implemented by gentlemen servants yielded only the barest subsistence to the robust but unskilled majority. The vagaries of the patron-client relationship doomed even the gentlemen to insecurity. In this context the streets, churches and squares of Rome offered richer, if sometimes dangerous, opportunities than the palaces to enjoy masculine privilege and the experience of egalitarian fraternity. This book mobilizes census records, trials, family account books and household manuals to show both the contradictions and the tenacity of patriarchy in a city of men.
- By (author) Laurie Nussdorfer
Other Titles in this Series
The Cardinal and his Painters
Giacomo Stefaneschi, Giotto and Simone Martini between Rome and Avignon
Lordships of Southern Italy
Rural Societies, Aristocratic Powers and Monarchy in the 12th and 13th Centuries
Volume 5
Similar Books
Behind the Scenes of Medieval Roofs
An Overview of the Roofing Systems of Italian Churches
Volume 90
Beyond Sovereign Courts
Agents and Practices in Early Modern Spanish and Habsburg Diplomacy
Volume 3
Circulation, Use, Impact
The Consumption of Architectural Books in the Early Modern Eastern Adriatic
Volume 1
Legal Visuality
Exegesis, Ambiguity, and Dissimulation of the Donation of Constantine in the Early Modern Period
Naples as Laboratory / Laboratorium Neapel
Style Options, Artistic Rivalry and Self Fashioning in Neapolitan Baroque Painting / Plurale Stilbildung, Kunstlerkonkurrenz und Self Fashioning in der neapolitanischen Barockmalerei
Power and Women in Southeast and Central Europe in Late Medieval and Early Modern Period (1300-1600)
Volume 10
Students, Scholars and Their Books at the University of Louvain (1425-1797)
Studium Lovaniense: Learning across Borders, 1
Volume 17
Tradition, Interpretation, and Change
Developments in the Liturgy of Medieval and Early Modern Ashkenaz
Networking through Biography
Constructing Intellectual Junctions in Antiquity, the Renaissance and the Arabo-Islamic World
Volume 19
Vincenzo Arangio-Ruiz e la nascita della papirologia
Il giurista tra filologia, storia antica e fascismo (1914-1956) - Tomo I
Art and Mysticism in Silesia in the Baroque Period
Angelus Silesius, Bernhard Rosa, and Michael Willmann
Building the Presence of the Prince
The Institutions Responsible for the Construction and Management of the Buildings of European Courts (14th-17th centuries)
Volume 14
fatastici dei traslati di proprieta dei beni stabili
The land registers of Venetian Candia (1588-1605, 1621-1645)
Volume 11
