cowan a., women, gossip and marriage in venice

7/28/2019 Cowan A., Women, gossip and marriage in Venice

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WOMEN, GOSSIP AND MARRIAGE IN

EARLY MODERN VENICE

diAlexander Cowan

This article arises from my recent study of the prove dinobilt, which was published by Ashgate in November2007.1 Witnesses interviewed by the magistrates of the

Avogaria di Comun gave detailed oral testimony about thewomen who wished to obtain official approval to marrypatrician husbands and bear sons who would go on to serveas members of the Maggior Consiglio. Some of thistestimony was based on direct personal knowledge, butmuch was based on hearsay, or, in other words, on gossip.These records are used here to explore the mechanisms by

This article is an abbreviated version ofGossip and Street Culture in earlymodern Venice, published in Journal of Early Modern History, XII(2008), pp. 1-21. I am grateful to Brill for giving me the permission topublish this in Storia di Venezia. It is part of a special issue devoted toStreet Culture in Early Modern Europe and will also be published byBrill in book form, edited by Riitta Laitinen and Tom Cohen.1 A. Cowan, Marriage, Manners and Mobility in early Modern Venice,

Aldershot, 2007.


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which information about the making of marriages and itscontext circulated within Venice.

Definitions of gossip vary. For the men of early modernEurope, it was a pejorative term for conversation betweenwomen, and was used to counteract a perceived threat tomale hegemony from an activity over which they had nocontrol.2 The content of these conversations was belittled inorder to give greater value to the purposeful exchangesbetween men. These value-loaded associations persist inpresent-day terms such as commrage (French) or pettegolezze(Italian), the one drawing attention to the exclusiveparticipation of women, the other to the potentiallyscandalous subject matter of gossip. In the Englishlanguage, on the other hand, the term gossip has begun to

lose some of these associations as it has become the subjectfor serious academic study. In anthropological terms, it canbe considered as two associated phenomena that haveendured over time and in different societies: the transfer ofinformation through conversation, and the actualinformation that is communicated. These bring togetherprocess and content. Gossip is no longer considered to begender-specific in the sense that the term embraces both

male and female conversation. On the other hand it is alsorecognized that the process of gossip can be highlygendered. For the history of culture, also, the subjects ofgossip and the implications behind their selection and theway in which they were discussed all open the door to an

2 B. Capp, When Gossips Meet. Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in EarlyModern England, Oxford, 2003, pp. 49-55.


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understanding of a widespread set of cultural values. Theseprovided a framework within which people could passjudgment on one another.

In a conference about the history of women in Venice, adiscussion of this kind might be expected to focus ongossip as a female activity. This will not be the case. It isargued here that, far from being an exclusively femalepractice, both men and women engaged in gossip. Thisexchange of information has much to tell us about a rangeof social norms. This article also suggests that the spatiallocation within which the circulation of information tookplace was of almost as much importance as the identity ofthe individuals involved. Rather than seeing gossip assomething which took place exclusively in public, we can

conclude that the way in which it took place underminedformal distinctions between the public and the private.Examining the spatial context also emphasises theimportance of visual observation in starting a chain ofcomments based first on unspoken assumptions. The lastpart of the article argues that as far as information aboutimpending marriages was concerned, gossip was far froman uncontrolled circulation of information which

individuals and their families wished to keep private. On thecontrary, gossip networks were deliberately used by thefamilies of brides about to marry patrician husbands inorder to spread the news as a way of enhancing their ownstanding within their immediate localities.

While there were many subjects for gossip in earlymodern Venice as in other urban societies at the time -political speculation, meteorological phenomena, slander,


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domestic disputes, information about trading conditionsand so on - this discussion is restricted to gossip aboutmarriage and in particular to gossip about the preliminarystages of the making of marriages. Theoral testimony givento the Venetian magistracy of the Avogaria di Comun onwhich this based generally took place before any religiousceremonies has been completed but after a marriage hadbeen arranged between a Venetian patrician and the familyof a woman who did not belong to the patriciate. Asuccession of laws from 1589 established a series of tests toevaluate the social status and moral reputation of potentialpatrician brides and their families. Failure to pass these testsmeant that any sons born to such mixed marriages wereautomatically excluded from the Maggior Consiglio.3 The

testimony which was given therefore concerned not onlythe knowledge that a marriage had been arranged, but alsojudgments about the future bride and her family.

Visual observation: the case of the Campo San Barnaba

Visual observation gave rise to gossip for one of twomain reasons. In one case, the gender, status or age of theperson being observed gave rise to certain expectations

3 For an extended analysis of these investigations, see Cowan, Marriage,Manners, cit. This is based on 579 surviving cases considered by theAvogaria di Comun between 1589 (the year in which theseinvestigations were first established) and 1699.


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about their behaviour. Generally, social observationoperated within a narrow range of conformity, but in thecase of widows or nubile girls, these expectationssometimes provoked appraisal that ranged between twoextremes. At such times, they aroused curiosity and invitedswift, firm judgment. Was a widow chaste, or was she lusty?Was a nubile girl modest, or was she incautious in herinteraction with others in public? Observers looked forevidence to answer these all-important questions in order toreinforce their cultural world and to police their socialworld.4 On observing something out of the ordinary, theirresponse was so strong that they then proceeded to speakto someone else about it, initiating a chain of gossip.

This can be illustrated by looking at a very specific

context, the Campo San Barnaba, and a specific example,that of the responses by local residents to the widow,Camilla Colonna, who lived quietly in an apartment in thecampo in the 1640s until she remarried in 1649.Neighbourhood gossip placed her in the category of themodest widow. Other sources, however, make it clear thatwhile she was widowed, Camilla had led a double life.5 Inthe patrician Malipiero family palace in the parish of San

Samuele, which lies opposite San Barnaba across the GrandCanal, Camilla was not known as a modest widow with nocompromising male visitors, but as the mistress of the

4 See Cowan, Marriage, Manners, cit. chapter VII, Gender, honourable anddishonourable behaviour.5 The case arose when the two daughters of her second marriage wereconsidered many years later by the Avogaria di Comun. Archivio diStato, Venice,Avogaria di Comun(hereafterAdC) 235/46; 241/70.


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observing them, not for any prurient reasons but becausethey could see them either from their homes, their places ofwork, or while crossing the square on day to day business,and that they were accustomed to look around them and toprocess what they had seen in social terms. Theseobservations were also corroborated by what they heardfrom gossip. Pietro Pischiato had a barbers shop on theCampo San Barnaba. He knew that Camilla had lived in theCampo for two or three years in an apartment above thefruit shop in a house belonging to the Pasqualigo family.She had three servants: two maids and a cook, and livedcomfortably. He saw the fruit merchant come to her houseto do errands for her. He was also asked if she had anyother male visitors and replied that, apart from her

landlord, her only visitor was her brother. This was clearly aleading question and the part of the investigatingmagistrates. A womans moral reputation would have beenseriously compromised if it were known that she hadseveral male visitors. On the other hand, the readiness withwhich the question was answered also suggests that thesame question must also have occurred to her neighbours.A youngish widow, living alone with servants, would always

arouse curiosity and speculation about her morals.8

Pietro Pischiato would also have been able tocomplement any visual observations with gossip as a resultof his profession. As a barber, he not only visited men in

8AdC235/46. For attitudes to widows, see A. Cowan, Lusty widows andchaste widows in seventeenth-century Venice, in ed. by A. Bellavitis I.Chabot, Famiglie e potere in Italia tra medioevo ed et moderna, Rome,forthcoming 2008.


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their own houses in order to shave them or cut their hair orgive them basic medical treatment, he also worked in ashop in the campo.9 In both circumstances, the exchange ofgossip was part and parcel of his work. It was quitecommon for barbers to be called as witnesses before theAvogaria di Comun for this very reason.10

Public space and domestic space

In Venice, the nature of observation was also closelylinked to the organization of space. The case discussed so

far involved a comparatively open space, the campo SanBarnaba, which had houses along two sides only. The othertwo sides were bounded by a canal, the rio di San Barnaba,and by the parish church. Most Venetian space, though,was much more densely populated with narrow streets andalleys overlooked by buildings several stories high. To the

9 The dividing line between barbers and surgeons was very thin. A

barber from the calle de Botteri in San Polo claimed to have knownEgidio Paganuzzi for thirty years because he always practised medicinein his house.AdC223/58.10 See the cases of Laura Scaramella and Chiara Marcello, AdC 217;

AdC207/87. There are close parallels with the behavior of pharmacists,whose shops were also known as centers of gossip and information. SeeF. De Vivo, Pharmacies as centers of information and sociability in early modernVenice, Renaissance Studies, XXI (2007), pp. 505-21. I am verygrateful to Dr. De Vivo for allowing me to see his work in advance ofpublication


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eyes of local observers, the boundaries between public anddomestic space were real, but hardly sharp and not alwayssignificant. This can be illustrated in terms of gossip basedon observation, because visual observation took place inboth directions between individuals inside and outsidebuildings. This complex observational relationship betweenthe public and domestic space was enhanced by a flexibleorganization of work and time that gave individuals ampleopportunity to stop and stare, and to process informationobtained from a variety of sources. This porousnessenabled individuals to learn key details about theirneighbours. In the 1660s, Giovanni Maria Mutti was livingin the parish of San Giacomo dellOrio. The patrician,Alessandro Contarini, lived in the adjacent house. As a

neighbour, whose contact with Contarini did not extend tofriendship or to domestic visits, Mutti still learned a certainamount of information about him which could only havecome to him by way of gossip. He knew, for example, thatContarini had married Bernardina Tomitano, a widow fromUderzo who had a nubile daughter from her first marriage,Cattarina Melchiori. He also knew that negotiations tomarry off Cattarina this daughter were in progress.11

While this information was conveyed through verbalgossip, other witnesses were close enough to see activitiesin their neighbours houses, either from their own homes,or from the street. Steffano Bonini, of the parish of SanPantalon, was able to confirm from visual observation thatboth Alba Gritti, the daughter of his neighbour across the

11AdC223/66.


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because of negative evidence. He recounted that he hadseen the girl leave her house from time to time, but that hehad not been able to see her inside her house through thewindows. She did not enter these rooms, at least when itwas possible to look through the windows. The inferencewas that she led a modest and retiring life. He concludedthat her reputation within the parish was one of greatrespectability15.

It is interesting to see the social effects of this closeproximity of houses confirmed by evidence from theInquisition case of a lusty friar studied by Guido Ruggiero.Ghielmina, the wife of Antonio explained to the Inquisitorsthat certainly I do not want to look because I mind myown business but one has to see the neighbourhood from

the balcony, and I have seen in three years that I have beenin this house that the friar has a reputation for a most evillife and keeps dishonest people in his house16.

Male gossip, female gossip and the street

It is not always easy to find out who was engaged in aspecific act of gossip, let alone where. Most of what appearsin the Venetian Avogaria investigations is the end-result of

15AdC31716 G. Ruggiero, Binding passions. Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at theend of the Renaissance, Oxford, 1993, p. 183.


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gossip, rather than the process itself. The magistrates wereonly rarely interested enough to ask their witness to identifytheir informants. Usually, witnesses gave hearsay evidencethat a particular woman was soon to marry, or that herparents were living together in concubinage. So we find thatBattista Manzoni, a fruit merchant testifying that he hadheard that La Dardana had arranged a marriage betweenone of her girls and a gentleman whose name I do notknow.17 Such gossip circulated not only among merchants,barbers, or boatmen, but also among the patriciansthemselves, who were equally interested in projectedmarriages outside their own circles.18

Many historians specifically link gossip withwomen.19The predominance of male witnesses before the

Avogaria di Comun skews our picture of how far gossipwas gendered in Venice. More weight was given to maletestimony in the belief that these witnesses would be betterinformed. On the other hand, this grouping of witnessesalso allows us to examine the process of male gossip ingeneral and to approach the issue of gossip as part of streetculture from a different perspective. The context of malegossip may be better understood through Robert Daviss

work on contested public spaces in Venice. Davis arguesthat men dominated the streets, making any women who

17AdC215/57.18AdC340.19 M. Tebbutt, Womens Talk? A Social History of Gossip in Working class

Neighbourhoods, 1880-1960, Aldershot, 1995; Capp, When Gossips Meet;cit.; S. Thomas, Midwifery and society in Restoration York, Journal of theSociety for the Social History of Medicine, XVI (2003), pp. 12-15.


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left the private sphere and walked through streets atransitory and subsidiary presence. Only in two public areas,according to Davis, churches and red light districts, was thepresence of women so strong that there was air ofuncertainty over whether or not they could be consideredas male-dominated spaces.20 One might want to modifythese views in the light of a court case discussed by DenisRomano, the late medieval equivalent of a modernexclusion order. To ensure that they never met, theVenetian state forbade a man from entering a specific areaof the city where a woman whom he had been importuningwas known to go about her daily business. The only way ofpreventing this from continuing was to ensure that theynever met.21 In reality, this case was the exception that

proved the rule that the streets were substantially a maledomain. This did not mean that for a woman going out inpublic was dangerous, but that she was subjected to malebehaviour that reinforced mens claim to control the space.

Some of this behaviour towards women identified themas sexual objects, but much of it was exclusionarybehaviour intended to communicate to women that theyhad no part in this gendered activity. Note the telling

contrast between dynamic female and static male behaviour.Women, though they might stand in doorways or aroundwells, mostly used the streets as spaces through which to

20 R.C. Davis, The geography of gender in the Renaissance, in ed. by J. BrownR.C. Davies, Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, London, 1995, pp. 19-38.21 D. Romano, Gender and the urban geography of Renaissance Venice,Journal of Social History, XXVIII (1989), pp. 339-53.


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an impending marriage, sexual scandal, illegitimacy andconcubinage, were also part of the conversation.

At this stage in the discussion, it is necessary to modifythe suggestion that gendered street culture wascharacterized by static males and dynamic females. Thereseems little doubt that most female activity in the street wasdynamic servants going shopping or on errands,respectable women going to church, or visiting friends andfamily. Male activity, on the other hand, was both static anddynamic. This can be seen in the behaviour of merchantsand shopkeepers, both of whom engaged in gossip as partof their everyday activities. There was little distinctionbetween conversations about buying and selling, and othersubjects. Rather than stand inside their shops, many

merchants stood or sat outside to discuss business,demonstrating here, at least, that the congruence betweeninside and outside and private and public was quite blurred.Selling involved talking up ones merchandise. SantoPetrobelli, for instance, who sold oils and other distillationsfor medicinal purposes in a shop in one of the arcades thatbordered the Piazza San Marco, sat in a chair anddiscoursed on the quality of his goods to those who came

to buy. He showed them the certificates from the HealthOffice so that they could believe that his goods wereperfect, wholesome, unique and rare.23 Many merchantsowned several shops as well as storage facilities on theRialto.24 This meant that they were frequently on the move

23AdC209/24.24AdC222/48.


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during the day, checking, acquiring information andsupervising their employees.25 Merchants moved around thestreets with purpose.

The evidence which we have of men meeting to talk inthe streets of many things including gossip about women,their own and others, suggests that there were indeed twoworlds, the domestic and the public and many men reliedon gossip for information because they did not enterhouses where they could be given direct personalknowledge. For example, the magistrates who interviewedDaniel Bertolotti in 1645 were frustrated when he wasunable to identify any of the female members of theMarcello household. As he said, I do not visit there (Nonho prattica). Bertolotti was a minor official at the Health

Office. Marcello, a patrician, had been elected to a positionin the same magistracy. They did not mix socially.26 Forthem, as for many men, there was no practical purpose inbringing business associates and others with whom theyhad a day-to-day working relationship into their houses.This would have represented more intimacy than theirrelationship warranted. Consequently, they exchangedgossip in the open as part of conversations encompassing

other business matters.27

Female gossip, on the other hand, represented animportant transition between the household and the street.Our cases before the Avogaria di Comun contain some

25AdC214/26; 220/37.26AdC209/27.27 J. Lee, Prologue: Talking organisation in ed. by G. Button J. Lee, Talkand Social Organisation, Clevedon, Pa., 1987, pp. 35-36.


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gossip outside the house in the open, largely because manyof their social interactions took place there, while womenexchanged gossip within the house because they metindoors. On the other hand, the movement of informationout of the house carried by men and women may havediffered in the way in which it was disseminated. Thetestimony of male witnesses suggests that the informationwas often, but not always, kept to themselves. They learnedsome information about someone else without feeling thenecessity to speak of it to others. References to informationemanating from the women of the house, as in theCesana case suggest a more active local female gossipnetwork. The magistrates choice to call in witnesses fromthe immediate locality in which their subjects lived placed a

particular emphasis on the circulation of gossip in theparish, square or courtyard that may have given moreprominence than necessary to local gossip. On the otherhand, this choice was based on long experience of thegeographical limits to social relationships within Venice.

Subjects of gossip and its purposes

What did people gossip about in seventeenth-centuryVenice and what was its significance? They passed oninformation about their neighbours, particularly newlyarrived neighbours. They wanted to know if a man and awoman who were living together were married or not. If


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they were married, they wanted to know something aboutthe wifes place of origin and social background. If she wasa widow, they wanted to know to whom she had beenmarried and whether she had any children. If young girlswere in the household, there would be speculation after acertain age about marriage plans. If, on the other hand, agirl moved away to a convent for her education, this wasalso a subject of discussion.

Gossip is frequently characterized as the circulation ofconfidences, where information to be kept within arestricted group escapes into broader circulation, and isoften embellished and sometimes damaging. Some gossip,however, could be instrumental. It was often fed byinformation that individuals wished known about

themselves, not for underhand reasons, but simply becausethe release of such information about themselves to thosearound them permitted them to be more easily integratedwithin society and conveyed positive messages about themand their families.

The deliberate circulation of information aboutimpending marriages, for example, had identifiableobjectives. The post-Tridentine emphasis on the presence

of witnesses at the engagement and the benediction of amarriage belonged to a much older tradition by whichpromises were frequently exchanged before witnesses toensure that in future, neither participant could deny theirexistence.29 By releasing information about an impending

29 S. Chojnacki, Nobility, women and the state: marriage regulation in Venice1420-1535, in ed. by T. Dean K. Lowe, Marriage in Italy 1300-1650,


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marriage to servants, kin and family in the expectation thatthe news would spread, proud Venetian fathers or mothersintended to signal a change in their daughters status. Suchan important life-cycle event was something for publicknowledge; a subject for congratulation, but also a signalthat a family was about to take a step intended to enhanceits future social status. Nothing could be clearer from thecases on which this article is based. Each one involved aplanned marriage between a Venetian patrician groom and anon-patrician bride. These marriages had important socialbenefits. Patrician status in Venice still had a certain aura,whether or not its holder was immensely rich, held majorpolitical office and lived in a palace on the Grand Canal.30Links with a network of patrician relatives through marriage

carried with them considerable cachet and influence. Whenattempts were made to blacken the reputation of certainfamilies in order to prevent such marriages, the protagonistsovertly referred to the kind of influence that could flowfrom access to a patrician network. Official governmentapproval for a marriage between a patrician and a non-patrician bride brought with it even more tangible benefits.These women were intended to become the mothers of

future patricians, future members of the Great Council and

Cambridge, 1998, 128; C. Cristellon, La sposa in convento (Padova e Venezia1455-1458), in ed. by S. Seidel-Menchi - D. Quaglioni, Matrimonio inDubbio, pp. 129-33.30 Some marriages with outsider brides involved patricians on the edgeof penury. For poor patricians, see L. Megna, Grandezza e miseria dellanobilt veneziana, in ed. by G. BenzoniG. Cozzi, Storia di Venezia, VII,La Venezia barocca, Rome, 1997, pp. 161-200.


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potential office-holders within the Venetian Republic. Nowonder that the name of a future patrician son-in-law wasdeliberately released into public circulation. Information outon the street among males enabled the symbolic power ofupward social mobility through marriage along the femaleline to resonate more widely from a very early stage.

Conclusion

The centrality of the making of marriages as a subject fordiscussion in the wider community and the power of

hearsay to disseminate information through gossipnetworks of varying kinds was an important element ofstreet culture in early modern Venice. The trajectory ofgossip is far from easy to trace. Unless pressed by themagistrates, the witnesses whose testimonies lie in thearchives of the Avogaria di Comun did not specify thesources of their information. Nor did they often locatewhere the gossip had taken place. Certain patterns do

emerge. Gossip about forthcoming marriages often tookplace between men rather than women, although the latterwere not excluded, particularly female servants. The subjectwas of great potential importance and represented not onlya major life cycle event for the brides family, but, in thecase of a marital link with a member of the hereditary rulingpatriciate, a matter of considerable social importance aswell. All links between patricians and those circles


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in the street, this was not always so. In order to betterunderstand this phenomenon, we would be well advised toraise our heads above street level and eavesdrop on theconversations which took place on the edges of the street aswell as in the centre.

cowan a., women, gossip and marriage in venice

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