Menacing Virgins (ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie) is a wonderful collection of essays on 16th century attitudes and traditions regarding female chastity and conjugal sex before and after marriage. These customs are inscribed by two other considerations: the honor of the household and virginity as a form of commodity that engenders an exchange of goods, debt, and payments. The bride should exhibit the virtues of her status vergine, onesta, casta, virginity, honesty, and social class. When conjugal sex becomes a requirement of marriage, chastity should be expressed through public modesty and private sexual restraint. In this first half of the essay, Cristelle L. Baskins' examines (the mostly male) attitudes toward female sexuality in the Renaissance. (*note to self, compare these attitudes to the women writers of the period.)
Research Notes from "Il Trionfo della Pudicizia: Menacing Virgins in Italian Renaissance Paintings" by Cristelle L. Baskins:
Quotes from the 14th to the 16th century, written by men on the proper behavior for women, revealing a concern should the wife fail to behave in the proscribed manner, she would in effect betray her husband's honor, and that of her children. And probably, financial concerns as marriages saw exchanges of money and goods prior to weddings; brides contributing dowries (paid out over time only if the marriage remained a moral activity) and husbands providing housing, and copious amounts of art and wedding furniture. (*note to self -- look up more information on the "Desco da Parto" birthing trays given as a wedding gift for the bride.)
Paolo da Certaldo: compares a woman's chastity to a beautiful flower and a husband's crown." (14th C) Francesco da Barbaro tells wives to "at least seem to be chaste in that sort of temperance from which chastity is derived...lust and unseemly desire are harmful to their dignity and to their husbands even when they say nothing about it." ("On Wifely duties" 1416) (117). Leon Battista Alberti: "nothing is so important for yourself, so acceptable to God, so pleasing to me, and precious in the sight of your children as your chastity. The woman's character is the jewel of her family...per purity has always far outweighed her beauty. (Delle Famiglia, 1440) (117) Baldassare Castiglione dialogue, "Il Cortegiano" (1528) ponders the construction of exemplary female chastity in the service of men. In the dialogues debating women's chastity, Giuliano de'Medici challenges a misogynist Gasparo: "But if you will acknowledge the truth, you surely know that of our own authority we men have arrogated to ourselves a license, whereby we insist that in us the same sins are most trivial and sometimes deserve praise which in women cannot be sufficiently punished unless by a shameful death or at least perpetual infamy." (117)
By the middle of the 16th century, the ambivalent attitude toward female sexuality intensifies as "every gesture towards purity of the text or the body risks further contamination and pollution. Virginity emerges in Renaissance discourse, then, as a site for the exercise of misogynistic assumptions about women's limited capacity for sexual restraint. " Francesco da Barbaro echoes an ongoing need to contain his wife's sexuality by requiring that even in her thoughts "...see that you never want another man to share this bed but me." 118)
Midori Snyder is the author of nine books for children and adults, published in English, French, Dutch, and Italian. She won the Mythopoeic Award for The Innamorati, a novel inspired by early Roman myth and the Italian "Commedia dell'Arte" tradition....
