
The legal case against Alessio Lonrenziano (Thomas Cohen: Love and Death in Renaissance Italy) highlights some interesting aspects of how economically disadvantaged young girls and women navigated the complexities and dangers of life in the mid-1500s. There were numerous forms of protection offered to such females through the Church and the charity work of powerful aristocratic women. Santa Caterina della Rosa was founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in 1542 and set up to serve as a refuge for the daughters of prostitutes and other girls whose virtue might have been at risk. The "zitelle" (maidens) were housed in a conservatorio (an institution for protecting the girls' maidenheads and their reputations. ) The young girls would be fed, clothed, and educated in the domestics arts to prepare them for eventual marriage.
Men in the administration screened potential suitors, allocated dowries (between 50-100 scudi), policed marital morals and disbursed funds. Even after successful marital arrangements were made, the couple would continue to be assessed to ensure a continued moral and respectable marriage, which did serve to protect the young brides from being exploited by their husbands. The upper-class women of the organization and the nuns were important because they had access to the girls in clausura (seclusion) and could help in their character formation. (There were institutions organized for adult women as well, those who were reformed prostitutes with children, widows with no family to care for them, who needed a refuge but did not plan to become nuns.)
Before entering the conservatori the girl was to be appraised, her virginity vouched for, and her hymen inspected by two midwives. The girls usually stayed about seven or eight years, pretty much hidden from sight. Though once a year on November 25th, Saint Caterina's feast day, in a much-anticipated event, the girls, dressed in plain smocks and aprons, processed through the city as eager bachelors look over the potential brides to be. (In some cases, the conservatori kidnapped girls languishing in dangerous living conditions to protect them from being sexually exploited.)
There are conflicting schools of thought on the lives of cloistered girls. One argument suggests that the enclosure of girls restricted the girls' lives and acted as a forerunner to institutions like the poorhouse, the madhouse, and the penitentiary. I see these options more at work in Great Britain rather than Italy which originated many charitable institutions intended to help people, from the first hospitals, orphanages and women's' shelters in Europe. The other argument is that in a world that held real dangers for females of any age without family and kinsmen to protect them, the conservatori offered safety and a path to successful marriages that benefited young women. Families and the young women themselves took steps to secure their future, relying on the well-ordered institutional system within and without the conservatori. And those women who chose to resist, or flee at least had a minimal education that could provide them with work.
The girls also ate well, according to modern archaeological digs and the bones of beef and lamb and porchetta (suckling pig). There were also found majolica ceramics -- bowls with each girl's name inscribed on it and brightly decorated with designs, flowers, and animals.
An interesting side-note: One of the more essential objects a young woman could hold in her hand was a handkerchief, especially one that she had hand-embroidered --like the girls in the conservatori. In this case, a young woman unable to make up her mind whether she wants to accept a marriage proposal or be a nun, drops her handkerchief for the prospective bridegroom, which he takes as a sign of her interest in him. But it is more than an invitation, Cohen argues, it is considered a form of a pledge. "When Shakespeare had Othello kill his wife for a dropped handkerchief, the playwright made good Renaissance sense because such a gift was not a symbol but a sign, a pledge, with all the solidity the culture invested in such things given."
I went searching through art images of the 16th century and was astonished to discover how many formal portraits of women from all classes included a handkerchief held in one hand -- like a calling card or an invitation, or an opportunity.
