Accounting for Affection

Caroline Castiglione is well known to historians of early modern Italy for her acclaimed first book, Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640–1760, published in 2005. Her change in focus—from rural to urban, from bottom-up to top-down—may surprise some readers. The most obvious point of connection is the Barberini family, the baronial clan who governed the six villages north-east of Rome which are at the heart of the earlier study and who were central to the complex familial networks that underpin this new one. Even so, the portraits of noblemen in wigs and portly ladies wearing pearls that intercut the text of this present book seem to have taken us far from the peasants working in the vineyards and olive groves of the Sabine Hills. In fact, the two books are united at a more fundamental level. Just as Patrons and Adversaries explored the ‘adversarial literacy’ of the villagers, who negotiated with their lords and played the law-courts, so Accounting for Affection perceives aristocratic women deploying written words—often ‘conversational and rambling’ in quality—as they fought for the interests of themselves and their families

Affection · Art history · Clan · Political science · Politics · Portrait · Sociology · Surprise · Classics · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Psychology · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity