Masculine hierarchies in Roman ecclesiastical households

Abstract

A specific genre of early-modern domestic-management handbook devoted to the running of cardinals' households enjoyed widespread popularity in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Such households were staffed by dozens of male servants whose requisites and tasks were minutely described in this literature. This article uses the descriptions of the types of men who should be hired for service posts in ecclesiastical households to analyse the construction of gender in the papal capital. It argues that the clerical ideal of manliness was an emergent but not hegemonic style of masculinity in Baroque Rome.

Keywords::

• masculinity
• household manuals
• Baroque Rome
• maestro di casa
• cardinals
• servants
• patriarchal literature
• gender

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Gigliola Fragnito for her assistance and comments and to the participants in the Harvard Early Modern Workshop and the University of Connecticut Workshop on the History of Early Modern Masculinities for their questions. My approach to the study of masculinity is indebted to Connell, Masculinities, and Shepard, Meanings of Manhood. My research was supported in part by a grant from The Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs First (1740–1823) Fund of Wesleyan University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1.Nussdorfer, “Men at Home,” 114–17.

^2.Nussdorfer, “Men at Home,” 124–7.

^3. The important work done by Karen Harvey, “Men Making Home,” and by participants in the April 2014 international conference, “Men at Home: Authority, Domesticity, Sexuality and Household Production” in Urbino, Italy, has illuminated the intermixing of public and private concerns that defined manhood historically. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy the new genre of literature on the cardinal's court adapted ancient notions of the household as a public, moral and economic entity to modern realities, giving them fresh relevance and wide circulation.

^4.Cavallo, Artisans; on ecclesiastical kinship among elites see Borello, “Generosità.” For yet another type of Catholic masculine community see Buttigieg, Hospitaller Knights of Malta.

^5. Indeed at their maximum in the 1610s there may have been 178 men for every 100 women in Rome; Sonnino, “Strutture familiari,” 248. Based on population figures (1600–60) in Cerasoli, “Censimento,” 174–9.

^6. For example, the 1629 census counted 5256 clerics, but there was a surplus of 29,755 men; Cerasoli, “Censimento,” 176. For the major demographic studies see Sonnino, “Popolazione e territori parrocchiali,” 93.

^7.Fragnito, “Buone maniere,” 80. In one heavily male parish in 1629, 16% of the men (257) lived in just 19 ecclesiastical households, only two of which belonged to cardinals; “Men at Home,” 125.

^8.Camiz, “Music and Painting,” 219; Nigro, “The Secretary,” 94–5.

^9. In English famiglia is best translated as household rather than family. The nephew–uncle axis was especially common in ecclesiastical patronage.

^10.Visceglia, “Factions,” 114–17.

^11.D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism, 228. The most famous was De cardinalatu by Paolo Cortesi, published posthumously in 1510.

^12.Fragnito, “La trattatistica,” 140–1; Gozzano, Maestro, appeared too late to be consulted for this essay.

^13.Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 15–16.

^14.Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 44–7. By composite elite I refer to the varied backgrounds in commerce, finance, office holding and landowning of Italian urban patriciates. The overwhelmingly Italian College of Cardinals itself reflected this social diversity with most cardinals coming from families of municipal elites and only a very few from ruling dynasties.

^15. See Frigo, Il padre. Even as publishers sought to highlight the utility of the texts “to the head or father of any household,” they seemed to think that many readers would be fascinated by the kind of lifestyle associated with the Catholic princes of the church; Evitascandalo, Dialogo, title page. Fragnito suggests that the Roman ecclesiastical model may have left traces on the courts of sovereigns who had once been cardinals or who depended on cardinal advisers, “Buone maniere,” 107–9.

^16.Fragnito, “Buone maniere,” 83, 85.

^17. I have discussed the authorial strategies and publication histories of the manuals in greater detail in Nussdorfer, “Managing Cardinals' Households.”

^18.Priscianese, Del governo; Fragnito, “La trattatistica,” 153; Fragnito, “Buone maniere,” 81, n. 11.

^19.Fusoritto, Il trinciante… aggiuntovi il mastro di casa (1593). A Venetian edition of Fusoritto'sIl trinciante published the same year does not include the maestro di casa text.

^20.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, “Al lettore,” also 68–9. It should be noted that while Fusoritto's 1593 text in a quarto edition was 19 pages, Evitascandalo's was 154. “Evitascandalo” means “avoid scandal.” Although such a name might well have been a pseudonym, it is worth noting that an individual called “Vitascandalo” is listed among the famiglia of Pope Paul V in 1611. (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Introiti e esiti, 40, 10v.) I thank Patrizia Cavazzini for this reference. For his author portrait see Figure 2.

^21.Evitascandalo, Aggionta. The author describes the 1606 edition as the third, although I have not yet found any surviving copies of the first (1595) edition; there was also a posthumous 1620 edition. Apart from the added Aggionta the texts of the 1598 and 1606 editions appear to be identical, although the format shifts from octavo to quarto. Because a good deal of it was copied verbatim by Francesco Liberati in the 1650s it is worth remembering that Evitascandalo's description is largely based on practices in the 1580s with some new material in the 1606 Aggionta covering the intervening 15 years. Cf. Fragnito, “Buone maniere,” 81.

^22.Adami, Il novitiato.

^23.Fragnito, “La trattatistica,” 173; Liberati, Il perfetto mastro. Liberati copied verbatim many passages from Evitascandalo and Adami. (My discussion draws only on Liberati's original 1658 edition; the author revised it for the 1663 edition, and various publishers shifted the text around and added material to the 1665, 1668 and 1678 editions; see Nussdorfer, “Managing Cardinals' Households.”)

^24.Priscianese, Del governo, 4. Some cardinals' households in the early sixteenth century reached 200 to 300; Fragnito, “‘Parenti’ e ‘familiari,’” 2: 569–70. Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 150–1. Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, provides a sample budget in 1658 for a famiglia of 89, n. p.

^25.Fragnito presents evidence from 1621 suggesting that the average size of cardinals' households was 66, down from an average of 148 in the admittedly smaller college of 1526; “Cardinals' Courts,” 50, n. 79, cf. 26, n. 1. Although we lack figures on seventeenth-century cardinals' households, Cardinals Marcello Lante and Cosimo de Torres, both living in impressive palazzi in the parish of Sant'Eustachio in 1629, had famiglie of 37 and 70 members respectively; Archivio Storico del Vicariato di Roma (ASVR), Stati d'anime, Sant'Eustachio, 1629, n. p. By contrast, Pope Urban VIII's nephew Cardinal Francesco Barberini had a household of 134 in 1637, though this was considerably smaller than some of the cardinal nephews who preceded him; Fragnito, “La trattatistica,” 137, n. 8. On declining revenues of some seventeenth-century cardinals see Visceglia, “Giusta Statera,” 206.

^26.Fragnito, “Le corti cardinalizie,” 50. See, for example, the changes in Cardinal Laudivio Zacchia's household when plague threatened in 1630; ASVR, Stati d'anime, San Nicola dei Prefetti, 1627–32.

^27. Some prelates deliberately abstained from ordination in order to be able to renounce their positions should their families need them to produce an heir. Though clerics in minor orders might have filled some of the other offices in the household, Fragnito also notes an aversion to clerical recruitment in the manuals; Fragnito, “Buone maniere,” 106.

^28. In this respect they can be compared to the English “character books” discussed by Shepard, “Manhood,” 79–81.

^29. “You must recompense everyone more or less according to the quality, duty, and value of what they do …;” Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 153.

^30.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 65.

^31.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 113.

^32.Evitascandalo, Aggionta, 8–9.

^33.Adami, Il novitiato, 79. As we shall see in Part III, this was a matter of debate.

^34.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 69–70.

^35.Nussdorfer, “Men at Home,” 116.

^36.Canepari, “Cohabitations,” 132–4.

^37. Even some footmen needed to be literate, such as those who performed the duties of the bottigliero or spenditore.

^38.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 47–8.

^39.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 88.

^40. These included the bottigliero (responsible for bottles and drinking vessels), coppiero (head of beverage service and the padrone's personal cupbearer), credenziero (in charge of setting the table and of the pantry and silver) and scalco (steward, in charge of meals). To ensure loyalty Liberati recommended that the cook, or at least his wife, come from the same town as the padrone (87).

^41. However, when his interlocutor demurred, he conceded that good looks were not an absolute necessity in the maestro di casa; Fusoritto, Il trinciante, 150; Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 61.

^42.Priscianese, Del governo, 72, 78; Evitascandalo added that they should be tall, Dialogo, 124.

^43.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 145.

^44.Priscianese, Del governo, 75.

^45.Paster, “The Unbearable Coldness,” 421–2.

^46.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 50, 61, 117.

^47.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 4. The disciplinary measures recommended were reprimands, warnings and, in certain cases, contumacia (depriving the transgressor of his food and drink allotment) or dismissal.

^48. Cf. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 23–5.

^49.Priscianese, Del governo, 49.

^50.Evitascandalo, Aggionta, 26–7. However, see Camiz, “Castrato,” 174, n. 30, for the presence of young boy singers in cardinals' households.

^51.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 120, 123–4; Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 52–3.

^52.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 4–8, 42, 53, 119, 123–4, 138.

^53.Evitascandalo, Aggionta, 26.

^54. “It is necessary to distinguish the different grades of person,” Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 152.

^55.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 7–10. There were 36 gentlemen out of a total of 106 in the famiglia described by Priscianese, Del governo, in 1543 (4–5) and 18 out of a total of 85 in Liberati's sample roll of 1658, n. p.

^56. It did, however, grant the right to wear a sword, normally limited to gentlemen, to all members of the famiglia who were not in holy orders; Nussdorfer, “Priestly Rulers,” 113, n. 29.

^57.Fragnito, “La trattatistica,” 172–3, 175–6, 180–1; the definition of nobility in the Italian tradition did not require a title and was synonymous with being a gentleman; Nussdorfer, Civic Politics, 97–8.

^58.Fragnito, “La trattatistica,” 156.

^59.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 152; Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, sample budget of 1658, n. p.

^60.Priscianese, 40.

^61. Even the cameraeri each had a servant; Priscianese, Del governo, 5.

^62.Priscianese, Del governo, 21–4.

^63.Fusoritto, Il trinciante, 151.

^64.Priscianese, Del governo, 8–9, 13, 15, 25–30.

^65.Fusoritto, Il trinciante, 161–2.

^66.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 97–8, 152. A gentleman received imported wine and 7.5 baiocchi a day for companatico compared to 5 baiocchi a day for non-gentlemen officials; lower servants drank local wine and drew 2.5 baiocchi a day for companatico. He admitted that these cash allowances were insufficient, having failed to keep up with increasing prices (24).

^67.Adami, Il novitiato, 180–1. Although Liberati's sample budget for 1658 broke the famiglia up by occupation, he adhered to the tripartite division when it came to the amount and quality of the wine distributed; gentlemen received almost twice the portion of the other servants; Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, n. p.

^68. Admittedly, these officials also had personal servants; Priscianese, Del governo, 5; Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, sample budget of 1658, n. p. However, these authors felt called upon to defend the honorable status of offices they had exercised that they felt were not adequately respected in late sixteenth-century Rome; Fusoritto, “Ragionamento.” See also Fragnito, “La trattatistica,” 169.

^69.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 65.

^70.Priscianese, Del governo, 39.

^71.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 16–17, 42.

^72.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 152.

^73. As Evitascandalo explained, although there were dozens of offices at court, only a few men were called officials. “With this distinction in names one distinguishes the quality of one servant from another, and the manner in which the maestro di casa must proceed with them;” Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 152.

^74. For definitions of these offices see the Glossary. The list also included the master of the tinello or servants' kitchen, although the tinello was no longer in fashion. Technically the footmen also counted as officials, but as liminal figures I will discuss them with the lower servants.

^75.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 30, 39.

^76.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 11, 30, 41, 63; Priscianese, Del governo, 39.

^77.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 13.

^78.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 9–13, 45.

^79.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 40, 42, 139; Evitascandalo, Aggionta, 11; Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 31, 46, 53, 58, 71, 76, 90–1, 94. All Liberati's examples appeared in earlier authors.

^80.Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 6.

^81.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, sample budget for 1658, n. p.

^82.Evitascandalo, Aggionta, 6. It may well be that “sweeping” also entailed emptying chamber pots, though this was not explicitly stated. The cardinals' footmen belonged to a confraternity whose statutes prohibited performing “servitij mecanici,” which apparently embraced sweeping and carrying firewood; Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 125.

^83.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 93–4.

^84.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 14, 43, 124–5; Adami, Il novitiato, 152. They should not be “impatient when they wait, loquacious about domestic matters, [and] sharp tongued,” wrote Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 97, see also 16, 66.

^85.Priscianese, Del governo, 49; Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 92–3, 98.

^86.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 92–3.

^87.Adami, Il novitiate, 142, 160.

^88.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 69–70.

^89.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 132, 135. See also Adami, 153.

^90.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 5.

^91.Adami, Il novitiato, 59.

^92.Adami, Il novitiato, 60, 63. Cf. Priscianese, Del governo, 52; Fragnito, “La trattatistica,” 150–1.

^93. “Holding office shows who the man is.” Classical maxim quoted by Adami, Il novitiato, 56.

^94.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 61.

^95. The increasing frequency of the notion of gravitas in conduct literature of the period is noted by Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 158.

^96.Fusoritto, Mastro, 151; Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 61; Adami, Il novitiato, 79. It would be useful to compare other contemporary courts, particularly ones strongly embracing Counter-Reformation values, to see if a similar dress code operated for laymen.

^97.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 61.

^98.Pastoureau, Black, 98.

^99.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 60.

^100.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 61.

^101.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 5–6.

^102.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 145. Don Adami, as the lone priest among the manual writers, diverged slightly from these emphases. His model maestro di casa worried less about offending the gentlemen at court and more about preventing swearing and gambling, Il novitiato, 64.

^103.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 61; Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 134.

^104.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 60–2; Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 25, 134–5, 137.

^105.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 63. He also recommended that he employ his own informants among the famiglia; Evitascandalo, Aggionta, 16.

^106.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 63.

^107.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 25–6.

^108.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 66–7; Priscianese, Del governo, 37; Fusoritto, Il trinciante, 155.

^109.Brunner, Vita nobiliare, chap. 4; Frigo, Il padre; Maifreda, From Oikonomia, 189. Cf. Adami, Il novitiato, 56.

^110.Adami, Il novitiato, 47, 49, 58–60, 184, 186, 211–12.

^111.Liberati, Il perfetto mastro, 7–10.

^112.Alberti, The Albertis of Florence, 226–8.

^113. See Adami, Il novitiato, Book 2, 183, which is directed at those who manage “case ordinarie, così di artegiani, come d'ogni altra qualità di persone private.”

^114. For a detailed discussion see Visceglia, “Factions.”

^115. For evidence that the cardinal princes did not always warm to this idea, however, see Visceglia, La città rituale, 142.

^116. See for example Di Monte Simoncelli, L'Idea del prelato.

^117.McCahill, Reviving the Eternal City, 123–4.

^118. Cf. Shepard, “Manhood,” 88.

^119.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 132, 146.

^120.Evitascandalo, Dialogo, 112.

^121.Nussdorfer, “Priestly Rulers,” 113, n. 29. For reference in Rome's criminal archives to a sword owned by a maestro di casa see Macioce, “Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio,” 163 (II doc. 193).

^122. Literally “they are very far from arms,” (sono affatto lontani delle armi), Sigismondo Sigismondi, Prattica cortigiana morale et economica (1604), quoted by Fragnito, “La trattatistica,” 181 n. 162. Sigismondi published this work in Ferrara, until 1598 the home of the Este dukes.

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Laurie Nussdorfer

Laurie Nussdorfer is William F. Armstrong Professor of History and Letters at Wesleyan University. The author of Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (1992) and Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (2009), she is currently working on a book on men and masculinities in Baroque Rome.