Research

One of the big challenges in writing the history of early modern masculinity is the difficulty of separating out generalizations about human beings from those about men as gendered beings. Most early modern writers talk about females in terms of their gender, but not so about males. Yet it is crucial to understanding manhood as a social construction  to be able to discern what is specific to males as “men.” As British historian Alexandra Shepard suggests, one way to meet the challenge of the “invisibility” of masculinity in early modern sources, is deliberately to seek out texts that discuss differences among men. In my research on papal Rome I’ve found guidebooks to managing the all-male servants in cardinals’ households a treasure trove of such discourse about male difference. Dozens of adult laymen worked in the palaces of the seventy or so princes of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and teaching them to produce a decorous court for a possible candidate for the papal throne was a high stakes test. They were easily distracted by status conflicts with other servants and by the temptation to pocket the objects and provisions that surrounded a wealthy cardinal. I argue that the official responsible for a successful outcome in this test, the maestro di casa, is offered as a model patriarch in a peculiarly Roman combination of lay and clerical fatherhood not unlike that of the pope himself.

My current book project, City of Men: Service and Servants in Baroque Rome, expands on these themes, which I relate to early modern Rome’s unusual demography as a city where men far outnumbered women. Because of this long lasting (16th-19th centuries) anomaly Roman society posed a challenge to the construction of gender. What was masculinity, and how was it established in a city that lacked women? To pursue these questions I have concentrated my research on male servants, particularly in large households with few or no women. I have also focused on the first half of the seventeenth century when the annual parish censuses in Rome become a regular source of information on all-male households. The skewed sex-ratio peaked in this period so I am looking at men in service at a moment when the city was at its most male. Because “servant” in the seventeenth century is a category that embraces a wide social range—from the theologian who advised his cardinal employer to the stable hand who cared for the cardinal’s many horses—I explore a variety of sources. In addition to parish censuses, criminal trials, household accounts and confraternity records provide differing perspectives on what it was like to live in a largely male society and how gender was negotiated among early modern men.

In a related study I tried to figure out why so many printed manuals on managing a cardinal’s household existed. Who wrote them and why? Who read them and why? What made publishers think a topic of such apparently limited relevance would find a market and re-issue these guides for more than century? Book history methods offer tools for investigating these and other intriguing questions about the genesis, circulation, and reception of texts. This project resulted in an essay entitled “Managing Cardinals’ Households for Dummies” that appeared in a festschrift honoring my teacher Anthony Grafton, For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton (Leiden, 2016).

Beatings, stabbings, muggings, and even murders happened regularly in 16th– and 17th-century Rome in part because it was considered a man’s duty to respond to violence directed against his person or household. I argue that violence was an important way for men to negotiate the city’s ambiguous status hierarchy in an essay entitled “Priestly Rulers, Male Subjects: Swords and Courts in Papal Rome,” in the volume, Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture, eds. J. Feather and C. Thomas (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). I also pursue other questions raised by the use of physical force in confrontations between men. What made the papal capital so violent? If priests were forbidden to shed blood, how did they earn masculine honor? Why did some men break the unwritten code and turn to the courts for justice?

How did the men in a male city live? With the help of Rome’s 1629 census I’m exploring this question in some of the neighborhoods where the male proportion of the population was at its highest: more than 70 percent. In my  essay “Men at Home in Baroque Rome,” in the journal I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 17 (2014): 1-27, I’ve discussed some of my findings. Since the disproportionate immigration of teenagers and adult men of working age caused Rome’s male “surplus,” we shouldn’t be surprised to find that more than a third of the households in my study sample consisted only of men. One big difference from modern cities where half the population is single, however, was that few of these immigrants lived alone. Households, not individuals, were the critical unit of social existence; in my sample the majority of the population lived in units of five persons or more. In a few of the very largest households, those headed by cardinals, dozens of men lived and worked under the same roof. Nevertheless, against the odds, some men (just under 10 percent) were able to find wives and form families that often included other kinfolk or apprentices.