My most recent book, City of Men: Service and Servants in Baroque Rome (Viella, 2023) tells the story of the men who fed, dressed, protected and advised the cardinals and great nobles of Baroque Rome. Mirroring a city where men far outnumbered women, elite households provided jobs for thousands of male immigrants from all over Italy and beyond. Footmen, courtiers, stable boys, secretaries and cooks composed an all-male world that fit awkwardly within a gender paradigm that privileged manhood but subordinated most men. I ask what being a man meant in a city of men, and I make use of census records, trials, family account books and household manuals to show both the contradictions and the tenacity of early modern patriarchy.
An earlier book, Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (Johns Hopkins, 2009), http://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu:80/ecom/MasterServlet/GetItemDetailsHandler?iN=9780801892042&qty=1&viewMode=3&loggedIN=false&JavaScript=y sprang from my first encounters with the records made by notaries; thirty thousand volumes of these acts for the period 1300-1850 are collected in the Roman state archives. Wondering why so many people, some of whom couldn’t read or write, commissioned documentation of their business and personal dealings led me to an expanding series of questions. Why did people go to notaries? What exactly did notaries know or do that made their writing different from that of ordinary people? And, finally, how does a society arrive at its particular understanding of what legal evidence is?
My first book, Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (Princeton, 1992) explored a different kind of question: What is politics in a city where the head of the church is also the head of state? http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5022.html The pope was both monarch and bishop to Romans. What exactly was the space in which papal subjects could act to influence their government or even to criticize it? My book looked closely at the center of civic government in Rome, the Capitoline hill, where a reconstituted SPQR (Senate and Roman People) tried to find room to maneuver under papal rule. I also argued that the voice of the Roman populace could sometimes be heard in protest or petition, especially during the interregnum that followed a pope’s death.