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. 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. In “Masculine Hierarchies in Roman Ecclesiastical Households” (European Review of History 22, 2015) 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.
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, Brill, 2016).
My most recent book, City of Men: Service and Servants in Baroque Rome (Rome, Viella, 2023), expands on these themes, which I relate to early modern Rome’s unusual demography as a city where men far outnumbered women. The annual parish censuses show that while the skewed sex-ratio peaked in this period (1620s), it was an enduring anomaly until the mid 19th century. Seen from this perspective, Roman society posed a challenge to the construction of gender. How did manhood show up in a city that lacked women? To address this question I have concentrated my research on male servants, particularly in large households with few or no women, a kind of microcosm of the papal capital itself. Since “servant” in the seventeenth century was a category that embraced 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 to observe men’s interactions with other men in the household. Very revealing are the records of compensation, both in kind and in coin, because they show that servants could not live independently on what they “earned” from service. Dependence on patronage, “non-monetary” aid, buttressed the patriarchal household and compromised gender privilege for all levels of the male servant hierarchy. Nevertheless, criminal records and confraternity documents reveal that in the Roman world beyond the household there were many opportunities for subordinated men to escape, and even challenge, the hierarchies that patriarchy imposed.
Having examined a significant cross-section of Rome’s working poor in my book on male servants, in a recent essay I turn my attention to men in elite families, focusing especially on the nexus of patriarchy and primogeniture. In “Meanings of Manhood in 17th-Century Roman Noble Families” I have a double goal. One is to develop a conception of masculinity that moves beyond notions of identity or performance in the direction of social process, and the second is to connect the study of masculinity as a dynamic operation more closely to family history. The rich sources and historiography available make Baroque Rome an especially fertile setting for such an ambition, and I focus on two well-studied families, the Orsini di Bracciano and the Spada, originally of Romagna. This piece appeared in a volume entitled Una curiosità generosa. Studi di storia moderna per Irene Fosi, edited by Giuseppe Mrozek Eliszezynski and Giovanni Pizzorusso (Rome, Viella, 2024), a collection celebrating the career of a prolific historian of early modern Rome.
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, edited by Jennifer Feather and Catherine 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 explored 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” (I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 17, 2014), I 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.