The variety of activities in urbanised areas in the period was considerable, as the discussion of guilds in Chapter 5 highlighted. These organisations were often at the heart of urban working society, but many occupations existed economically and socially above and below them. Contemporaries enthusiastically categorised occupations and status. This is best seen in Tomaso Garzoni’s La Piazza Universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, which was first published in Venice in 1585, and had about 30 editions over the next century. He created an imaginary piazza, a sort of world theatre, in which all occupations are represented from the most noble and respectable at the centre, to the most ignoble, like latrine cleaners on the edges. He mentions about 400 different occupations under 155 separate Discorsi, which mix occupations sometimes in strange ways. Garzoni’s occupations cover the most obvious ones like lawyers, smiths, barbers, dyers, butchers or printers that one expects from the world of guilds; but many less obvious ones like charlatans, charmers, buffoons, bandits, beggars; and even lovers, drunks, layabouts (Otiosi di piazza in Discorso CXVII), pimps and whores, or guards and spies, inquisitors and heretics. He has 18 different kinds of prophets, soothsayers, fortune tellers (in Discorso XL). Godmothers (comari) are brought in with midwives, wetnurses and other nurses as all dealing with pregnant women (Discorso CXXX). Garzoni provides a very complicated view of society, with multiple gradations based on moral worth (partly in a Counter- Reformation spirit) and concepts of nobility and ignobility, as much as economic importance. He stressed both the integration of activities, whether within the city or between city and countryside, and minute differentiations.1
Outside the fictional world, one should emphasise also that a particular family might cross several occupational demarcation lines, be classifiable at different status levels and occupy different spaces in and around the piazza. A businessman or merchant and his family might be involved in a whole range of occupations, as also a nobleman, notary or cleric; few were specialists. Andrea Arnaldi of a fifteenth-century family in Vicenza, was a notary, tax farmer and legal agent, also a wool merchant and silk retailer, and organised the raising of livestock and selling of agricultural produce. The Arnaldi family over the decades had a whole range of shops around the Piazza Maggiore, frequently changing location and what they bought, sold and exchanged. As they sought to rise in status in the city they moved out of some of the smaller trading activities, moving from diversified retail to specialised wholesale.2
This chapter will focus on a number of occupational groups or classifications, bearing in mind earlier discussion and exemplification through the guild structures, and forthcoming comments on some elites of city and countryside.
The previous discussion of guild organisation stressed a male world, though women were involved in some guilds. The historical records have tended to underestimate the extent and variety of women’s work outside the immediate family. Given recent unveiling of evidence about where women worked with men, and debates about women’s hidden work, some comments on women working and earning with men may be helpful in a focused section. Female servants, midwives and prostitutes will feature elsewhere below in appropriate places.
The close, but easily hidden, female involvement with male work was highlighted by Deborah Parker’s study of women in the book trade in early modern Italy, stressing their important activity in many processes alongside fathers, brothers and husbands in what could be a family enterprise involving masculine physique, feminine delicacy and the learning and literary skills of all. Family living conditions and the workplace, the printing atelier, were often closely integrated.3 The workshop production of books involved a complex co-ordination of skills and specialists; and involving a degree of secrecy. The full role of women as ‘the printer’ is disguised by their not being named as such, but recorded as heirs of the master male printer – husband or brother usually. A few like Girolama Cartolari (in Rome after working with her husband earlier in Perugia and Pesaro), and Elisabetta Rusconi (in Venice), did eventually publicise their own name as printer. The printing enterprise was often, maybe usually, an extension of the master printer’s house – and household. Guild rules and family pressures encouraged keeping presses within the family and also encouraged intermarrying between printing families. This was facilitated by the tendency to cluster printing establishments in a particular neighbourhood of a city (in Florence around the Badia, around the Piazza Parione in Rome). Only males could officially be apprenticed; they might live in with the family and work, unless near neighbours – and end marrying a daughter of the house. Wives and daughters in printing families were taught to read and share in the production, even if not paid and formally trained. If they usually lacked the strength to operate large presses, they could be compositors and proofreaders. Having to be literate, and sharing in a complex co-operative venture within the supposed security of the household, meant these women could take over operations and maintain a family enterprise if the male master-printer died with a going concern. While family interests might stimulate an unusual female input from adolescence onwards into the workshop system, it should be noted that larger-scale enterprises such as Paolo Manuzio’s in Rome in the 1560s brought in a significant number of women printers, when trying to cope with post-tridentine official publications, notably the Breviary.
Recently social historians have become more aware of female activity in the economy and broader ranges of society outside the family and cloister. Many mature women were neither married nor in convents. Many were widowed or abandoned without male support.4 One has to explain how unprotected women, young and old, survived. There is much debate on the nature and extent of female employment, and whether work opportunities rose or declined from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century – especially with declines or shifts in textile production, and possibly changes in attitudes towards living-in female house servants. Historians of poverty often argue that the numbers of vulnerable women increased from the sixteenth century; though changes may be distorted because of a greater concern then for the problems of the vulnerable poor who ‘deserved’ assistance.
Documenting female employment and ‘work’ is difficult because of the nature of surviving records; and the female contributions are almost certainly heavily under-recorded. Many females were part of the domestic family workforce, unpaid as such and so unrecorded. Just as in the countryside women worked alongside men in the fields, so in the city they contributed in the artisan workshops. If widowed they could sometimes utilise technical or managerial skills so learned to continue the shop and craft as the leading income earner. Urban parish records show considerable numbers of female heads of households; while some record keepers might indicate the employment (or at least formal skill) of a male head of house, they much more rarely indicated a woman’s skill or source of income, whether head of house or independently working wife or daughter. One cannot assume that such women were not earning money, nor know whether when a widow was given an ‘occupation’ she really worked as a sail-maker or blacksmith in the Venetian Arsenal, or merely presided over the establishment using male labour. Many urban women heading ‘houses’ probably supported themselves as landladies, as has been argued for the Venetian Arsenal area, and as is suggested by Roman parish records at the turn of the sixteenth–seventeenth century, when house lists give non-family members who must have been lodgers and/or apprentices.
Several issues concerning urban female occupations can be illustrated from the start of our period from the Tuscan Catasto record of 1427.5 For Florentine Tuscany it registered 7114 female heads of households (against 52,661 male heads): 3755 in the cities (1536 in Florence itself), 3359 in the countryside; but only a few female heads were given an occupation. The largest numbers were servants (116 household-heads). The only two categories that might involve major new income are wool merchant (2) and innkeeper (3). Those recorded as uncloistered religious (59 pinzochere), or dependent on a religious house (41), had a reasonable high tax assessment, which presumably implies past resources, investments and grants. Pinzochere, as independent women living in small female communities but in the world, were later to come under attack from Counter-Reformation leaders, and pressurised to enter nunneries taking full vows. They might be suspect as prophesiers and healers – from which activities they might have derived an income. Laundresses and hairwashers sometimes alternated as prostitutes in reality or in the accusations of civic leaders, as in Perugia.6
Some women were in top guilds, though the degree of their direct involvement cannot be ascertained. In the industrial and commercial sector women were most likely to be involved with textiles: processing wool, cotton and silk, weaving, cloth making and tailoring. In Venice women were active even at the full guild level, where they were noted among fustian weavers, comb-makers, cappers, tailors and doublet-makers.7 In Florence after the Black Death there seemed to be a decline in the female labour force; but the work of Judith Brown and Jordan Goodman suggests that from the sixteenth century women had a larger proportionate involvement in both woollen and silk textiles again. By the mid seventeenth century women constituted between a third and half the labour force in Florence. In 1604 62 per cent Florentine weavers were women, and about 40 per cent of all textile workers; in 1662–3 39 per cent wool workers, and 84 per cent silk workers. And a large number of female silk weavers and throwsters were ‘masters’, i.e. fully qualified and legally recognised producers. One explanation of this rise is that males were moving into more skilled luxury crafts – ceramics, furniture, jewellery, coach-building – leaving women with lower-paid and nastier jobs. The lower skill, and lower pay, aspects of female employment are highlighted by the evidence that, among the Florentine weavers in the 1610–20 period it was women who mainly wove taffeta, producing 10 braccia a week for 70 soldi; while men mainly wove the more luxurious satin velvet, producing 4 braccia a week for 210 to 280 soldi.
That ‘unsupported’ women sought to finance themselves through skills in tailoring, stocking-making or as seamstresses is indicated by Turin records on the poor in the eighteenth-century, when single women or women with children attached applied for poor relief, having fallen ill and being no longer able to work fully at these activities. If such women and children were taken into the Turin ‘hospitals’ as part of the relief, they might continue to work as seamstresses and tailors from within the institution.8 One suspects that female skills in lace-making became, under the dictates of fashion, an increasing part of the family economy from the seventeenth century; produced from home and requiring limited space, resources and equipment.
Women could enter presumed male preserves. Fifteenth-century Florentine women were in middle rank guilds, sometimes as masters, goldsmiths, painters, carpenters, butchers and cobblers; they were vintners, oil merchants, cheese dealers, and at least one was recorded as a blacksmith. Five women doctors and five apothecaries between 1345 and 1444 were registered by the guild of doctors and apothecaries.9 In sixteenth-century Venice women are recorded as barbers and tooth-drawers; bakers, ironmongers, wallers and chimney-sweeps; glass and mirror makers, boat-makers, carpenters and coopers. In a 1569 list of eighty-five apothecaries (who dealt with not only medicines, but spices more generally, confectionery and wax), five were women; none of them was described as ‘poor’, while forty male apothecaries were in that category. In the Arsenal area women appear as sail-makers, blacksmiths, boatmen and sailors. The degree of up-front, public, physical involvement of the women in such ‘male’ enterprises – as opposed to behind-the-scenes management in place of deceased or absent husbands – is unclear. Partial censuses for Venice in the seventeenth century (from 1633, 1642 and 1670) record the occupations of more than 900 women, giving them 112 different occupational describers across the categories of craft women (mainly textiles), retailing and other services. Parish recorders were under-recording, since in some parishes no woman was allocated an occupation. In contrast, scribes in the Santa Croce district gave occupations not just to heads of household, but also wives and daughters.10
In retailing, women legally could not buy or sell without a husband or guardian’s permission. But in practice women seemingly had a significant involvement in retailing, whether alongside men or alone; but no doubt usually with many handicaps. Bologna records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century showed that women were retailing on their own, but that male stall-holders were intent on keeping them out of the central city market areas, and confining them to the suburbs and rural areas. They used the police and magistrates to enforce this anti-competitive segregation.11
Female involvement in family businesses could be opposed by male guild-masters, who felt this could defraud the guilds of full dues. The 1446 rulebook of the Venetian mercers declared:
Because in the Merceria, and at San Polo, and in many other parts of the city, there are men who employ their mothers or wives in their shops, and they themselves are there too, but do not pay dues to the Scuola, and because of this many men out of their malice and meanness enrol [only] the said women and the women are held responsible for everything, be it understood that from now on no one may under any cover or fraud refuse to join the Scuola.... Moreover... if the said women wish to join the Scuola for their devotions, we shall be obliged to accept and enrol them like the other women mercers who are established in the various districts of the city and who go to market at San Marco and San Polo and to the fairs.12
Female involvement was allowed, but with full responsibilities and obligations.
Women could find niches in the world of production and retailing, probably increasingly so away from home from the seventeenth century, if less well-paid and profitably than for men. The male–female balance in the servant world had more complex competitive fluctuations, as will be suggested below.
Italian cities, and some contado areas, had a whole range of professionals and male officials, of different reputations and prestige. Over the period there was an increase in professionalism and bureaucratisation: in formal organisation, training, the establishment of status and in social and organisational demarcations. Members at the top end of the legal, medical and educational professions could be part of the social– political elite, as could the secretaries, chancellors and humanist scholars who served princely courts, and staffed the major administrative and fiscal government agencies. Social prestige could produce intellectual ossification, especially in lesser universities, where professorial appointments might be confined to members of the local elite, ignoring talented outsiders. But the detrimental effects of this tendency, as of increased government regulation which some have seen as social control, have been exaggerated.13 At the lower end of the professions many had a social prestige reputation little different from lowly artisans.
The major secular professions were those of law and medicine, whose prestige remained high throughout the period, and with those at the top end socially being seen increasingly as ‘noble’. Brescia developed three Colleges of Judges, Notaries and Physicians from the sixteenth century that were involved in professional accreditation, in pathways to conciliar government and control of administration, and to social mobility and recognition of nobility. This was part of a fashionable tendency to stress a collegial structure and status for elite professionals. The universities produced many lawyers; an elite group went on to serve as leading advocates and judges, and gained elite status through Colleges, while others increasingly staffed bureaucracies at different financial and social levels. Medical graduates similarly scattered through social levels. Florence’s Medical College had been founded in 1560 to differentiate a select group, primarily physicians, above the broader guild of physicians and apothecaries, who were not necessarily graduates.14
The medical profession, and medical practice, involved a range of people: the collegiate physicians and surgeons, guild barbers and apothecaries, midwives, specialists in making trusses and other supports for those suffering from hernias, ciarlatani peddling remedies both helpful and dubious, and ‘cunning women’ with herbal treatments and abortifacients. Through to the fifteenth century women have occasionally been traced as guild-recognised doctors and apothecaries, (as in Naples and Florence). Others practised by special licence, as in Rome and Venice. Protomedici and their deputies increasingly supervised the profession, probably to the detriment of women as doctors. Medical practice was improved by better biological and chemical knowledge, which printing publicised. Anatomy from the early sixteenth century was more openly and publicly practised (with church blessing). However conservative the official curriculum of the universities, in practice much new science was taught, and experiments made. The collegiate pursuit of status, and demarcation disputes over who should do what, could undermine good practice, and the learning process. The medical professions were sometimes too tied up with the magical sciences, and too supportive of magical and miracle cures. Medics and clergy supported the use of elixirs like the Flos Coeli (seemingly derived from alchemical secrets), while the charlatans employed elixirs sold in the piazze. Doctors and midwives might back some of the faith healers and ‘living saints’, and recommend their patients to resort to the curative powers of relics, while admitting they themselves did not have all the answers. Despite demarcation disputes, the different areas of medical practice shared common mentalities, and high and low culture co-mingled with both beneficial and adverse results.15
By the early seventeenth century there were fourteen medical Colleges, dominated by the physicians who saw themselves as professionally, culturally and socially superior to surgeons. They developed the networks of protomedici, and interlocked with them. The medical colleges varied in their exclusivity and inclusivity; and in the degree of control over other practitioners. Since Milan’s limited itself to local patricians, many other physicians practiced outside this corporate body. Bologna normally only accepted citizens, and tended to encourage a family succession of physicians; but was ready to accept a prestigious outsider, such in 1691 with Marcello Malpighi, an outstanding anatomist and microscope user. Salerno was the most open, socially and geographically. These Colleges set up one kind of social demarcation. Below them surgeons battled to achieve a separate, higher status than mere barbers. They disputed with apothecaries, whose guilds in turn had disputes with grocers, since they dealt in similar goods at times. The fuzziness of status and practice kept the protomedici busy. University physicians might teach and practice surgery without social stigma, while elsewhere a physician found it demeaning to conduct a surgical operation. Surgeons could aspire to be physicians or be forced to administer physical remedies without consultation with a physician. In many communities a barber-surgeon played all roles as the only qualified medic available. Apothecaries, supposedly servants to physicians, might know far more about drugs, and again be the only person available to help a patient. Whatever the Colleges said, some apothecaries could achieve considerable social prestige in their community, as Malpighi’s friend Lorenzo de Tomasi did in Messina, and then Rome; he was noted as also a physician and mathematician. Most apothecaries, however crucial to the life of small communities, were encouraged to keep a humble place, showing off neither in Latin nor in flamboyant carriages.
Midwifery in early modern Italy remained a female speciality that gave certain mature women a dominant role and influence in local society. It was largely an occupation for widows, experienced in childbirth themselves, who developed a reputation locally, and were possibly possessed of a specialist birthing-chair. They were there to help mother younger women giving birth; the common Italian words for the midwife, comare, mammana, derive from madre, mother. The baptismal records for the Roman parish of S.Giovanni dei Fiorentini 1586–90 show a Florentine widow (donna Catherina obstetrix Florentina) as regularly called upon for births; she enters the record because she also acted as godmother.16 Post-tridentine church reform stressed the role of the midwife as responsible for baptism (by her) if the baby’s life was in danger; and for having the child’s birth and baptism recorded in the newly required parish records. She was also expected to report the parentage of illegitimate babies. Besides assisting with births, the midwife dealt with problems of conceiving and rearing, a range of female maladies, advised about sterility and became an expert witness in cases of infanticide or rape.17 In the late medieval period a few women seemed well qualified in surgery. On the other side of law and morality, a midwife might be expected to use herbalist and chemical expertise to provide abortifacients, and contraceptive techniques. Slowly through our period registration was developed, more formal control instituted, and a kind of professionalism established, at least in the cities. Eighteenth-century registers indicate that midwives passed on their expertise to relatives who started as recognised apprentices. By then midwives in key areas like Venice were well trained, educated in new surgical knowledge, organised and licensed – by men of course. Grevembroch reported that Venice had about 100 recognised midwives (and some others). In Italy it was not until the late eighteenth or nineteenth century that gynaecological control and domination passed to university-trained male doctors.
Notaries and scribes were professionals at the heart of Italian culture, seldom granted the prestige they often deserved. Notaries and lesser scribes have been seriously understudied, though their voluminous records are the key to much historical investigation.18 Notarial clerks were required for most serious contracts, and the preservation of their records crucial for resolving disputes. Skills were required in drawing up different kinds of documents in true form, that could withstand legal contestation. For the illiterate they have been seen as ‘the priests of practical literacy, the professionals who had the reins of power over memory’, and so wrote up ‘memoirs’ for a peasant.19 Their roles ideally required trust and discretion for all parties involved in civil matters; but they also had to be aware of government and church wishes – as over testamentary dispositions in favour of hospitals or church establishments, or the need to ensure that transactions avoided usurious interest rates. Some notaries travelled considerably, and sometimes dangerously, to accompany judges and administrative officials, civilian and clerical. They took depositions, made enquiries for courts, wrote and rewrote testimonies, and in practice they probably ran many courts, as in much of the Veneto. They had to be multilingual, even in a city like Venice, which from the fifteenth century used Latin much less in the operations of government, administration and the law, for they might have to interpret a number of vernacular languages or dialects.20 Since neither the notary nor the judge or presiding official might be from the same area, much interpreting must have gone on through to the surviving preserved written record. The implications for understanding the surviving evidence, and the power and social roles of the notaries, have not yet been fully faced by historians.
The training, organisation and status of the notary varied considerably geographically, and maybe through the period. In some areas a recognised notary was clearly distinguished, but in others little distinction between a licensed notary and a clerk or chaplain (as on Venetian ships)21 able to notarise documents. Some notaries were part of the government elite, and from patrician families, others socially much inferior. Other scribes learned some notarial skills and earned some prestige. By the fifteenth century Perugian notaries had a powerful corporate identity in a consortium, putting them outside and above the normal (and powerful) city’s guild structure, subject to the College of Judges. They could serve as judges in certain cases. They had prestige and privileges, some were rich and boastful of it. Giovanna Benadusi argued for a town like Poppi that through the early modern period the status of the notary declined; but here in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the leading families of the town were providing most notaries, which was not the case in, say, Perugia. Some notaries clearly wanted to be counted as gentlemen, while other professionals resented such pretensions. When Giovanni Borelli advised his fellow physician Malpighi how to behave when going to Messina as a professor, he told him to maintain a carriage to show his status: ‘no physician would be without one’. He added that many notaries and apothecaries had them, so they could not be that expensive to keep.22
Notaries might move in and out of bureaucratic positions within cities, and even head the administration as chancellor. The Lapucci or Baldacci families of Poppi shifted from strict notarial careers into the wider Tuscan administration, earned added prestige and influence, and then withdrew from the notarial profession. In Venice the Ducal Chancellery’s main officials often had a notarial background, and some were classified as cittadini originari, the second elite. In Rome the senior members of the papal notarial-chancellery structure, the participating protonotaries, could be very powerful and prestigious men, who ranked in ceremonial ahead of mere bishops; their elevation to this title may have come after an influential career through the papal clerical system. In Rome’s civilian structure the top group of notaries forming the Thirty Capitoline Notaries had, at least in the seventeenth century, prestige, wide powers and influence. But many Milanese notaries came from artisan and lesser merchant families, who thought it helpful to have one son legally trained primarily for business purposes, and to provide an additional network of social contacts. Cities like Vicenza and Verona had colleges of notaries who were ranked alongside physicians and lawyers, above the guilds of artisans, which might put them on the path to nobility.23
Notaries and businessmen often worked closely together, as Marina Gazzini’s study (1997) of the account books of Donato Ferrario da Pantigliate in early fifteenth-century Milan illuminates. Donato was at the centre of neighbourhood groups in the Porta Nuova area in particular, and later in Porta Romana, who were involved in a variety of investment enterprises within the city, in the contado, and in connecting city and countryside. At times a local hostelry, with its investing owner, was a focal point. But more significantly, merchants, notaries and officials were brought together by a charitable confraternity – the Scuola Della Divinita – which Donato helped launch in 1429. Donato’s wife Antonia Menclozzi was an active business partner, bringing through the marriage a useful network of contacts in Milan for the relatively new man, Donato. Yet business could go on among retailers, artisans and small businessmen without notarial intervention, as a study of 17 local merchants in Prato in Donato’s period has shown. They relied on their own ledgers, and a degree of trust (fiducia).24
Many offices required business expertise, so somebody like Donato Ferrario had official posts connecting with supervising money coiners and other metal workers (which may have got him established in the city), and later provisioning Milan – based on his experience in both transport and animal husbandry. Presumably serving as an official likewise benefited subsequent personal business. Many other ‘officials’ would have had legal training in civil and/or canon law at university, or were notaries. They served dynastic political courts, courts of law and policing systems, the guilds, bureaucratic offices dealing with food supplies, taxation, health regulations and so forth. Given the way Italian governments worked, with frequently changing councils, advisory bodies and short-term contracts as legal or financial officials to avoid corruption and favouritism, an ‘official’ might have many different jobs through a career, and be peripatetic. Historians have stressed the development of prestigious bureaucracies, with an increased professionalism and education derived from university legal and notarial studies, as notably in Tuscany from Cosimo I.25
Venice can usefully exemplify the world of officialdom. Through our period the Republic developed a complex system through the two main levels of elites, of patricians and cittadini (originarii or de privilegio). In 1440 there were 347 patrician offices for the city, 16 for the mainland supervision and 71 for overseas (stato da mar); for 1540 these figures were 551, 78 and 117. The city offices so counted ranged from the Doge, lawyers (avvocati) for various bodies, councillors for various councils, senators, the six heads (capi) of the sestieri districts, the three patrons of the Arsenal to officials (savi or provveditori) dealing with controls over wine, grains, salt and various taxes, and the six signori di notte who policed the city at night, and investigated criminal and moral activities. An individual official from such elites might move between the city, the mainland and colonial posts. As a sample we can take two Venetian officials, respectively from upper and middling patrician families. Leonardo di Zuane Emo (1475–15??) joined the council of Forty soon after he was twenty, was captain of a galley in 1510, had two years on the Senate, then various strategic posts for war activities 1512–14 in Bresciano, Padua and Friuli. From 1515 he had many city posts. Notably he served as a ducal councillor (1515, 1522, 1528, 1531), was a member of the council of Ten (1518, 1519, 1521) and then headed it as Capo 1524–31, while also being a savio of the council 1527–36. He had various military posts again in 1520–22. Secondly we have Vincenzo di Pietro Zen (from the Santa Sofia branch of the clan, c. 1467–1521); though on the Maggior Consiglio from 1487 he does not feature in known office lists until 1500 when he was elected as a minor judge. He joined the Forty, served as podesta (judge and administrator) in distant Caravaggio, returned to Venice to be a signore di notte, went off to be castellan of Faenza, was again a signore di notte, then was away once more as podesta at Antivari in Dalmatia. After over three years there he appealed to the Senate to be replaced, but had to wait another year as his scheduled replacement was detained in France. On return he was almost immediately dispatched to lead, at his expense, a troop to help defend Padua (1513); there was then a gap in his office-holding career, until he became a provveditore controlling firewood supplies, in which post he died.26
Most officials remain mere names, their real lives and duties often obscure. However we have recently been granted unusual insight into one man’s career in the fifteenth century, that of Beltramino Casadri of Crema, who served as magistrate for the Gonzagas of Mantua and the D’Este of Ferrara. Particularly through his own letters to his political masters we learn what it was like to be a travelling magistrate in various posts trying to control crime, enforce justice against violent bandits and equally violent local lords, and cope with political and social pressures on all sides.27
From seventeenth-century Rome the life and personality of an urban lay official can be understood through the diary and other writings of Giacinto Gigli (1594– 1671), and some other surviving documentation about him. From a well-established Roman merchant family, he was a law graduate (after a Jesuit education), who considered himself noble. A fervent supporter of the papal Barberini family, he was proud to serve the city and its government based on the Capitol, especially as its district officer (caporione di Campitelli). He was involved in commercial affairs, taxation and processional ceremonials; ever anxious that the civic life of the city be properly conducted, and honour also paid to the papacy as appropriate. An active official life was conducted alongside his literary interests, and he engaged in some acute observation of Roman secular and religious life.28
As the ‘modern state’ evolved through the early modern period, whether with supposedly ‘absolute’ territorial Princes or with the few remaining enlarged oligarchic Republics, there was an increasing professionalism of senior bureaucratic officials, notably in the secretariat around the central government. Francesco Sansovino in his much-published Del Secretario (from 1564) propagated the view of some theologians that a secretary in his closeness to the prince was comparable with angels, close to God. The prestige of high-level secretaries, like that of chancellors or similar figures close to the ruler, was enhanced in the fifteenth century by their roles as writers and speakers of elegant Latin, producing formal documents and scholarly letters and conducting important discussions with other states and their orators. They could be useful humanist propagandists, and be chosen for their literary skills. Through the sixteenth century and beyond, other types of secretaries emerged, as in the Medicean Dukedom of Tuscany, more noted for their political skills and administrative abilities; firstly substituting for the prince in foreign relations, then taking on subsections of the burgeoning domestic administration. The Medici Grand Dukes had a cadre of twelve such secretaries in 1588, rising to twenty-one in 1609, though the numbers were reduced again by the mid seventeenth century. In place of frequently changing councils and officials of the old communal systems there were long-serving officials, like Bartolomeo and Giovanni Battista Concini or L. Usim-bardi, who developed considerable expertise. These officials in Tuscany were largely drawn from those with legal training, while their Savoyard equivalents were more often chosen for their close loyalty to the ruler, and as part of a clientele system. Such men, with a degree of professionalism, become part of a secondary urban elite.29
Over the early modern period the professional, legal and bureaucratic sectors of urban society had thus become more prominent administratively and socially, as government became more complex, as amateurish local councils and petty tyrants and their entourages declined or disappeared. There was much scope for social competition, status rivalries, in a more genteel mode. But it must be stressed that families could provide representatives in different categories outlined above, and individuals alternate between ‘professional’ and ‘official’ roles, and move between major urban centres, and contado areas.
Many in urban society, male and female, were servants – whether in their main career, or more briefly in youth. Service was a very common occupation for both sexes, embracing domestic service, but also people (usually young), who worked in botteghe or on farms without being formally apprenticed, or being a paid labourer. The account book of the Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto (unmarried) records a confusing variety of apprentices and servants, male and female, serving him in different ways as he travelled about.30 Under the category of ‘Servant’ we can include upper-status children and youths of both sexes learning and serving in other aristocratic houses, older ladies-in-waiting and companions to the rich, lackeys and footmen, gondoliers in Venice, housekeepers for priests (who might be an elderly relative or mistress), down to skivvies and near-slaves ‘below stairs’ or in the attics. Figures are difficult to interpret, because some records only registered in-house servants, and sometimes only those serving nobles and leading citizens, as Dennis Romano found in studying various Venetian figures. Some patricians had many servants, but plenty of artisans had a servant, as did prostitutes we know about in Bologna, Rome or Venice. In Siena in 1560 about half the households headed by bakers and masons had at least one servant. In Parma in 1545 out of 1900 households, 293 had one servant, 160 had two or three, while 75 had four or more.31
For a significant number of urban Italians being a servant at some point was part of the life cycle, especially in their late teens and early 20s. In Verona in 1545 30 per cent of those aged 16–20, and 19 per cent of those aged 21–25 were servants; in Parma in the same year the figures were 34 per cent and 25 per cent. For females in particular domestic service was a way of earning a dowry, and then they left to marry, while males might move to artisan jobs. However various figures for Parma, Siena and Verona imply 10–20 per cent of all later age groups to the 50s were servants. The balance between male and female servants was on the male side, but not overwhelmingly so. It was probably the largest job category for girls and women. In Venice there were significantly more female than male servants: 8234 female and 4574 male in 1563, with 6554 to 3681 in 1642. But the patricians and cittadini tended to keep male servants for status as well as utilitarian reasons; females were more commonly servants in artisan families.32
There is an argument that the servant population shifted towards the male to the detriment of female job opportunities under the moralising impact of catholic reform. Living-in servants were sexually vulnerable, whether from the master and his sons, or other servants. While in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries some of the resulting bastards might be absorbed into the household, this was to be less so in later stricter moral climates. Employing male servants might be less embarrassing than having to dismiss female servants, and send their offspring to the foundling hospitals. The arguments are complicated by the fact that in Florence Christiane Klapisch-Zuber has detected an earlier shift, through the fifteenth century, from young girls to older women, presumed widows; and other evidence indicates that the proportion of female servants in Florence increased through the sixteenth century. Rome tended to have a high proportion of male servants in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries – as moralists would hope given the large servant-employing households headed supposedly by celibates – and female servants appear attached to female-led lesser households. Yet Hanns Gross’s figures – admittedly for a very select group of parishes – show a significant rise in the percentage of female servants as the eighteenth century progressed.33
While doubtless conditions for the average servant could be grim, the job ill-paid, and the chances of sexual exploitation high, more positively the young girl could end up with a respectable dowry, saved from her payment (and supplemented by a gift from a satisfied employer), and a desirable marriage, and the longer-serving and older women might be remembered in the employer’s will. Male servants in Venice also received such recognition. Government regulations tried to produce harmony, especially within patrician palazzi, and showed worry about disobedience, disloyalty and violence from servants; courts records indicate offences on both sides.
According to Klapisch-Zuber the most respected and rewarded servant (leaving aside the upper-crust lady-in-waiting) was likely to have been the nurse; the wetnurse who breast-fed the household babies, and stayed to cosset them into adolescence, and beyond. The wetnurse (balia) was a person who could be praised and rewarded, or reviled and persecuted. In the absence of any reliable substitute for breast-milk for infants, wetnurses were needed for babies in respectable conditions, when the mother died or was too ill to feed her own child, when the mother needed to continue her own work but did not wish to abandon the baby (if paying another was cheaper than sacrificing her income), when the wife had a social profile and role militating against her own active nursing and – probably most commonly in respectable families – when the husband did not want a long gap before he resumed sexual relations with his wife. Learned authority ruled that sexual intercourse while the mother still breast-fed was detrimental to all concerned. Wetnurses were also needed when babies were abandoned and taken up by nunneries, confraternities and hospitals.34
The opportunity to earn money as a wetnurse was largely, but not exclusively, the result of death. But it became increasingly organised, even professionalised, through the early modern period. Though it is medically possible for a woman to produce breast-milk without having been pregnant and giving birth, presumably very few if any in the period mastered the technique. Wetnurses were women who had produced their own child; that child might have died (from natural causes, deliberate neglect or infanticide35), leaving the mother with milk still to offer, but this was not (as used to be argued) always the case. The mother might wean her own child early, and take on another baby for pay before she dried up. She might breast-feed another child (or two) alongside her own; this was not liked by respectable families, or by some institutions, because of cross infection. Some poor bastard-bearing mothers (such as dismissed servants) were taken into foundling hospitals to have and rear their own child and feed others there as well. A mother might pass on her own child to another (within the family, or to a cheap wetnurse, particularly in a village), and then take her milk to offer for greater money to a respectable city family, or better-paying hospital. Wetnurses operated in other people’s homes at the top social level; otherwise in
Wetnurses operated in other people’s homes at the top social level; otherwise in their own homes in cities as well as in the countryside, or within hospitals. The limited evidence suggests that Italians were more inclined to organise wetnursing within the household than, say, their French equivalents. If Italians wanted wet-nursing outside the family they tended to send babies to nurses in villages, where air was supposedly better and women more robust. Foundling hospitals used in-house wetnurses and outsiders in city or contado. Evidence from foundling institutions in cities like Rome, Perugia, Bologna and Milan reveals that some families took on a succession of foundlings for wetnursing (with the husband as the contractual organiser). Wetnursing could clearly be significant for the domestic economy of some families, and also for certain large villages or small città; Gorgonzola in the early modern period was more notable for wetnursing the babies from the great Ca Granda hospital of Milan than for its cheese. The wetnurses who came to serve in the larger households might end up as lifetime servants there, and confidantes of children and mothers.
In contrast there were nastier male servant companions, the bravi – defined in 1609 by the Venetian government as those ‘who seek to earn their living by arms’.36 As such they were a criminal element, escorting more elite figures, or coming into the city to carry out threatening activities and intimidation. Many were already outside the law as banditi, but others had been (or would return to being) more legitimate unarmed servants. Bodies of bravi were a major problem in rural areas, intimidating peasants on behalf of landowners. But they have shown to be a major nuisance in Venice, and the subject of much legislation and intermittent legal action. Clearly being a bravo for a patrician was a significant way of earning a living, having an exciting urban life for a short while at least. Bravi operated protection rackets for their masters and themselves, settled vendettas, were frequenters of gambling dens and brothels and facilitated the sexual escapades (often violent) of their employers. Garzoni’s Piazza Universale portrayed them as brutal animals, whose gifts to a prostitute were ‘bites on the breasts, and making her howl like a desperate bitch’.37 Venetian legislation treated them all as dregs of society, unskilled and a menace. In practice they did have fighting skills with various weapons and may well have enjoyed a moderate social status at some point. While some violated prostitutes, others defended them. In 1609 rival courtesans Alba Albanesi and Cornelia Savioni both employed factions of bravi to protect themselves and their trade. Venetian legislation may to some extent have stereotyped and demonised them, but some bravi were undoubtedly involved in serious violent crimes, alongside violent renegade patricians like Michiel and Antonio de Silvestro Memmo, Alvise and Zuanne de Gabriel Zorzi and Lunardo Pesaro, who were accused of murder, rape, sodomy, extortion and so forth. In practice distinctions were not clear between unarmed and armed servants, soldiers, sbirri and outlaws, when healthy males unable or unwilling to have a peaceful way of earning money sought employment.
Service could thus be a respectable long-term career for both sexes, an apprenticeship, a pre-marital path to a respectable dowry and marriage, but also a dangerous transient expedient, that alternated with other casual labour and employment.
Below the level of the organised artisans socially and often, though not invariably, economically were many occupations besides service for more casual and precarious employment allowing males, and fewer females, to survive. Some were legal and respectable, others verged on the criminal. Chapter 5 has already discussed the itinerant sellers, organised in guilds or not, who were a major part of the marketing systems; here some men and women could move in and out of a commercial activity as they faced difficulties, while for others such trading was their life career. Some occupations provided a precarious living for the unskilled or offered salvation for the more skilled who had fallen on hard times through general economic crises, through personal family and business misfortunes or through falling foul of legal proceedings, whether guilty or innocent.
Estimating the extent of a manual labour force outside the guild–artisan structure is very difficult, even for a well-documented and bureaucratic city like Venice, as R. T. Rapp admitted.38 Guilds varied in what unskilled workers they incorporated, and who they left as an individual to seek work by the day, without protection or control. In Venice the ratio between those in guilds and those outside the structure was about 3:1, but with variations from 1:1 for the Arsenal, and 1:4 for the wool sector (in the 1590s). Rapp admits defeat in estimating the unincorporated and casual silk workers. The less controlled and protected labour force included porters, messengers, building-site workers, street-cleaners, lamp-carriers, gardeners and street vendors. Rome in the eighteenth century had about 260 kinds of street vendors (male and female), some in guilds others not, though all supposed to have licences and the quality of their wares checked.39 Rome had considerable areas of vineyards, market gardens, and meadows within the walls, to provide casual labour for urban residents and contadini entering daily. Venice’s Giudecca and other parts probably provided the same opportunities on a smaller scale. Building operations involved unskilled manual workers. In fifteenth-century Florence and Rome large numbers were hired and paid in cash as individuals on a daily basis. By the seventeenth century it seems that in Rome most building labourers were employed through the guild system, as in Venice or Milan.
The sbirri referred to were the messengers and police or prison officials who served the various legal and administrative bodies in all Italian cities and towns. Garzoni was as vituperative against their violence and corruption as against the bravi. His views were shared by later writers, such as Giovanni Rainaldo in the seventeenth century who judged the papal sbirri to be: ‘ignorant, vile, haughty, voracious, miserly, insolent, lying, greedy, and fraudulent’.40 In practice diverse lesser officials, messengers and servants were employed in running the urban community and linking with the hinterland. In Florence many were literate and reasonably honest serving the main policing system and magistracy, the Otto di Guardia, as they may have served commercial institutions and guilds. Others all too readily alternated between being messengers, prison guards, soldiers and prisoners themselves. Serving judicial and administrative officials, delivering warrants, collecting fines and debts, seeking to arrest accused, protecting the magistrates and so on were dangerous, life-threatening activities – more particularly if sent out of the city to the contado, as we know from accounts concerning Mantuan and Ferrarese magistrates and their officials in the fifteenth century,41 or of forces of sbirri sent out from Bergamo, Brescia, Padua or Verona to do battle with Venetian bravi and banditi in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Given low pay, the temptations to do corrupt deals, free prisoners or avoid implementation of sentences were considerable. A Roman sbirro in 1629 was judged too poor to pay personal tax. Establishing how many people were involved in this type of activity seems impossible, given the considerable number of institutions and officials that needed sbirri of some kind, and that the more formal appointments were often on two- to six-month rotas, that there might be unofficial equivalents under a generic title of sbirri, as well as those officially called that. Scattered documentary scraps give momentary insights. In Florence the Otto di Guardia alone had a cross-bow guard of 200 for civic control; in the eighteenth century the captain of the Bargello commanded a force of 60. Andrea Zorzi reckoned that by the fifteenth century the Florentine police forces constituted 1 to 150 inhabitants or even 1 to 125.
In 1790 Rome had 163 official sbirri under 8 captains (bargelli ), serving the various courts and tribunals, but notably the main Governor’s court for both criminal civilians cases. Some of these would operate outside the city as mounted police; but in the province of Umbria and Duchy of Spoleto within the Papal State 31 communities had 96 sbirri and bargelli paid for by the central Roman government, and another 81 by the local communities. By this period the sbirri of the Papal State had an evil reputation for brutality and corruption; they were seen as being recruited from the dregs of society, as ready to extort money, rape women and to use violence indiscriminately against clergy and nobility (at least until the latter bought them off). Earlier, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the motley forces in Rome of marescalchi, bandaresi, turrieri and balestieri etc., had been much more socially acceptable, and less worrying than this. The growth of the papal absolute state had produced a more feared force, but with no improvement in justice and law enforcement.42
Casual labour was available whatever the extent or otherwise of guild controls and incorporations. While some servants, female and male, were long-term careerists, others would have come from the pool of casuals available. Hawking and peddling of goods might be regulated within Venetian or Bolognese guilds, but was probably open and uncontrolled elsewhere; and in Venice incomers could start outside the arti, especially the merzeria, but be embraced by the system, and given more security. Women (and girls from about 7 years old, as in seventeenth-century Rome)43 could pick up unskilled or limited skilled jobs in textiles industries or could earn money from lace-making at home. In crises – personal or general economic – girls and women resorted to prostitution as a temporary solution, until able to return to textile work or domestic service. Some women (and a few men) must have supplemented incomes by magical practices, though the Inquisition records do not help us much on the returns for such risky services.
The marginalised poor, if able-bodied, had casual employment opportunities – at least in sound economic times. In mortality crises some unemployed casuals could shift to grave-digging, which through both pay and theft might be lucrative should they survive the disease, and the professional grave-diggers’ antipathy.44 It is probable that artisans would at times also drift in and out of policing forces of various kinds, especially as they were expected in some cities like Rome to act in a civic militia as required. Poor, underemployed artisans from Venice voluntarily or under government pressure were employed in the state galleys.45
Female prostitution was a major aspect of the urban economy and social life of the larger Italian cities, as was recognised at the time. Italian authorities, lay and clerical, had conflicting and changing attitudes and policies towards female prostitution.46 In a panic over plague (as in Perugia in 1487 and 1493), food or political crises, with worries about law and order (as in the 1559 crisis in Rome on the death of Paul IV), the authorities might temporarily expel prostitutes along with vagabonds and alien beggars. They did not resort to the draconian measures of some Protestant northerners who closed down brothels and tried heavy punishments for all extramarital sex. Catholic reformers did encourage prostitutes to reform, and sought to seclude them from further temptation in conservatories, but they recognised that vulnerable women might have to resort to the income of prostitution to survive, and needed philanthropic aid of shelter, food, clothing and even marriage dowries in substitution. Prostitution was generally tolerated and subject to limited control to avoid excessive public scandal. In the eyes of moralists sodomy and male prostitution were far greater sins and evils, and female prostitution was a less undesirable substitute for sexually frustrated, late-marrying males – as particularly in Florence. And the toleration of licensed prostitutes would save other innocent girls and women.
In some cities prostitutes were officially confined to set red-light areas and buildings: the Mercato Vecchio (old market) area of Florence; near the Rialto in Venice. In fifteenth-century Perugia prostitutes were allocated a zone between the two main squares and thoroughfares – called the Malacucina.47 Laws were sometimes imposed to make prostitutes wear red or yellow badges, and to control their ostentatious dress. Florence between 1403 and 1680 had a major magistracy, the Onestà, designed to both control and protect prostitutes. Prostitutes and clients alike resented and evaded control in an atmosphere of inefficiency and corruption, not least because from the 1540s licenced users of the bordello were taxed to help pay for institutions for the ‘reformed’ prostitutes. When from 1633 harsher regulations essentially criminalised prostitutes, more sought to go underground – or operate as ‘exempt’ courtesans.
This leads to various points about the numbers of prostitutes, and classification. Extravagant, polemical, allegations were made at times that key cities, especially Rome, had thousands – or even 10,000 – prostitutes as part of their moral corruption. A census return for Rome in 1621 is more realistic in giving 718 prostitutes. That figure, and similar ones, derive from what parish priests reported to the Roman Vicariate or Vatican officials based on their status animarum returns. Priests were supposed to record those women who were active, unrepentant prostitutes who might be spiritually unfit to receive Easter communion. Studies of the actual registers suggest that the recording of such women was rather haphazard; that the end total did not always tally with the notifications of meretrice against names in the house-by-house register. Clearly some clergy were reluctant to count and classify prostitutes; the curates of Milan in 1610 merely counted eight, hardly an accurate tally of the activities in ill-reputed areas such as the piazza S.Marcellino, and around the Castello.48 Probably these were the professionals, the full-time common prostitutes surviving – sometimes doing well – on this activity. Additionally there were more girls and women who entered prostitution intermittently according to personal and general economic circumstances; and there were ‘higher class’ courtesans who were likely to be treated differently as part of elite, cultured society. In a Florence census in 1569 the Onestà had 159 prostitutes registered in the red-light brothel areas; 77 other women, ‘richer’ and more highly taxed, were allowed to operate as non-registered practitioners – consorting with elite and in court circles. Bologna in 1598 registered 584 prostitutes for fining/taxing purposes, of whom at least 71 can be identified as non-Bolognese by birth or parentage. Given the dire economic conditions of this decade one would expect a high level of prostitution.49
An elite prostitute was often called cortegiana, rather than the more declassè meretrice or putana; but there were contentious borders between the classifications. At the top of the scale, courtesans could be highly accomplished, educated and cultured women, prized as ornaments of elite patrician society and courts, and having a lavish lifestyle. They might dress flamboyantly boasting the finest jewellery, and be painted nude or semi-nude by the greatest painters like Titian and Palma il Vecchio. They presided over their own salons, or ran salons and academies for their chosen lovers, picking their competing clients and patrons at will; and they could settle for a prestigious husband at the end. Such elite social figures were most famous, or notorious, in Rome in the first half of the sixteenth century, in Florence under the Medici Dukes, and especially in Venice through the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Possibly the best known, making a lasting cultural contribution, were Tullia d’Aragona, a leading contributor to the poetic and musical circles of Rome in the 1520s and 1530s and then in Florence, and Veronica Franco in Venice, one of the finest sixteenth-century poets.50
Some courtesans clearly enjoyed a fine lifestyle, without being too close to the most powerful, as the surviving inventory of the possessions of the Venetian Julia Lombardo and her sister demonstrate.51 Those who attached themselves to respectable patricians and merchants could do well; but there was always the danger of becoming involved with rougher patricians (from the same family, as Veronica Franco herself found), to become involved with the bravi – both as victims and employers.
Prostitution concerned more than selling the body and simple sex in return for money and survival. If cultural services were provided by the tiny elite at the social peak, more dubious skills were offered by others at all levels. Professional prostitutes were experts in love, expected to be knowledgeable about love potions and magic, spells and incantations to bind or loose lovers and rivals. Extrapolating from this expertise they knew how to cure illnesses or find lost property. The trial records of ecclesiastical inquisitions and secular courts indicate that there was a perceived and real link between prostitutes and superstitious practices – on their own behalf (seeking to keep a lover/patron/ financial supporter stalwart), or that of others. In Venice in 1588 the courtesan Paolina de Rossi mixed sage (a recognised aphrodisiac) with her menstrual blood in the food and wine of a victim, to regain his affections.52 Andriana Savorgnan, a higher-class Venetian courtesan, was accused (among other charges) of using superstitious practices to bind the nobleman Nicolo Corner to her. She had used olive branches issued to her in church, bound them together and dipped them in holy water; then said: ‘As I bind this wood with this string, so too may be bound the phallus of Nicolo Corner so that he may not be able to go to any woman but me.’ Then, having planted the wood in the ground: ‘As this wood will not grow again or branch out again, so too Nicolo Corner may not be able to have relations with other women than me.’53 She was not a great success as a magician; Nicolo’s wife had a child about a year later. However, Andriana survived inquisitorial enquiry and the dangers of prostitution to become a patrician’s wife.
In Rome the courtesan Lucrezia the Greek was investigated by the Governor’s court in 1559 for her uses of love magic (involving candles, lamps, prayers) to seek the favours and support of various men; ‘... the courtesan Lucrezia the Greek makes alliances and uses magic to conduct the risky politics of love’.54 From this investigation, and from another trial in which she also appears, Lucrezia was well enough off to have two or three servants; she was an acceptable part of a co-operative neighbourhood community. But she was also vulnerable to unwelcome threats to house and body from undesired or dissatisfied clients, and to the scourge of syphilis – as allegedly from her illustrious ‘friend’ Cardinal Strozzi.
Prostitution was a significant part of the female economy, a salvation for betrayed and deserted young women, sometimes a pathway to marriage and stability. It saved families in dire temporary economic conditions. With services and skills beyond the mere selling of sex, it empowered a significant number of women. It involved women from many levels of society, though probably most ended among the destitute.
These categories of the social order were even more fluctuating than in modern society. The concepts of the ‘poor’ and ‘miserabili ’ were varied at the theoretical level, with commentators, charitable institutions and tax organisers anxious to make discriminating sub-divisions of these categories. Social welfare was affected by such subtle categorisations. Many individuals from sectors of society discussed above in this chapter might be deemed ‘poor’ and even be destitute at crucial moments in their lives, through economic misfortunes, deaths of relatives or major illnesses. A merchant might be in dire circumstances through the loss of a ship and his cargo, especially if he had a large family of females to support, or even one daughter to dower when he was sick, as Francesco Bonaventura claimed (successfully) in petitioning for a grant from the Venetian confraternity of S.Maria dei Mercanti in 1553.55
This section briefly looks at those more obviously poor for long periods.56 Various historians agree that in western Europe, including Italy, there was a category of structural poor of about 4–8 per cent of the population needing help for long periods or all their lives. Up to about 20 per cent constituted the conjunctural poor, meaning those who could expect to be dangerously poor at one or more points in their lives, given normal extraneous economic conditions. But 60 per cent or more of the population could be rendered destitute in a prolonged crisis induced by food shortages and very high prices. S. D’Amico (1994, 1995), using Milanese parochial records for the period 1580–1610, reckons that about 17 per cent of the city population consistently were counted as poor, on a basis with which modern assessors could concur. The financial and health crisis of 1619–21, especially affecting the silk industry, rendered 40 per cent of the working population unemployed. In 1661 the Venetian government treated 33 per cent of inhabitants of the city as poor, on the criteria of their living in charitable institutions (such as alms-houses), or in rented habitations for less than 12 ducats a year, which meant damp first level housing, or wooden shacks.57
The structural poor sector might include the very young and old without able-bodied relatives capable or willing to support them; the maimed and long-term sick; single women without skills or in cities where there were limited opportunities for textile production outside small family units; males with limited skills or physical ability to secure more than an intermittent casual job; those ‘criminalised’, under threat of arrest or being killed who could not secure open employment. Such people survived by begging on the streets, at church doors or even inside churches (though attempts were made to curb that from the later sixteenth century), by stealing and by prostitution. Parochial, monastic and confraternity poor-relief systems developed especially from the mid sixteenth century.
We have limited knowledge of how and where such people lived. Some lived and died on the streets, as found by confraternities (such as the Della Morte companies in Rome or Perugia), who were concerned with giving decent burial to the poor. Health board officials, as from Florence or Genoa, worried about plague, typhus and dysentery epidemics, testified to grim conditions of people existing in damp or flooded basements, with putrid mattresses or sordid straw, with alleys as open sewers polluting the air and infiltrating basement rooms. In 1630 Florentine gentlemen appointed to survey the plague threatened city were horrified by the living conditions of the poor: ‘in many houses there are no beds and people sleep on scattered straw and some have palliasses that are filthy and fetid.’58 Such existence in Bologna in the 1590s received publicity from the published poetic Laments of Giulio Cesare Croce, who emerged himself from poverty to read, write and publish.59 Room renting was seemingly fairly cheap, and this could be made more so by single persons, male or female, cramming together however unhygienically. It is also surprising how many people lived alone, in richer or poor areas. At the most marginal levels of society people could drift in and out of habitations and hardly enter the records, especially if male. From the mid sixteenth century they were likely to be at times institutionalised as mendicants.
While Chapter 5 sought to outline the organisation and nature of the central core of the male urban population, the backbone of the economy, this chapter has categorised a number of other categories of society, female as well as male, that were part of the working community, at least in better times. At the top end, professional and bureaucratic society seems to have become more organised and professional over the period, and sometimes haughtily elitist – as will be later emphasised. At the lower end there were always many vulnerable persons. Problems of evidence make it difficult to tell whether the opportunities for casual employment became proportionately greater, though we will later note a probable increase in philanthropic help as an alternative or supplement for those poor deemed deserving. Opportunities of employment for women seem to have fluctuated over time and in different locations but, while the paucity of unveiled records may distort the trends, jobs for women in textile work, retailing and sometimes in domestic service seem to have grown through an increased level of material culture. Employment opportunities, social security status, the need to seek casual employment or resort to prostitution, depended much on the strengths and weaknesses of the family and household, to which we now turn.