In order to even begin to understand the Renaissance, one must recognize that
the "Preoccupation with Salvation and the Fear of Damnation and Divine Wrath
"control" and "consume" the persons of that period.

"Honor", "Agency" and "Status" are important secondary themes. The authors 
also feel it is important to convince us that this is an "Alien" Society, and 
we must be willing to judge their Renaissance actions by the "reasonable" 
standards of that time. 
==================================================
Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas V. Cohen. Daily Life during the Italian 
Renaissance. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. 336 pages. Index. $49.95 
(cloth), ISBN 0-313-30426-2. Reviewed by Luci Fortunato De Lisle, Associate 
Professor of History, Bridgewater State College. Published by H-Italy 
(January, 2002) 

"A chronology of the political and cultural history of Italy from the Black 
Death to the execution of Giordano Bruno and a map of Renaissance Italy open 
the book." ..and  proceeds through seventeen chapters.

"The FIRST Chapter serves as a primer on Renaissance Italy, touching briefly 
on the nature of daily life and the perennial "problem" of the historical 
label "Renaissance" before surveying the geographical conception of "Italy" 
and Renaissance culture, politics, economics."...

There is "concern not to oversimplify life in Renaissance Italy and their 
caution not to reinforce exhausted cliches. They succeed further in 
introducing scholarly preoccupations with themes such as honor and agency." 

[RAA NOTE:This concept of "Agency" intrigues me.]

..."throughout the book contrasts are drawn to emphasize a view of the 
Renaissance not as is often overemphasized as the precursor of western 
modernity but rather very much as an alien world and mentality.[RAA NOTE: " 
An "Alien" World????] 

"Rank, age, and gender thread through the presentation of society--clergy, 
country folk, city dwellers, soldiers, ...--in Chapter TWO... 

"Chapter THREE, 'Dangers' attempts successfully to convey the perceived 
supernatural, and actual natural and human threats to security in Renaissance 
Italy. PREOCCUPATIONS with SALVATION and the just, though PUNISHING, ROLE OF 
DIVINE PROVIDENCE--or more simply put, FEAR OF DAMNATION and DIVINE 
WRATH--are keys to understanding the presumed supernatural threats and social 
responses to events such as visitations of the plague that were ascribed to 
God or the devil...."

[RAA Note: I always felt that insufficient attention is given to this aspect, 
and if we recognize and accept that as the pervading and pervasive omniscient 
factor in their life, then it cannot excuse, but can explain why people who 
were so dedicated to culture, could still be so unhumanitarian to one other. 

"Family and other Sodalities" (Chapter FOUR) are presented as the most 
practical modes of protection, as well as the essential sociological 
organizers of Italian Renaissance society. Family is considered... also as a 
collective concerned with matters of honor, identity, control of public 
space, and as a gendered and generational hierarchy concerned largely with 
practical matters such as property and dowry. The complex of relationships is 
extended to the patron client system and other formal and informal groupings 
including town and neighborhood affiliations, guild and religious 
confraternities..." 

"The hierarchical nature of society--conceived as the proper natural social 
order--is developed in Chapter FIVE. After examining the received classical, 
religious, and biological traditions informed by patriarchal, and age 
assumptions, the authors proceed to describe social rank and titles within 
family and society. A brief discussion (pp. 77-78) of the language of status 
and address in Renaissance vernacular usage and literature offers subtle 
insights into the social inequalities that operated. As a counterbalance to 
status determined by birth or office, the authors note how prestige might be 
acquired through "cultural and intellectual capital" (p. 80); that is... 
displayed through prestigious consumption and personal presentation of 
refined dress, gestures, and manners." 

"Chapter SIX returns to the central thematic concerns of honor and agency in 
treating Renaissance values and moralities. Honor is presented in the context 
of a broad Mediterranean value system. Family and gendered concepts of honor 
are central... and linked to honor and shame." 

"This secular notion of honor with its particularism was often in tension 
with the universalistic brotherhood preached by the Christian religion that 
dominated the peninsula...."

The Renaissance preoccupation with maintaining social order emphasized in 
chapters four-six is expanded to the institutional level of the state more 
centrally in chapter SEVEN. The realities of urban politics and bargaining of 
all sorts toward the end of social control and order are considered with a 
central focus on the role of communal government, police, the courts and 
finally the execution of justice." 

The direction of the book shifts with Chapter EIGHT, "Media, Literacy, and 
Schooling." Media is understood in a broad sense to encompass the transient 
stimuli conveyed by the senses of a human touch or a smell and the more 
conventional images conveyed in art or in print. The Renaissance revolutions 
in print and art as crucial innovations, and their social and historical 
implications...other methods of cultural communication, both oral and 
written, are not ignored. Indeed to assess the impact of the print revolution 
requires an understanding of the nature and extent of literacy in the era 
which the authors attend next to schooling, the survival and construction of 
documents, and the growth of journalism. They are careful to stress the 
survival of the oral tradition in the activities of cantastorie and preachers 
throughout the Renaissance. They comment, additionally, on the popularity of 
diaries and ricordanze among the popular literate classes to conserve their 
activities and lives in memory. 

"Spaces" and "Time" occupy chapters NINE and TEN. The Renaissance geometrical 
conception of space is taken up first with reference to art, cartography and 
defensive urban planning. The uses of rural topography, the construction of 
villages and houses, and the place names ascribed to them are then contrasted 
with the uses of urban space. The section of the chapter on the towns conveys 
a sense of the physical realities inside urban walls, of neighborhood 
divisions that fostered solidarities and rivalries, and which harbored sacred 
spaces. It grapples with the phenomenon of the evolution of urban 
architecture in response to demographic changes or threat of war...Chapter 
ten sorts out modern and Renaissance perceptions and experiences of time. In 
discussing the differences of the calendar year, considerable attention is 
given to religious feasts and celebrations closely keyed to the agricultural 
cycles. While noting the underlying linear millenarian eschatology widely 
known through Christian teaching, the authors assert that for most 
Renaissance Italians, this explanation did not satisfactorily explain the 
rest of human history....

>From a macrocosmic consideration of time the authors turn (chaptersELEVEN and 
TWELVE) to consider the temporally circumscribed human life cycle. They draw 
upon scholarship on the history of childhood and on more recent literature 
about adolescence. Adolescence, which was brief for upper-class females, 
often brought an early passage to adult status as wife or nun and sometimes 
even the special threats of assault and rape, while for males a long 
adolescence could be marked by ritual, self-imaging and, often violent 
activities. Matchmaking and marriage receive extended attention before the 
authors conclude the life cycle and the funeral rituals that followed. 

Human comfort and survival link the next three chapters. Chapter THIRTEEN, 
"Houses, Food, and Clothing," ranges across the ways in which individuals 
sustained their bodies to maintain health and propriety. Drawing on 
Renaissance sources, the authors offer further description of domestic space 
and the objects that filled it and of the amenities (or lack thereof!), of 
the food available and methods of preparation, and of the clothing, hair 
dyes, and cosmetics available to women.

Chapter FOURTEEN documents the individual and collective response when health 
could not be maintained, beginning with a survey of the medical theories 
highlighting the miasmatic theory of plague and the social responses based 
upon it. Infectious diseases from plague to syphilis that predominated from 
the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries are discussed along side diabolical 
possession. Early modern Italians' attempts to cure are typical of the mix of 
remedies attempted across Europe before the Scientific Revolution. 

"Work" and "Play" (Chapters FIFTEEN and SIXTEEN) conclude the individual 
thematic chapters of the text. As the authors state plainly, the chapter on 
work "surveys the large social division of labor...looks at the cultural 
meanings of work, their bearing on status and self-worth...[and] the 
conditions of production" (p. 253). Most interesting in this chapter are 
quotations and a vignette drawn from the Archivio di Stato di Roma that 
recount, sometimes inadvertently, the "long, hard, and dangerous" (p. 269) 
agricultural work day in Renaissance Italy." 

"Despite the hardships of daily survival, the distinctively theatrical nature 
of Italian Renaissance play is accentuated in Chapter SIXTEEN. The authors 
stress the promise of relief from self-control through leisure activities, 
the pursuit of physical and mental well-being, the sociability of leisure 
activities, the association of "play time" with periods of liturgical ritual, 
and the formal spaces that hosted the activities in both country and urban 
settings. Music and dance, religious and political spectacles, and ritualized 
often violent or politically-inspired sports competitions comprised many of 
the all-human activities. Animals were involved, as well, in hunts, baiting 
sports, and races. Similarities between the Renaissance pallone and modern 
soccer are striking; card games and gambling flourished." 

Despite the temptation to find similarities, the authors recall their caveat 
to readers in their conclusion (Chapter SEVENTEEN): "Renaissance Italy 
differed from our twenty-first century world in physical environment and in 
institutional and cultural responses to it" (p. 297). Their emphasis on 
challenging the modernist thesis of the Renaissance is the major achievement 
of this volume. In its place the authors have offered a way to understand the 
Renaissance ON ITS OWN TERMS, and by including... the entire range of society 
within its scope. The authors' insistence on understanding all Renaissance 
Italians historically through the notion of agency--no matter what their 
social status--leads the reader to a multi-valenced and more complete 
assessment of human experience. By INDENTIFYING THE DANGERS... that comprised 
the common concerns faced in the Renaissance and tTHE SOCIAL and RELIGIOUS 
RESPONSES to them for individual and collective protection, they illustrate 
again human action in a specific historical and cultural context.
 
Theatricality, finally, whether it be in the economic competition for the 
display of what Lisa Jardine has labeled "worldly goods" or in spectacle or 
display, leaves us with an understanding of Renaissance Italians as actors in 
daily life. 
====================================================
Citation: Luci Fortunato De Lisle . "Review of Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas 
V. Cohen, Daily Life during the Italian Renaissance," H-Italy, H-Net Reviews, 
January, 2002. URL: 
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=32151013802121. 

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