Women and men in Early Modern Venice: Reassessing History

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2005 by Stanley Chojnacki

Datta's odd book has the virtue of synthesizing much of the scholarship he discounts without, however, offering any new findings on his chosen themes. In each chapter he proposes a theoretical reconfiguration of the subject under discussion, but in the end his conclusions rehearse well-known, even trite ideas. His "new approach" in chapter 2, for example, finds "widespread acceptance of patrician rule as legitimate by the common people" (87). The lengthy chapter 3 on the cultural experience of artisans concludes that artists and artisans "were tied to each other both in the course of work and in the sense of social interaction (for example through devotional activities within the scuole)" (151). After discussing the writings of Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, and Arcangela Tarabotti, Datta declares, "Their critical remarks (especially Tarabotti's) on the social position of women contain suggestive and inventive elements on a number of points and their arguments do not lack a sense of reality" (176).

Ironically, Datta's banal rehashing of existing scholarship, coupled with his dismissal of the ingenuity and effort responsible for it, achieves the opposite of his intention. It illustrates how a half-century of productive historical, art historical, and literary research has yielded a corpus of complex and varied interpretations of early modern Venice that no critic, however hostile, can dispense with.

STANLEY CHOJNACKI

University of North Carolina, chapel Hill