Conclusions

Summary

Although Genevra has been unlucky in how history has portrayed her, she was incredibly lucky in life. She existed as part of the most privileged group of people from the early modern European era—living as a glamorous, wealthy, respected and prominent aristocratic Italian woman who almost never had to struggle for basics like food, clothing or shelter; who had continual access to interesting people, news and social events and to artists and artisans available to help her with projects; who was exceptionally fortunate with her health as a female who endured eighteen childbirths without one complaint or complication left on record; and who lived comfortably among her many healthy children and grandchildren and alongside dozens of on-call staff members and between literally magnificent palatial surroundings. On a historical level Genevra has been fundamentally privileged too as a woman whose name has not been forgotten (thanks to archival documents, art and various publications) and about whom a research project could be planned and conducted in the first place when compared to the majority of early moderns about whom we have few individual, researchable traces—people whose lives were once closely interwoven among their networks of friends, relatives and neighbours and whose existences helped shape their families and their cultures but whose stories have, without specific written traces, faded into the bigger picture.

The chapters of this book display a historical and thus revisionist view of the life of a previously unexamined elite early modern woman in Northern Italy. Uncovering and understanding as much as possible about Genevra's life based on surviving contemporary documentation has yielded much nuanced historical information about her and her enormous family as well as about many aspects of life in Renaissance-era Bologna. Genevra is worth knowing as an example of a unique fifteenth-century female who invented herself on a thoroughly traditional yet grand scale within the restricted gendered contexts of the Sforza and Bentivoglio worlds.