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Camilla the go-between: the politics of gender in a Roman household (1559)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Elizabeth S. Cohen  and
Thomas V. Cohen
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Continuity and Change , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , May 1989 , pp. 53 - 77
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

ENDNOTES

1 The manuscript source for this tale is in the Archivio di Stato, Rome (hereafter ASR), in the series: Governatore, Tribunale Criminale, Processi, XVI secolo: Busta 48, case 15 (1559). The students in our undergraduate seminar (1986–87) all made helpful suggestions; Elizabeth Petrucelli first transcribed the manuscript and Cheryl Tallan wrote up the case. Further useful comments came from Professors James Amelang and Guido Ruggiero. For the fire and the spinning, Camilla, , 5 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 644rGoogle Scholar. For the slippers, Giulia, testimony of 6 December, fo. 663r. All Giulia's testimony took place at home. We date and locate testimony because circumstances influenced what the two women said. The chronology of the legal proceedings was as follows. The discovery of the affair came on Saturday, 2 December. At some point, Gieronimo called in the authorities. We do not know against whom he directed his formal complaint. Camilla first testified in the Piccardi house on Tuesday, 5 December, when she pleaded ignorance of the events. On Wednesday, 6 December, Giulia made a long confession to the notary and the procuratore fiscale. On Thursday, 7 December, Camilla was again questioned and then was confronted with Giulia's testimony of the day before. Even to Giulia's face, she continued to deny it all. Later that day, Giulia was once more examined, this time on the subject of magic and poison, of which she had said nothing in her confession. On Friday, as was customary after a confession, the officials brought Giulia back to review and confirm her testimony and then went up to inspect the window. One week later, on Friday, 15 December, Camilla appeared before officials in the Tor di Nona jail. Although the officers of the court expressed doubt about her testimony and threatened her with torture, she remained obdurate. For the resolution of the case, see below. Our manuscript has the clarity and pentimenti of a second, good copy. The several testimonies are not in perfect chronological order.

2 We know from details of the testimony that the house had a back yard (scoperto) and a single door to the street, which had in it a panel that opened even when the door itself was locked. There must have been one stairway to a second floor where the family slept. There were three upstairs rooms, one in front for the couple, one in the middle, near the top of the stairs, which led by a doorway to the maid's chamber at the back of the house. A window on the second floor could be seen from some vantage point at the house next door. We do not know what street or square the house stood on.

3 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 663r.Google Scholar

4 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 663v.Google Scholar

5 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 663r.Google Scholar

6 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 663v.Google Scholar

7 Camilla, , 5 12, fo. 644r.Google Scholar

8 Camilla, , 5 12, fo. 644v.Google Scholar

9 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 663v…Google Scholar.et in questo Camilla voleva fuggire di casa, dicendomi Madonna io me ne voglio andare perche M. Gieronimo m'ammazzerà, io la ritenni, et le dissi, Ohime, Camilla, tu mi hai guidata a questo et poi mi voi lasciare. Se moro io, voglio che mori tu ancora.

10 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 663v…Google Scholar.M. Gieronimo l'arrivò et le disse, vien su Camilla non haver paura, non dubitare, dimmi chi è quello, et lei rispose, è questo vicino di qua.

11 The Italians have coined the expression la microstoria (micro-history) for that version of narrative history which gives a close reading of something small. For some very canny remarks on the uses of such an approach, see Brown, Judith C., ‘Rediscovering the individual: history of the people and for the people’Google Scholar, and Muir, Edward, ‘American anthropology and Italian microhistory’Google Scholar. Both of these papers were delivered to the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference, Tempe, Arizona, October, 1987. A revised version of Muir's paper will appear as the introductory chapter to a collection he is editing of papers in micro-history translated from Quaderni Storici, now in press with Johns Hopkins University Press.

12 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, Montaillou: the promised land of error, Bray, Barbara tr. (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Sabean, David, Power in the blood: popular culture and village discourse in early modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar; Brucker, Gene, Giovanni and Lusanna: love and marriage in Renaissance Florence (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986)Google Scholar; Brown, Judith C., Immodest acts: the life of a lesbian nun in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar, are some famous or recent examples.

13 In the past two decades, anthropology has debated the centrality of ‘roles’ for the analysis of behaviour. Against the structuralist-functionalists, who read men and women as best understood as obeying the dictates of roles, there has arisen a school of ‘exchange’ or ‘transaction’ theorists who prefer to focus on patterns of choice within the general constraints set by culture. Much in their work parallels the sort of analysis we do here. For a lively but very tendentious statement of their position, see Boissevain, Jeremy, Friends of friends: networks, manipulators and coalitions (New York, 1974)Google Scholar. Much of his illustrative material is taken from modern Malta and Sicily, societies that share many of the traits of madonna Giulia's Rome. For an insider's clear essay on the knotty intellectual problems of exchange theory, see Kapferer, Bruce, ‘Introduction: transactional models reconsidered’, in Kapferer, Bruce, ed., Transaction and meaning: directions in the anthropology of exchange and symbolic behavior (Philadelphia, 1976) 1–22Google Scholar. Gilsenan, Michael, ‘Lying, honor, and contradiction’Google Scholar, Ibid. 191–219, offers a lively transactional analysis of the play of honour and shame in modern Lebanon. Like us, to make his argument, he argues from the patient dissection of complex incidents.

14 For examples of a careful reading of the politics of the choice of words in court, see: Ginzburg, Carlo, The night battles: witchcraft and agrarian cults in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, John, and Tedeschi, Anne, tr. (London, 1983)Google Scholar and The cheese and the worms, John, and Tedeschi, Anne, tr. (Baltimore, 1980)Google Scholar; Davis, Natalie, The return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., 1983)Google Scholar and Fiction in the archives (Stanford, 1987).Google Scholar

15 For the ways in which early modern Europeans resorted to the law and its courts to carry on their private disputes, see Bossy, John, ed., Disputes and settlements: law and human relations in the West (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar. Although the entire volume is interesting in this regard, the essays by Simon Roberts and Richard L. Kagan are particularly germane.

16 For continental canons of proof and procedures of inquiry, see Langbein, John H., Torture and the law of proof (Chicago and London, 1977) 3–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peters, Edward, Torture (Oxford, 1985) 40–73Google Scholar. The best source for the criminal law as practised in Rome in the sixteenth century is the large body of consilia and treatises of the jurist Prospero Farinacci, whose Opera criminalia were first published in Lyons in 1606 and several times thereafter. For the Roman prisons and other punishments, see Paglia, Vincenzo, La ‘Pietà dei Carcerati’: confraternite e società a Roma nei secoli xvi–xviii (Rome, 1980), especially ch. 1.Google Scholar

17 The sentences are registered in two separate archival records, both very incomplete. We have not been able to find the sentence to this case.

18 Because Rome was a big, fluid town, full of immigrants and foreigners, it is not easy to find supplementary documents on protagonists to lawsuits. The. historian is often forced back on what the court itself provides. Thus, social data on such things as property, membership in guilds and confraternities, public offices held and larger networks of family and kin are not easy to assemble. The historians of Venice and Florence, better governed and stabler cities, have an easier time.

19 Pullan, Brian, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice: 1550–1670 (Oxford, 1983) 117–22Google Scholar, argues at length for the reliability and veracity of testimony before the Italian Inquisition. The tribunal of the Governor of Rome, which used much the same procedures of interrogation and record-keeping, is just as good a source.

20 Giulia, , 6 12, fos. 661r–664r.Google Scholar

21 Nussdorfer, Laurie, ‘The Vacant See: ritual and protest in early modern Rome’, Sixteenth-Century Journal 18, 2 (summer, 1987) 173–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Camilla, , 15 12Google Scholar, in di Nona, Tor. fo. 655rGoogle Scholar. ‘I know indeed that her husband treated her terribly and barely let her go to mass. And after the Pope died she has never gone’.

23 Giulia, , 6 12, fos. 661r–662rGoogle Scholar. ‘To be a go-between to me’: Che vollesse farme l'ambasciata.; ‘He was a gentleman of worth’: Era un gentiluomo chi meritava.; ‘And good would come to me from it’: Che io ne haveria del bene; ‘I shouldn't want them. It will be my ruin.’ And she said, ‘“Rest easy, Madonna, it will be your good fortune!”’ io non li vorrei, sarà la ruina mia et lei mi disse, state queta Madonna che è la ventura vostra.; ‘He will be all your amusement. You have no amusement at all.’: Che sarà tutto lo spasso vostro, voi non havete spasso alcuno; ‘She was advising me like a daughter of hers’: Me consigliava da figliuola.

24 For a mid-sixteenth-century story with many of the same elements, see Bandello, Matteo, Novelle, 1, 9Google Scholar (any edition). There, too, the wife is unhappy, the husband neglectful and cruel. We find not one, but two middle-aged women, a servant and a godmother, who jointly act as go-betweens and helpers. To let in the lover, they unlimber a long-sealed cellar door. For love gifts spurned and cast into the street, see Bandello, , Novelle, 1, 8Google Scholar. For women as go-betweens, see ibid. 1, 8; 1, 14. For a wife so cruelly close-kept that she was not allowed downstairs, and could go to church only on high holidays, and only to first mass, see ibid. 1, 53. For a very close parallel to our tale, a courtship from a near-by house, whence the aspiring lover threw letters into a courtyard, only to have the women throw them in the fire, see Straparola, , Piacevoli notti, 4, 4Google Scholar, translated in Italian Renaissance tales, Smarr, Janet Lavarie, tr. (Rochester, Michigan, 1983) 184Google Scholar. Straparola's novelle were published between 1550 and 1553. For seductive letters, see the fifteenth-century work of da Salerno, Masuccio, Novellino, IGoogle Scholar, in Smarr, , Tales, 76Google Scholar. The novella, which, from Boccaccio on, was much given to tales of adultery, abounds in such details of illicit courtship, which often echo those of madonna Giulia's adventure.

25 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 662v.Google Scholar

26 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 662vGoogle Scholar. Ohime, questo non voglio comportare, lo voglio dir à M. Gieronimo, et lei mi respose, state queta Madonna che questo sarà lo spasso vostro, non ci e donna al mondo che non faccia de queste cose. We shall return to these words.

27 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 662v.Google Scholar

28 For a general discussion of the role of honour in Italian life, see Burke, Peter, The historical anthropology of early modern Italy: essays on perception and communication (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar. See especially ch. 1 and ch. 8.

29 For the double standard, when the woman was of lower status, see Ruggiero, Guido, The boundaries of eros: sex crime and sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York and Oxford, 1985) 60–2.Google Scholar

30 The Roman courtesans were themselves not without honour. Individual Romans were therefore keen to defame them in the course of quarrels. See E. S. Cohen's unpublished paper, ‘Gender politics of shame: neighborhood ritual in early modern Rome’. One consequence of the relative honour of courtesans was that, like ‘honest’ women, they could be taken from a man to insult and degrade him. The blow, however, was far softer than when a woman was completely honourable.

31 Camilla, , 15 12Google Scholar, in di Nona, Tor prison, fo. 651vGoogle Scholar. Quel mio padron è un' huomo, il quale parteria il pidocchio per mezo, et tutto quel che fa, fa per guadagnarsi la robba di quella poverina di Madonna Giulia. Camilla spoke more freely, she said, once out of the master's house.

32 Camilla, , 15 12Google Scholar, in di Nona, Tor, fo. 652r.Google Scholar

33 Camilla, , 15 12Google Scholar, in di Nona, Tor, fo. 652rGoogle Scholar. Et la teneva serrata nella camera, et gli faceva simili altri comportamenti da cane.

34 Camilla, , 15 12Google Scholar, in di Nona, Tor, fos. 655r–655vGoogle Scholar. Il di de S. Andrea con licentia del marito s'era vestita per andare alla parochia a messa, et M. Gieronimo, vedendola, parendogli troppo avvistata gli mise l'ugne nelle gotte, et la graffiò che credo anche che ci habbia li segni.

35 Camilla, , 15 12Google Scholar, in di Nona, Tor, fo. 652r.Google Scholar

36 Giulia, , 7 12, fo. 665rGoogle Scholar. In the interrogation about poison.

37 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 662r.Google Scholar

38 Camilla, , 15 12Google Scholar, in di Nona, Tor. fo. 652rGoogle Scholar. For a woman's inability in her husband's lifetime to enjoy the fruits of her dowry, see Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, ‘The “cruel mother”: maternity, widowhood, and dowry in Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’, in her Women, family, and ritual in Renaissance Italy, Cochrane, Lydia, tr. (Chicago and London, 1985) 117–31Google Scholar and ‘The Griselda complex: dowry and marriage gifts in the quattrocento’, ibid. 213–46.

39 Camilla, , 15 12Google Scholar, in di Nona, Tor, fo. 651vGoogle Scholar. Con li pugnali in mano più volte è andato da Madonna Giulia.

40 In Italy, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, many scholars have found in folk culture an analogy between women's bodies and houses. For Algeria, see Bordieu, Pierre, ‘The sentiment of honour in Kabyle society’, in Peristiany, J. G., ed., Honour and shame: values of a Mediterranean society (Chicago and London, 1966) 193–243Google Scholar, especially 222. For Greece, see Dubisch, Jill, ‘Culture enters through the kitchen: women, food, and social boundaries in rural Greece’, in Dubisch, Jill, ed., Gender and power in rural Greece (Princeton, 1986), 195–214Google Scholar. For Italy, see Cohen, , ‘Gender politics of shame’Google Scholar; Ruggiero, Guido, ‘“Più che la vita caro”: onore, matrimonio e reputazione femminile nel tardo rinascimento’, Quaderni Storici 66 (12, 1987) 753–75Google Scholar, especially 759–61. For a literary version of the analogy, see Ariosto, , ‘Lena’Google Scholar, Act V, scene 11. Beame, Edmond M. and Sbrocchi, Leonard G., tr. and ed., The comedies of Ariosto (Chicago and London, 1975) 197Google Scholar. A loose woman reproves her pandering husband, ‘Ah cuckold, you speak of modesty? If I had accepted all those to whom you had recommended me I know of no prostitute at the Gambaro who would be more public than me; this front door hardly seemed wide enough for you to receive them all, and you even advised me to make use of the back door.’ Roman trials bear out the parallel; for instance, ‘She's married…but at her house anyone who wants to can go in.’, said one woman when asked to judge the respectability of another. ASR, Governatore, Tribunale criminale, Processi, XVI secolo, busta 38, case 19, fo. 456v.

41 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 663r.Google Scholar

42 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 660vGoogle Scholar. ‘…he had you come here to examine Camilla, my servant, and me because he wanted to find out how this thing happened’.

43 Camilla, , 7 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 649vGoogle Scholar. Giulia makes no mention of dealing with him. It was Camilla who went tattling to him against her mistress. See below.

44 Camilla, , 5 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 645rGoogle Scholar; Camilla, , 7 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 649v.Google Scholar

45 Camilla, , 5 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 645rGoogle Scholar; Giulia, , 7 12, fo. 665r.Google Scholar

46 Camilla, , 7 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 649rGoogle Scholar; Camilla, , 15 12Google Scholar, in di Nona, Tor, fo. 654v.Google Scholar

47 Camilla, , 5 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 645r.Google Scholar

48 Camilla, , 7 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 648rGoogle Scholar. Sono soliti star in fuoco e in fiama e star come li cani e gatti senza star mai un hora in pace.

49 The officials, to Camilla, , 7 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 648vGoogle Scholar. ‘Does she know that Madonna Giulia had made some false keys for opening the strongbox of her husband Gieronimo in order to rob him of his money? And does she know that Madonna Giulia did it and asked her to help?’ None of these matters appear in Giulia's confession. Has the court information from Gieronimo, or is it merely fishing, casting about for a banal domestic misdemeanour?

50 See below.

51 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, ‘Honour and social status’Google Scholar, in Peristiany, , ed., Honour and shame, 19–77Google Scholar. In a large literature, this is one of the subtlest discussions of the implications of an honour ethic for social comportment. See especially 42–6 for a discussion of the difference, in Spain, between male and female honour, the one active, the other passive.

52 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 662rGoogle Scholar. Strictly, ‘It's your chance!’ Mercenaries were soldati di ventura.

53 Camilla, , 7 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 647rGoogle Scholar. ‘Titta told me that he had been with her, and that he had had intercourse with her and had had her the second week of their marriage, and she couldn't deny this. And she confessed that before she married they flirted in the house of Giulia Santana and he gave her scudi and they kissed each other dancing. And this he told me and so did she.… And she said that Titta had had her, and what he did at the ball, and she couldn't deny it and confessed that once Titta had left her fifteen scudi’. A standard term for sexual intercourse was negotiare; a man would say, ‘I negotiated her’. Sexual dealings, both legitimate and illegitimate, were bound up in larger webs of well understood exchanges. As Christian Klapisch-Zuber remarks, Italians could record the weddings and deaths of women as if they were the incomes and outlays of an account book. See ‘The “cruel mother”: maternity, widowhood, and dowry in Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’, in Klapisch-Zuber, , Women, family and ritual in Renaissance Italy, especially 117–20.Google Scholar

54 See Cohen, E. S., ‘No longer virgins’Google Scholar, forthcoming in Italian in Quaderni Storici, for examples of gift-giving in illicit sexual commerce. For patterns of seduction, see Cavallo, Sandra and Cerutti, Simona, ‘Onore femminile e controllo sociale della riproduzione in Piemonte tra sei e settecento’, Quaderni Storici 44 (08, 1980) 346–83Google Scholar. The complex topic of the role of gift-giving in sexual dealing is largely unexplored by historians.

55 Bandello, , Novelle, 1, 3Google Scholar. ‘She had some income of her own, from an inheritance left her by an aunt, from which she had more than a little profit. For this reason she could play freely with her husband.’ The lady in question mischievously dared her husband to cut her dress with his new, sharp sword.

56 Giulia, , 7 12, fo. 65vGoogle Scholar. ‘Camilla said to me that she would get Camillo to buy me a pair of strong boxes and have them filled with woollen clothing and that Camilla would have hidden them for me in the house of a woman-friend and companion of hers and kept them there for me.’ Camilla me disse che mifacessi comperare un par de forzieri da M. Camillo etfarli empir de panni de lana, et che essa Camilla me li havria nascosti in casa d'una sua arnica e compagna, et che me li havria conservati. Our student, Katherine Boucher, suggests a plan here to flee the house.

57 See Giulia's story, above.

58 For a canny discussion of the place of improvisation in vernacular culture, see Martin, John, ‘A journeymen's Feast of Fools’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 (1987) 140–74Google Scholar, especially 171–3.

59 We have seen two other cases of intimate go-betweens. ASR Governatore, Tribunale criminale, Processi, XVI secolo, busta 137, case 5; busta 143, case 10.

60 Giulia, , 7 12, fos. 664v–665rGoogle Scholar. ‘I will tell you the whole truth. And if I say anything else, I pray that God make me the sorriest woman in the world. And if I have ever thought to make or give poison or do any hurt to my husband, whom I have loved and love more than my life, even if I have done him this wrong with Camillo Mantoano, about which I have grieved so bitterly with Camilla, saying, “Camilla, Ohime, what is this wrong that you made me do with my husband!” And she kept saying, “Ohime, Madonna, why are you getting so squeamish? [che fastidio è questo che pigliate?] There is this one and that one!” And she named me many noble ladies and great ladies who did this thing with an easy mind. And she told me that the Lord God was helping me, and he was doing it by way of a miracle, because I knew how fierce-tempered [fastidioso: fussy: a euphemism] my husband was, and because I didn't have any fun. And in taking up the company of messer Camillo I would have all the pleasures.’ Note that, this once, Camilla appears as speaking not of spasso but of piaceri (pleasures).

61 Giulia, , 7 12, fos. 665r–665v.Google Scholar

62 Camilla, , 7 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 648rGoogle Scholar. For Camilla's account of the arrival of the second packet, see text.

63 In what is now northern France, in the fifteenth century, according to literary evidence, to tame a rough husband a woman would put his shirts under the altar for the reading of the passion on Good Friday. This magic seems to have elements in common with Giulia's. Muchembled, Robert, Culture populaire, culture des élites dans la France moderne (xve–xviiie siècles) (Paris, 1978) 97Google Scholar. For another Italian case of placing objects under an altar in the magical pursuit of love, here a doll full of pins, see Ruggiero, , ‘“Più che la vita caro”’, 753–4.Google Scholar

64 Very many female servants seem to have been older women, some of them married, and others widowed. For good statistics from the Florentine fifteenth century, see: Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, ‘Female celibacy and service in Florence in the fifteenth century’Google Scholar, in Women, family and ritual in Renaissance Italy, 165–77, especially 172–5; Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, ‘Women servants in Florence during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’, in Hanawalt, Barbara A., ed., Women and work in pre-industrial Europe (Bloomington, 1986) 56–75Google Scholar, in particular, Table 3 on p. 63. In Bandello, , Novelle, 1, 9Google Scholar, the godmother, acting for her amorous goddaughter, looks to an elderly (anziana) servant to arrange the trysts, deeming the young girls untrustworthy in such affairs.

65 Camilla, , 7 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 648v.Google Scholar

66 Camilla, , 15 12Google Scholar, in di Nona, Tor, fo. 651vGoogle Scholar. “My master and my mistress want me to lose the little I have in their house.…’

67 Pitt-Rivers, J. A., The people of the sierra (Chicago and London, 1961) 60–1, 176–7, 186–8Google Scholar, and passim for shamelessness and its many liberties. A picaresque novel such as El Lazarillo de Tormes makes best sense as an evocation of shamelessness, which, by heaping up the outrageous, inverts the moral order. The same can be said of the ‘Lena’ and the ‘Necromancer’, plays of Ariosto, of Aretino's courtesan dialogues and of the plays of the Venetian Ruzante. Machiavelli's Prince yields up an interesting reading if taken as an exercise in shamelessness.

68 Bordieu, , ‘The sentiment of honour in Kabyle society’, 198, 235, n. 3Google Scholar, on noses and beards. Blok, Anton, ‘Rams and billy-goats: a key to the Mediterranean code of honour’, Man 16 3 (09, 1981) 427–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see especially 433 for a discussion of sfregio, literally any disfigurement of the face, but, in Sicily, by extension, an affront to the social honour. The same association held true for Rome in the sixteenth century, where sfregio was a crime all its own. Thus, Benvenuto Cellini could claim to have said, ‘… and if I hadn't been sold under Papal guarantee for a bishopric, by a Venetian cardinal and the Roman Farnese, both of whom have scratched the face of God's law …’ Cellini, Benvenuto, Autobiography, Bull, George, tr. (Harmondsworth, 1965) 216Google Scholar. Cellini's Italian says, ‘…e se io non fussi stato venduto, sotto la fede papale, un vescovado da un veniziano cardinale e un romano Farnese, e’ quali l'uno e l'altro ha graffiato il viso alle sacre sante legge …’. Cellini, Benvenuto, Vita (Turin, 1982) 259.Google Scholar

69 Giulia, , 7 12, fo. 651r.Google Scholar

70 Camilla, , 7 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 646vGoogle Scholar. Che io le facessi l'ambasciate amatorie come si fa.…

71 By the late fifteenth century, Italians had begun writing neo-classical Latin comedies on the Plautine model. In the early years of the sixteenth, they began to do so in Italian as well. Beame, and Sbrocchi, , The comedies of Ariosto, x–xiiiGoogle Scholar. That stock figure, the cunning servant, machinator and wry commentator, was often there. We can prove that the type became known well outside the circle of cultivated readers, for we have found a trial of 1574 which investigates a circle of tailors, cobblers, potters and herdsmen, many of them illiterate or barely literate, who for carnival put on a mildly blasphemous semi-classical comedy in the remote village of Caspera, deep in the rough Sabine mountain country. The players said the play, ‘Crapino’, was in print, but we cannot trace it. Alongside its amorous shepherds and disdainful nymphs, its necromancer, devil and silly hermit, it had its rapscallion servants. ASR, Governatore, Tribunale criminale, Processi, XVI secolo, busta 155, case 3.

72 Note this soliloquy by Corbolo, the tricky servant of Ariosto's ‘Lena’ (Act III, scene 1). ‘… What is needed is a cunning servant who would be able to draw this amount out of the purse of his older master by means of fraud and deception as I have sometimes seen done in plays’. Beame, and Sbrocchi, , The comedies of Ariosto, 172Google Scholar. Here we see in art a purported imitation of life's imitation of art. Although the author is only playing at realism, the reflexivity of the passage may mirror something real, off-stage.

73 Kettering, Sharon, Patrons, brokers, and clients in seventeenth-century France (New York and Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar elaborates on the differences between patron, broker and intermediary and offers a bibliography of works from the social sciences. The anthropologist, Boissevain, , in Friends of friends, 147–69Google Scholar, has very interesting comments on the role of brokers in networks of communication. He sees them as, like Camilla, exacting a fee for the use of privileged channels. Payment need not be tangible or immediate. One often deals in credit.

74 Camilla, , 5 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 645rGoogle Scholar. ‘I have never spoken with any neighbour, neither with man nor with woman, except with the wife of the fiscale of the Campidoglio and with the wife of messer Claudio della Valle [a notary of the Governor's court]. Every now and then they have sent me on some errand.’

75 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 663rGoogle Scholar. For signals and for standing guard.

76 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 663rGoogle Scholar. Italics ours.

77 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 663rGoogle Scholar. Che voleva che tirassimo un puoco le fave per dar martello à M. Camillo et cosi cominciammo a tirar quelle fave che le sapeva fare certe cose con esse, dicendo certe orationi, et mi diceva che M. Camillo mi voleva un gran bene. Martello meant a jealous passion. Guido Ruggiero tells us that in Venetian magic the word had connotations of magic, where it meant ‘hammering’ or ‘damage’. For a very full description of bean magic of just this sort, see Aretino, Pietro, Dialogues, Rosenthal, Raymond, tr. (New York, 1971) 429–31.Google Scholar

78 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 664rGoogle Scholar. Se io fossi stata una santa questa ribalda de Camilla me havria fatto romper il collo come hà fat to con le sue belle paroline, et con tante persuasioni che mi faceva …

79 Camilla, , 7 12, fo. 650v.Google Scholar

80 Giulia, , 6 12, fos. 663v–664r.Google Scholar

81 Italians of the sixteenth century were well able to lay public and private life in parallel. Guicciardini, Francesco, Maxims and reflections (Ricordi), Domandi, Mario, tr. (Philadelphia, 1976) 59–60Google Scholar (Ricordo C. 71), wrote, ‘If you see a city beginning to decline, a government changing, a new empire expanding, or any such phenomenon – and these things are sometimes quite clearly visible to us – be careful not to misjudge the time they will take. By their very nature, and because of various obstacles, such movements are much slower than most men imagine. And to be mistaken in these matters can be most harmful to you. Be careful, for this is a step on which people often stumble. The same is true even of private and personal affairs…’; see also Bandello, , Novelle, 1, 9Google Scholar. A woman says to her go-between, ‘Ora commar mia, v'ho fatto queslo breve discorso per aver da voi aita e conseglio…, that is, ‘Now, godmother, I made you this short speech to have from you aid and counsel [that is, feudal auxilium el consilium]…’

82 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 664rGoogle Scholar. Io son stata assassinata e tradita da Camilla el dalla fortuna. Italians used assassinare figuratively to mean vilely or violently betrayed. Women, as well as men, would use the terms.

83 Giulia, , 6 12, fo. 663vGoogle Scholar. Ohime, Camilla tu mi hai guidata a questo el poi mi vuoi lasciare. Se moro io, voglio che mori tu ancora.

84 Camilla, , 7 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 650v.Google Scholar

85 Camilla, , 7 12Google Scholar, in the Piccardi, house, fo. 649r.Google Scholar

86 Camilla, , 15 12Google Scholar, in di Nona, Tor, fo. 664vGoogle Scholar. ‘Rather she wanted to put the blame on me and to excuse herself. Rather, because she hated me because that day I said something really bad and because messer Gieronimo made all this fuss. Madonna Giulia had taken something or other, I know not what, from the serving woman of the nuns of Campo Marzio by the slit in the door, and when I told on her, Madonna took to hating me and said against me what she has said.…’

87 Peter Roosen-Runge, of the Department of Computer Science at York University, points out to us that the analogy here is imperfect because the women could communicate.

88 Giulia, , 7 12, fo. 664r.Google Scholar