Columbia University Women and Society Seminar: Megan Moran, “Amicitia e Famiglia: Female Friendship, Family Ties, and the Exchange of Gossip in Early Modern Florence”

“Amicitia e Famiglia: Female Friendship, Family Ties, and the Exchange of Gossip in Early Modern Florence”

The formation of female friendships challenged the traditional reliance on marriage as the primary social relationship for women in early modern Florence. This chapter contends that women formed a myriad of friendships in the surrounding community as important components of their social and economic networks. Female friendships facilitated an exchange of news and a space for women to speak to one another about family, community, and civic events inside and outside the home. Women acted as crucial links in the chain of networks constructed throughout Tuscan society in ways that reveal the multi-layered nature of patriarchy. This chapter argues that through the exchange of services and favors, forming introductions, and sending recommendations, patrician women actively connected their households to one another in Florence and the growing Tuscan state during the sixteenth century.

Speaker Bio:
Megan Moran is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Montclair State University in New Jersey.  My research focuses on gender, family, and sexuality in early modern Italy.  I have published work such as an article on gender and memory in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2011) and a recent article on sibling relationships in the Florentine Spinelli family in The Sixteenth Century Journal (spring 2013).  My current book project examines how women used letters to form social networks with family members, friends, and patrons in order to participate in the larger social, economic, and political life of early modern Italy.

Discussant Bio: 
Dr. Smith is a Professor and Department Chair at Wagner College on Staten Island.  Her research focuses on the social history of early modern Italy, gender, and urban elites in Verona and Venice.  She has published articles on women, material culture, and sociability in sixteenth century Verona.  Her published work includes articles such as “Locating Power and Influence within the Provincial Elite of Verona: Aristocratic Wives and Widows,” Renaissance Studies (1994), “Gender, ownership, and domestic space: inventories and family archives in Renaissance Verona” Renaissance Studies (1998), and a recent chapter, “Revisiting the Renaissance Household in Theory and Practice: Locating Wealthy Women in Sixteenth Century Verona,” in Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy, Ashgate Publishing (2012), among others.  She is currently working on a monograph on the musical academy, the Accademia Filarmonica, in early modern Verona.