Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy
$144.09
- Hardcover
240 pages
- Release Date
20 March 2017
Summary
Roisin Cossar brings a new perspective to the history of the Christian church in fourteenth century Italy by examining how clerics managed efforts to reform their domestic lives in the decades after the arrival of the Black Death.
Priests at the end of the Middle Ages resembled their lay contemporaries as they entered into domestic relationships with women, fathered children, and took responsibility for managing households, or familiae. Cossar limns a complex portrait of da…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780674971899 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0674971892 |
| Author: | Roisin Cossar |
| Publisher: | Harvard University Press |
| Imprint: | Harvard University Press |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 240 |
| Release Date: | 20 March 2017 |
| Weight: | 498g |
| Dimensions: | 156mm x 235mm |
| Series: | I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History |
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Critics Review
This is a major contribution not only to the history of the late medieval family and the Italian church, but also to historical methodology. With her subtle analysis, Cossar persuades us that scholars must be attentive to archival documents as carefully crafted instruments of those who participated in their creation, rather than as transparent windows onto the past. – Shannon McSheffrey, author of Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London
Cossar’s research has implications for our understanding of the state of the clergy and their relationship to the laity on the eve of the Reformation in Italy. It is a rich study based on testaments, inventories, and visitation records, and it is a rewarding read that will find a broad audience among not only historians of religion and of Italy, but also historians of other European areas. – Thomas Kuehn, author of Heirs, Kin, and Creditors in Renaissance Florence
An original and important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on clerical concubinage between the Gregorian reform and the Council of Trent and to the social history of late medieval Italy. Cossar’s exploration of the composition and dynamics of the household embraces all its components: the priest himself and his domestic partner, of course, but also their children, the priest’s mother, servants, and slaves. Specialists will welcome her arguments for treating archival records as crafted artifacts and seeing Venice as more closely resembling its neighbors on the north Italian mainland. All medievalists will want to take note of what Cossar has to say about church and religion, culture and society, families and households, in Italy in the half-century after the great pandemic of 1348. – Daniel E. Bornstein, author of The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late Medieval Italy
Roisin Cossar
Roisin Cossar is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Manitoba.
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