Negotiating the Art of Fatherhood in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy examines contested notions of fatherhood in written and visual texts during the development of the mercantile economy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy. It analyzes debates about the household and community management of wealth, emotion, and trade in luxury goods, including enslaved women, as moral questions. Juliann Vitullo considers how this mercantile economy affected paternity and the portraits of ideal fatherhood, which in some cases reconceived the role of fathers and in others reconfirmed traditional notions of paternal authority.

Examines the impact of Italian fatherhood from a variety of unique entry points including paternal emotions and the mercantilism economy Connects medieval and early modern perspectives to contemporary discussions about the changing roles of Italian fatherhood Provides readers with a wide range of Italian writers including Leon Battista Alberti and Giannozzo Manetti.

Autorentext

Juliann Vitullo is Associate Professor of Italian, Senior Sustainability Scholar, and Co-Director of the Humanities Lab at Arizona State University, USA. She has written on various aspects of medieval, early modern, and contemporary Italian culture with emphasis on the relationship between textual traditions and the material world, including money and food. Her publications include The Chivalric Epic in Medieval Italy (2000)*as well as the co-edited volumes: At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2007) and Money, Morality, and Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe* (2010).

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. Fertile Fathers of the Poor.- 3. Emotion and the Art of Fatherhood.- 4. Passion and Paternity: Debates about Fictional Fathers.- 5. Paternal Pedagogy and the Palate.- 6. In Bed with the Infidel: Fathers, Slaves, and Children.