| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Ancient and Medieval

Holly S. Hurlburt. The Dogaressa of Venice, 1200–1500: Wife and Icon. (The New Middle Ages.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2006. Pp. vii, 304. $69.95.
Holly S. Hurlburt has set herself a very difficult assignment. Between 1200 and 1500, thirty-three women held the position of dogaressa (wife of the doge, elected head of the Venetian government). Information about them is so thin that writing a collective biography would be impossible. Hurlburt has opted for a different approach. Using the few extant tesserae and a great deal of interpretive cement, she has created a mosaic, a study of what she calls the office of dogaressa over three late medieval centuries. She aims to extend consideration of gender in Venice beyond social and economic perspectives—areas in which historians during the past two decades have made important contributions—into the realm of politics. "The dogaresse," she asserts in the introduction, "were amongst a small handful of Venetian women with proximity and regular access to the spheres of Venetian power, who may have had opportunities to exercise direct political influence and whose public appearances resonated with civic and social symbolism, complicating the masculine spaces of the medieval polity" (pp. 4–5).	1
Regrettably, Hurlburt has chosen an unstable wall—the anachronistic distinction between public and private spheres—on which to lay her tiles. Mentioning briefly that some scholars question the relevance of the "two spheres" concept to the history of gender in Europe before the eighteenth century, she does not choose to engage them in debate. A single prescriptive work, the Venetian patrician Francesco Barbaro's De re uxoria libri duo (1416)—well known to modern scholars, but how widely circulated during the fifteenth century she does not say—supplies epigraphs for her chapters. It provides inadequate warrant not only for repeating the received assumption that most patrician women in Venice were confined to the "private" space of households but also for claiming that dogaresse were an exception to the rule.	. . .

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