Giovanna Benadusi

AHR Forum: Negotiating Power

Investing the Riches of the Poor: Servant Women and Their Last Wills

One of the most complex endeavors of early modern European historians is to recognize how the ostensibly powerless produced history. Scholars strive to recover the experiences of ordinary people in texts that these people did not author. They also search for "marginal" voices in the terms and expressions that so often were mediated through the conceptual framework of the dominant social orders. How can historians read legal texts, while taking into account the diversity and incoherence of experience within these documents? How can they discern the many truths these documents contain? Existing scholarship has acknowledged the collaborative quality of past documents. That collaboration extended beyond the legal apparatus to form multiple layers of negotiation involving a variety of contexts, situations, and cultural practices across class and gender. But what cultural means were available to illiterate women and men at the bottom rungs of the social ladder, and how did they use those resources to speak their truths? One answer is that villagers and servants, peasants and working women, articulated a counter-hegemonic language—a language they could bend to their own use. Although this language inevitably conformed to the dominant written forms, it also contained possibilities for critical use and thus was potentially subversive. With this language, the seemingly disempowered revealed their experiences, upheld their identity, and voiced their rights. But their contribution did not end here. They also produced practices of negotiation and mediation leading to new modes of domination and subjugation.

In this essay, I reconsider last wills by seventeenth-century women. What use did women make of legal practices that are otherwise seen as outside women's domain? Did last wills become legal instruments that women used to talk about themselves? If so, what do they reveal about how women organized and gave meaning to their individual lives and the world around them? As I argue, last wills, and the law that informs them, did become a way for women to tell their stories. Through these stories, women voiced their aspirations, desires, and choices. Indeed, they shaped their own ultime volontà (last will) in ways that scholars have thought women unable to do.¹ The deathbed scene and the dictation of last wills is a familiar one for historians who study testaments. In important ways, however, women's stories depart from those with which historians are most familiar. What we have neglected are the differences in the content and purpose of women's testaments.

This essay focuses in particular on women who worked as domestic servants. Their wills are part of a larger study that centers on legal texts to reveal the connections among gender, class, legal norms, and cultural practices in early modern Italian society. Last wills are, to be sure, the results of negotiation involving the notary and the testator—a negotiation complicated by the context, in which conflicting legal norms, cultural practices, and local circumstances all played significant roles. The collective nature of last wills easily conceals the individual voices of the participants. This is particularly evident in the case of working women's wills. Whereas recent work has broadened discussion on testamentary practices and the nature of wealth, it has not explored or problematized the social patterns of inheritance practices. We have become familiar with the role that upper-class women—especially widows—played in giving form to their own testamentary procedures. The absence of research on the last wills by women of the working classes underscores the need for careful attention to nuances in the texts, for caution in applying assumptions based on wills of wealthier people, and for boldness in interpreting their meaning and historical significance.² Most of all, focus on last wills by working-class women demands a reinterpretation of testamentary practices and the law that instructs them. The reading of working women's last wills calls for awareness not just of the gender and familial order regulating testamentarial practices but also of the social order and class constraints affecting the position of testators.

The last wills of three female domestics—Paola, Margherita, and Domenica—emphasize the connection of gender and class to legal norms and cultural practices. The three women lived in Arezzo, in northwest Tuscany, between the late sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century. Their wills are among hundreds of examples of female testators that fill the papers of Tuscan notaries. Provincial women from all social classes drafted at least one will and often two or more during their lifetime. It was not uncommon for servants who defined themselves as such in their wills to devolve their possessions—a small field or house—on surviving sons, daughters, or nieces. Something unusual, however, sets servants like Paola, Margherita, and Domenica apart from other testators.³ The three women clearly defined themselves as servants, and in the case of Paola as a nutrice (nurse).⁴ But they had no wealth to speak of and had very few, if any, kin. They were widows. All three left their masters heirs of their meager possessions and bequeathed their personal belongings to nieces, nephews, and other women. Their wills were recorded in Latin and filled only about half a page of the cartulary of Ser Anton Filippo Ruberti, a notary in Arezzo. For all these reasons, these wills were mute and the voices of these three old women unspoken. What, then, drove them to draft wills—a legal instrument usually intended to transmit wealth, select heirs, and consolidate power?

Wanting to read testaments in their own terms, in the bequests made by the three women I searched for their voices rather than an assumed logic of preservation and distribution of wealth, the dominant theoretical framework of historians interested in last wills. I singled out the heirs and, when possible, the friends in the lives of Paola, Domenica, and Margherita. I sought to understand the kind of wealth they had, where it came from, and what value the three servants gave to it. I wanted to know how they turned their possessions, through their legacies, into powerful cultural resources. Finally, in the written words recorded by their notaries, I set out to discern the laws that regulated the transmission of property and the management of women's dowries in their towns. But what I found in the last wills of women servants was blurred by multiple voices and confused by layers of participation. I began searching the simple and short notarial texts for clues that could tell me about these women's lives and for the important symbols that explained their domestic worlds. As I read the wills of the three servants, I sought to recreate their familial ties and understand the boundaries of their affective relationships. In time, their wills came to life and so did their intentions.

There is no doubt that in their last wills these servants asserted their volontà to reveal their social standing. In particular, they entrusted the memory of their domestic experiences to the public depositaries of notarial records. In the process, these women sent powerful messages to an assumed audience and proved their ability to operate within the legal tradition of their town. The last wills of Paola, Margherita, and Domenica exemplify the content of these messages and reveal their imagined audience. Through pious and personal bequests in anticipation of their deaths, the women not only sought personal gratification and the salvation of their souls but also pursued and found the opportunity to step out into the public realm. In the process, I argue, these women redrew a code of honor that altered the rules of admission into the public that defined domestic spaces in terms of labor and gendered them female. These women rejected the idea that female integrity was "naturally" defined by sexual behavior and civil status and that women's honor depended on the price of a dowry. Instead, in their wills, they emphasized their own professional identity as wage earners, reconfiguring the bounds of public and private space in ways that reflected their particular class and gender position.⁵ What follows are the hopes and joys, the exploitation and injustice, of Paola, Margherita, and Domenica as they were told in the written words of their notary and left to memory in their last wills.

At the time we meet the three servants, they are all widows. Few other facts are certain about their lives. About Paola we know the most.⁶ She was the daughter of Giorgio from Castiglion Fibocchi in the outskirts of Arezzo, and had been in the service of Sebastiano Magi, a medical doctor, for most of her life. From the fragmentary evidence recorded in Paola's testament, we know that she was hired as a nutrice (nurse or wet nurse) for Vittoria Magi, one of the three daughters of Sebastiano, sometime in the second half of the sixteenth century. But the life story of Paola is inevitably sketchy, as many of the life stories of domestic servants are.⁷ We know that she had been married to a man named Matteo, from whom she might have had at least one child, considering that she was hired as a nurse. At one point in her life, as was the case with many other servants, she probably moved from a nearby small town, possibly Castiglion Fibocchi, to the city of Arezzo to work for the Magi family. Maybe she became a widow early in her life and, like many rural widows, left her village and moved to town searching for a job. After all, for women, domestic service was certainly a more prestigious occupation than other jobs, especially working in the textile industries. She might have also decided to enter the service of the Magi family as a nurse soon after the birth of her child. Wet nurses were the highest paid among all servant women, and it was not uncommon for rural mothers, seeking to improve the financial standing of their families, to abandon their own babies and move to the city to nurse the children of wealthy families.⁸

Whatever the circumstances that led Paola to move to Arezzo, she lived with the Magi family for most of her life. The coming of age of Vittoria and her two sisters, Caterina and Marta, did not signify the end of Paola's presence in the family. At some time, either after the death of her old mistress, the mother of the three Magi girls, or following Vittoria's marriage, Paola moved into the service of Antonio Pacinelli, Vittoria's husband. It is here that Paola lives at the time we encounter her. But in the beginning of November 1596, Paola's health began to deteriorate. Her mind was alert, but her weak, aging body confined her to bed. On the ninth of the same month, with her death imminent, Ser Anton Filippo Ruberti was called to draft Paola's last will. In her testament, Paola named as her beneficiaries the three Magi sisters and selected her master, Antonio Pacinelli, as her heir. Theirs were the only names that Paola mentioned in her testament, no grown children, sisters, brothers, or more distant kin.

The details surrounding the life stories of Margherita, daughter of Domenico and widow of Domenico, from Prato, and Domenica, daughter of Giovanni and widow of Taddeo, are even less certain than in the case of Paola. Indeed, the wills of the two women are so short and terse as to make any assumptions about their lives almost impossible. On February 17, 1612, the same notary, Ser Ruberti, went to hear the last will of Margherita, the aging domestic servant of the "esteemed" priest Benedetto di Ser Giulio Scortecci.⁹ A few years later, on April 13, 1615, the widow Domenica, with death imminent, also dictated her last will. Ser Ruberti was called to her deathbed, in the house of her master, the Reverend Francesco Palazzeschi.¹⁰

I tried to make sense out of Paola, Margherita, and Domenica's testamentary decisions and looked for a logical order behind them. What led Paola to entrust her wealthy master and mistress with her possessions? Unlike Paola, Margherita and Domenica had close kin. A nephew survived Margherita. From Domenica's will, we learn that she had a niece, Jacopa di Battista di Giovanni from Uliveto, daughter of a brother, and she named a friend, who also may have been a domestic servant, Lucia di Biagio. Since local statutory regulations would have taken care of Margherita and Domenica's possessions, why did each draft a last will? Moreover, why did they, like Paola, leave most of their wealth to their masters? Were they urged to do so by their masters and mistresses, or was this their own decision? Was the motivation to draft a testament dictated by piety and religious beliefs, or were there more worldly concerns?

During the past two decades, legal and economic perspectives have dominated the reading of last wills as legal texts used for the transmission of property and the selection of heirs in Western Europe.¹¹ Scholarship has shown that, through testamentary procedures, fathers and husbands divided their fortunes among sons, daughters, and kin and took care of surviving wives, mothers, and daughters.¹² In this way, men controlled and assured an orderly administration and preservation of the family patrimony from generation to generation. Male testators, by concentrating their bequests on sons over daughters, and on older sons over younger ones, defined the boundaries of patrilineage and the order of gender hierarchies. In particular, testamentary procedures came to involve not only the inalienability of patrimony for future generations but also a policy of succession that, by the sixteenth century, favored primogeniture, the male line, and the family name.¹³ Research on testamentarial practices and other legal texts has clearly pointed to the legal and economic marginalization of women. The legal tradition in conjunction with familial practices excluded women from property rights and inheritance, while placing the responsibility for the preservation and the distribution of wealth on men.¹⁴ Concentration on issues of property, wealth preservation, and family consolidation inevitably restricted historical attention to those social groups that held property. Moreover, the legal exclusion of women from a significant part of family wealth caused, at least for some time, the omission of research on women's testaments. A fairly recent focus on women has not only introduced women into the discussion of the legal and economic significance and role of testamentarial practices but has also expanded the analysis of testaments to embrace a more cultural approach. At the same time, a growing if limited body of research has begun to complement the established scholarship on testaments by raising important questions about the significance of legal norms regulating inheritance as well as the gendered implications and meanings of property.

The broadening of research to include women's testaments has opened a debate over differences in women and men's legacies. There is no doubt that female and male testators exhibited distinctive patterns in their legacies. Women spent more time than their male relatives distributing gifts and dictating itemized lists of their jewels, clothes, household objects, and other personal items. They bestowed their possessions on relatives as well as friends and on sons and brothers as well as daughters, daughters-in-law, and sisters. They rarely forgot to give something to their servants and made donations to charitable and religious institutions, chapels, and hospitals more often than their male kin did. These findings have led in a number of interpretative directions aimed at explaining and understanding the extent of women's independence and the significance of their prerogatives over their possessions in late medieval and early modern societies.¹⁵

Seeking to contextualize the gap between women's and men's legacies, scholarship has emphasized the degree of women's control over property and their ability to pass it on to their heirs, and has connected both issues to local statutory rules regulating the transmission of property. As Samuel K. Cohn has argued, the rigid rules that determined the devolution of wealth along the male line in many fourteenth and fifteenth-century Italian cities led to fewer testatrices. Where statutory laws regulating those practices did not confine property rights along a strictly patrilineal pattern of descent, the number of women who redacted wills was much larger and their space for maneuverability in selecting their heirs was wider. In line with this interpretation, Cohn has suggested that regional differences, not gender, defined women's ability to control property and select heirs.¹⁶ While not denying the presence of strong male preferences embedded in the law, other scholars have presented a picture in which the legal systems of many late medieval and early Renaissance Italian cities constrained husbands and wives under the same conjugal duties and normative hierarchies concerning inheritance. In work on Florence, Isabelle Chabot has concluded that neither men nor women had much space for maneuvering around the law. Both were equally influenced by legal practices and cultural prescriptions that regulated the transmission of property.¹⁷ In conjunction with this position, without downplaying the importance of strong legal constraints for both women and men, the studies of Julius Kirshner and Thomas Kuehn for Florence and Stanley Chojnacki for Venice have merged the gap between the law and culture, suggesting a more nuanced reading of legal texts and cultural prescriptions regulating women's position within the family and as legal persona. All three scholars conclude that, notwithstanding the legal subordination that constrained women's ability to inherit and bestow property, upper-class women were able to devise different forms of agency and maneuver around the structures of patriarchy.¹⁸

By privileging a reading of the application of law in daily life and emphasizing its "ambiguities" and "incoherence," this new scholarship has advanced beyond a static understanding of law as a self-evident frame of reference for historical analysis. Overall, however, women's testaments have continued to be read and evaluated according to upper-class male concerns in matters of inheritance. The meaning of property and the origin of wealth have been neither questioned nor problematized but have been assumed to carry a universal meaning that can equally pertain to all, regardless of gender and class. In a study of fourteenth-century testaments, for instance, Cohn has certainly broadened discussion to include the ranks of artisans and propertied peasants.¹⁹ The analysis, however, is based on the assumption that wealth is a fixed entity. Yet, in law, wealth is a site for negotiation. As such, it had different meanings for villagers and the Florentine patricians, for elite women and working women. When I first approached the testaments of servant women from a background of universal meaning, they were silent. Looking more closely at the social context in which testaments were produced and trying to understand how testatrices conceived of their wealth made the voices of servant women become louder and clearer.

The conventional interpretative parameters used to understand testaments did not fit easily with the experiences of the servants Paola, Margherita, and Domenica. Indeed, the three servants' wills called for new criteria of interpretation that embrace the fragmentary information of non-elite women's testaments. This shift entailed redrawing the roles and functions of gender and class as they influenced the depiction and the self-representation of women in notarial texts. Most important, it demanded rethinking the nature of women's property in relation to family wealth and to women's prerogatives in devolving their possessions. Recent scholarship has advanced a cultural reading of property and wealth, has made women's wealth central, and has opened up space for those testatrices, like the three servants of this study, who did not conform to conventional patterns. Martha Howell's studies of the Low Countries and Renata Ago's work on seventeenth-century Rome have examined women's social and cultural assumptions about wealth not only as the product of a legal system that controlled inheritance and property distribution but also as the result of a gendered reinterpretation of the economic importance of women's personal property.²⁰ Women's wealth was not "unimportant" even if, at least in monetary terms, it amounted to less than men's wealth. Notwithstanding significant differences in the abilities given and legal rights afforded women and men, the two historians argue that wealth existed in many forms and carried diverse meanings, not directly linked to its material value but reflective of the myriad ways in which individuals conceived of wealth. The two historians agree that wealth was not a fixed concept but was created and revised through complex and uneven processes. Women, according to Howell, "tended to treat property less as economic capital than as cultural and social capital."²¹ The issue, then, is not whether men's property carried more weight and importance than women's property. It is not even what kind and amount of wealth women were allowed to devolve on their heirs. Instead, the crucial question is how people would link themselves to others by means of property, as well as the value of the unspoken but acknowledged power of credit and of goods as commodities.²²

How did Paola, Margherita, and Domenica define property? How did they use their possessions to shape their relations with their masters and mistresses? And what language did they use to "link" themselves to their employers/beneficiaries? Paola's testament was filled with an itemized list of her personal possessions, the names of their recipients, and the explicit tasks they were called on to perform following her death. First, Paola addressed concerns about her spiritual salvation. She wanted to be buried in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo and, more precisely, in the place where all the Pizzochere sisters (Beguines) were usually buried. Then she mentioned her beneficiaries and heir. With the legacies she left Caterina and Marta, two of the Magi sisters, Paola sought to reinforce the already strong personal bonds she had created in a lifetime as nurse and domestic servant for the Magi family. Marta, who at the time Paola dictated her last will was the wife of Innocenzo Barbani, received 14 lire. To Caterina Magi, a nun in the monastery of San Benedetto in Arezzo, Paola left 7 lire. Caterina was to receive this sum six months after Paola's death.²³

With her gifts, Paola presented herself—as many provincial elite women did in their wills—as an active supporter and benefactor of the well-being of the two younger women. In their wills, elite provincial women left legacies that were directed at affecting the lives of other members of the family. In these ways, elite women—just like their husbands—shaped for themselves and their families a public reputation that carried respect and honor. Undoubtedly, as in the last wills of male relatives, many elite women's endeavors were aimed at sustaining the self-aggrandizing and self-perpetuating image of their families and transmitting the normative hierarchies around which provincial elite families sought to reconstitute themselves. They did not sacrifice themselves entirely for these values, however. Indeed, provincial women operated within the paradox of a new familial ideology that constrained them as it privileged them and, in the process, influenced change in the world within and beyond the household. In giving away their possessions, many provincial women used this image and the corresponding language of respectability in different ways. They challenged restrictions and included themselves in the privileges supposedly unavailable to women. They did this by distributing a share of their remaining possessions to other women who often had no connection to their family, such as friends and women in need; other times, they devolved some of their possessions on sisters, sisters-in-law, daughters, and even daughters-in-law. In all cases, however, women always stipulated that the monies they left should go to augment the dowries of their beneficiaries.²⁴ In this way, elite women constructed a collective identity of the family that included both the maternal and the paternal lines.²⁵ Paola must have known the common practice of testamentarial acts, in line with the dowry pattern of the time, for she left Caterina, the married woman, twice the amount she gave Marta, who had become a nun. Conforming to the same language of elite women, through the personal bequests to Marta and Caterina Paola sought personal gratification but also recognition in anticipation of death. With her legacies, Paola probably wanted to ensure her continued remembrance in the life of the Magi sisters after her death. Indeed, as Dennis Romano writes in his study on Venetian servants and masters, gifts from servants often represented "tokens" of affection and gratitude as well as means "to perpetuate ties with their masters."²⁶

But there may have been even more to it, as Paola's behavior toward Vittoria, the third of the Magi sisters and her mistress, demonstrates. As a nurse, Paola enjoyed a higher status than a simple servant. But what kind of relationship did Paola imagine with Vittoria when she had her will drawn up? It was not unusual for a servant to move from the original household that employed her to the new household that her employers' daughters had entered by marriage. In many of the elite women's wills, the legacies mistresses left their female servants took effect only if servants continued their term of service in their daughters' households, following the testator's death.²⁷ At the same time, it was not unusual for a mother to instruct both daughters and sons to take care of the family's old servants after her death by providing for them either in their homes or by making available a house, food, some land, and even extra money. Scholarship has often explained this behavior as originating from the particular relationships that developed between mistresses and servants or masters and servants. Following employment by professional and commercial urban families, poor women, often young and from rural villages, lost their independence but gained a new position as family members under the maternal and paternal supervision of their employers.²⁸ This domestic and paternalist view of servant-mistress relations often contrasts with the more pragmatic behavior displayed by both employers and servants, who seemed to have viewed their relationships also in clear financial and labor terms. Mistresses, according to Gayle Brunelle's study of Nantes, did not hesitate to bring their servants before officials whenever the latter breached the stipulated terms of service. Servants, too, brought their employers to court for unpaid back wages.²⁹ Nonetheless, until recently, the dominant interpretation has supported the idea that servants accepted the paternal reading of the relationships with their employers, even if some scholars have acknowledged the existence of an ambiguous area where servants were caught between their position as family members and as wage-earning employees.³⁰

Evidence from Paola's testament certainly suggests such an ambiguity in her relationship with Vittoria. Paola did not leave cash to Vittoria. Instead, she gave her all her personal effects, including a bed, a mattress, small household articles, and a number of unidentified personal items, linens, and bedclothes. Some of Paola's belongings might have come from her dowry or some previous inheritance from her father or deceased husband. But it is more likely that a good part of her effects might have been gifts Paola had received from the Magi family, likely from Vittoria's mother or Sebastiano Magi. It was not unusual for mistresses to compensate their long-time servants for their work with legacies, and a common reward to servants was their own bedroom furniture along with the blankets, linens, and the clothes they had received while in service. In addition, mistresses, contrary to masters, rewarded their servants with a variety of different goods. A mistress frequently entrusted her servants, especially if young, with extra money intended for a dowry. Oftentimes, small personal articles were added, such as combs, wooden boxes, and clothes, and in some more rare instances even jewels. In 1662, for example, Doralice Rasi, widow of a noble citizen of Arezzo, left something to all of her servants. But to Leonora di Francesco, Donna Doralice also left one of her own chests full of clothes, in addition to 7 scudi intended to augment her dowry and the usual bed, mattress, linen, food, and wine. Caterina Gramignoli, wife of Antonio Fabeni, went even further and left Santa, her servant, 15 scudi intended to constitute her dowry, along with furniture, household items, clothes, and even "a garnet necklace interspersed with gold buttons [un vezzo di granati con bottoni d'oro]."³¹ In other cases, mistresses left older servants personal effects, furniture, and frequently a small house with a field as well as a certain amount of grain and wine per year to assure them a decent living until death. With their gifts, mistresses showed their servants affection and appreciation. They were certainly encouraged to give gifts to their servants as charitable activities by the religious fervor and increased concern for the afterlife promoted by the Tridentine reforms.³² As Francesco Ricciardi wrote in his last will, he left his servant, Camilla di Bartolomeo, 20 common florins of Arezzo "propter amorem Dei [for the love of God]."³³ In 1650, Maria Forti made two bequeaths of 10 scudi each to Bernardina and Lisabetta. The former was the servant of Maria's sister and the latter the daughter of her brother's servant. Both girls were young, and hence the legacies were intended to serve as dowries.³⁴ Maria, who was in her second marriage and had no children, might have wanted to present herself as the benefactor of needy younger girls. But there might be another way of looking at these practices. In certain cases, there was specific legislation that regulated the donation of goods to servants. One of these laws passed in 1595 in Venice, for example, establishing that, after six months of service in the case of men and one year in the case of women, servants could keep the clothes they received from their masters "as part of their upkeep or salary."³⁵ Mistresses' "gifts" to their servants, then, while certainly revealing compassionate feelings of appreciation and generosity, might have also created a bounded space in which the social status of the employer was reinforced and at the same time the social inequality of the relationship between servants and mistresses was reproduced, thus indirectly and symbolically placing mistresses in a dominating position.

Through last wills, masters and mistresses exercised other forms of authority over their servants by imposing conditional clauses over "gifts" they left them. Often, employers specified that legacies to servants were contingent on their uninterrupted service in their family after their death. In 1587, for example, Porzia Vannucci, a widow, left her servant Camilla from Anghiari her upkeep if she continued to serve her heir, but if Camilla left, all she received from her mistress would have been the bed where she slept and a certain amount of wheat.³⁶ In 1602, Marietta Ottaviani, a widow, left Camilla di Jacopo the sum of 50 scudi if "she was still at her service" when she died.³⁷ Were masters and mistresses threatening their servants? Was this a way for employers to control their servants and avoid possible breaching of the stipulated terms of service? Conceivably, masters and mistresses, by bending a legal tradition that certainly never intended to bequeath a debt that was owed, attempted to discipline their servants' freedom and limit their rights. Marcel Mauss and others have clearly explained how gifts are inextricably linked to the kind of relationship that ties givers and receivers.³⁸ But while we know about masters' and mistresses' gifts to their servants, not much has been said on the bequests that servants left their mistresses.³⁹

Can more be said, then, of these gifts that mistresses and masters and servants exchanged in their last wills? Paola's legacy to Vittoria certainly revealed the strong affection that tied her to the woman she had once possibly nursed and certainly cared for since infancy. With her legacy, Paola gave her mistress a gift, the same kind of gift that elite women left their servants. We do not know the monetary value of this gift; but, undoubtedly, by giving Vittoria her personal effects, Paola strongly desired to impress the memory of her presence in the life of her mistress. She also might have wanted to express gratitude to Vittoria, for having taken her into her home and provided security during Paola's middle age. Paola's legacy, however, while conveying gratefulness and affection, also allowed her to reposition herself alongside Vittoria, hence bridging the social inequality that was so often reconfirmed in mistresses' legacies to their servants. It can be argued, as Martha Howell has done for the women of Douai, that Paola turned her earned personal goods into commodities with which she redefined her relation with her mistress both in labor and familial terms. In this way, the servant-nurse used her belongings and the legal practice that allowed her to bequeath them to create her own professional and personal links with her mistress. This interpretation is further corroborated by how Paola exercised her prerogative to constitute her possession's legacy by imposing additional clauses on Vittoria's bequest.⁴⁰ Vittoria was the only one among the Magi sisters who was required to perform a task in exchange for Paola's gifts. It might not be a coincidence that, while the legacies to Caterina and Marta were free from any conditions, Paola required Vittoria to give two sets of sheets to the convent of the Franciscan friars.

What did Paola want to tell her mistress with this conditional clause and to what end? In many ways, the wills of domestic women conformed to those of other women and men of upper ranks. While most testators dictated conditional clauses that had an impact on future generations, women servants limited any form of control to their immediate heirs and beneficiaries. Not all the women who left wills placed restrictive conditions on their legacies. In seventeenth-century Arezzo, as was the case in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, very few upper-class women placed any form of conditional clauses on their bequests, especially if their wills are compared with those of elite women from Sansepolcro.⁴¹ There, women not only wrote longer wills but also placed on their heirs many restrictions, which ranged from inalienability of property to instructing them on the kind of charities to select. These women even instructed their beneficiaries on how to invest their inheritance, what properties to buy, and what profit they were supposed to secure from these investments. They went so far as to threaten their beneficiaries with complete loss of their inheritance if they either failed to complete their orders to the "last detail" or mismanaged the inherited properties. Long lists of names of people and institutions were mentioned one after the other, predicting that heir after heir would not fulfill the volontà of the testatrix.⁴² While contextual distinctions might set apart women's ability to dictate their last wills, elite men, instead, persistently and consistently restrained future generations with the intent to control the actions of their heirs and hence impose and preserve their own "will" from beyond the grave.

In light of this evidence, the case of Paola shows that a combination of class and gender might have shaped women's ability to control property and impose their will on surviving heirs.⁴³ In her final hours, through her testament and with her legacy, Paola sent a powerful message to Vittoria, addressing the meaning of privilege and the limits of power.⁴⁴ Specifically, Paola entered into dialogue with her mistress, the legal system, and cultural practices that actually confused the boundaries of social hierarchies or at least prompted Paola to develop new ways of thinking about herself and her relationship with her mistress. This dialogue, as it took shape in her last will, afforded Paola an outlet for voicing publicly and legally an alternative vision of the social order she inhabited. Indeed, Paola might have used her personal belongings to reverse and potentially subvert the social order that defined master-servant relationships. Through her bequest, Paola gave Vittoria more than just a gift. She exchanged with Vittoria a payment for the service of giving two pairs of sheets to the convent. Paola not only sought some form of control over the future of her possessions but also attempted, in her own way, to direct and hence exercise authority over the actions of her mistress. Notwithstanding the existence of intimate and paternalist relations between servants and their employers, Paola used the testamentary text and her possessions actively to address and fashion a new relationship with her mistress.⁴⁵ In her will, while portraying an image of herself as a domestic and affectionate servant, Paola also projected a representation of herself that established both her own professional identity as a working woman and a member of the Magi family.

But what gave women like Paola the strength and self-assurance to reverse or at least rethink the social order that defined her relationship with her mistress? This question is better answered by continuing our discussion of the heirs selected by Paola and the other two servants, Margherita and Domenica. All three servants designated their masters as heirs of their patrimony and stipulated in detail the tasks the three masters were required to perform in return for their inheritance. Antonio Pacinelli received Paola's entire patrimony of 30 scudi with the stipulation that, four years after her death, Pacinelli would give the 30 scudi to the Franciscan friars.⁴⁶ In addition, Antonio Pacinelli was expected to provide the Franciscan friars with charity for the celebration of ten masses for the salvation of Paola's soul immediately following her death and ten other masses for the salvation of the souls of other people of her heir's choosing.⁴⁷ In 1612, when Margherita drafted her last will, she pleaded with her master to give her nephew "that amount from her legacy that his conscience believed was best" and to organize an honorable ceremony for her funeral. But the most elaborate ceremony demanded of a master was Domenica's. After leaving some personal effects to her niece Jacopa and entrusting some provisions to her friend Lucia, Domenica dictated to the notary a step-by-step description of the ceremony her master and heir was to organize for her memorial service. First, she requested that her funeral be presided over by twelve priests. Then, in exchange for an unspecified inheritance, Domenica wanted her heir, Reverend Francesco Palazzeschi, to provide the usual charity so that the church of Antria, Domenica's place of birth, could ensure candles for her funeral. Moreover, she asked her master to celebrate a funeral mass for the salvation of her soul. Specifically, she wanted a mass with high ritual in the church outside the town in the reverend's parish. Still, this was not enough for Domenica, who obviously believed that her inheritance to her master was worth even more. So Reverend Palazzeschi was to pay for the celebration of thirty masses at the main altar of the Capuchin Church in Arezzo for four years after her death and was required to give the Capuchin brothers the equivalent of 10 lire in carved candles.

By nominating their masters as heirs and executors of their last wills, Paola, Margherita, and Domenica conformed to a common pattern among female servants, according to most historical interpretations that see in this behavior the reaffirmation of the paternalist trait of the relationship between masters and servants. But the three examples presented above challenge the traditional notion of inexperienced and helpless servants who relied on their "fatherly" masters to manage their possessions. There are, to be sure, several cases in which servants ask their masters to intercede for them as their testamentary executors after having devolved their belongings on surviving sons, daughters, and grandchildren. Maria Rambuli, a single woman and a servant in the house of the nobleman Cosimo Ricciardi from Arezzo, asked her master to act as her executor. In the name of "good sentiment, honesty, and good will," Maria asked her master to help her three heirs—her sister's son and two daughters—divide the field she entrusted them after her death.⁴⁸ Giulia di Giovanni by contrast was a widow and the servant of Cosimo di Antonio Pacinelli, Vittoria Magi's father-in-law. In 1589, Giulia, still in full health, drafted a testament in the home of her master. She named her granddaughter Benedetta universal heir of all her possessions. After Benedetta's death, the unspecified inheritance should have gone, in order, to Benedetta's sons, in their absence to her daughters, and finally to a certain Lucia di Santi.⁴⁹ The circumstances surrounding Maria and Giulia's testaments are quite different from those of Paola, Margherita, and Domenica. In fact, a number of factors set the testaments of the five servants apart. Neither Giulia nor Maria was nearing death. In addition, it was clear that Maria's inheritance consisted of property she probably received from her family: a field in Funtiano, the village where she was born. Giulia had very close kin: a granddaughter, daughter of Giulia's son. These examples, then, demand particular attention to the exact role masters played in their servants' wills. Were they testamentary executors or heirs? Were there close kin surviving the testator, and what did they inherit? Last and, I think, more important, where did the money that the three servants bestowed on their masters come from? The conventional explanation that justifies servants' motivations in making their masters testamentary executors and heirs on the basis of concepts of loyalty and gratitude needs to be rethought. Loyalty and gratitude by themselves do not fully explain the demands that Paola, Margherita, and Domenica made on their male employers.⁵⁰

As the case of Paola's mistress suggests, the interactions that took place in these last wills reveal a more complex—and certainly a more confused—understanding of social rank, wealth, and the testamentarial process. Addressing the issue of the origin of the three servants' possessions might help clarify this confusion. In addition to the personal belongings that the three servants left to other women, Paola possessed 30 scudi, and Domenica and Margherita an unspecified amount of money. All three servants were widows. Hence their inheritance could have consisted of part of their dowry. According to the inheritance and dowry restitution laws of Arezzo, if the husband died and there were no children, the wife could keep as her inheritance one-sixth of the entire dowry.⁵¹ But if this money constituted her dowry, why did Paola bestow her inheritance on the Franciscan friars, to be paid four years after her death? Why did Margherita rely on the "goodness" of her master rather than on the rule of law, which would have protected her nephew's rights of inheritance? And, finally, why did Domenica leave her niece, daughter of a brother, only her personal belongings? These questions suggest other ways to explain these servants' possessions: the money that comprised each of their inheritances represented all or part of delayed payments of their salaries as servants.⁵²

It was not unusual for masters to fail to compensate fully their servants for a lifetime of work. Such cases have been explained as the products of "long-term sexual and emotional relationships" between masters and female servants, in particular. Romano has also argued that the life of servants often became so enmeshed in the life of the family as to render compensation for their service almost unnecessary. Finally, it was not unusual for masters to lack cash and hence be unable to pay servants' salaries on a regular basis.⁵³ That masters and mistresses did not pay their servants regularly is apparent in last wills of both masters and servants. Unfortunately, not all servants' wills are as clear and forthright as that of Lisabetta di Agnolo, domestic servant of Paolo Catani, a priest. In her last will, written on her deathbed on April 6, 1638, Lisabetta left her niece Maria, daughter of her brother, 12 scudi of the value of 7 lire each, which her master had yet to give her "from the amount of goods and salary [he] still owed [her] after many years [of service]." Lisabetta must have been quite anxious to have this money handed over to her niece, who was not yet married and possibly needed it for her dowry. First, she urged her master to advise his heirs to carry through on their commitment to pay the debt. Then, Lisabetta asked her master to fulfill his obligations and provide her with a decent burial "of his liking" and the celebration of thirty funeral masses for the salvation of her soul within two months after her death. Finally, Lisabetta freed her master and his family from any debt he still had with her "for all the time she has served [Catani]."⁵⁴ Lisabetta's public denunciation of her master's creditor status toward her is quite unusual in a servant's will. But masters and mistresses reconfirm in their wills the all-too-common practice of leaving servants' salaries unpaid.

There were two different sorts of legacies to servants: when the masters, but mostly mistresses, recognized their servants' creditor status, and when instead they remained silent as to the origin of their bequests. In 1662, Doralice Rasi, widow of the nobleman Aleotti, left Leonora, her servant, a substantial number of personal goods as well as 7 scudi for her dowry. Doralice, however, acknowledging her servant's creditor status, emphasized that the legacy to Leonora was not intended as payment of the debt her family had incurred to Leonora for her service.⁵⁵ In several other cases, masters and mistresses clearly do acknowledge debt payments to their servants. In 1594, the priest Giovanni Buoni left Jacopa, his servant, 25 scudi in addition to her clothes and "other objects" she was already using.⁵⁶ The list of masters and mistresses leaving their servants 25, 50, in one case even 100 scudi is fairly long. Giovanni Cagliani and Giulia Catani, among others, did not hesitate to spell out the significance of their legacies to their servants: the 25 and 100 scudi that they respectively left Dianora and Lisabetta, their servants, represented the debt payment for their unpaid "salario et mercede [wage and reward]."⁵⁷ Camilla Gavilli instead specified that her servant Leonarda had accrued a credit for her service in her home that amounted "at present to 18 scudi of the value of 7 lire each, and she [the servant] will receive the mentioned scudi right after her [Camilla's] death."⁵⁸ Why did they all leave their servants the sum of 25 scudi or its multiple and why only if they were still working for them after their death? The consistency in amount and their recurrence clearly indicates that these legacies constituted the wages that masters might have owed their servants for the duration of a contract that could last between six and ten years.⁵⁹ But in law, can one bequeath what one owes? Why would masters and mistresses state the balance due their servants in their last wills and leave their heirs in charge of settling their debts? What assurance did servants have that the heirs would actually pay them? Certainly, Lisabetta di Agnolo, the servant mentioned above, showed some diffidence when she recommended her master urge his heirs to carry through on their commitment to pay their debt.

The second group of testators that made legacies to their servants did not state the origin of the gifts but often specified that the amount of money would have served to pay for the servant's dowry. Without denying true feelings of affection and the display of Christian generosity on the part of mistresses and masters toward their servants, it seems to me that the gifts that they left servants concealed an ambivalent strain. In fifteenth-century Florence, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber argues, masters went so far as to invest themselves with the responsibility of a "true father" and as such looked after the virtue and the best interest of their young servants. For this reason, masters withheld part of the wages earned by these girls, and by the time servant girls were ready for marriage they provided them with a dowry.⁶⁰ Legacies of masters to their servants, then, should be read with cautiousness and their paternal generosity with a certain skepticism, especially in those cases when servants were young girls and when the bequest was intended as a dowry. Was this amount of money a gift or money that the master owed the servant? Was the legacy a sign of compassion and generosity on the part of the master, or did it instead help the master retain control over servants, in particular young girls, and fashion an image of himself as benevolent "pater"?⁶¹ Overall, mistresses' and masters' gifts to their servants conveyed more than just affection. Just as feelings of loyalty and gratitude do not fully explain the gifts of servants to their employers, so generosity does not entirely sustain the legacies of masters to servants. Instead, as commodities, these gifts spoke about the relationships between servants and masters in a subtle, complex way and engaged testatrices and testators in a dialogue about the gender and social order that defined relations of domination and subjugation.

In light of this evidence, then, Paola, Margherita, and Domenica's decision to nominate their masters heirs of their "possessions" becomes all the more significant. The legacies forced their masters to acknowledge publicly and legally the unrecognized value of their service, the power of their creditor status, and the honor of their profession as working women. It is possible to argue that these widows selected their masters as their heirs because the bulk of their inheritance consisted of salaries never received and, in effect, involuntarily "loaned" to their masters. Unquestionably, servants' last wills released their masters from indebtedness and from any obligations to their servants. There is no doubt that in their wills servants pleaded with their masters to give some of this money to relatives. What else could these women do? What other power did they have? The opportunity afforded masters, or anyone else, to contest a testament has been clearly explained by Thomas Kuehn in his work on repudiation.⁶² Masters could easily repudiate the inheritance left by their servants. As it was not worth much, it was all the easier to do. Thus the most effective way Paola, Margherita, and Domenica had to compel their masters to return what was morally if not legally theirs was to appeal to their masters' and mistresses' religious fervor, especially at the moment when their soul was in balance. In a subtle form of moral persuasion, servants asked their masters and mistresses to interfere on their behalf for the salvation of their souls and fulfill pious and charitable bequests to churches and religious institutions.⁶³ In this way, the three servants' legacies had the potential of undermining not just their masters' honor but also their opportunity for salvation. The three domestic women thus placed their masters in the uncomfortable position of possibly facing public shame and certainly jeopardizing their own salvation if they did not uphold those wishes.⁶⁴ It was through their last wills, with the support of the law and possibly the collaboration of their notary, that such servants gained the strength and self-assurance to require mistresses and masters to perform a service in their names. It is also clear that the three servants were not initiating a tradition on their own but were following in the footsteps of their employers and likewise incorporating their own domestic and working experiences into the legal process. By safeguarding and demanding their unpaid wages, even if only symbolically, servants publicly proclaimed their identity as working women.⁶⁵

Through legal measures in these last wills, servant women challenged and redefined the social order that regulated their relationships with mistresses and masters. In their wills and through their legacies, at least some servant women saw themselves first and foremost as working women—wage earners who negotiated reciprocal obligations with their employers. By asserting control over their "potential" possessions, women like Paola, Domenica, and Margherita thus initiated a dialogue with their employers and with the law. This dialogue afforded them partial success without having to face the long and exhausting legal conflicts that required access to magistrates and court procedures, which most servants could not afford. It is also likely that such servants did not want to enter into any kind of litigation that would have placed them in a direct confrontation over unpaid salaries. On the whole, sentiments of gratitude and benevolent paternalism made such legal disputes unlikely. Moreover, the familiarity with notaries and the domestic character of the testamentarial procedure certainly contributed to making testaments accessible legal instruments to servant women. The servant women of Arezzo worked for lesser elite families, professional and mercantile ranks, many of which numbered notaries among their members. Surely, notaries came into their masters' homes as friends and kin in addition to fulfilling professional tasks.⁶⁶

Foreseeing their deaths, some domestic servants found and pursued the opportunity to step out into the public realm, to talk publicly, to be heard and seen beyond the confines of prescribed social and gender conventions. Testaments afforded servant women the possibility of contesting the limitations and reconstructing the opportunities that at once defined and conditioned their domestic position as well as their professional identity and labor relations with their masters and mistresses. In the hands of women servants such as Paola, Margherita, and Domenica, testaments became the space where they redressed perceived injustice and left to memory their identity as working women. The stories of these three servants challenge the assumption that testaments were deeply intertwined and naturally rooted in the normative hierarchies around which elites sought familial consolidation. They also raise questions concerning the notion that inheritance practices operated solely within the self-preserving values of elite families. Instead, servant women's testaments reveal the existence of a written tradition established by women of the lower classes that portrays them as historical subjects who helped shape the language that defined wealth and that they then used to appropriate notarial practices otherwise seen as outside the domain of working women. The legacies of three servants of Arezzo have shown that, although all testaments shared the common legal objective of recording the transmission and preservation of property and goods, not all were rooted in the same legal and familial logic of upper-class families, nor was this logic universally accepted as the unavoidable product of testamentary procedures. Instead, the legacies of women servants uncover multiple layers of notarial practices, definitions of heirs and wealth, and interpretations of testaments. In particular, women envisioned testamentary practices as the arena in which they redefined their relationships with their masters and mistresses, through which they altered and gendered the rules of admission into the public space.

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2001 Southern Historical Association in New Orleans, the 2002 American Historical Association in San Francisco, and the 2002 New College Conference on Medieval-Renaissance Studies in Sarasota, Florida. Special thanks for comments and suggestions are due to Laura Edwards, Thomas Kuehn, Robert P. Ingalls, Fraser Ottanelli, Dennis Romano, the History Department Discussion Seminar at the University of South Florida, and the editors and anonymous readers of the AHR. I also gratefully acknowledge the research support of the American Philosophical Society and the University of South Florida.

Giovanna Benadusi is an associate professor of history at the University of South Florida. She received her PhD at Syracuse University, where she worked with Edward Muir. Her previous publications include A Provincial Elite in Early Modern Tuscany: Family and Power in the Creation of the State (1996), and she has published articles in Social History, The Sixteenth Century Journal, and Nuova Rivista Storica. Her major fields of interest are Renaissance and early modern Italy, with emphasis on legal and social culture, and gender. She is currently working on a study of women's testamentary practices in early modern Tuscany.

Notes

¹ The works of Doris Sommer, "'Not Just a Personal Story': Women's Testimonios and the Plural Self," in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography, Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck, eds. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 107–30, and Joanne Rappaport, The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes (Durham, N.C., 1998), have influenced my rereading of women's testaments.

² References to non-elite women can be found in Gianna Lumia, "Morire a Siena: Devoluzione testamentaria, legami parenteli e vincoli affettivi in età moderna," Bullettino senese di storia patria 103 (1997): 235, 240; Maria Luisa Lombardo and Mirella Morelli, "Donne e testamenti a Roma nel quattrocento," Archivi e cultura 25–26 (1992–93): 23–130; Giovanni Silini, "Famiglia, società e patrimonio a Lovere negli atti dotali e testamentari (secoli XV–XVI)," Archivio storico bergamasco 21 (1991): 68–126. See also the interesting essays in Dead Giveaways: Indigenous Testaments of Colonial Mesoamerica and the Andes, Susan Kellogg and Matthew Restall, eds. (Salt Lake City, 1998).

³ Not all servants defined themselves according to their profession. It is, however, possible to estimate a larger number of servants' wills by detecting certain characteristics that set these wills apart from others. Lack of a last name and origin in a rural village or small provincial town are usually the first two prerequisites. Other bits of information include the actual place where the testament was drafted, the people who witnessed the drafting, and the presence of the homeowner among the witnesses, especially if addressed with a title. In this way, those last wills that are usually discarded because too short and, at first appearance, meaningless can be rescued from anonymity.

⁴ Christiane Klapisch-Zuber has noted that the work of domestic servants, nurses, and washers was, for the most part, underestimated since it was connected with the same domestic tasks "naturally" attributed to mothers and wives. She has also emphasized the complexity in understanding the degree to which working women identified themselves for their labor. See "Un salario o l'onore: Come valutare le donne fiorentine del XIV–XV secolo," Quaderni storici 1 (1992): 41–49, esp. 47.

⁵ For a discussion on feminist theories of the public and the private, see the essays in Joan Landes, ed., Feminism, the Public and the Private (Oxford, 1998), in particular, Landes, "The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration," 135–63, and Seyla Benhabib, "Model of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas," 65–99.

⁶ Archivio di Stato, Florence (hereafter, ASF), Notarile Moderno (hereafter, NM) 8986, Anton Filippo Ruberti, November 9, 1596, fols. 1v–2v.

⁷ On domestic servants, see Raffaella Sarti, Vita di Casa: Abitare, mangiare, vestire nell'Europa moderna (Bari, 1999); Dennis Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600 (Baltimore, 1996); Angelina Arru, Il servo: Storia di una carriera nel settecento (Bologna, 1995); Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, "Women Servants in Florence during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries," in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, Barbara A. Hanawalt, ed. (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 56–80. Some of the most important works focusing on other European countries are Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and Their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore, 1984); Sara Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (Princeton, N.J., 1983); Timothy Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household (Harlow, Essex, 2000); and Gayle Brunelle, "Contractual Kin: Servants and Their Mistresses in Sixteenth-Century Nantes," Journal of Early Modern History 2, no. 4 (1998): 374–94.

⁸ In fifteenth-century Florence, wages for a servant woman amounted to 8.5 florins a year. In reality, however, wages were often limited to an average of between 5 and 8 florins. Male servants were paid an average of 10 florins. See Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, "Female Celibacy and Service in Florence in the Fifteenth Century," in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1985), 176. In Venice, the capitulary of 1595 set the salaries of servant women at 6 ducats a year, while nurses were paid 7 ducats a year. As in Florence, also in Venice male servants fared better. See Dennis Romano, "The Regulation of Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice," Sixteenth Century Journal 4 (1991): 674. See also Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., "Prosperity in the Countryside: The Price That Women Paid," in Cohn, Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore, 1996), 162–63; Klapisch-Zuber, "Blood Parents and Milk Parents: Wet Nursing in Florence, 1300–1530," in Women, Family, and Ritual, 132–64; Daniela Lombardi and Flores Reggiani, "Da assistita a serva: Circuiti di reclutamento delle serve attraverso le istituzioni assistenziali (Firenze-Milano XVII–XVIII secoli)," in Simonetta Cavaciocchi, ed., La donna nell'economia, secoli XIII–XVIII (Florence, 1990), 301–19.

⁹ ASF, NM 8986, Anton Filippo Ruberti, February 17, 1612, fols. 80r–v.

¹⁰ ASF, NM 8986, Anton Filippo Ruberti, April 13, 1615, fols. 108v–109v.

¹¹ Research on testaments began under the influence of the French historians Michel Vovelle and Pierre Chaunu, whose works focused on the religious and pious decisions of testators to understand changes in the religious mentalité and sensibility of French people during the early modern period, and more specifically on the eve of the French Revolution; Michel Vovelle, Mourir autrefois: Attitudes collectives devant la mort aux XVII^e et XVIII^e siècles (Paris, 1979); Pierre Chaunu, La mort à Paris: XVI^e et XVIII^e siècles (Paris, 1978). Italian and American scholars have also studied testaments to understand changing attitudes toward charity, piety, and patronage, in particular during times of plague. See Paolo Preto, Peste e società a Venezia, 1575 (Vicenza, 1978); Alessandro Pastore, "Testamenti in tempo di peste: La pratica notarile a Bologna nel 1630," Società e storia 16 (1982): 263–97; Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Death and Property in Siena, 1205–1800: Strategies for the Afterlife (Baltimore, 1988); and Cohn, The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy (Baltimore, 1992). A different approach is that of Sandra Cavallo, who has linked legacies in wills and forms of charity to uncover institutional and secular understanding and organization of poverty in early modern Italy. Charity and Power in Early Modern Italy: Benefactors and Their Motives in Turin, 1541–1789 (Cambridge, 1995).

¹² Joan Thirsk, "The European Debate on Customs of Inheritance, 1500–1700," in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800, Jack Goody, Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson, eds. (Cambridge, 1976), 177–91.

¹³ This phenomenon has been observed for sixteenth-century Tuscan elites by Richard Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence: A Study of Four Families (Princeton, N.J., 1968), 171–72; Francis W. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1977), 136–40; Judith Brown, In the Shadow of Florence: Provincial Society in Renaissance Pescia (Oxford, 1982), 40–41; Cohn, Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death, 353 n. 135. For the seventeenth century, see R. B. Litchfield, Emergence of a Bureaucracy: The Florentine Patricians, 1530–1790 (Princeton, 1986); and Giovanna Benadusi, A Provincial Elite in Early Modern Tuscany: Family and Power in the Creation of the State (Baltimore, 1996).

¹⁴ Scholars who study medieval and Renaissance Florence have argued forcefully that devolution of property was strongly in favor of the patrilineal lineage. See Isabelle Chabot, "Risorse e diritti patrimoniali," in Angela Groppi, ed., Il lavoro delle donne (Rome-Bari, 1996), 47–70; Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., "Last Wills: Family, Women, and the Black Death in Central Italy," in Women in the Streets, 39–56; Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1991); Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual. For Siena, see Lumia, "Morire a Siena," 103–285.

¹⁵ Sandra Cavallo, "Che cosa trasmettono le donne? Proprietà domestica e confine del 'personale' tra Sei e Settecento," in Le ricchezze delle donne in età moderna: Diritti patrimoniali e poteri famigliari (XIV–XIX sec.), Giulia Calvi and Isabelle Chabot, eds. (Rome, 1998); Renata Ago, Maura Palazzi, and Gianna Pomata, "Premessa," Quaderni storici 86 (1994): 293–98; Ago, "Ruoli familiari e statuto giuridico," Quaderni storici 1 (1995): 111–33; and "Oltre la dote: I beni femminili," in Groppi, Il lavoro delle donne, 164–82; Lumia, "Morire a Siena," 231–72; Julius Kirshner, "Material for a Gilded Cage: Non-Dotal Assets in Florence (1300–1500)," in The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present, Richard Saller and David Kertzer, eds. (New Haven, Conn., 1991), 184–207; Maria Antonietta Visceglia, "Corpo e sepoltura nei testamenti della nobiltà napoletana (XVI–XVIII secolo)," Quaderni storici 2 (1982); Stanley Chojnacki, "Patrician Women in Early Renaissance Venice," Studies in the Renaissance 21 (1974): 176–203; Linda Guzzetti and Antje Zieman, "Women in the Fourteenth-Century Venetian Scuole," Renaissance Quarterly 4 (2002): 1151–95, in particular 1171–78.

¹⁶ In cities such as Florence, Arezzo, and Perugia, Cohn argues that the weight placed on the male line in property descent combined with a strong concern over the preservation of the testator's earthly memory and the consequent rejection of mendicant ideals of charity to impose harsher restrains on women's ability to control property. In these cities, women redacted very few wills. When they did, they appropriated and transmitted the normative hierarchies of their families' ethos. Women thus favored the male line and excluded themselves and other female kin from legitimate participation in the success of their families' lineage. For this reason, according to Cohn, in Florence, Arezzo, and Perugia, women drafted last wills with the single purpose of reconfirming husbands the universal heirs of their properties, both dotal and nondotal. Contrary to patterns in these cities, in Pisa, where fathers favored their daughters over distant kinsmen, women not only testated at a much higher rate but also exhibited more freedom in deciding their testamentarial legacies and heirs. The strength of the male line as reflected in the inheritance regulations and conventional cultural practices of some central Italian cities, then, influenced and determined women's freedom to express their feelings, desires, and choices through testamentary procedures. Cohn, Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death, 195–201; "Last Wills," 53–54.

¹⁷ Chabot acknowledges the inextricable nature of the two most important statutory articles: the one that restricted what women could inherit and the one that limited what they could bestow. Notwithstanding the contextual differences in regulating women's ability to dictate their last wills, she has claimed that lack of property and inheritance rights by women did not exist in proportion to the strength of patrilineal patterns of inheritance. Isabelle Chabot, "La loi du lignage: Notes sur le système successoral florentin (XIV^e/XV^e–XVII^e siècle)," Clio, histoire, femmes et sociétés 7 (1998): 51–72. Chabot also disputes that women enjoyed more freedom over their property on the basis that their possessions had limited material value. This argument, as some scholars present it, compares the degree of women's control to the lack of statutory limitations over their properties. See Preto, Peste e società, 98–108; L. Deleidi, "Donne milanesi della prima metà del cinquecento: La memoria degli atti notarili," Società e storia 64 (1994): 279–314; Giuliana Vitale, "Affettività e patrimonio attraverso i testamenti femminili medievali," in Donne tra memoria e storia, Laura Capobianco, ed. (Naples, 1993), 107–31.

¹⁸ While Kirshner sees the space for women's maneuverability within the context of Roman law and Kuehn considers the practice of law, Chojnacki focuses on the day-to-day relationships of wives and husbands within marriage. The three scholars question the idea of "patrilineal imperatives" that inevitably subordinated women. Florentine statutes did not clearly and absolutely take away women's rights concerning inheritance, especially when there was no close male kin. Julius Kirshner, "'Maritus Lucretur Dotem Uxoris Sue Premortue' in Fourteenth and Fifteenth-Centuries Florence," Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 77 (1991): 111–55; and "Material for a Gilded Cage," 184–207; Thomas Kuehn, "Some Ambiguities of Female Inheritance Ideology in the Renaissance," in Law, Family and Women, 238–57; Stanley Chojnacki, in his numerous studies on Venetian women now collected in Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore, 2000). See also Giulia Calvi, "Diritti e legami: Madri, figli, stato in Toscana (XVI–XVIII secolo)," Quaderni storici 86 (1994): 487–510. In "Introduction: Family and State, Women and Men," in Women and Men, 5, Chojnacki asserts that Venetian patrician women "possessed the resources and determination to act on their own" in part because the rise in the value of dowries during the sixteenth century had given women greater economic and social leverage, but also because both women and men were instrumental in preserving and consolidating family wealth.

¹⁹ Cohn, "Last Wills," 39–56.

²⁰ Martha Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550 (Chicago, 1998), 152–67; Renata Ago, "Donne, doni e public relations tra le famiglie dell'aristocrazia romana del XVII secolo," in Cavaciocchi, La donna nell'economia, 175–94; and Ago, "Ruoli familiari e statuti giuridici," Quaderni storici 88 (1995): 111–33. See also Thomas Kuehn, "Understanding Gender Inequalities in Renaissance Florence: Personhood and Gifts of Maternal Inheritance by Women," Journal of Women's History 8 (1996): 65–72.

²¹ Howell, Marriage Exchange, 153.

²² Howell, Marriage Exchange, 228.

²³ For similar bequests, see Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 204.

²⁴ In 1660, Antonia Torrigiani from Pescia stipulated that the monies she left her daughters should augment rather than constitute the dowries already given by their fathers; ASF, NM 12524, Giuliano Ceci, fols. 22v–24v. See Giovanna Benadusi, "Equilibri di potere nelle famiglie toscane tra sei e settecento," in Calvi and Chabot, Le ricchezze delle donne, 78–92. Howell's study of fifteenth-century Douai, in the Low Countries, highlights the difference between men and women's selection of beneficiaries. As was the case in seventeenth-century Siena, women chose other women more often than men did. Marriage Exchange, 162–67; and Samuel K. Cohn, "Women and the Counter-Reformation in Siena: Authority and Property in the Family," in Women in the Streets, 57–75.

²⁵ On the aspiration of women to incorporate their legacy into that of their husbands, see in particular Giulia Calvi, "Maddalena Nerli and Cosimo Tornabuoni: A Couple's Narrative of Family History in Early Modern Florence," Renaissance Quarterly 45 (1992): 312–39; and also Calvi, Il contratto morale: Madri e figli nella Toscana moderna (Bari, 1994); Benadusi, "Equilibri di potere nelle famiglie toscane tra sei e settecento," 78–92; Tommaso Astarita, The Continuity of Feudal Power: The Caracciolo di Brienza in Spanish Naples (Cambridge, 1992), 175–201.

²⁶ Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 204; see also Christine Churches, "Women and Property in Early Modern England: A Case Study," Social History 23 (1998): 165–80.

²⁷ This trend persisted throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; see Angelina Arru, "Uomini e donne nel mercato del lavoro servile," in Groppi, Il lavoro delle donne, 245–68.

²⁸ Klapisch-Zuber, "Women Servants in Florence during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries," 56–80; Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 137–50; Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 193, 210.

²⁹ Brunelle has recently supported this view with evidence from the disputes that mistresses and servants brought before the municipal council of Nantes during the 1570s; "Contractual Kin," 389. Romano has found several cases in which Venetian masters prosecuted servants but only nine cases in which servants brought charges against their masters. While in most cases, masters brought their servants to court on charges involving the breaking of contracts, servants charged their masters with beating. Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 64–73, 221–22. See also Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 66.

³⁰ Both Brunelle and Romano have argued that the relationship between servants and masters was often the product of ambiguous dynamics embracing at the same time loyalty and disloyalty, obedience and disobedience. Brunelle, "Contractual Kin"; Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft.

³¹ ASF, NM 16509, Bastiano Balsimini, February 6, 1662, fols. 33r–35r, September 15, 1662, 37r–v.

³² According to Cohn, in Siena during the Counter-Reformation, there was a dramatic increase in women's last wills and in the amount of property they received from their husbands. He attributes this increase to the Tridentine reforms: "The culture of the Counter-Reformation changed the ways in which both men and women imagined the afterlife and lived in the present ... In the charged atmosphere of seventeenth century spiritual fear, obsession and expectations, men ... relied much more heavily than during the sixteenth century on the terrestrial intercession of their wives to say prayers and masses ... [T]he wife had become ... the spiritual smiths of the household." Cohn, "Women and the Counter-Reformation in Siena," 73–74. See also Cohn, Death and Property in Siena. On this issue, Cavallo has suggested a more nuanced reading by placing forms of charity within the specific circumstances which produced them; Charity and Power in Early Modern Italy.

³³ ASF, NM 4435, Angelo Lauri, fol. 13r.

³⁴ ASF, NM 10112, Antonio Rosgialli, April 29, 1650, fols. 17r–18v.

³⁵ Romano, "Regulation of Domestic Service," 674.

³⁶ ASF, NM 4435, Angelo Lauri, 1587, fol. 32v.

³⁷ ASF, NM 8986, Anton Filippo Ruberti, September 13, 1602, fols. 25r–29r.

³⁸ On the gift as social value, see Marcel Mauss, The Gift (London, 1990). Howell has discussed the interconnectedness between the meanings of wealth once it is exchanged and the impact of exchanged wealth in redefining social relations; Marriage Exchange, 137–38. See also Ago, "Donne, doni e public relations," 175–94; Kuehn, "Understanding Gender Inequalities in Renaissance Florence," 58–80.

³⁹ Romano mentions the practice of drafting testaments by servants but focuses mainly on the instructions they left to their masters about funeral expenses. He also writes about cases of servants who left gifts to their masters, which he interprets as tokens of affection and gratitude. Housecraft and Statecraft, 182–87, 204.

⁴⁰ Women of the Venetian patriciate undoubtedly displayed the same strong sense of entitlement over their possessions, as shown by Chojnacki in Women and Men in Renaissance Venice; for Pisa, Cohn has calculated that women redacted wills as often as men, as opposed to a much smaller ratio in both Florence and Arezzo; "Last Wills," 51–55.

⁴¹ My analysis is based on a sample of 140 last wills of elite women of Arezzo. Also, in sixteenth-century Siena, women did not place any limitations on their legacies. See Lumia, "Morire a Siena," 108.

⁴² To date, I have looked at 130 last wills by elite women from Sansepolcro. See Benadusi, "Equilibri di potere nelle famiglie toscane tra sei e settecento," 78–92. Cohn argues that the Counter-Reformation ideals of new Catholic devotion offered Sienese women increased possibilities to control their possessions by channeling them into charitable legacies. At this time, Sienese women began drafting wills at an unprecedented rate. "Women and the Counter-Reformation in Siena," 57–75.

⁴³ According to Cohn, this trend was stronger in Arezzo, Florence, and Perugia than in Pisa, Siena, and Assisi. "Last Wills."

⁴⁴ Romano has argued that in Venice, toward the end of the sixteenth century, the legislation regulating domestic service indicated a change in masters' perception of servants: "The elite came to perceive servants as arrogant, disobedient, even as evil. They spoke of the 'tyranny' of servants within households." Romano attributes this change to a growing fear among elites of lower classes as well as to changes in elites' self-perception. In particular, servants became a symbol of masters' status and hence of "their own honor and prestige." "Ironically"—Romano concludes—"it was masters who ... placed themselves at their servants' mercy, for the honor servants could bestow, they could also jeopardize through the displays of disobedience." "Regulation of Domestic Service," 676–77. A similar trend began in Florence toward the end of the fifteenth century, when the status of servant women deteriorated as male servants became more popular. See Klapisch-Zuber, "Female Celibacy and Service in Florence," 176–77.

⁴⁵ Howell, Marriage Exchange, 132–38.

⁴⁶ In Arezzo, 1 scudo was worth 4 lire and 5 soldi.

⁴⁷ At this point, I have only found the testament that Antonio Pacinelli drafted on his deathbed. At this time, Vittoria Magi, his wife, was still alive, and so were their three daughters and two sons, all minors. ASF, NM 9407, Giovanmaria Vestitelli, September 24, 1610, fols. 7v–9v.

⁴⁸ ASF, NM 16509, Bastiano Balsimini, June 14, 1677, fols. 100v–101v.

⁴⁹ ASF, NM 6806, Giovan Battista Borghetti, May 29, 1589, fols. 13r–14r.

⁵⁰ Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 182–83.

⁵¹ Archivio di Stato, Arezzo, Liber Statutorum Aretii (Firenze, 1580), "De Dotis Promissione, ac Restitutione," 137–39.

⁵² Others have previously suggested that masters and mistresses bequeathed wages for their servants, but they have not elaborated on the implications of such a practice for structuring their relationships. See Barbara A. Hanawalt, "Peasant Women's Contribution to the Home Economy in Late Medieval England," in Women and Work, 6; Lumia mentions the case of a servant woman who, in her last will, indicated that her possessions were the fruit of her labor; "Morire a Siena," 235.

⁵³ According to Romano, servants loaned money to masters when these were short of cash. In other cases, however, servants asked masters to keep their salaries in a safe place. Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 146–47. See also Klapisch-Zuber, "Women Servants in Florence," 71–72. For France, Brunelle reconfirmed the lack of written contracts for domestic servants already noticed by studies on French domestic service; "Contractual Kin," 377.

⁵⁴ ASF, NM 10810, Camillo Marsuppini, April 6, 1638, fols. 97r–v.

⁵⁵ ASF, NM 16509, Bastiano Balsimini, February 6, 1662, fol. 33v.

⁵⁶ ASF, NM 6806, Giovan Battista Borghetti, April 28, 1594, fols. 52r–56r.

⁵⁷ ASF, NM 8986, Anton Filippo Ruberti, November 24, 1614, fols. 98r–99r; NM 4437, Angelo Lauri, March 20, 1613, fols. 9r–10r.

⁵⁸ ASF, NM 10110, Antonio Rosgialli, November 20, 1614, fols. 38r–41v.

⁵⁹ Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 135–38; Brunelle, "Contractual Kin."

⁶⁰ Klapisch-Zuber, "Female Celibacy and Service in Florence," 174.

⁶¹ Both Romano and Brunelle argue that mistresses gained control over their servants by withholding the dowries they owed them: Brunelle, "Contractual Kin," 381; Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 136–38.

⁶² Thomas Kuehn, "Law, Death, and Heirs in the Renaissance: Repudiation of Inheritance in Florence," Renaissance Quarterly 3 (1992): 484–516. Angelina Arru has discussed the case of a nineteenth-century Roman servant who took her master's heirs to court on charges that they had not fulfilled her master's legacy to her; "Uomini e donne nel mercato del lavoro servile," 247–51.

⁶³ Traditionally, research has merged in a single interpretation the pious bequests by testators from upper and lower classes. Since focus has been placed on reading testaments during time of plague and other natural catastrophes, these legacies have been interpreted as part of changes in the religious and pious behavior of testators. Pastore, "Testamenti in tempo di peste," 291–95.

⁶⁴ It has been argued that dishonor can only occur between social equals. This view of honor is closely linked to the individual but often also to the family and hence related to issues concerning sexuality, chivalry, and property. See John G. Péristiany, ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (Chicago, 1966); David D. Gilmore, ed., Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean (Washington, D.C., 1987); Frank Henderson Stewart, Honor (Chicago, 1994); Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford, Calif., 1999); Donald Weinstein, The Captain's Concubine: Love, Honor, and Violence in Renaissance Tuscany (Baltimore, 2000). Ariela J. Gross has suggested a different understanding of honor linked to work and labor relationships between masters and servants. In her view, dishonor is deeply linked to social inequality. See Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton, N.J., 2000).

⁶⁵ Brunelle emphatically argues that in sixteenth-century Nantes servants "seem to have been inclined to view themselves as autonomous wage earners"; "Contractual Kin," 388.

⁶⁶ We do not know the profession of Antonio Pacinelli, but we know that his father, Sir Cosimo Pacinelli, was a notary; ASF, NM 6806, Giovan Battista Borghetti, May 29, 1589, fol. 13r.

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