a general awareness that among the nobility in the city-states, women were much more cloistered/controlled in their movements, and often married off younger and so on.
From what I have read, including those two sources, Renaissance Florence was demographically a lot more like classical Athens in this sense, in that you get the upper class women cloistered, married off at young ages, men having to wait until they were almost 30 to get married, and a lot more homosexuality due to men having far fewer options. The government even came up with state-sponsored prostitution at one point to get the men to stop fucking each other and start fucking lower class women like God meant them to!
Having an ENGLISH noble say things like "younger than [13] are happy mothers made" would revulse the crowd to the point that you'd have to, like, somehow have Paris be VILLAINOUS and probably even somehow not REALLY a noble, or else you're implying that Our Own Nobility is somehow very bad (and they'll get upset with you); having an Italian one makes use of the "oh those weird and crazy Italians" enough
Ah, that makes sense and is not something I would have picked up on! 16th century English perceptions of Italians is too far outside my wheelhouse. I have an idea of who was doing what outside my period (including your points about women as economic actors, the older age of marriage outside the upper classes, individual cases of medieval and Renaissance political marriages, etc.), but what was perceived how by whom outside my period is not something I can speak to. Thank you!
Were a few of those English nobles probably still marrying and consummating with teenagers? Yeah probably but that doesn't mean anyone would TALK about it or publicly APPROVE of it.
From earlier in the century, off the top of my head, Catherine Howard comes to mind (she wasn't a super young teenager, but the age difference was significant), and Mary, Queen of Scots (she was young, but she and her husband were roughly the same age, and the marriage might never have been consummated), and Lady Jane Grey (but she was 16, not 13, and I don't know if it was consummated, and she and her husband were roughly the same age)--was public perception of these marriages (the marriage, not the head-chopping part) that bad? (Oh, lol, I just realized all three were executed. Only one by her husband. :P)
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Date: 2022-06-18 08:29 pm (UTC)From what I have read, including those two sources, Renaissance Florence was demographically a lot more like classical Athens in this sense, in that you get the upper class women cloistered, married off at young ages, men having to wait until they were almost 30 to get married, and a lot more homosexuality due to men having far fewer options. The government even came up with state-sponsored prostitution at one point to get the men to stop fucking each other and start fucking lower class women like God meant them to!
Having an ENGLISH noble say things like "younger than [13] are happy mothers made" would revulse the crowd to the point that you'd have to, like, somehow have Paris be VILLAINOUS and probably even somehow not REALLY a noble, or else you're implying that Our Own Nobility is somehow very bad (and they'll get upset with you); having an Italian one makes use of the "oh those weird and crazy Italians" enough
Ah, that makes sense and is not something I would have picked up on! 16th century English perceptions of Italians is too far outside my wheelhouse. I have an idea of who was doing what outside my period (including your points about women as economic actors, the older age of marriage outside the upper classes, individual cases of medieval and Renaissance political marriages, etc.), but what was perceived how by whom outside my period is not something I can speak to. Thank you!
Were a few of those English nobles probably still marrying and consummating with teenagers? Yeah probably but that doesn't mean anyone would TALK about it or publicly APPROVE of it.
From earlier in the century, off the top of my head, Catherine Howard comes to mind (she wasn't a super young teenager, but the age difference was significant), and Mary, Queen of Scots (she was young, but she and her husband were roughly the same age, and the marriage might never have been consummated), and Lady Jane Grey (but she was 16, not 13, and I don't know if it was consummated, and she and her husband were roughly the same age)--was public perception of these marriages (the marriage, not the head-chopping part) that bad? (Oh, lol, I just realized all three were executed. Only one by her husband. :P)