Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Allison Levy, Allison Levy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351872980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: European Art

Whereas recent studies of early modern widowhood by social, economic and cultural historians have called attention to the often ambiguous, yet also often empowering, experience and position of widows within society, Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe is the first book to consider the distinct and important relationship between ritual and representation. The fifteen new interdisciplinary essays assembled here read widowhood as a catalyst for the production of a significant body of visual material-representations of, for and by widows, whether through traditional media, such as painting, sculpture and architecture, or through the so-called 'minor arts, ' including popular print culture, medals, religious and secular furnishings and ornament, costume and gift objects, in early modern Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Arranged thematically, this unique collection allows the reader to recognize and appreciate the complexity and contradiction, iconicity and mutability, and timelessness and timeliness of widowhood and representation.

Chapter 1
Widow’s Peek: Looking at Ritual and Representation

Allison Levy

Whereas recent studies of early modern widowhood by social, economic and cultural historians have called attention to the often ambiguous, yet also often empowering, experience and position of widows within society, Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modem Europe is the first book to consider the distinct and important relationship between ritual as it pertains to widowhood (namely, the culturally dictated and managed set of social roles and responsibilities of widows during and after mourning ceremonial) and representation. The essays assembled here read widowhood as a catalyst for the production of a significant body of visual material - representations of, for and by widows, whether through traditional media, such as painting, sculpture and architecture, or through the so-called ‘minor arts,’ including popular print culture, medals, religious and secular furnishings and ornament, costume and gift objects. As this introduction and the essays that follow will suggest, a careful and critical look at this unique and understudied correlation can offer valuable insight into the fashioning and re-fashioning of individual, family and civic identity, memory and history in early modern Europe.

A Way of Looking at Widows

Much important work on women has been published in the 25 years since Lauro Martines issued a plea ‘to rearrange our grasp of the whole social life’ of late medieval and Renaissance Europe.¹ The present study is indebted, in immeasurable ways, to those scholars who first peeked - and more often than not stared - into the lives of all women, not just of widows. It was Joan Gadol Kelly who, in 1977, directly confronted the infamous out-of-step assertion by Jacob Burckhardt that ‘women stood on a footing of perfect equality with men,’ asking decisively, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ and sparking a provocative debate both on the status of women within early modern culture and on feminist interpretations of that history.² David Herlihy’s reconsideration of that question and, specifically, the subsequent trend within feminist scholarship to judge the Renaissance ‘meaningless when applied to women and their history’ countered the assumption that women were restricted and repressed and, in so doing, expanded the scope of inquiry.³ As he and other scholars have proposed, looking toward social determinants in order to understand the more complex notion that the whole idea of gender raises allows us, according to Judith C. Brown, ‘to historicize the conditions of both women and men as actors on the historical stage.'⁴ Inspired by this rhetoric of performance and challenged by the previous promise of destabilizing restrictive categories and assumptions, the essays in this collection, which focus the gaze on widows’ lives, seek to newly re-view the circumstances and experiences of early modern women through the lens of visual culture.

An overview of early modern widowhood, while recognizing the various period, geographical and class differences that exist, can help us to see more clearly our subject. Popular images of the widow as old and ravaged, barely more than a personification of death, or as a lustful, licentious temptress, or as a penniless and hopeless caregiver - imposing pictures, indeed - portray a substantial segment of the early modern European population as marginalized; yet very often neither decrepit, dangerous nor destitute, widows were anything but displaced members of society. The realities of widowhood paint a very different portrait and, perhaps, explain why and how such stereotypes became institutionalized in the first place.

We might begin by defining the widow as a woman, at a particular cultural and historical moment, caught in a situation of complex and complicating transformation. With her new social designation, which, itself, was non-negotiable, came a multitude of dramatic changes. Indeed, women’s lives were suddenly in flux, and the events and experiences that followed affected everything from emotional states to economic ones. In most parts of Europe, following burial ceremonial, women returned to live with their birth, or agnatic, families. If they received an inheritance or gained control of their dowries, some widows found themselves in economically advantageous positions, resulting in financial security and even leading to relative independence. Other widows might be forced to support themselves and their children; such circumstances could determine whether or not a widow was to remarry, a delicate negotiation that was usually decided by a male relative. As ‘passing guests’ between households, such arrangements could be problematic, especially if the widow had children, who then would be placed in a vulnerable and compromising position.⁵ Upon widowhood, there were many expectations but just as many opportunities - conflicting and consensual, desirable and devastating, ephemeral and eternal.

The uncertainties of widowhood in early modern Europe led to a substantial production of literature, from conduct books to sermons, ‘governing’ (there was a thin line between recommendation and law) the comportment of widows. For such an example, we might look toward the most influential women’s conduct book of the sixteenth century, A Very Fruitful and Pleasant Book Called the Instruction of a Christian Woman, written by Juan Luis Vives in 1523, published in Latin in Antwerp that same year and, underscoring the popularity of the book, soon thereafter translated into English, Castilian, French, German and Italian. As a means of presenting the general tone and tack of this and similar literary persuasions and dissuasions, substantial excerpts follow from the Third Book, which takes as its topic the roles and responsibilities of widows. In Chapter 1, ‘Of the Mourning of Widows,’ Vives dictates the proper type and amount of mourning for women; with the devastating loss of a husband comes a loss of identity, which not only justifies but also requires even uncontrollable grief;

Good woman, when her husband is dead, ought to know that she hath the greatest loss and damage that can bechance her in the world, and that there is taken from her the heart of mutual and tender love toward her. and that she hath lost not only the one half of her own life (as learned men were wont to say when they had lost them whom they loved dearly) but herself also to be taken from herself altogether and perished. Of this cause may come honest weeping, sorrow, and mourning with good occasion, and wailing not to blame. It is the greatest token that can be of an hard heart and an unchaste mind, a woman not to weep for the death of her husband. Howbeit there be two kinds of women which in mourning for their husbands in contrary ways do both amiss: that is. both they that mourn too much and those that mourn too little. I have seen some women no more moved with the death of their husbands than it had been but one of light acquaintance that had died, which was an evident sign of but cold love unto their husbands. Which thing is so foul that none can be more abominable nor more cursed.⁶

In Chapter III, ^'0f the Minding of Her Husband,’ the author recommends how a widow should act during her widowhood; she should understand that with the death of her husband, who is now considered a ‘divine ... spy,’ she must behave accordingly, for she has a duty to both his memory and his children:

Let a widow remember and have still before her eyes in her mind that our souls do not perish together with the body, but be loosed of the bonds of our corporal grossness. and be lightened from the burden of the body ... Wherefore a good widow ought to suppose that her husband is not utterly dead, but liveth both with life of his soul and beside with her remembrance ... Then what should a Christian woman do? Let her keep the remembrance of her husband with reverence and not with weeping, and let her take for a solemn and a great oath to swear by her husband’s soul and let her live and do so as she shall think to please her husband, being now no man but a spirit purified and a divine thing ... Also let her take him for her keeper and spy. not only of her deeds, but also of her conscience. Let her handle so her house and household and so bring up her children that her husband may be glad, and think that he is happy to leave such a wife behind him. And let her not behave herself so that his soul have cause to be angry with her and take vengeance on her ungraciousness.⁷

Vives prefers that widows not remarry, but if they must, in Chapter VII, ‘Of Second Marriages,’ he offers advice on choosing a second husband; the best kind is old and stern, able to control and discipline the widow, who is in need of order and rule:

I would counsel a good woman to continue in holy widowhead, namely if she have children, which thing is the intent and fruit of matrimony. But and she doubt lest she can not avoid the pricks of nature with that life, let her give an ear unto St. Paul the apostle writing unto the Corinthians in this wise: ‘I say to unmarried women and widows, it were good for them if they kept themselves as I am: but yet if they cannot suffer, let them marry. For it is bett[er] to marry than burn’ ... Yet let them beware that they do it not by and by after their husband’s death, for that is a token that they loved not them, for whose departing they have so soon left sorrowing, mourning, and all desire of them. And if they must provide ought for their house or children, let them see to it before the business of marriage and dominion of a new husband. And let them get such husbands as be according for widows to be married unto, nor young men, wanton, hot, and full of play, ignorant, and riotous, that can neither rule their house nor their wife nor themselves neither; but take an husband something past middle age, sober, sad, and of good wit, expert with great use of the world, which with his wisdom may keep all the house in good order, which by his discretion may so temper and govern all thing that there be always[s] at home sober mirth and obedience, without forwardness, and the household keep in their labor and duty, without pain, and all things clear and holy.⁸

As these excerpts demonstrate, stereotypes of widows (as decrepit, dangerous or destitute) coexisted with social demands and expectations of widows (as passive, submissive, weak and silent). If Vives’s document, equally prescriptive and proscriptive, reinforces this shallow though deeply troubling picture, other sources, both literary, as touched upon below, and visual, as the essays in this volume will explore at great length, suggest that widows in early modern Europe did not always follow the advice of those (male) dictates of ritual etiquette, instead, often going against the grain and blurring such socio-behavioral boundaries. For example, counter to Vives’s counsel that women remain widows, shunning remarriage in honor of their husbands’ memories, Alexander Niccholes, in A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving, first published in London in 1615 and then again in 1620, reports that ‘at the decease of their first husbands, [widows] learn commonly the tricks to turn over the second or third, and they are in league with death and coadjutors with him ....'⁹ The anxious tone of this account perhaps reveals why such ‘dialogues’ were first recorded - not as impartial cultural documents but as preconceived directives - but it also reveals, albeit in a hostile manner, a glimpse into the reality of widows’ lives.

If widows could, and apparently did, remarry, sometimes even with frequency and, thereby, challenging social and emotional limitations, they also could circumvent economic restraints. A French widow, for instance, stepped in as head of the family business upon the death of her husband; a notarial contract of 1612 discloses that ‘[she] has shown to the best of her ability up to the present and promises to continue to show and teach to the best of her ability the merchandise of bookseller and all in which she is involved in this trade.'¹⁰ An extreme illustration of a widow taking matters into her own hands can be found in fifteenth-century Russia, where the very ambitious widowed mayor, Marfa Boretskaia, ‘wanted to marry a noble of the Lithuanian king ... and to rule with him in the king’s name the entire Novgorodian land.'¹¹ These are two cases of women who, through various means of micro- and macro-management, respectively, negotiated and manipulated the circumstances of their widowhoods to their own end, seeking and gaining control - if not power. To be sure, such opportunities were not available to all women, but what we can recognize from these two examples is that the range of possibilities and ambiguities of widowhood in early modern Europe points to a complex and complicating relationship between reality and representation.

Review of Books on Widowhood

There is a wealth of published material on topics closely related to the present study, such as the socioeconomic variables of widowhood, the role of gender within death and mourning rituals, the form and function of the arts produced in conjunction with those rituals and women’s patronage. The following compilation is not meant to be exhaustive but suggestive of the variety of approaches to the study of widowhood, offering a broader context in which this collection can be read.¹²

General studies on widowhood in medieval and early modern Europe include the following single-author studies and edited collections (arranged in alphabetical order): Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, eds, Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Jan Bremmer and Lourens van den Bosch, eds, Between Poverty and the Pyre: Moments in the History of Widowhood (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), which offers a comparative worldview of widowhood, written from an anthropological perspective, and focuses on power relations between men and women; Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl, eds, Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), which interrogates the social constructions of widowhood; Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner, eds, Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Longman, 1999), which presents new approaches to the study of widowhood from both the male and female perspectives and includes a useful suggested reading list; Olwen H. Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe 1500-1800 (London: HarperCollins, 1995), which includes a chapter on pan-European widowhood; Louise Mirrer, ed., Upon My Husband’s Death: Widows in the Literature and Histories of Medieval Europe (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992); which addresses cultural, legal and socioeconomic concerns within literary and historical accounts; and Michel Parisse, ed., Veuves et Veuvage dans le Haut Moyen Age: Table Ronde (Paris: Picard, 1993).

On visual representations produced in conjunction with and/or as a result of funeral and burial ceremonial in medieval and early modern Europe, see the single-author books by Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), and Nigel Llewellyn, The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual, c. 1500-c. 1800 (London: Published in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum by Reaktion Books, 1991), both of which connect European (mainly English and French) ritual and representation through a study of commemorative objects and monuments. The edited volume by Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin, Art, Memory, and Fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Widow’s Peek: Looking at Ritual and Representation
• PART I: REPRESENTING WIDOWHOOD: MOURNING MODELS
• PART II: RE-PRESENTING WIDOWHOOD: FASHIONABLE CHOICES
• PART III: WIDOWHOOD AND REPRESENTATION: BUILDING MEMORIES
• PART IV: WIDOWHOOD AND RE-PRESENTATION: CONSTRUCTING HISTORIES
• AFTERWORD
• Index