Renaissance

1. Niccolò Machiavelli Women’s Role Renaissance

2. Who was Machiavelli? Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli 3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527 was an Italian historian, philosopher, humanist, and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance He wrote The Prince and Discourses on Livy. He is known for being inovative in his ideas and is one of the fathers of modern replubican ideals.

3. What was going on in Europe at the time? Machiavelli was born in a tumultuous era—popes waged acquisitive wars against Italian city-states, and people and cities might fall from power at any time. Along with the pope and the major cities like Venice and Florence, foreign powers such as France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and even Switzerland battled for regional influence and control. Political-military alliances continually changed, featuring condottieri (mercenary leaders) who changed sides without warning, and short lived governments rising and falling. Via wikipedia

4. Machiavelli He was well educated man. He is known for his political ideals and books now, but during his lifetime he was also know for his stories and plays. He was able to see what life was like in both a republic and a ruling family and was able to write political philosophies with this information in mind. During his life time, the ruling family of the Medici’s were overthrown and a republic system came into play.

5. Machiavelli con’t He was great friends with the Medici Family who were one of the more influential families in Florence at the time. He was a diplomat for the Medici family while they were exiled. However when the Medici family came back from exile, they removed him from the government. The Prince was written in an attempt to regain favour with the family.

6. The Prince The Prince is a book that is well known. Many historians agree that it was not written as a true “guidebook” but as a political satire.

7. Some Quotes from The Prince • “And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.” Chapter XVII: Of Cruelty and Clemency, and Whether It Is Better To Be Loved or Feared

8. Quote from The Prince And here we must observe that men must either be flattered or crushed; for they will revenge themselves for slight wrongs, whilst for grave ones they cannot. The injury therefore that you do to a man should be such that you need not fear his revenge. Chapter III: Of Mixed Princedoms

9. Quote from the Prince “And it will always happen that he who is not your friend will invite you to neutrality, while he who is your friend will call on you to declare yourself openly in arms. Irresolute Princes, to escape immediate danger, commonly follow the neutral path, in most instances to their destruction.” Chapter XXI: How a Prince Should Bear Himself So As to Acquire Reputation

10. Quote from The Prince Be it known, then, that there are two ways of contending, one in accordance with the laws, the other by force; the first of which is proper to men, the second to beasts. But since the first method is often ineffectual, it becomes necessary to resort to the second. Chapter XVIII: How Princes Should Keep Faith

11. Quote from The Prince And here it is to be noted that hatred is incurred as well on account of good actions as of bad; or which reason, as I have already said, a Prince who would maintain his authority is often compelled to be other than good. For when the class, be it the people, the soldiers, or the nobles, on whom you judge it necessary to rely for your support, is corrupt, you must needs adapt yourself to its humours, and satisfy these, in which case virtuous conduct will only prejudice you. Chapter XIX: That a Prince Should Seek to Escape Contempt and Hatred

12. Discourses of Livy • This book was also written by him and gives his true views on politics • “In fact, when there is combined under the same constitution a prince, a nobility, and the power of the people, then these three powers will watch and keep each other reciprocally in check”. Book I, Chapter II • This is what republican gov’ts base their ideas on. Essentially that there should be a series of balance and checks and no one person should have too much power.

13. Terms Machiavellian- corrupt government; term comes from the Prince

14. Women’s Role Women have always been responsible for the business of everyday life: having and raising families, feeding, clothing, sheltering, and healing the human race. While their history is not always evident in the male dominated world, women were very busy behind the scenes and were very influential.

15. Women’s Role- Queen Elizabeth Known as Elizabeth Rex, she was the head of state. She never married and was known as the Virgin Queen.

16. Noble Women Social class was a very big deal back then, more so then it is today. A noble women was important as her marriage to another noble man could secure her family’s social and political standings.

17. Middle Class Women Women of middle and lower class were often full partners in their husband’s trade. They needed to work as a family to ensure that the family business was successful. Often times when merchants were away on business it was the women of the household that managed the affairs. The story of illustrates this fact. Women also often ran the business after their husband died, which did cause resentment from some journeymen as they could not buy the business. “Magdalena Paumgartner was the wife of a Nuremburg merchant during the time of Le Poulet Gauche. While he traveled throughout Germany and Italy, placing orders, buying goods at great mercantile fairs, and trading in currency, she managed affairs at home. Her duties included receiving the goods (examining them for damage after their long journey), distributing the orders once they arrived, and collecting payments. She also managed their household staff and a small number of tenant farmers. Magdalena frequently advised her husband on what to buy and was not shy about letting him know when the goods she got were not as she specified.” http://www.lepg.org/herstory.htm

18. Lower Class Women Among the lower classes, women have always worked. Since women were paid less than men and were usually more reliable (less prone to go get drunk on their wages), women workers were often preferred for hired farm work, and certainly for domestic work. Women have always been a majority of the household servants. When a country family needed money, they would often send the daughters out to service or to day labor. “Le Poulet Gauche frequently employs day laborers of this kind. The inn keeps a small staff of girls who live there and work every day. When a runner arrives to make arrangements for a large party of travelers, or during a busy time such as a festival or fair, we hire on additional girls to help in the kitchen and common room. Girls are hired to serve, help in the kitchen, and do scullery work. ”

19. Women and the Army Women were also an integral part of the armies of the day. Not as combatants (at least not in the role of women), but as the support services necessary for any army. There were no field hospitals -- soldiers depended on these camp followers to take care of them when they were sick or wounded. The fighting men counted on their women to help carry their gear while on the march, to put up a tent and cook a meal at the end of the day, and to provide the usual sorts of comfort that men expect from women. Consequently, many of these women were carting babies along with their 50 pounds of clothes, tents, and cookware. In spite of their usefulness, camp followers were certainly often despised by society, and even by the ones who benefited from their services. Puritanical leaders often wanted to get rid of them, considering them a source of disorder, but until standing armies were organized with steady pay, medical services, and reliable logistics support, this just could not happen.

20. Prostitution Another way a women was gainfully employed often living at a brothel where she had food, shelter, and health care as well as protection. Most of these closed after the reformation.

21. Covenants The convent represented another option for women. For the most part, the best positions in convents were only open to women of high birth. Poorer women could join as lay sisters, where they did much of the domestic work of running a convent, but the choir was largely for upper class women. Some women exercised vast political and social influence from convents. This was more true in the past than in the sixteenth century, as the trends to enclose women and to encourage them to pray and not study books increased. However, a contemplative nun like St. Theresa of Avila had a big impact on the Counter-Reformation, and St. Vincent de Paul organized an order of women to do gritty social work among the poor. Hospitals were still staffed by nuns, and the idea of such an institution being secular only came about after the Reformation, when the government of Protestant areas had to take over the social of the functions of the church. The closing of convents where the Reform took hold was probably a considerable loss for many women. The Protestants thought they were "liberating" the nuns, but a number of them probably didn't feel that subjecting themselves to a husband and having a dozen children or so was an improvement in their lot. In Protestant countries, single women with a vocation ended up being spinster aunties and governesses, with considerably less status.

23. Witch Hunts Directed against women one cannot discuss the history of women during this time without discussing the craze for burning witches. This is a trend which seemed to have been seriously fanned by the printing press. The publication of the witch hunter's guide, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) at the end of the 15th century and its popularity in print probably caused a great deal of harm. Enlightened Renaissance scholars like Jean Bodin wrote seriously on the subject of witches, and few philosophers found any conflict between science and magic. Witch persecution is a subject that deserves a huge amount of historical examination. It is clearly a social force directed against women, who comprised the overwhelming number of victims, but what this means about the pressures the society was feeling isn't clear to me.

24. Witch Hunts For example, witches appear to have been often older women, usually widows, often living alone. Sometimes they had property, and sometimes they were beggars. Propertied old women are an obvious target for greed, while poor women seem to have been victimized because their begging was a nuisance. "She asked me for a pan of milk, and when I would not give it to her, she cursed my cow," seems to be the sort of evidence given against them. Both of these kinds of women were part of general population trends. The population growth of the 16th century increased the number of indigent poor, overwhelming the charitable institutions that would normally care for them and making people afraid and angry towards them. The population increase also added to the number of discontented young men unable to buy a shop or a farm in order to establish themselves and marry, which would make old widows controlling these kind of resources a target. Sometimes sexual violence and jealousy form a part of these attacks. However, there were villages were not a single adult woman was left alive after the witchhunters had been by -- which would seem to be socially quite counterproductive, as some of the dead were no doubt young mothers whose loss would impact the viability of the next generation. A society composed only of men is a tad sterile, so woman-hating is a bizarre phenomenon involving a great deal of double-think -- another treatise well beyond our scope. http://www.lepg.org/herstory.htm

25. Witch Hunts Whether or not the witches thought of themselves as such is quite unclear. Most confessed under torture, which can hardly be considered objective. Their confessions all end up sounding a lot the same, because for the most part they were prompted out of the same books. Being curious, Montaigne met and talked with some accused witches. He concluded that they were rather pathetic people in need of help, and unlikely to be in league with the devil. Henri IV, the ultimate pragmatic man, interfered with some witch prosections, declaring that that had been quite enough and the royal magistrates had better things to do. http://www.lepg.org/herstory.htm

26. Witch Hunts con’t Women have always practiced "traditional medicine." This was part of any housewife's expected regimen, but some women were specialists. Some of their herbs and potions actually worked, but these were viewed as hedge witchery by scholars who knew all about the circulation of the four humors and their relation to the planets. These superstitious charms could be harmless enough, but if one can cure, one can harm as well. Midwives knew all the mysteries of birth (a subject that had only begun to interest educated men) and they were sometimes feared and suspected of being able to cause miscarriage and abortion as well. The unclear line between medicine and magic was quite normal, but could be turned against a woman. Even if they weren't witches, women were always being suspected of poisoning their husbands if they died suddenly -- part of the fear that the women who were so responsible for maintaining all the fundamentals of life had the power to subvert it as well. http://www.lepg.org/herstory.htm

27. Witch Hunts The witch-hunters were frequently jurists from the cities. Well educated and cosmopolitan, they travelled from the cities to create order in the countryside. The rural people in the villages they visited inhabited a very different world from them -- a world full of supersititon, ancient semi-pagan customs,  and a primitive, poorly-understood form of religion. They had a concrete, non-intellectual, non-reflective way of acting, feeling, and thinking that the average university-educated magistrate could not comprehend. For many of these magistrates, the contact with rural culture was a shock. The countryside of remote areas seemed to be teeming with superstition, deviltry, and fear. The interest shown by the upper classes in the customs and personal habits of the poor and rural is new thing, fueled by the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the growth of the state. Some view the witchburnings as part of an attempt to exterminate an old, native, peasant culture and replace with a new one, more suitable to modern state that wants a unified national culture. http://www.lepg.org/herstory.htm

28. Educated Women Women were generally less literate than men. Those that were literate often probably put their pens to use keeping the family accounts and writing letters to keep up the web of social fabric. A few prominent women wrote memoirs, and someone like Catherine de' Medici had a voluminous correspondence that has been preserved. However, few wrote books or left their thoughts and experiences to posterity. It means that even in the midst of the Renaissance, one has to dig for their history like one was looking for Troy. http://www.lepg.org/herstory.htm