Gender Relations and Social Networking in Early Modern Italy

This paper explores the language of letters, creation of kinship networks, and the place of gender relations in the formation of social networks in early modern Italy.  Traditional scholarly studies of family life in Renaissance Italy emphasize the importance of male kinship associations in defining family structure and community identity. This preoccupation with the patriline supposedly relegated women to the outskirts of family and community life.  Along the same lines, early modern prescriptive texts often portrayed men’s words as trustworthy testimony while characterizing women’s words as unreliable rumor or trivial domestic gossip. However, this paper argues that the letters exchanged by men and women in the Spinelli family, a prominent merchant and banking family in sixteenth century Florence, demonstrate how men and women actually formed social networks in similar ways.  The letters of three individuals – Benedetto Spinelli, his sister Gostanza Ugolini Spinelli, and his wife, Mattea Mellini Spinelli – reveal a common discourse where both men and women passed on gossip, preserved family memories, and exchanged news about events in their households in order to form larger social, economic, and political networks in early modern Italian society.  As a member of the mercantile class, Benedetto Spinelli traveled away from Florence for business on a regular basis and he relied on knowledge from his sister and wife to keep him informed about family affairs, financial developments, and even larger political events in the city.  These case studies show that men encouraged female gossip and that women turned this seemingly trivial domestic news into important economic or political information in their letters.  This paper argues that historians need to reconsider the gendered nature of the language used in letters and reframe studies to place gender relations at the center of community formation and social networks in early modern society.