Gender, Agency, and Life Cycle in the Italian Émigrée Experience: The Letters of Luisa Donati Strozzi, 1466–1510
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PhD Thesis
Embargoed until: 2025-04-26
Reason: Author request
Embargoed until: 2025-04-26
Reason: Author request
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This thesis examines the letters of the Florentine patrician Luisa Donati Strozzi (1434–1510). It provides the first critical analysis of this vernacular-authored correspondence as a case that allows the close study of the life cycle of an elite émigré woman in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy, and the permutations of political catastrophe that shaped her historical trajectory. Two hundred and ten letters are extant. Written mainly from Ferrara, Luisa’s city of residence following her expatriation from Florence, the letters are predominantly addressed to her sons, scattered across the northern peninsula. Spanning almost forty-five years, the letters offer a new context for understanding women, gender, and the practice of patriarchy as a dialectic of power in family and lineage. Agency is an implicit theme. The thesis uses the substantive content of the letters to examine how patrician women, following their menfolk into exile, and forced to resettle in foreign cities, experienced the distancing occasioned, the struggle over livelihood, and the subordination of their needs and interests to the failings of the conjugal lineage. In the substantial body of scholarship on women and the family in Italy, historians have not accounted for émigré women forced to manoeuvre between gender, the contemporary strictures of normative reality, and female exceptionalism away from their natal cities and kin. Luisa Strozzi’s predicament invites us to rethink received scholarly paradigms on the movement and activities of women in relation to the ‘houses’ of men. Through the prism of the letters, the thesis tests the hypothesis that, in a counterintuitive way, the phenomena of banishment and forced migration could be simultaneously penalising and formative for women, by widening the space in which they acted, and enlarging both their options and their world.
Authors
Di Crescenzo, LCollections
- Theses [4127]