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"Castiglione, Caroline"
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Patrons and adversaries : nobles and villagers in Italian politics, 1640-1760
The early modern Roman countryside was a site of contestation between great aristocratic families and an expanding papal political regime. Rarely has the role of the inhabitants of this landscape--the villagers--been considered as part of that power struggle. As Caroline Castiglione shows in this compelling revisionist work, one Roman aristocratic family, the Barberini, was not squeezed out of governing by the extension of the papal bureaucracy, but rather became increasingly engaged with it during the long eighteenth century. Through their participation in the rural commune, villagers in an extensive territory belonging to the Barberini became active participants in the governing of the countryside. Villagers cultivated and exploited interference from the aristocratic family and the papal government, but they also kept urban elites at bay, defending their rights through the strategies of adversarial literacy. Such literate practices drew on village mastery of local constitutions, debates in the village assembly, and brilliant use of the legal system of the papacy to thwart the designs of the Barberini. Later villagers created and interpreted sources for themselves, effectively challenging the elite monopoly on making and interpreting texts. A lost world of increasingly savvy villagers, irate nobles, and exasperated bureaucrats emerges here in an engaging narrative that chronicles how seemingly marginalized villagers challenged the pragmatic control of the Roman countryside, using texts and ideas that urban elites had exported to the countryside for other purposes.
eBook
Death Did Not Become Her
Castiglione and Scanlan raise the question of how to commemorate unconventional women with existing iconographical conventions. By analyzing one such moment of rupture, marked by the massive tomb built in the first years of the 18th century to commemorate Eleonora Boncompagni Borghese (1642-1695), they show how new representations were forged and instituted in the funeral monuments of early modern Rome.
Journal Article
Mater Litigans: Mothering Resistance in Early Eighteenth-Century Rome
This microhistory analyzes the efforts of a widowed mother, Teresa Boncompagni, to maintain custody of her only daughter, Cornelia. Teresa protested her brother-in-law's legal right to Cornelia's custody. The mother's resistance combined a savvy understanding of the Roman judicial system with an insistence upon the centrality of motherly affection and maternal daily care to the child's well-being. She argued that the concept of free will necessitated a period of childhood exempt from family pressure to marry the man her brother-in-law had chosen. Although Teresa's adversaries pronounced her views outrageous, and maternal affection and advocacy would later be sanitized to include affection but to exclude women's resistance, Teresa's efforts succeeded in convincing even her enemies that a good mother knew how to fight legally and that the emotional bond epitomized by affective mothering was paramount to the healthy development of the child.
Journal Article
Adversarial Literacy: How Peasant Politics Influenced Noble Governing of the Roman Countryside during the Early Modern Period
The Forum analyzes the negotiations for power among various groups of people. Caroline Castiglione begins the discussion by examining the abilities of ordinary Europeans to utilize judicial and political systems in which they had restricted legal rights, a subject of considerable historical interest, especially during the early modern period, when overlapping jurisdictions offered a variety of venues for their grievances. Castiglione argues that noble governing practices had to recognize the political power exercised by the villagers through their use of what she terms \"adversarial literacy.\" [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article
The Politics of Mercy: Village Petitions and a Noblewoman's Justice in the Roman Countryside in the Eighteenth Century
By virtue of their ubiquity and their staggering quantity, petitions are among the most common sources for understanding the interactions between rulers and ruled in early modern Europe. In much of the countryside near Rome (as in many rural areas of Europe), aristocrats were also the recipients of petitions, since they controlled the administration of justice. During the 1770s, one Roman noblewoman, Cornelia Costanza Barberini, devoted greater attention than her male predecessors to recording and preserving the petitions she received from her villagers. This chapter focuses on petitions from villagers of the stato of Monte Libretti, an extensive semi-independent territory north of Rome, whose governing had long been a serious preoccupation of the Barberini family. Cornelia Costanza's innovation in record-keeping allows us to chart her consistent waiving of many penalties, as requested by petition-writers, a leniency with many parallels elsewhere in Italy. Thus despite the draconian punishments called for in the laws (including laws issued by the Barberini), petition-writers secured moderation in judicial practice and protection for the poor. These ideals (often associated with eighteenth-century reformers) must thus also be connected to the everyday interactions between rulers and their subjects. Cornelia Costanza also tightly linked her attention to justice to her practice of charity, since money derived from the administration of justice was allocated for charitable purposes. This attention to piety extended to the villages, where she commanded that the culprits participate in Catholic rituals, and that priests send attestations that the guilty had performed these acts of piety. The noblewoman's intense religious paternalism, however, was clearly intended to counterbalance criticisms of the Barberini circulating in the stato. Politically active villagers used the strategies of adversarial literacy to emphasize the social justice embedded in Catholic theology and to argue that the Barberini had failed to deliver justice and land as promised in the village constitution. These villagers thus questioned the religious paternalism and the legitimacy of the Barberini's seigneurial regime. Cornelia Costanza's ledger of mercy attempted to counteract these critiques that inspired the politics and won the loyalty of some villagers in the stato of Monte Libretti.
Book Chapter
Extravagant Pretensions: Aristocratic Family Conflicts, Emotion, and the ‘Public Sphere’ in Early Eighteenth-Century Rome
During a frustrating custody battle for his niece, a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church (Francesco Barberini Junior, (1662-1738)) successfully plotted her kidnapping, nearly lost custody of her because of his dramatic tirades before the pope, and in calmer but no less bitter moments, lamented what he saw as the dangerous link between public sympathy for the child's mother and the legal decisions of papal magistrates in the 1720s. This article analyzes the issues at stake in this aristocratic controversy, demonstrating that as was the case in France, such legal cases showed the impact of women's effective use of the law courts to address their grievances in the family. Of particular interest in this case is the central place the cardinal assigned to public emotion for the mother as the deciding factor, limiting his \"victories,\" and overturning legal precedents. The case suggests that the increasing support in the mid-eighteenth century for celebrating human sentiment and for overturning laws that violate it may trace its origins to the proliferation of litigation by women for their interests in the family.
Journal Article