Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index

Record Number: 4201
Author(s)/Creator(s): Chojnacki , Stanley.
Contributor(s):
Title: Measuring Adulthood: Adolescence and Gender in Renaissance Venice [The article studies the different ways adolescence and adulthood were defined for men and women in renaissance Venice, and argues that graduated adulthood offered both sexes the possibility of varied adult identities. Title note supplied by Feminae.].
Source: Journal of Family History 17, 4 ( 1992): Pages 371 - 395. Republished in slightly altered form as Measuring Adulthood: Adolescence and Gender. By Stanley Chojnacki. Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pages 185-205.
Description:
Article Type: Journal Article
Subject (See Also): Adolescents Age Groups Ages at Marriage Marriage Puberty Venice
Award Note:
Geographic Area: Italy
Century: 13- 14- 15
Primary Evidence:
Illustrations:
Table: One Table. Table 1 shows Patrician Men's Ages at Marriage, 1408-1490.
Abstract: The prescriptive threshold of adulthood among late-medieval Venetian patricians appears very different for men and for women, centering on social (i.e., public) puberty as the guage of adulthood, physiological (i.e., childbearing) puberty that of female. Yet in practice men did not inevitably achieve the normative patriarchal outcome of a graduated, formalized adolescence; nor did adolescence end for all women with teenaged marriage and motherhood. Non-patriarchal male adulthoods and the graduated phases of the uxorial cycle for women modify the impression of sharp gender contrast that results from viewing age at marriage as the pivot of adulthood. Graduated adulthood in both sexes gave men and women alike the possibility of varied adul identities, responding to a range of choice and circumstance.
Related Resources:
Author's Affiliation: Michigan State University
Conference Info: - , -
Year of Publication: 1992.
Language: English
ISSN/ISBN: 03631990