‚Space, Privacy and Gender in the Roman Baroque Palace‘

In recent years early modern historians of gender have paid considerable attention to space. In Foucauldian fashion scholars initially embraced the idea that space is constructed to reflect the politics of power – in this case the gender order – and to separate what is considered ‘the other’ from ‘the same’.1 Hence, women were seen to be excluded from many outdoor public spaces, especially those devoted to the exercise of government and trade, and to be quintessentially associated with the private sphere of the home Historians of early modern Italy have focused in particular on urban living and traced the areas of the city accessible or barred to women. In his study of renaissance Venice Dennis Romano argued that women were excluded from S. Marco, the area of politics and civic life, and that gentlewomen were also banned from Rialto, where commercial transaction and business took place, due to its association with street violence and prostitution.2 Only in the familiar territory of the neighbourhood upper class women moved more freely. Even mixed public gatherings were gendered: Natalie Tomas shows that gender segregation affected church going in fifteenth-century Florence, since the women’s side of the church was separated from the male one by a curtain, and Sharon Strocchia that funerary practices took markedly public forms in the case of dead men, while dead women were commemorated more privately.3 This sharp distinction between masculine and feminine spaces was then softened by consideration of class: lower–class women, who often worked in workshops, were to be found in allegedly male spaces much more frequently.4 Age and marital status also alter this spatial pattern since it has been noted that women, even if from the upper classes, enjoyed more freedom of movement when widowed or old, also due to their involvement in the management of property and financial matters that were normally