Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Unlike modern households, those of late medieval and early modern European society included many individuals not related by blood or marriage. Prominent among these were domestic servants, members of the lower classes whose duties ranged from managing of the household to raising the children. Within the confines of the household, the powerful and the powerless came together in complex and significant ways. In Housecraft and Statecraft, historian Dennis Romano examines the realities and significance of domestic service in what was arguably the most important city in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe--Venice. Drawing on a variety of materials, including humanist treatises on household management, books of costumes, civic statutes, census data, contracts, wills, and court records, Romano paints a vivid picture of the conditions of domestic labor, the difficult lives of servants, the worries and concerns of masters, and the ambivalent ways in which masters and servants interacted. He also shows how servants--especially gondoliers--came to be seen more and more as symbols of their masters' status. Housecraft and Statecraft offers a unique perspective on Venice and Venetian society as the city evolved from a merchant-dominated regime in the fifteenth century into an aristocratic oligarchy in the sixteenth. It traces the growth, within the elite, of a new sense of hierarchy and honor. At the same time, it illuminates the strategies that servants developed to resist the ever more powerful elite and, in so doing, demonstrates the centrality of domestic servants in the struggles between rich and poor in early modern Europe.

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CHOICE Review

Using diaries, court records, and the census, Romano has amassed thousands of references to master-servant relationships. From these he derives statistical tables and illustrative anecdotes in chapters on theoretical treatises on household management, government regulations, the household in actual practice, and the dynamics of personal relationships. There is considerably more housecraft than statecraft here. As time passed, the rich had larger households with more specialized servants who were ever more commonly males than females. From this Romano concludes that in the 16th century, Venetian society was becoming more aristocratic. Though less extravagant and less interested in display than society north of the Alps, it was nevertheless more concerned with honor and status than before. In confirming what previous scholarship had surmised, Romano provides examples of real human beings trying to get through life with maximum satisfaction and minimum bother. Masters and servants had a symbiotic relationship that was neither entirely happy nor without mutually rewarding moments. Upper-division undergraduates and above. W. L. Urban Monmouth College (IL)