Negotiating the Art of Fatherhood in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy

Negotiating the Art of Fatherhood in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy examines contested notions of fatherhood in written and visual texts during the development of the mercantile economy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy. It analyzes debates about the household and community management of wealth, emotion, and trade in luxury “goods,” including enslaved women, as moral questions. Juliann Vitullo considers how this mercantile economy affected paternity and the portraits of ideal fatherhood, which in some cases reconceived the role of fathers and in others reconfirmed traditional notions of paternal authority.

Juliann Vitullo is Associate Professor of Italian, Senior Sustainability Scholar, and Co-Director of the Humanities Lab at Arizona State University, USA.  She has written on various aspects of medieval, early modern, and contemporary Italian culture with emphasis on the relationship between textual traditions and the material world, including money and food.  Her publications include The Chivalric Epic in Medieval Italy (2000) as well as the co-edited volumes: At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2007) and Money, Morality, and Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2010).