“Generosity Competitions: Bologna’s 16th Century Welfare Market”
“Records of Employment: Luisa Sigea and
Looking for Work in the 16th Century”
Date: February 28
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Burwash Common Room (85 Charles St W)
The Early Modern Interdisciplinary Graduate Forum 2022-2023 will be hosted as a hybrid event, with our speakers presenting in person at University of Toronto. Our goal is to encourage early modern scholars to return to meeting in person, socialize, network, and become part of the early modern community in the Greater Toronto Area. Coffee and light snacks will be provided for all EMIGF events this year. For those who cannot attend in person, we will also make the event accessible on Zoom.
PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Toronto
Generosity Competitions: Bologna’s 16th Century Welfare Market
This paper examines the development of Bologna’s welfare state in the sixteenth century and explores how it became an economic space where political conflicts played out. Bologna’s economic policy remained unchanged from its capitalist beginnings, leaving public services like welfare largely unregulated from state control. In this environment, local government could open its own charitable alongside those opened by private individuals. With government split between papal and secular administrators, competition to offer the best charitable services was a way to sway public opinion in favour of either faction within Bologna’s regime. The case of Giovanni Pepoli and his grain provisioning scheme, the Pio cumulo della misericordia is a case study in factional tensions coming to a head with welfare services as the market arena in which they played out. For Pepoli, his grain scheme was the last straw in a factional conflict between the city’s republican oligarchs and its papal rulers which culminated in his assassination in prison on trumped up treason charges.
PhD, University of Toronto, CRRS Fellow
Records of Employment: Luisa Sigea and Looking for Work in the 16th Century
Luisa Sigea (ca. 1522–1560) was a well-connected humanist in the court circles of Portugal and
Spain. Her father, Diego Sigeo, worked at the Portuguese Court for several decades and facilitated the employment of his two daughters, Luisa and Angela, with the Infanta Maria of Portugal—Luisa specialized in Latin, Angela in music. And as I have argued elsewhere, Sigea’s 1544 letter to Pope Paul III—a linguistic tour de force which she enclosed with her poem, Sintra—garnered her international fame.
Yet for all that, when Luisa and her husband, fellow humanist Francisco de Cuevas, decide to return to Spain from Portugal in 1555, their employment prospects dimmed substantially. Of Sigea’s 22 surviving letters, almost a quarter of them cover her and Francisco’s search for gainful employment in Burgos. These “Records of Employment” act as petitionary letters, but also as cover letters and portfolios, highlighting Luisa’s (and Francisco’s) skills and employability. Even Luisa’s pregnancy and impending motherhood work their way into these letters, as does her increasing desperation when the opportunities she expected do not materialize.
This talk will explore how humanist court employment intersects with gender and motherhood to
impact Luisa’s ability to help support her family.
