ABSTRACT
The history of women in medieval and early modern Italy has largely been dominated by a scholarly focus on Florence and Venice, despite the historical signifi cance and rich archival holdings of other cities and regions on the peninsula. This chapter presents new information on the women of Siena and evaluates their position in their families and communities in regard to current trends in research on Italian women. Inquiry into the lives of Sienese women has been diffi cult due to a drastic restructuring of Sienese archives during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which enormous quantities of codices, parchments, and loose documents were discarded to make room for new material. Only documents reporting names of well-known families, such as Piccolomini and Tolomei, escaped destruction. As a result, research in the Sienese archives must be conducted in two ways: (1) by studying individual parchments and scattered documents that provide information about wealthy and high-born women; and (2) by examining the informative but as yet underused tax records and notarial acts that allow us to examine the experiences of women of the lower classes. Because early modern Siena was subject to the Florentine principate, information on prominent Sienese families can also be found in letters to the Medici dukes, detailing cases in the subject territory that often reveal the confl icting interests of women and their kin. This chapter makes use of all these varied sources-civic statutes, notarial acts, tax records of Siena, and the letters from Medici ducal archives-to examine elite and nonelite women from Siena and the surrounding countryside.
