ABSTRACT
The wife was usually little more than a child when she became a mother. A well-to-do mother gave her babe over to a wet-nurse, and her children were sent out of the overcrowded, ill-served house and unhealthy town to the hills, where hardy peasants were glad enough to increase their little store by taking charge of them. A specially careful mother would keep her daughters from reading Boccaccio, and even the sonnets of Petrarch, “for,” says a moralist, “although it is the custom, it is not good that the pure minds of girls should learn other love than that of God and their own husbands. Most mothers would have small scruple in trouncing a disobedient daughter, though some were of the opinion of Palmieri that it destroyed filial love and that “judicious reproach was enough for the noble soul”.
