Donne inglesi a Livorno nella prima età moderna

The article deals with the history of the British community of Livorno in a gender perspective. Reconstructing the history of an early modern foreign mercantile community usually means telling a history of men and about men. All the leading figures of the community – consuls, diplomats, ministers of religion – are men. And, of course, the merchants are men who went abroad, often leaving their families at home. When women appear on the scene they are, in general, wives and daughters of merchants, and often the documentation leaves only a faint trace, perhaps only their names mentioned in a will or marked on a register of baptisms or marriages or on a tombstone. More rarely, the elements at our disposal allow us to reconstruct their stories, and when this happens, they are often characterized by unique and exceptional events. These are women who had problems with secular or religious authorities or came into conflict with their community or their family or otherwise, left their country, suffered reverses of fortune abroad. A history of the women of the English ‘nation’ in Livorno inevitably – for the most immediately accessible sources to the scholar – would be so a history of autonomous women, often women involved in some scandal, meaning female figures atypical both for their country of origin and for that in which they lived. In addition to some case-studies (such as that of Lady Baltimore, Charlotte Lee, wife of Benedict Leonard Calvert, fourth Baron Baltimore) Villani reports the first results of a comprehensive study of the abjurations of Protestant people preserved among the Inquisition papers of the Archiepiscopal Archive of Pisa (the fund of the Inquisition is composed of 32 files with documents ranging from 1574 to 1734, but to date only a dozen of them are indexed and calendared). As for the British, often were sailors and small traders who abjured. Very few women: a first survey, but that must be confirmed by more systematic research, we can estimate that, apparently, of about 150 British abjurations preserved in the papers of the Inquisition of Pisa, those by women are fewer than 20. The examination of these documents provide a glimpse into the lives of many Catholic British (or Anglo-Italian) families who lived in Livorno indulging in petty trade and crafts in general, although there are families where the husband was a sailor or a soldier and the wife was a servant or a prostitute. The men of these families, being neither merchants nor factors, were not part of the British Factory, a sort of merchant guild which gathered all the British merchants that was formed in Livorno probably during the 1600s, was very well structured by the 1700s. Generally not fully integrated with the Italians and on the edge of the English “nation” with which they maintained close ties, these British Catholics had apparently a double identity as they were watched with suspicion and little sympathy both by English because they were Catholics and by Catholics because they were former Protestants. Since the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century there were some cases of conversions to Catholicism of young British women that often agitated relations between the British residents in Livorno and the Tuscan political and religious authorities. It is difficult to explain this phenomenon. If there is a strong feeling that many of the abjurations documented in the papers of the Inquisition were motivated by a desire for integration rather than by a true religious crisis, these eighteenth-century cases seem to have originated primarily as conflicts between the girls and their family of origin. The passage to Catholicism was, firstly, the rejection of the family religion. But it can not be excluded that the attraction to a Church that in those years was developing what has been called a “feminization” of devotional practices also played some role. The gender approach has allowed the author to investigate aspects so far ignored by all the historians who had dealt with the foreign presence in Italy in the seventeenth century.