Barbaro, Francesco (1390-1454) Prudentissimi et Gravi Documenti circa la Elettion della Moglie.
Venice: Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, 1548.
First edition, translated into Italian by Alberto Lollio, woodcut printer's device to title page, bound in full parchment over boards; from the library of Walter van Rensselaer Berry, with paper book label on ffep; and Harry Carresse, with his gilt-tooled morocco label inside front board, 5 3/4 x 4 in.
Barbaro wrote this treatise on marriage in 1415 to mark the marriage of Lorenzo de' Medici and Ginevra Cavalcanti. "Francesco Barbaro's definition of marriage at the beginning of his treatise explicitly endorsed in Dolce's Dialogo, could have been consented to by all the writers: a perpetual union of man and woman for the procreation of children it is natural, socially useful, and, if well ordered, emotionally satisfying. [...] A [later] writer like Speroni might praise the inspirational power of woman more extravagantly than did an earlier author like Francesco Barbaro, but this did not lead him to argue for a different role for her in society." (Quoted from Mary Rogers's An Ideal Wife at the Villa Maser: Veronese, the Barbaros and Renaissance Theorists of Marriage, published in Renaissance Studies, December 1993, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 379-397.) At the end of the essay Rogers notes that instead of asking "Did women have a Renaissance?" a question posed by J. Kelly-Gadol in a 1977 essay by that name, but rather, "What sorts of Renaissance did women have?"
