DAILY LIFE

DAILY LIFE. Until the mid-twentieth century, professional historians often ignored the
details of everyday life as antiquarian, in the sense of mundane, instead concentrating
their narrative efforts on the wars and machinations of the powerful. The new legitimacy
of the study of daily life derives from the growing concern with social history, beginning
around the middle of the twentieth century, with its focus on mentalities, social classes,
and ideas. This outlook argues that continuity and evolution are more significant than
dramatic events like wars and dynastic upheaval, and asserts the validity of the study
of, literally, the mundane—conditions of material life, and modes of work and play, for
instance.

A major step was the publication in 1977 of Lawrence Stone's Family, Sex, and
Marriage in England, 1500–1800, which argued that the early modern era saw the
traditional extended family evolve into a recognizably modern nuclear family of
individuals connected by affect. Beginning in the 1970s, the use of the computer to
compile, organize, and sort large amounts of data enabled historians to detect subtle
changes and long-term continuities. In their influential work Tuscans and Their Families,
David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber digitized the wealth of detail in the 1427
catasto ('tax census') of Florence, which described the wealth, ages, size, and
composition of families. The recent boom in women's and gender history has also
contributed to the study of daily life by demanding the inclusion in the story of all
members of society, not only prominent males.

Also vital to understanding this topic are the material conditions of life: what people ate,
the diseases that sickened them, their sexual habits, how they worked, where and
under what conditions they lived, their manners, even changes in their size. Although
the material conditions of daily life varied according to factors like social class and
geography, Europeans also shared commonalities, like exposure to diseases and, with
the exception of the Jews, Christianity. Life in this era remained dependent on farming;
not until the industrial revolution's agricultural surpluses and paid work in factories would
the urban population boom. This new historical focus is documenting the economic,
religious, and even climatic factors that influenced the evolution of daily life in early
modern Europe.

FAMILY LIFE

An understanding of daily life in early modern Europe begins with the family. Recent
research has revised the thesis of Philippe Ariès, who maintained that parents did not
bond with their children because of high child mortality rates; both art, like Agnolo
Bronzino's sensitive portrait (c. 1549) of Giovanni de' Medici as a baby, and documents
reveal the deep love parents felt even for infants and their appreciation of childhood as
a separate, formative stage of life.
While maintaining that marriage is licit and intended (by the Christian deity) for
procreation, the Catholic Church upheld the superiority of celibacy. A licit marriage was
one undertaken freely by the two parties, although males continued to arrange
marriages for dependent females. Most marriages included a dowry, often payable on
consummation of the union. The Protestant Reformation, however, wrought a dramatic
change. Martin Luther (1483–1546) declared that hardly one woman in ten thousand
could keep a vow of celibacy, and that marriage and parenthood were the wholesome,
divinely ordained destiny of human beings. He also urged women to become pregnant
as often as possible, for doing so fulfilled God's will. Intercourse between spouses,
therefore, was a spiritual duty, and Luther recommended it twice a week. Failure to
produce offspring could lead to suspicion of witchcraft or vicious ridicule of the
husband's lack of sexual prowess, and, in Catholic areas, be considered grounds for
annulment.

Spouses were supposed to remain faithful. For males, however, this ideal was often
honored in the breach: in Protestant Zurich, about 40 percent of divorce suits claimed
that the husband had been unfaithful. Zurich retained its brothel, while Catholic Florence
registered prostitutes. Male-male sexual activity was common in late Renaissance
Florence despite anti-sodomy laws.

Advice literature stressed careful household management and childrearing, Protestant

handbooks likened the father to God, lovingly correcting his wife and children, setting an
example through his own disciplined life, and supporting the household. The good wife
counseled her husband when asked, obeyed him, and oversaw the household with
wisdom and thrift. Handbooks frequently admonished husbands not to mistreat their
wives and children. This wholesome Christian family was to mirror the wholesome state,
in which the monarch ruled his people as a loving father ruled his family.

Fathers hoped for sons. The sculptor Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) related that his
mother, having borne a girl after several miscarriages, believed that her next pregnancy
signaled another girl. When the newborn proved to be male, the ecstatic father named
him Benvenuto ('welcome'), for his sex was a delightful surprise. The writer Pietro
Aretino (1492–1556), however, reported that, although he had wished for a son, his
infant daughter had filled him with tenderness and love at first sight. Still, adult
reminiscences of beatings by parents or schoolmasters indicate the frequency of harsh
discipline.

The middle and upper classes tended to seek wet nurses for infants, despite the high
rate of mortality from this practice and exhortations to mothers from advice manuals to
nurse their own children. The recourse to wet nurses may have resulted from the sexual
demands of husbands, for intercourse was believed to ruin a mother's milk; canon law
called for new parents to remain celibate during nursing.

FOOD, DIET, AND HEALTH

The German saying "Der Mensch ist was er isst " ('a man is what he eats') was a social
truth, for the prosperous could be recognized by their regular consumption of meat. Still,
early modern Europeans generally consumed more meat than their contemporaries
elsewhere. Economic and demographic change, however, meant less meat during the
seventeenth century; in one French town, the number of butchers declined from
eighteen in 1550 to two in 1660 to one a century later. Not until the industrial revolution
did the meat consumption of average Europeans increase. The poor appear to have
been increasingly prevented from hunting, as the aristocracy made game preserves off-
limits to all but themselves, yet the growing exploitation of the fishing banks off North
America gave Europeans a plentiful, cheap source of protein.

Vegetable foods, including grains, were the staff of daily life for Europeans. Only in
Ireland and parts of Germany did the American potato become a significant foodstuff.
Maize was cultivated as early as the sixteenth century, but made its way to the Danube
only in the nineteenth. Guild rules governed the quality, weight, and ingredients of
bread, but ample evidence shows frequent evasion of these regulations. Individuals also
baked bread, but pressure from bakers led to attempts, as in Geneva in 1673, to forbid
the practice. The poor ate darker, coarse bread, while consumption of white bread
signaled a prosperous household. The social distinction was not lost in Florence, where
a charity offered symbolic white bread to its clientele, the "shamed poor"—innocent
paupers willing, but unable, to earn their livelihood.

Hard alcohol was used mostly for medicinal purposes until the eighteenth century, but
wine was a staple in Europe, even more so than in the present: in the early seventeenth
century, for instance, Germans cultivated four times today's vinifera acreage. The
addition of brandy to Portuguese wines during fermentation allowed for more stability
during shipping, and slaked the English thirst for sweet wines at a time when the crown
imposed high taxes on imported French wines. Connoisseurship emerged, with one
sixteenth-century Tuscan oenophile identifying the best vineyards and varietals. The
grand dukes of Tuscany attempted to ensure quality by regulating the grape harvest. To
stave off drunkenness among youths, they cracked down on taverns. The growing use
of hops increased the popularity of beer, especially in non-wine-growing areas.

Products from Asia and the Americas changed everyday life. Coffee and tea became
fashionable in the seventeenth century; the scientist, diplomat, and epicure Lorenzo
Magalotti (1637–1712) suggested drinking coffee as an aid to health, digestion, and
wakefulness. The first coffeehouse in London dates to 1650, and such establishments
soon became so popular as places to exchange news and gossip that a royal attempt in
1675 to close them came to nothing. Chocolate, too, won favor, and was made into a
hot, sweetened drink (Magalotti collected a recipe on his travels). Tobacco, brought
back from the Americas by Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), was at first a botanical
and medicinal curiosity. By the late sixteenth century, it was cultivated in Spain, Italy,
the Balkans, and elsewhere in response to the European demand to chew, smoke, and
sniff it. England attempted to prohibit its use in 1604, but in vain; governments taxed it
instead.
The seventeenth century witnessed several wars and a "little ice age," resulting in poor
harvests. According to a Tuscan report of 1767, of the previous 316 years there had
been 111 years of dearth and only sixteen of bounty. The abbess of the French convent
of Port-Royal wrote in 1649 that marauding soldiers had seized the crops, refusing to
give anything to the locals. A 1651 account of St. Quentin, Normandy, claimed that the
starving inhabitants had little to eat other than mice, roots, and bread made from straw
and earth.

Early modern governments felt both concern for and fear of the poor. Begging,
supplemented by occasional work, theft, pawning, and alms, formed part of a strategy of
day-to-day survival for the lowest classes. Complaints proliferated about wandering,
masterless men whose numbers increased as landlords enclosed formerly common
land. An English law, drafted in 1536, complained that the able-bodied begged instead
of working, depriving the honest, deserving poor of alms. Bavaria, among other areas of
Europe, granted begging licenses only to inhabitants; outsiders were arrested or driven
away.

HEALTH, DISEASE, AND MEDICINE

Recent research has shown that the average adult male in seventeenth-century France
was short—under 5 feet, 4 inches (about 1,617 mm). The same study proved a strong
correlation between average height and quality and quantity of harvest, and showed a
trend to greater height with the waning of the "little ice age." Social class correlated with
height: the sons of cloth workers were about 1.4 inches (36 mm) shorter, on average,
than the sons of the upper classes. Class also helped determine lifespan. While
between 30 and 50 percent of children died before age five, 70 percent of children of
the ruling classes survived to age fifteen in the sixteenth century, a much better ratio
than for the lower classes. Aside from plague, malaria, measles, smallpox, and the like,
children suffered from worms, infections, dysentery, and other ailments. They learned
about mortality early, both from the diseases that struck them and their relatives and
from public executions.

Diseases, including smallpox, ravaged early modern Europe, but none was more feared
than the plague. Not until the late seventeenth century did its threat recede. Some cities
in northern Italy created health boards charged with detecting outbreaks of plague,
issuing health passports, and preventing the disease's spread. In sixteenth-century
Tuscany, the Medici dukes attempted to ensure the availability of physicians and
pharmacists even in remote areas.

Written and archaeological evidence suggests that Columbus's sailors introduced

syphilis from the Americas to the unexposed population of Europe. A 1496 woodcut by
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) depicted the gruesome, shocking symptoms. Two years
later, a Viennese illustration hinted at the cause of infection by showing a naked couple,
pocked with sores, being treated in a bedroom. Contemporary accounts described a
rapid, horrifying progression of disfiguring lesions, madness, and death. Likely victims of
syphilis included Henry VIII of England (ruled 1509–1547), Charles VIII (ruled 1483–
1498) and Francis I (ruled 1515–1547) of France, and Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503).

Though the sick who could afford it consulted physicians, a leading British physician of
the late eighteenth century complained that almost nothing was known of the nature and
prevention of contagion. The first defense against a contagious disease arrived in the
late eighteenth century with Edward Jenner's vaccinations—met with great skepticism—
against smallpox. Some herbal remedies, like digitalis, from the foxglove plant, were
effective, but others ranged from ineffective to dangerous.

Few of the sick sought care in hospitals, which treated the indigent. The Spedale degli
Innocenti ('foundling hospital') of Florence enjoyed a lower mortality rate in the sixteenth
century than some Parisian hospitals in the eighteenth. In 1776, Brussels, with 70,000
inhabitants, had only one hospital with seventy-seven beds; Antwerp, with 50,000
people and ninety-six beds, fared little better. Massive migration to the cities beginning
in the mid-eighteenth century led to a worsening of living conditions and invited the
spread of disease.

Personal hygiene varied widely. In some parts of Europe, curative baths were popular.
Magalotti suggested cleaning the teeth with a paste containing spices and then rinsing
with wine. The ricordi ('family memoirs and accounts') of one Florentine of the late
sixteenth century included regular payments to barbers for haircuts, shaves, and
shampoos. Other ricordi list the considerable expenses incurred in purchasing drugs to
treat illnesses.

EDUCATION AND CIVILITY

By the sixteenth century, the middle class sought larger living quarters and more
privacy, and had adopted good manners to distinguish itself socially from those beneath
it. The humanist Desiderius Erasmus's (c. 1466?–1536) best-seller, On Civility in
Children, taught the young that those who seized the choicest morsels from the
common dish and overate behaved like peasants. Table cutlery grew in popularity, and
middle-class Italians had begun to use forks by the late fifteenth century. Not until the
next century did the rest of Europe embrace them: the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V
(ruled 1519–1558) owned only a dozen.

The importance of good manners in climbing the social ladder reached its zenith at the
court of Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715). There, nobles vied
for the opportunity to be present at the king's rising and retiring each day. They learned
that, to win the attention of the monarch and to rise above their peers, they had to
master a byzantine etiquette that included bowing to the king's dinner as it was carried
past. Still, merchants' manners and aspirations to nobility were bitingly parodied in the
playwright Molière's (1622–1673) Self-Made Gentleman (Le bourgeois gentilhomme ).
Some 25 percent of Florentine boys may have acquired basic literacy in the fifteenth
century. Vittorino da Feltre's (1397–1446) school in Mantua accepted boys and girls,
children of the nobility, and poor scholarship students. In general, however, education of
girls aimed at instilling virtue and rudimentary literacy; embroidery and needlecraft
taught them discipline and patience. Of course, the daughters of the upper classes often
received a much better education from some of the outstanding teachers of the day.
Education included religious instruction, with children memorizing their catechisms'
questions and answers.

THE ECONOMY AND DAILY LIFE

In general, prices rose steadily over the course of the sixteenth century, apparently the
result of the devaluation of silver currency. In 1540, for instance, Henry VIII of England
took the silver shillings that he had collected in taxes, melted them down, mixed them
with copper, and returned many more of these now-debased shillings to circulation. But
rising prices also created opportunities for peasants with surplus crops, landowners who
took in-kind rents, and some shopkeepers and merchants.

By the late sixteenth century, guilds controlled matriculation and standards in most
skilled trades and professions, though their attempts to prevent the exodus of skilled
workers—symptomatic of their waning power—crumbled before the prospect of higher
wages elsewhere. In Rouen, they managed to prohibit the manufacture of a cheap cloth
designed to compete with silk. In response, merchant-entrepreneurs simply moved
production to the countryside, installing looms in peasants' cottages. Weaving cloth in
the putting-out system, in which workers received wages per piece, offered country
dwellers a source of cash income, which led to changes in buying habits and in
consumer demand. The impact of international trade can be seen in northern still-life
paintings, which, by the mid-sixteenth century, depicted such novelties as turkeys and
North Atlantic lobsters. The 1640s witnessed the tulip mania in Holland, one of the first
Western consumer fads.