How to Be a Renaissance Woman by Jill Burke

Author:Jill Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2024-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

The gaze in the Renaissance was understood as having tangible power. Women could be prosecuted in court for casting spells with their eyes to bewitch men – a kind of love magic, as discussed in the last chapter – or even to kill love rivals and children. As late as the early eighteenth century, in Apulia a woman accused of witchcraft, known as Antonia Donatino, was said to have cured a young woman of pain in her eyes and kidneys caused by ‘the eyes of those in love with her’ due to her prettiness.8

It was relatively common for older women to be accused of casting evil eyes, especially at young babies. In late-sixteenth-century Latisana, a small town in north-east Italy, a woman named Apollonia, who was well known as a local healer, helped to protect infants from demonic attacks by making holy signs over their swaddling clothes: ‘I sign you against the evils of witchcraft, against the evils of bad encounters, and against the ills of the evil eye.’9 Travellers and infants, or others thought vulnerable to the evil eye, were encouraged to carry talismans to distract the gaze. These really could be distracting – in the shape of male and female genitalia, or in the relatively decorous form of a clenched fist, with the tip of the thumb peaking out between the index and middle fingers – the ‘fica’ (vulva) gesture. There are some disconcerting late-fifteenth-century pilgrims’ badges from the Netherlands that show penises and vulvas riding horses, or being carried aloft in penis parades, or simply wandering around in hats, that surely would have worked to divert the evil eye towards them and away from their bearer.10

Votive pilgrim badge in the shape of a vulva (c. 1400–1500)

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