Stories of Women in the Middle Ages by Brolis Maria Teresa

Author:Brolis, Maria Teresa [Brolis, Maria Teresa]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2018-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

AGNESINA

AND POVERTY

The plague had recently decimated the population of Bergamo, arriving late, with respect to other Italian areas, but not being more merciful in the least. And yet there were two young people intent on marrying each other, despite the fact that the environment was so inhospitable, and the couple penniless.

Her name was Agnesina, and she was fatherless, Bertolino Baroni, her father, being deceased. She had reached marriageable age, which at that time was between fourteen and sixteen. The young Agnesina worked as a servant in the home of the noble lords of Crema, who lived in the neighbourhood of San Giacomo della Porta, in the upper city. Agnesina’s employers were not insensitive to the plight of the poor, because they had founded an almshouse and allowed their maids to register into the largest Bergamasque association: the Misericordia Maggiore Confraternity.

The fiancé was called Paciolo (or Pacino), perhaps hailing from Val Brembana and a resident of the city. He was definitely young; the diminutive of his name indicates that (Paciolo comes from Pace, a much-used name at the time) and so does the type of work he had done in the home of a member of the powerful Suardi dynasty: work as a famulus, or garzone (errand-boy), boy-servant, helper in the house.

How could two penurious youths (she an orphan, he an exgarzone and seemingly unemployed) establish a new family in the Bergamo of 1362?

For women, the dowry was furthermore indispensable, and requested in the marriage agreement. In our case, perhaps the betrothed themselves, or their masters, or someone else must have asked for help from the city’s Confraternity of Mercy, which, for around a century, had dealt with these and similar problems. And lo and behold, twenty coins were bestowed as a dowry on Agnesina: the marriage could take place.

In this same period, 254 other girls were helped by this charitable organization in the same way. As poor as Agnesina, they belonged mostly to salaried families, or ones of artisans of modest means, who came from the country, or were immigrants on the outskirts of Bergamo. Often the girls to be married were orphans, as evidenced by the high mortality rates in the area, because of the recent plague. The fourteenth-century lists, with the names of future brides, are found in the records of offerings and expenditures that the managers of the great Misericordia Confraternity drew up with extreme care, reporting all the receipts and expenses: from the hundredweights of grain stored in the largest warehouse to the single egg distributed during an expedition into the urban neighbourhoods (the so-called andate or outbound missions).

Historians know how difficult it is to reconstruct the identity of the poor, to the extent that someone coined the expression “no-names” to denote the destitute. It is even more difficult to reconstruct the identity of poor women. And yet within this context, the Bergamasque Misericordia Confraternity’s archive has proven to be rather generous, because it has preserved other lists with the names of its beneficiaries. The

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