Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence. by Gene BruckerReview by: Lauro MartinesThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), p. 288Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2541198 .

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288 The Sixteenth Century Journal xvIii

Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence. Gene Brucker. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986. 138 pp. $13.85.

Here is a gem of a study, an intriguing tale, and a book beautifully produced. In 1980, while working on the fifteenth-century Florentine church, Gene Brucker, one of the premier students in the field, came on the notarial protocols (some 300 pages) of a lawsuit heard in 1455, in the court of the archbishop of Florence. Lusanna, the daughter of a tailor and widow of a humble linenmaker, had moved a case against Giovanni della Casa, a banker born to an upstart but well-connected Florentine family. Giovanni had been recently married to a girl from one of the city's elite households (the Rucellai) and Lusanna challenged the validity of this marriage, claiming that she and Giovanni had been secretly, but legally, married in 1453. Some ten years before this, when they were each about twenty-three years old, Giovanni-struck by Lusanna's remarkable beauty-had begun to pursue her, despite the fact that she was married. They became lovers. In front of witnesses, he seems to have promised to marry her if her husband died; and in 1453 indeed, four months after his death, they married, it appears, in the presence of certain witnesses. The marriage, however, was not notarized and made public-the common Florentine custom-because Giovanni insisted that it be kept secret, from fear that his father would otherwise disinherit him. They lived apart but were often together both in town and country, primarily among her friends and relations.

Counsel for Giovanni hotly disputed the core of Lusanna's claims, and in fact someone in his circle pressed for an investigation, in the main temporal court of the city, of the alleged poisoning of Lusanna's first husband. But after issuing in a dramatic confrontation between the archbishop and the podestz, Florence's chief judge, these inquiries were quashed by the Signoria, the city's highest governing council. In Octo- ber, the episcopal court finally ruled in Lusanna's favor. Giovanni immediately appealed to Rome, and there a papal court overturned the Florentine decision. Giovanni's fashionable marriage to the Rucellai girl was confirmed.

Brucker sees his book as a venture in narrative history; he tells a very good story. The interest for the historian, however, must go beyond the narrative to the contro- versy, attitudes, and points of bias surrounding the case, as well as to the ways in which these accorded with their social and political context. In fact, the author's handling of these matters, as he passes from narration to analysis, is astute and imaginative. For money, status, class, politics, friendship networks, and the marriage market all entered into the fortunes of the case; so also the issue of temporal versus ecclesiastical jurisdic- tions, the social origins and canon-law expertise of the archbishop (Antoninus), the impact of the local neighborhood, and even, arguably, the question of "individualism." Perhaps the last of these touched Lusanna's determination to venture all: to bring her adulterous life out into the open course of a trial, thus risking everything for the sake of holding on to the man she loved. Not surprisingly, therefore, having lost her case, she vanishes from Florence, possibly emigrating, as Brucker suspects, into the Tuscan countryside.

Lauro Martines University of California, Los Angeles

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