The Study of Honor in the Renaissance Period

The study of honor in Renaissance cities presents an intriguing paradox. On the one hand, honor seemed �more dear than life itself’, and provided one of the essential values that shaped the daily lives of urban elites and ordinary city folk. For wealthy merchants and aspiring artisans, honor established a code of accepted conduct against which an individual’s actions were measured by his or her peers, subordinates and social superiors. Possessing honor helped to locate a person in the social hierarchy and endowed one with a sense of personal worth. The culture of honor, which originated with the medieval aristocracy, directed the everyday activities of urban-dwellers of virtually all social groups from at least the fourteenth century on.

Honor – whether of one’s self, family, or neighborhood – hinged on a publicly bestowed evaluation over which individuals had only limited control. To regain lost honor required not only the exertion of personal agency but also the intervention and re-evaluation of others in the community. Within the fray of everyday life one’s personal or family honor was subject to repeated attacks and might be won, lost, or exchanged with remarkable speed. Hence honor, despite its immense and pervasive value, was paradoxically neither a static nor an absolute possession. Rather, for renaissance people it functioned as an important yet intangible resource that figured in social transactions between people who might have competing property claims, divergent political or marital aspirations, patronage ties, class differences, or simply grudges against each other.

Although honor acted as a primary driving force in urban culture, its precise expressions and meanings varied according to social group, local political structure, and era. While duty and revenge stood at the heart of an enduring code of honor, the actual behaviors that expressed these values depended on particular historical circumstances for their strategies and success. *where did avenues of honor and reward derive from (preferment of the prince as court expanded in size and splendor, multiple criteria such as wealth, office-holding, ancestry, personal networks, correct social behavior). Broad political changes reshaped the path to honor (sixteenth century).

One of the main factors differentiating the precise currency of honor at work in the Renaissance was gender. That is, the social and symbolic practices of honor defined, defended and restored honor in different ways for women and men. The multiple ways that men and women laid claim to honor, whether through word or deed, converged to form a rich, interwoven set of cultural values and shared interests. Yet at the same time, considerations of honor also point to particular disjuncture between the ways that women and men lived their lives as gendered beings. The code and ethics of honor caught men and women in different kinds of situations and cultural binds, particularly as social institutions and conceptions of civility changed over time. (the extent to which a woman’s public reputation and standing in a community hinged on her adherence to sexual norms, especially to concepts of chastity and sexual fidelity).

Renaissance street life bustled with an assortment of ritual enactments that afforded numerous opportunities for assertions of honor. These rites ranged from well-orchestrated familial occasions such as weddings and funerals, to more loosely organized or improvised events such as corporate competitions, to personal insults that sometimes erupted into outright violence. Public ritual performance had a double edge: they communicated broad conceptions of power and hierarchy among urban-dwellers while at the same time offering participants a means to stake out their own specific claims to honor within the bounds of social conventions.

These occasions pulled into their orbit such a broad array of participants, including those who followed normative behaviors as wells as those who deviated from them. Mature, established men and women of urban elites played their parts in various rights. Artisans, tradesmen, and still more socially marginal people frequently engaged in ritualized verbal exchanges thereby adopting some of the conventional postures that allowed them to claim a share of honor. The wide array of ritual behaviors in word and deed reveals both the creativity of those who had different lines of access to honor resources, as well as the conditionality of the code of honor itself.

Rituals marked important sites for the creation of gender identity. Ritual activities provided the stage settings for women and men to carry out socially appropriate behaviors marking key points along the moving edge of their life course. In the process, rituals posited a set of gender expectations that were complicated by the realities of everyday life, for ritual practices embodying definitions