5 - Times Told: Women Narrating the Everyday in Early Modern Rome
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2021
Summary
Abstract
In the criminal courts of Rome c. 1600, women's testimony, delivered in formal settings and recorded verbatim, carried serious legal weight. Yet telling time orally to intimidating male officials was challenging. As complainants, as suspects, and as witnesses, women had to remember, reconstruct, and tell stories about recent and more distant pasts and to situate their accounts within convincing temporal frames. Some of their expressions reflected their particular experience as women, but in this public arena they, much like their male counterparts, used varied narrative strategies and temporal rhetorics to lend veracity to their tales. The abstractions, precisions, and disciplines of official time—the sort that we moderns prioritize—often gave way in early modern courts, as in life, to less clear and less efficient, but nevertheless functional practices of local time.
Keywords: time-telling; women; testimony; judicial records; Rome
In the criminal court records of Rome c. 1600, ordinary women show themselves to be canny and adept tellers of time. As elsewhere in early modern Europe, criminal courts took active part in government campaigns to corral and correct the behavior of the broad population. To that end, Roman tribunals, needing to reconstruct and verify offenses that the culprits wished to obscure, interrogated witnesses and asked them to narrate from memory events in the less and more distant past. In generating these accounts, in which magistrates and witnesses collaborated, rhetorics of time became an important dimension of ordering evidence convincingly. An energetic Roman justice created hundreds of fat volumes of complaints and testimonies, recorded verbatim, including many by women as well as by men. Ratified by delivery in the same, rather intimidating judicial settings, both men's and women's words carried weight. Here I focus on women's testimonies and on the ways that they told time in this distinct arena where what they said did matter, to the courts, but also to themselves, their families, their neighbors, and their enemies. Early modern time-telling, especially in an oral mode, was not straightforward, and not all women talked time alike. Roman women's temporal language sometimes reflected their particular gendered experience. Much of their testimony, however, deployed various forms of telling time selected from a repertoire of local oral usages that women shared with their male counterparts.
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- Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World , pp. 115 - 134Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018