Caroline Castiglione
Associate Professor of Italian Studies & History:
Italian Studies
Phone: +1 401 863 2098
Caroline_Castiglione@brown.edu
Caroline Castiglione examines how seemingly marginalized individuals challenged systems of power in Italy during the period 1500-1800. Her book, Patrons and Adversaries, demonstrated that rural residents successfully contested urban rule through the strategies of adversarial literacy. She now investigates Roman aristocratic mothers involved in intense familial conflicts. Her studies illuminate how subaltern groups used judicial means to broaden received beliefs about their rights in society and in the family.
Biography
Caroline Castiglione writes about the political and cultural history of early modern Italy (1500-1800). She earned a B.A. in French in 1985 from Trinity University and a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1995. Before coming to Brown in 2005, she taught history at the University of Texas at Austin, where she won the first prize awarded for excellence in teaching writing (2003). Her book Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640-1760 (Oxford, 2005) won the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies in 2005. In addition to her publications on politics in early modern Italy, she has also published articles related to her new project, Extravagant Pretensions, which examines unpublished writings by women describing the family crises of early modern Rome. She teaches courses on microhistory, women's history, and law courts in early modern Italy.
Interests
Caroline Castiglione is a historian in the departments of Italian Studies and History. Her research interests are political, cultural, and women's history in Italy during the period 1500-1800. Her book, Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640-1760 (Oxford University Press, 2005) furthered our understanding of how vitally important governing was to every class of society in early modern Italy, including nobles and villagers. She focused on central Italy, specifically on the Roman countryside, typically viewed as a site of contestation between great aristocratic families and an expanding papal political regime. Patrons and Adversaries demonstrated that one prestigious aristocratic family, the Barberini, was not squeezed out of governing by the extension of the papal bureaucracy, but rather became increasingly engaged with it between the late seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. Through their activities in the rural commune, villagers in an extensive territory belonging to the family also became active participants in governing the countryside. Villagers cultivated and exploited interference from the aristocratic family and the papal government, but they also kept urban elites at bay, defending their rights through the strategies she called "adversarial literacy." Villagers cobbled these literate practices together from their mastery of their constitutions, from debating in the village assembly, from dragging their feet in the payment of dues and dragging their lords into papal courts. In its later manifestations, adversarial literacy involved villagers writing and interpreting sources for themselves in order to challenge the monopoly on text-making claimed by ruling elites in Rome. A lost world of increasingly savvy villagers, irate nobles, and exasperated bureaucrats is analyzed to illustrate how villagers challenged who controlled the rural world, using texts and ideas that urban elites had exported to the countryside for other purposes.
Prof. Castiglione has published two articles related to her current research project, Extravagant Pretensions, which explores the kinds of tactics employed by aristocratic women, especially aristocratic mothers, during family conflicts in Rome, between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In their unpublished writings such women commented on issues critical to their contemporaries: the ideal way to govern the family; the appropriate relationship between parents and children; whether property and affection can coexist; how honor and identity intertwine; and whether there is any way or any reason to define a separation between public and private. How women conceptualized and attempted to live through these thorny dilemmas are the focus of the book. Castiglione explores writings by women in dialogue with their male contemporaries, for whom the women's ideas were "extravagant pretensions" rather than legitimate claims. A comparative gender analysis of family conflict across genders maps the intersection of gender and power in and beyond Roman aristocratic households.
In both projects she has been concerned with how seemingly marginalized individuals were able to challenge the systems of power relations that in theory left them without a voice. Both projects required archival sleuthing in obscure places – rarely utilized village archives or sources not always well catalogued because they pertained to women. Such archival excursions further our understanding of the ways that subaltern groups used non-violent judicial and literate means to broaden received beliefs about their rights in society and in the family. In both teaching and writing, she emphasizes the gradual and collective elements of this process and the irrecoverable anonymity of many who contributed to it.
Awards
2005: Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies (for Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640-1760)
2003: Prize for Excellence in Writing Instruction, University of Texas at Austin
1999: American Council of Learned Societies Fellow
1999: Gladys Krieble Delmas Fellow
Affiliations
American Historical Association
Society for Italian Historical Studies
Renaissance Society of America
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Funded Research
Research Funding since 1999:
American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (1999)
Gladys Krieble Delmas Fellowship (1999)
University of Texas at Austin – Faculty Research Assignment (1999); Research Grant (2000); Proposal Award (2000); Dean's Fellowship (2001); Special Research Grant (2001); Texas Humanities Institute Fellowship (2002); Travel Grant (2002); Summer Research Assignment (2004).
Curriculum Vitae
Download Caroline Castiglione's Curriculum Vitae in PDF Format
