In the sixteenth century, Grand Duke Cosimo I reformed charitable institutions in his realm, including the Innocenti foundling home, which Philip Gavitt ably studied in his Charity and children in Renaissance Florence Footnote 1, carrying the story as far as 1536. Here in Gender, honor, and charity, he follows these ducal reforms through the records of Cosimo's superintendent of the Innocenti, Vincenzo Borghini (1515–1580). One dimension of this study is Gavitt's intent to demonstrate that reforms not only dealt with the deplorable conditions of charitable institutions but that the duke and others used these places as savings banks, among other things for daughters' dowries.

Gender, honor, and charity is much more than a study of the Innocenti, though Gavitt's familiarity with its resources and its large role in Florentine society means that it plays a central role. This book is also about the other institutions – the Spedale degli Abbandonati, Santa Maria e San Niccolò del Ceppo, the Fanciulle della Pietà, Santa Caterina della Ruota, the Orbatello, and even the convents of the city. With his characteristic fine sense of the institutional dynamics of such places, Gavitt dedicates the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters, respectively, to the care and instruction of the boys apprenticed in crafts, of the girls learning household skills, and the ‘unruly nuns’, whose clausura, he argues, was inevitably incomplete and porous in light of families' patronage of convents, no matter the intention of the Tridentine Church to make cloisters separate and secure. Insofar as institutions for wayward girls and repentant prostitutes modelled themselves on convents, Gavitt can justify including them in a discussion of charitable institutions.

His main justification for doing so, however, lies in what he presents as the operative context of all charities, which in the sixteenth century saw a continual increase in the numbers of children, especially girls, that they handled. The prevailing lineage inheritance practices in Florence, as Isabelle Chabot has argued, were more resolutely patrilineal than most other Italian communities. In law and in testamentary customs, the family patrimony was designed to pass to one son, generally the eldest. Dowry inflation, increasingly evident following the plagues of the mid-fourteenth century, so raised the costs of marrying daughters that typically only one girl was married off. Others found their way to convents and foundling homes. Wealthy families could invest in such institutions with an eye to taking care of their members while preserving the all-important patrimony.

Behind the growth of charitable institutions in Florence, then, was what Gavitt calls a crisis in the system of inheritance. This, he insists, was less a matter of gender, though it was an important factor, than of the ideology of lineage. Women's honour was not about masculinity, it was about the certainty of legitimate progeny; women's limited management of property was not about irrationality but about their lack of authority within a lineage defined by its men. It was the pairing of this lineage ideology with what Gavitt claims was a culture of status and consumption that truly precipitated the crisis behind the city's charitable institutions. Vincenzo Borghini himself related the influx of girls into the Innocenti to the fact that they were excluded from inheritance.

A key to inheritance practices for Gavitt is the fact that ‘dowry, far from providing unconditional support to systems of patrilineal inheritance, both supported and undermined them’ (p. 101), as it was a separate and transmittable fund tied to a woman. Still, one might expect to find dysfunctionalities and unintended consequences in any system of inheritance. If the Florentine system (which was not so peculiar in the broad Italian context) was so dysfunctional, it might have more to do with entails, which came into greater use during the era of crisis precipitated by the Italian wars, than with dowry, which had been in use for centuries. There is surprisingly little here about fideicommissum and entails, which many others have seen as characteristic of inheritance from around 1500. It was when there were no male heirs that dowry might stay with a woman or move through her hands to others than members of the lineage she had married into. The conditional clauses of fideicommissa were designed to postpone, if not utterly preclude, such heirless moments. Entailing of property made provisions for dowry, especially more than one, fairly difficult for some families.

This is a work with many nuances and much sophistication. It reaches out to ideas of discipline in the works of Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault; it ranges through the extensive literature on Florentine families and women; it draws perceptively from the many moral treatises on family from sixteenth-century authors such as Silvio Antoniano and Torquato Tasso, as well as earlier figures like Leonardo Bruni and Leon Battista Alberti, not to mention the vast quantities of archival materials. Some of the most interesting pages of this book are those in which Gavitt details the inheritance strategies of the notary, Ser Andrea Nacchianti. His is an example of the peculiarity of circumstances of so many Florentines and of the creative steps they took to make law work for them.

Gender, honor, and charity is and will long be an important contribution to a lively and growing area of research interest, the inheritance practices of early modern Italian societies.