Bestowing Care and Earning Honor: Female Hospital Donors and Politics in Renaissance Rome

Abstract

Through donations, both during their lives and after death, early modern women were able to influence the practice and decoration of hospitals, shape the narrative around their memories, and provide aid to the Roman community in a time in which charity hospitals found themselves in peril. Throughout the Renaissance, the Ospedale del Santissimo Salvatore ad Sancta Sanctorum was part of one of the most powerful, influential, and exclusive Roman confraternities.  Despite their exclusion from aspects of the institution, female donors provided fundamental financial support to the hospital.  This project analyses how elite women with substantial political ties and occasionally dubious reputations, such as Vannozza Cattanei, Cristofora Margani, and Tuzia Colonna Mattei, used monetary, property, and finery donations to the Ospedale del Salvatore to influence the institution and the public imagination of themselves and their families.