Women’s Account Books in Venice and the Veneto Region. Material and Emotional Aspects

In recent years, scholarship has highlighted how early modern women engaged in everyday writing and accounting, including in the Italian context. This paper shifts the focus to their relationship with the materiality of the account books they used, drawing on a corpus identified in Venice and the Veneto between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Alongside a brief overview of the books’ variety and material features, the study examines the emotional dimensions linked to their possession and use, as reflected in several women’s wills.