Hacke, Daniela 1966- (Daniela Alexandra Hacke)

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Hacke, Daniela 1966- (Daniela Alexandra Hacke)

PERSONAL:

Born March 16, 1966. Education: University of Hamburg, M.A.; University of Cambridge, Clare Hall, Ph.D., 1997.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Historisches Seminar, University of Zurich, Karl Schmid-Str. 4, Zurich, CH-8006 Switzerland. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, member of faculty. Advisory board member of South-West German working group for city history.

WRITINGS:

Women, Sex, and Marriage in Early Modern Venice, Ashgate (Burlington, VT), 2004.

Contributor of essays and chapters to various publications.

SIDELIGHTS:

Daniela Hacke earned her graduate degrees from the University of Hamburg in Germany and Clare Hall of the University of Cambridge in England. She serves on the faculty of the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Her primary areas of research and academic interest include art history and Italian literature, and particularly marriage and gender relations in Venice, which was the subject of her doctoral thesis and eventually evolved into her first book, Women, Sex, and Marriage in Early Modern Venice. The work is a part of the series "St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History."

Women, Sex, and Marriage in Early Modern Venice addresses gender roles and rights in the post-Reformation period in Venice. Hacke's research delves into both religious and legal issues, analyzing various cases and judgments that took place in Venice and how gender appeared to affect the various outcomes. Not only does the book give readers an insight into the different gender roles and their accompanying rights, but it provides a better understanding of Venetian domestic society of the time. Hacke researched extensively, relying heavily upon court documents that recorded various domestic disputes and conflicts between spouses, or between parents and their daughters. Most related to gender and different standards of sexual morality, as well as issues of marriage. Very often either the church or the government or both were called upon to play mediator in these types of disputes. While the domestic situations in Venice were similar to those in other regions, they were under the jurisdiction of the patriarchal authority in the city, which played a very different role than did other local governments, to the point of abusing their power. Legal documents that resulted from these disputes give modern readers a look into the dynamics of Venetian relationships of the era, including understandings regarding proper behavior within a marriage and the guidelines for the running of the household. They include statements from witnesses, evidence, and explanations for many of the decisions. Hacke covers not just internal disputes but crimes that were linked to marriages, including both adultery and prostitution. Charmarie J. Blaisdell, in a review for Church History, remarked that "the author has made a convincing argument for the centrality of sexual morality to Venice's patriarchal society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," and dubbed the work "a dense study that requires careful reading." Margaret L. King, in a contribution for the Renaissance Quarterly, opined that "interspersing her analysis with brief microhistorical case studies, Hacke brings this remote era before our eyes."