Two aspects of identity shaped the lives of women, men, and children in the Song more than anything else: gender and generation. Gender determined an individual’s place and role both within the family and in society. Generation – position in a descent line – defined an individual’s place and role within the family, and this was also reflected in society. Some individuals and groups lived outside the molds created by gender and generation – Buddhist and Daoist nuns and monks, for example – but these exceptions highlight the norms. Legal cases and government law codes inform us about the official structures that circumscribed daily life in marriage, family, and community. Other sources, such as funerary inscriptions, biographies, and anecdotal collections, allow us to flesh out both the customary and the extraordinary practices of marriage and family life. Extrafamilial relationships, such as those of men and courtesans, friendships between women and between men are also important features of individual social and emotional engagement with others. Due to reticent sources, we know far less about childhood. Ideas of gender, marriage, and family among the Khitan and Jurchen differed greatly from those of Song people, and encounters between and among them generated new configurations for all.

This chapter looks at the last phase of the communications circuits, in which texts move from producers to readers or listeners. It studies the various means through which women of all social classes could encounter texts. It is most concerned with books as objects that women came to own, through gift-giving (especially in the case of Books of Hours), dowries and inheritance, by commissioning manuscripts, through purchases, and through borrowing from other members of their communities. It also considers the contexts in which women could hear texts performed in song or speech. The chapter ends with a case study of the acquisition of books by a prominent Renaissance consort, Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua.

Although Lorenzo had been planning Piero’s marriage to Alfonsina Orsini since the summer of 1486, he was unable to carry the plan forward until November, after the conclusion of the Barons’ War. He described it to Francesco Gonzaga the following March as a gift from Ferrante to Piero, ‘to whom it pleased him to give the daughter of the late illustrious Orsini knight’. With its huge dowry of 12,000 ducats, the marriage clearly represented a gesture of gratitude to Lorenzo for contributing to their victory in the war, in which the Orsini had played a crucial part in supporting Ferrante, not the pope. Virginio was Alfonsina’s guardian after the death of her father, Roberto, Count of Tagliacozzo and Alba, who had been a favourite condottiere of Ferrante’s. So the marriage served to confirm and consolidate the Medici’s bonds with both the Orsini and Ferrante – although initially risking the loss of his hard-won friendship with the pope.1