The Education of Young Noblewomen in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the First Half of the 19th Century

In light of the debates on the "feminisation of religion" that have animated historiography, during the Restoration one can distinguish two educational strategies towards the education of women. On the one hand, we can make out a symbolic system in which women, whether religious or married, fulfilled values that the male part of society seemed to deny or have forgotten. The same period, especially through the social action of the new religious congregations, saw an activity and a visibility that could not be attributed to a political dimension, but rather to a pre-political one. The relationship between women and the sacred conferred legitimacy on the reclusion of women, that is, the need for a confinement which constituted the physical and symbolic element of the continuity between the education given in monastic institutions and that of many nineteenth-century boarding schools for young women. Women's action outside the classroom belonged more to the sphere of the symbolic than to that of the useful, and, in any case, were founded on an essentially individual type of relationship.