Some of you may remember this post from last December, where I wrote about a portrait by Clouet of a left-handed banker and speculated on the treatment of left-handers in the sixteenth century based on what few sources I was familiar with at the time. Recently, on the same History Extra article where I originally found the link to the Raffaello de Montelupo quote, I saw a reference to a source that I originally overlooked, a poem balled La Balia (The Nurse) by Luigi Tansillo (1510-1568), which describes the work of a wet nurse in sixteenth-century Italy and (in the English translation by William Roscoe originally published in 1798) includes these lines: "If, when his little hands, from bondage free / Restless expand in newborn liberty / You teach the child by reprehension light / In preference to the left to use the right; / --If thus the body claim your constant care / Shall not the mind your equal caution share?" Assuming that the poem describes practices common at the time, it does seem that at least some Europeans in the sixteenth century did try to suppress left-handedness.
As a southpaw myself, I must admit that I'm a bit disappointed to learn that they were already doing such a practice in my favorite time period. However, I'm honestly not surprised, given that the source by Sir Thomas Browne that I linked to in my post from December seemed to imply that it was a well-established practice by the mid-seventeenth century. Perhaps it's to be expected, since the sixteenth century was a very superstitious time when people were not generally very tolerant of anyone considered "different." (Of course, I realize that the religious conflicts and witch hunts of the century, which affected far more people both directly and indirectly, illustrate the intolerance of the period far better than perhaps anything else.) Just because the people of the era produced so much beautiful art, architecture, music, literature, clothing, etc. does not at all mean that it was an enlightened time by modern standards.
