Informal Marriages in Early Modern Venice

Jana Byars

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429675614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Conditions of the marriage market and sexual culture, and the needs of wealthy families and their members created social tensions in the late sixteenth and early-seventeenth century Venice. This study details these tensions and discusses concubinage– a long-term, sexual, non-marital union - as an alternate family model that soothed them by meeting the needs of families and individuals in a manner that did not offend the sensibilities of the authorities or other Venetians. Concubinage was quite common, and the Venetian community regularly accepted concubinaries, concubinal relationships, and the offspring concubinage produced.

1 Introduction

Maddalena Tognetto had no idea how poorly her night would go when she went home to her husband Antonio on September 8, 1600.¹ Entering her marital home was not a particularly daring move; by rights, she should have been able to slide into bed quietly, wake in the morning, and return to work. That is not what happened at all. She arrived very late, probably around midnight. Antonio was surly and instigated an argument. The argument escalated into a screaming fight. Within hours of her failed attempt to get a good night’s sleep, Antonio would be lying on the floor covered in blood and she would be making good her escape.

The trouble between Antonio and Maddalena lay outside their house, indeed, outside their marriage. Rather, the real trouble lay in anger, disappointment, jealousy, and perceived dishonor over her concubinal relationship with another man, Zuanne Andrea Ferraro. That night, Maddalena had returned from her post as a housekeeper in his house. Zuanne Andrea was a merchant of some means who lived in Antonio and Maddalena’s neighborhood in Cortiola.² A widower, he had hired Maddalena to work as his housekeeper about three years before the night of the fight. At first, this arrangement was probably fairly ordinary and sexless. Maddalena would have gone over in the morning to manage his household: cleaning, shopping, preparing meals, and the like. Perhaps Maddalena began to stay on through dinners, with conversations turning from mundane household details to matters intimate. Eventually, the relationship between Andrea and his housekeeper deepened. In the language of an observant neighbor, one Donna Giacoma, wife of Zuanne Maria Martinelo, he “went mad with lust for her,” and she evidently reciprocated.³ The neighbors also noticed that she spent more and more time with him, often spending the night at his house without returning to her marital home. As the relationship between Zuanne Andrea and Maddalena intensified, that between Maddalena and Antonio turned decidedly frosty.

Already the relationships in this case seem to defy what is commonly understood to be normative sexual patterns in early modern Europe. Yet in fact, relationships like this—concubinal relationships—were quite common throughout Europe and particularly in Venice. They form the subject of this book. That is, this will be a study of a sort of heterosexual relationships of some duration that existed outside of marriage and, though materially beneficial to both partners, were not strictly commercial like prostitution. Such relationships were astonishingly pervasive yet generally invisible unless legal or ecclesiastical authorities were effectively compelled to intervene. At that point, the relationship became a matter of public concern and entered the public record. Then it became very clear that the stakeholders in such relationships involved not only the partners and their spouses, if there were any, but also legitimate and illegitimate children, other kin, religious and secular authorities, and the broader network of the community around them. This can be demonstrated by the events of September 8, 1600—when Maddalena Tognetto went home to her husband Antonio—and their aftermath. The violence perpetrated by Maddalena led the Venetian secular authorities to investigate and come to understand a concubinal triangle already well known to the entire community.

Antonio and Maddalena’s marriage benefited from her concubinal relationship as well. She occasionally dropped in on Antonio to make him dinner. Sometimes she extended these visits until morning. Though none of the witnesses mention the employment or status of either Zuanne Andrea or Antonio, there were clear class distinctions. Zuanne Andrea is referenced as a widower who owned his home and some other property. No one ever mentioned Antonio’s profession. He is only understood to financially benefit from Zuanne Antonio’s largesse. For instance, most witness testimony reads like a particular comment that “for about three years [Antonio] and his wife lived in their house without paying anything for rent.”⁴ However, the neighbors noted that this lodging was not completely without cost. Rather, most mentioned that Antonio was left alone to fend for himself a great deal. One witness, a widow name Adriana Pitona, but called Rozatta, told a story of Maddalena’s cruelty and abandonment of her lawful husband. “One day … Antonio, the husband of this Maddalena, was sick in bed, and she was in the bed of this Zuanne Andrea… . When her husband called her, she said no to him, as if she was not his wife.”⁵ Even if she exaggerated a bit for rhetorical purposes, the point is still clear: Antonio needed his wife, but she was out tramping around.

Antonio was decidedly neither Maddalena’s primary sexual partner nor her preferred companion. When Maddalena gave birth to a child in 1599, nearly everyone in the village—including the mother, her lover, and her husband—believed the child to be the product of concubinal, not marital, intercourse. Witness after witness echoed Cattarina, the wife of Bartolomeo Giro, in asserting that she had “heard it said that said … that Maddalena had a baby she named Innocente, [and he] is the son of the above mentioned Zuanne Andrea.”⁶ Perhaps the sight of Maddalena nurturing her bastard child sparked severe negative emotions like anger, jealousy, and feelings of impotence in Antonio. Perhaps this, finally, was an indignity too great to bear. Perhaps the weight of his neighbors’ gaze seemed to fall heavier or have grown harsher. Within a year of the birth, tensions would finally boil over.

This story was culled from a series of records, called Miscellany, among the bounty of the State Archives of Venice. The pages record denunciations, testimony, and the occasional sentencing from both civil and criminal cases collected in Venice proper as well as her territories. The Venetian archives house a trove of material from the early modern period just like these that allow us to hear comparatively unrestricted voices from the lower classes. I will discuss these records in greater detail later. For now, it is enough to note that these sorts of personal details abound in the first-person testimony of these records. It is also notable that these records make plain that the relationship between the concubinaries, Antonio’s cuckolding, and the presumed paternity of Maddalena’s child were all matters of public knowledge and conversation in the village. Had the bout of domestic violence not occurred, the relationship would have left no record, and we would know nothing about it. So, in some small way, we thank this fight, and all the others, that resulted in something to document these relationships that were otherwise tolerated and, thus, invisible.

No testimony addresses Antonio’s ongoing reaction to the concubinaries or his failing relationship with his wife. In part, this omission results from legal realities: Antonio’s emotions about his wife’s infidelity in no way influenced the prosecution of his attacker. But Zuanne Andrea and Maddalena’s relationship really did not matter to the prosecution, either. The fact that everyone in the neighborhood assumed Antonio was not the father of his wife’s child was not particularly germane to Maddalena’s prosecution for assault. That did not stop neighborhood gossip from entering the documentary record. I suspect that Antonio’s affect was not subject to discussion in part out of tact: his public cuckolding was shameful, and his neighbors had little interest in adding insult to literal injury. But more to the point, there was no compelling legal or cultural reason for them to discuss Antonio’s reaction. Dozens of literary characters, as well as village tradition, had written and publicized the script for the chapfallen cuckold.⁷ His position would have been understood without explanation from his neighbors. His temperament and actions on the night of the stabbing are well documented; a cuckold may not be news, but once the cuckoldry devolved into violence, it was the province of the entire community.

Antonio was certainly very angry when he went to bed that evening in September, with neither supper nor wife to buttress him against the autumn chill. Unfortunately for both of them, Maddalena chose that night to return to her husband. Maybe she made too much noise entering the apartment and woke him. Maybe he had been waiting up for her, fuming over the indignities he suffered at the hands of Maddalena and her lover. According to the case’s opening summation, she made her way into the apartment to find him awake, hungry, and in a foul mood. Antonio bellowed at her, loudly enough to wake the neighbors who would later testify to the argument. He angrily demanded that she come to bed with him, ostensibly for sex. Displeased with the rage and recrimination she received in lieu of a proper welcome, Maddalena refused.

The argument escalated. The couple continued to fight, screaming at each other loudly. The altercation started in their bed but migrated to the kitchen area. Sometime just before 3 a.m., Maddalena grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed Antonio in the neck. She immediately ran out. He probably did not even try to pursue, as he was seriously wounded and bleeding profusely. He presumably could not have gotten far even if he had tried. He was able to raise an alarm, though, which alerted his already disturbed neighbors to his injuries. At least one of them arrived to nurse him immediately after Maddalena’s departure. He was lucky too: he lived.

Most likely, Maddalena ran directly to Zuanne Andrea, if only to report to her lover and plan her swift escape. After the stabbing, Maddalena was in serious trouble with the authorities. Her concubinal relationship had, up to that point, followed an acceptable path and had thus been largely ignored, even tacitly tolerated. But with this event, Maddalena and Zuanne Andrea’s relationship had become problematic, and Maddalena was now a criminal. She could not even have been certain Antonio would live. Her last glance on her way out had him lying on the floor, screaming, with blood spurting from his neck. But she had to know that even if Antonio survived, she was facing some severe punishment, maybe even imprisonment. Zuanne Andrea also must have recognized the danger immediately and helped her get away. By the time the authorities called on him while looking for Maddalena, she and their child were long gone. Although none of her neighbors claimed to know her exact whereabouts, most surmised that she had gone to live with her mother in some other mainland town. They were not helpful. Someone reckoned Maddalena had gone to live in Rovigo, another town in the Veneto.⁸ Zuanne Andrea evidently did know where she had gone. He quickly gathered her things and sent them off to her before he, too, left the city. Though there is no record of his later whereabouts, one assumes he went to meet Maddalena and his child. The Avogaria di Comun published a proclamation on October 7, 1600, demanding the couple appear before the city’s lawyers for questioning.⁹ Neither Maddalena nor Zuanne Andrea accepted the invitation. Both were banned in absentia, as was the custom.¹⁰ Her banishment was more severe, for life, while Zuanne Andrea received only 25 years. If they ever again returned to Venetian territory, they did so quietly, for it is with this exile that their story—or at least the documentary record of their story—ends.

This domestic dispute caused nary a wrinkle in the history of the village, much less the Venetian Republic. No one died. No one even went to jail. Although the story of the night Maddalena stabbed Antonio in the neck must certainly have been retold for quite some time around the communal wells and in darkened cantinas, neither Maddalena nor Antonio met an untimely end as a result of the incident. When a clever storyteller told the tale, she might have begun with the fight and its lamentable outcome, but would soon step back and explain its root cause. In order to explain the fight, she would have to explain the affective triangle formed by the three principle players in the drama. This is a concubinal relationship—one made up by concubinaries, people involved in a sexual, non-marital, long-term relationship. And it is this concubinal relationship that provides the spark for this book. This story includes many key themes: the parties to the concubinage all benefited from it, though in different ways. The members of the relationship navigated—and crossed—class barriers. It was known publicly in the community and tolerated by neighbors as well as secular and ecclesiastical authorities. It was a neighboring state to marriage and to prostitution, bordering on both. And, finally, it was exhaustively documented, but only because it had ceased to work.

The Historical Situation

We know the story of Maddalena, Antonio, and Zuanne Andrea because their relationship resulted in violence and societal disorder, not, as might be expected in this era of Reformations widely considered to be extremely conservative on both religious and political fronts, because their relationship fundamentally existed in opposition to ecclesiastical or secular standards. This relationship, like many other similar arrangements, flourished in plain sight of communities and authorities alike. The scholarship of this period portrays an age of growing authoritarian governments, one in which powerful machines of secular and ecclesiastical authority consolidated and centralized their immense power. Yet, we see in concubinage a prevalent adaptive relationship in which the concubinaries and their surrounding structures adapted to one another. Even in this era, that was occasionally rigid, with governments best described as top down, the existence and experience of concubinage demonstrate a basic mutuality between Venetians and their neighbors, and between Venetians and their governments.

This book addresses the informal union of concubinage and its concomitant issues: marriage, sexuality, gender, and the family in the century following the Council of Trent in the Republic of Venice. It is the only book to do so, even though, as our introductory tale illustrates, such relationships sat at the core of many Venetian households. Partial explanation for the omission lies with concubinage’s lack of visibility. There are a number of terms used to discuss concubinage, from referring to someone’s “friend” to the notion of “carrying away” a woman to your house, and thus the union can be hard to define and hard to spot in historical documents; it goes by—and passes with—many different names. It has been hiding in the discipline of history as well, as historians, in seeking to investigate marriage and the family have focused exclusively on other categories—marriage, prostitution, even adultery—that are, while more easily defined, not necessarily exclusive. But concubinage sits in the center of this discussion and the history of the family and marriage must involve the history of concubinage.

Marriage was the officially sanctioned form of long-term sexual pairings. But just as there were powerful incentives to form long-term relationships, there were also powerful incentives to avoid marriage, whether temporarily or permanently. The nature of those incentives were closely tied to class and created divisions within concubinage along class lines. Patrician families, concerned for the preservation of their wealth, sought to limit the number of marriages, and thus legitimate offspring, in each generation.¹¹ Wealthy merchants and members of the middling citizen...