Women, Sex and Marriage in Early Modern Venice

Daniela Hacke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351871457
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Women, Sex, and Marriage in Early Modern Venice is the first study to investigate systematically the moral policies of both Church and State in the age of Counter-Reformation confessionalisation in Venice. Examining ecclesiastical and civil lawsuits related to illicit sex, broken marriage promises and disrupted marriages of artisan and ordinary women and men, Daniela Hacke can convincingly show how central sexual morality was to the patriarchal society of sixteenth and seventeenth century Venice. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, the author skilfully reconstructs what gender difference meant in daily life, in courtship rituals, marital disputes, and in sexual relations. In the streets and in the courts, women and men fought not only over proper gender behaviour within and outside marriage, but also about the meaning of conjugality and of domestic patriarchy. Neighbours played an active role in mediating between distressed partners and between children and parents. Their interventions and perceptions reveal much about the moral values and the networks of support within a fascinatingly heterogeneous community such as early modern Venice. The study makes important contributions to the fields of gender history, social history and the history of crime and sexuality.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

In Mattäus Merian’s engraving from 1630 Venice looks like a peaceful and tranquil city, with just a few people walking on the fondamenta, and rather more gondolas plying the Canal Grande. Great care was devoted to depicting the city’s splendours, such as the Ducal Palace, and, in particular, the urban topography: its palaces, churches, gardens and many small streets. At the far eastern end the cathedral church of S. Pietro di Castello – the ecclesiastical centre of Venice – stands out among the other buildings (see Figure 1.1).

Castello was one of the most populous of Venice’s 71 parishes (see Figure 1.2), with more than 9000 inhabitants in the 1580s, most of them humble people such as simple labourers working for the nearby arsenal, fishermen and washerwomen. The seaman Alessandro Franchi and his young wife Elena Bottera formed one of the many households of this parish. But they did not live in conjugal harmony. They had quarrelled soon after their marriage, and ever since their lives were overshadowed by marital discord. Neighbours would hear Elena yelling and crying and believed that Franchi, far from being a good companion, battered his wife ‘without any reason’. By about 1582 Elena had abandoned the marital home and had moved in with her mother near S. Sofia, a parish on the northern side of Venice. One day the peace in the neighbourhood was disturbed by loud screaming. Attracted by the noise, a woman looked down from her balcony to discover a man standing below, insulting Elena’s mother and threatening to make mincemeat of her. This curious neighbour later learned that the furious man was Alessandro Franchi, whose wife had deserted him.

In April 1583 this case of marital discord came to the attention of Venice’s secular authorities, the Avogadori di Comun. Mother and daughter accused Franchi of ‘unnatural’ sexual intercourse, ‘cruelty’ and ‘tyranny’. He had treated Elena so badly and had beaten her so severely, they alleged, that she had lost her unborn child. Franchi denied these allegations; in return he accused his wife Elena of laziness and disobedience, maintaining that she had refused to obey his orders and had not wanted to lift a finger, not even to prepare his dinner for his return from work. He argued that he had therefore simply corrected her behaviour and given her a few slaps. Elena and her mother, however, could call on 12 witnesses to support their case. The pair wanted to live ‘in peace’ – and to get the dowry back.¹

1.1 View of the city of Venice (Matthäus Merian, 1630)

1.2 Map of Venetian parishes

Marriage culture, gender and social order

This is just one example of numerous cases of domestic disputes and marital discord that lay at the heart of early modern Venice, belying the city’s apparent tranquillity. As this study will show, scenarios like this one permeated the city to the point of threatening the very fabric of early modern Venetian society, as many women, both single and married, filed lawsuits on domestic and marital matters at the Venetian secular and ecclesiastical courts. Through the use and analysis of contemporary case studies this book presents and examines the dynamics of domestic society, focusing in particular on marital disputes, ideas of gender and the role of the courts in Counter-Reformation Venice. An important aim is to explore the internal dynamics of Venetian households by looking at contested meanings of domestic patriarchy. This book is not so much about normative texts emphasising ordered households, but rather about the implementation of patriarchal authority in daily life – its abuse, acceptable limits and related problems. It examines what patriarchy meant to the people living in the fascinatingly heterogeneous parishes of early modern Venice.

What, then, do cases of marital dysfunction tell us about marriage culture, conjugality and patriarchy in early modern Venice? As this study will show, gender was crucial to the legal dynamics and patterns of accusation. Both men and women, husbands and wives referred to contemporary understandings of dominant gender roles and behaviour when attacking the head of the household’s use or abuse of authority. Allegations of cruelty and tyranny made by wives against husbands figure prominently in marital disputes: these were quite familiar and potent images in early modern Venice, and they were elaborated copiously. Wives would complain about cruel and lazy husbands who battered them, neglected family members and wasted household resources. Counter-allegations by husbands would then focus on the wives’ refusal to perform their household tasks, to care for their husbands and to fulfil their sexual commitment to them. Men and women thus fought not only over proper gender behaviour within marriage, but also over the meaning of conjugality and domestic patriarchy. Legal depositions of the time give complex and telling insights into contemporary ideas of how the conjugal household was expected to work. While various authors of prescriptive literature expressed their vision of ordered households and ordered society, numerous legal depositions from litigants and both male and female witnesses provided a unique window onto the appropriation of these dominant gender ideologies. While husbands, in ruling over their wives, defined conjugality and the way households should be run, unhappy and mistreated women underscored the limits of male authority when they filed requests in court for separation or annulment.

Marital disputes therefore expose the challenges posed to domestic patriarchy – by husbands who abused their authority or were unable to consummate a marriage and by wives who abandoned the conjugal home or betrayed the holy sacrament of matrimony. Adultery was the most manifest expression of a husband’s loss of control over his wife. A wife’s desertion of her husband then marked the final breakdown of household order and was, moreover, perceived as endangering neighbourhood peace and civic harmony. As cases discussed in this book will show, there was a strong connection between the breakdown of marriage and the abuse of male authority. Patriarchy, then, was not a stable concept but one that had to be enforced and implemented in daily life.

When disputes between men and women, husbands and wives, or parents and children overshadowed the peace of Venice’s densely populated neighbourhoods, the parishioners would stop to observe quarrelling couples from their balconies or windows. When they later were summoned to court as witnesses they had to reflect on their understanding of domestic hierarchy, proper female or filial conduct and marital conjugality. Before the city’s secular and ecclesiastical authorities they would be asked to form and express moral judgements that were linked intrinsically to questions concerning the daily conduct of husbands and wives or parents and children. They thus had to reflect on domestic patriarchy, gender differences and the way these differences operated in daily life.

Marital and household disputes also had wider implications: because society was based on stable marriages and household order, disputes threatened the peace and harmony not only of the neighbourhood but that of society as a whole. From the fifteenth century onwards good household rule was considered crucial for the maintenance of household order and social stability, and the importance of the family as the foundation of social order was increasingly stressed. The cittadino (citizen) Giovanni Caldiera (c. 1400–74), for example, emphasised in De oeconomia veneta (c. 1463–64) the head of the household’s responsibility to govern his family in a well-balanced way, promoting desirable virtues in his children, the future citizens of the republic. Caldiera’s views on the household were unsurprisingly hierarchical, but his vision of domestic patriarchy was tempered by virtues befitting each household member. The main characteristics of a boun economo (good household manager) were virtue and the ability to make sound decisions. Above all he had to be ‘wise and prudent’. His rule had to be strict but righteous, caring for the physical and spiritual well-being of the household members.²

Since gender relations and household hierarchy in early modern society were understood more broadly in their relation to social order, household rule had to be well balanced and judicious. Indeed, in the early fifteenth century the patrician Francesco Barbaro (1390–1454) established a connection between the well-being of the republic and ordered households. In his De re uxoria he insisted that ‘well-ordered families maintain the stability of the state’. The conjugal household was, moreover, perceived as a diminutive image of the state, a political metaphor often expressed in connection with noble households. It was the aforementioned Giovanni Caldiera who developed the fullest expression of the family as a political metaphor when he wrote, ‘[a]nd just as every economy resembles a polity, so also the home is in the likeness of the city.’³ In this analogy of city and household, family life was seen as mirroring the order of the state. Household rule embodied symbolic meaning because it paralleled the rule of the city magistrate and thus the relationship between ruler and ruled. As Dennis Romano has argued, in Renaissance Venice this political metaphor altered servant-master relationships and influenced profoundly the way in which masters responded to acts of disobedience.⁴

Use of the analogy between household and social order was widespread among Italian humanists. For example, in 1560 Alessandro Piccolomini could claim bluntly that ‘a house … is none other than a small city; and a city a big house.’⁵ It was also during the sixteenth century that the perception of Venetians’ well-balanced rule found its fullest expression. In his De magistratibus et Republica Venetorum the renowned sixteenth-century Venetian patrician Gasparo Contarini praised the city’s unique balance between monarchy, aristocracy and democracy in the Venetian constitution. Contarini articulated the myth of Venice as a city of stable government in which a perfectly formed constitution prevented opportunities for self-interest and dissension through a system of a ‘mixed constitution’. In his view monarchical rule was limited by the control of the magistracies and by the laws that safeguarded public welfare, so that ‘all dangerous inconveniences, whereby the commonwealth might sustain harm, are thereby removed.’⁶ In this way, Contarini held, ‘any man may easily understand, that the Duke of Venice is deprived of all meanes, whereby he might abuse his authoritie, or become a tyrant.’⁷ According to the dominant understanding of Venetian self-fashioning, tyrannical rule was an abuse of authority and constituted the antithesis of republican ideals, which placed public welfare, stability and the freedom of the republic at the centre of political behaviour.

Paolo Paruta, nominated storiografo pubblico in February 1580, elaborated this political metaphor even further. In his treatise Della perfezzione della vita politica (‘On the perfection of political life’) he not only transferred the Venetian principle of mixed government to the household, but also elaborated the specific role that women played within this idealised government. Paruta emphasised that the monarchic government of the household ruler was – like that of the doge – ideally limited by transferring the principle of mixed government to family life. With the co-operation of the wife in running the household, autocratic rule was modified into a government of the few, while the services of the brothers, oriented towards the public welfare of the household members, symbolised the democratic element.⁸ The much-praised republican ideal of the Venetian mixed constitution thus paralleled the ideal government of the household. As in political rule, tyranny and abuse of authority were prevented through a system of control in which gender played an important role.

This ideal of reasonable, sound and moderate rule was expressed not only in treatises for patrician households or in political theory. As will be shown...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Notes
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The City: Principles of Early Modern Venetian Society
• Part One: Boundary Making: Church, State and Marital Transgressions
• Part Two: Couples in Court: The Church and Marital Disputes
• Part Three: The State and Crimes Related to Marriage
• Conclusion and Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index