Husbands, Wives, and Concubines: Marriage, Family, and Social Order in Sixteenth-Century Verona (review)

Husbands, Wives, and Concubines places Emlyn Eisenach among the best of a large contingent of international scholars studying non-normative heterosexual relationships in early modern Europe. These scholars, many Italian or researching Italian materials, have already contributed to three volumes edited by Diego Quaglioni and Silvana Seidel Menchi, covering topics like separation and divorce, clandestine and contested marriages, and concubinage, adultery, and bigamy. Eisenach's monograph ranges across many of these topics.

Eisenach exploits ecclesiastical court records, but she does not pose her findings in terms of the changes worked by Tridentine reforms, if only because the period from which she draws her cases, 1538-1593, did not really see their effect. Instead she frames her analysis in terms of patriarchalism—a normative model centering on the padre di famiglia. She sets out to problematize this model against actual cases with their variations of social class. She also distinguishes the concerns of churchmen, notably Verona's famed bishop, Gian Matteo Giberti, who saw limitations and responsibilities in paternal power.

A short review cannot convey how rich this book is. The heart of Eisenach's approach is her second chapter. There she argues that, alongside the conventional model of patriarchal arranged marriage, there was a second form prevailing among "ordinary" folk. Lack of economic leverage gave poorer parents less control of children's marriages, and where they were in control that did not mean marriage was forced or without spousal affection. Eisenach argues, convincingly, that the style of wedding ritual in which the bride's father was prominent was not designed so much to publicize the legitimate union but to stress his influence in it and his continuing interest in his daughter (and her dowry). Wedding rituals in which there was no father tried to fill the void with evidence of the groom's affection and commitment.

Clandestine marriages had their uses. Secrecy avoided contrary kin and bought time to win them over. Pregnancies threw such plans awry and tended to land parties in court. The secrecy itself was not unusual, "they made private promises to each other, which they and their community considered highly binding" (p. 96). The risks represented by secrecy and possible legal denial of marriage were balanced for women by the possibilities of improving social position.

Concubinage figures largely as elite exploitation of lower status women. The court cases that disclose these relationships arose when the man's wife sought separation because he kept another woman or, more rarely, when the lower-class woman's husband sought separation or demanded that she return to a matrimonial relationship with him. Concubinage by the elite threatened legitimate families on all social levels. "Nonelite" concubinage (between roughly social equals) was rarer and more likely to be equated with forms of prostitution for the women.

Women left husbands because they were mistreated; they sued for formal separation amensa et thoro. Women's departure harmed their husbands' economic position and reputation; husbands thus might countersue for adherere to make them return. Wives' very act of departure was a challenge to the social order, breaking up a household in an act that was anything but subservient. So women had to make the case that, in face of a husband's flagrant abuse, they were upholding social order by their departure. Courts were fairly sympathetic to their claims when presented with the evidence.

Eisenach is a careful reader of her sources. She makes clear that there were strategies, interests, and procedural logics at work in shaping them. The considerable strength of her book lies in this close interpretation, and in the clear prose by which she places it before her readers. The main critical concern resides in the statistical...