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

Eisenach's study of marriage in sixteenth-century Verona unfolds during the period of the "aristocratization of Italy," when the Italian ruling classes became increasingly fixed and stratified, resulting in the gradual exclusion of the lower classes from political life and economic advancement. Against this background, Veronese nobles became progressively more domineering and violent as they amassed their land holdings and manipulated grain sales. Their corrupt behavior attracted the attention of reform-minded bishops such as Gian Matteo Giberti and Agostino Valier, who attempted to curb aggressive noble behavior by imposing a view of patriarchal society and the orderly family in the hopes that this would frame civic, moral order for Veronese society as a whole. However, reformers' ideals met with widespread resistance and a diversity of popular practices regarding marriage and social life that Eisenach discusses to reveal the fissures and inconsistencies in the functioning of patriarchy.

Eisenach investigates reformers' prescriptive literature, visitation records, and nearly 200 cases of marriage disputes before the diocese of Verona to explore marriage, gender, and power in the early modern world. She employs these sources to make a range of assertions. For instance, while social historians have traditionally paid much attention to the procession of a wife to her new husband's house, Eisenach discusses cases where newly married couples lived for up to a year or more in the home of the wife's family before moving. In addition, fathers did not necessarily provide a daughter's entire dowry immediately, instead sometimes slowly transfering the dowry to the husband over time. These and other aspects of marriages among the common people of Verona suggest prolonged links between marrying families rather than a quick and sharp break between a bride's natal and married kin. Similarly, investigations of clandestine marriages reveal that this practice did not necessarily happen out of the desire to assert one's free will to marry a beloved. Clandestine marriage, for instance, often worked to allow women and their families to assert their independence from their fathers and to improve their collective position in society.

While many of Eisenach's conclusions are the results of intelligent historical reading, they are also occasionally problematic. Many of her assertions are by no means surprising. For instance, she argues for the significance of cases in which mothers or friends instead of fathers gave women away in marriage. But if the vast majority of these women were orphans or servants working far from home, is this at all noteworthy? Cases of women with surviving kin living nearby whose fathers did not preside over their marriages would be much more unusual. Eisenach finds it noteworthy that mothers had the authority to arrange their daughters' marriages, another fact that historians by now know happened with some regularity (see Ann Crabb, The Strozzi of Florence: Widowhood and Family Solidarity in the Renaissance [2000]).

More troublesome, however, is the way in which her deductions are frequently based on a relatively small number of cases. For example, Eisenach states that "increasing noble involvement in the bassa veronese may also have encouraged the practice of clandestine marriage. . . . As these outsiders tried to increase their investments in the region: they also tried to increase their control over local society" (131). She bases this conclusion on eleven court cases in the region, an interesting occurrence, but hardly conclusive. Similarly, she argues that concubinage "symbolized and implemented the growing dominance of elite men over the rest of society" (136). Yet this assertion — which is also perhaps not surprising — is also based on a small number of cases. Only a quarter of the cases of concubinage she has studied clearly involved elites: a total of fifty-seven men in a territorial population of roughly 170,000 people.

Husband, Wives, and Concubines nevertheless creatively blends social history, the history of...