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Chapter  Satisfying the Laws: The Legenda of Maria of Venice Susan Mosher Stuard The Dominican Tommaso di Antonio da Siena (Thomas Caffarini ) arrived in Venice after pilgrimage to the Holy Land in  and began his assigned task of composing a rule for Dominican penitents (his Tractatus, then folded into the bull Sedis apostolicae by Innocent VII on  June ).1 Thomas also translated and glossed exempla featuring celebrated Italian saints: Catherine of Siena (–), Giovanna of Orvieto (–), and Margherita of Città di Castello (–). He added one original work to this corpus, the legenda of his friend Maria of Venice.2 This work, crucial to his project, featured a life lived with respect for legalities: statute law of Venice, the diritto comune (common law tradition that had grown up out of canon law in Italian towns), various consilia, the learned opinion of theologians, canon law itself, papal directives, Dominican directives , and the case law of pertinent courts. Apropos to his audience of wealthy, law-abiding families, Thomas sought a young woman from just that sort of background who also exemplified virtue, and piety, perhaps excessively so.3 Maria’s young husband did not meet this standard, and therein hangs the plot. With this story to tell, and despite good intentions, Thomas Caffarini stumbled, ironically, on church law, where he was proficient . He needed a miracle of sorts to redeem his legenda for the Penitent Rule. Situated squarely on the contested ground of marriage law, Caffarini’s legenda of Maria sought to satisfy legal niceties. Civic law and church law alike hedged ‘‘Roman’’ dowry, the chief marital assign awarded at Venice, with restrictions. ‘‘Roman’’ dowry, a bride’s father’s contribution to the marriage, harked back to postclassical Theodosian law.4 This gift was the bride’s by law, but controlled by her husband, who must make money from it but never squander capital, a tall order in a commercial economy for even  Susan Mosher Stuard a well-intentioned spouse (Maria’s was not).5 Diritto comune policed dowry awards, while local sumptuary law governed wedding gifts and registered dowries. The church viewed dowry and other wedding gifts, along with consent, as grounds for valid marriage, and stated so plainly; a husband or his kin were required to provide the bride victus et vestitus (a living) by both laws. Once this condition was met, the husband’s authority was nearly absolute, even over a wife’s desire to enter holy orders, according to Thomas of Chobham’s Summa confessorum.6 Saints by their calling flee the commonplace, yet Maria’s life celebrates her harmony with, rather than her separation from, her law-abiding urban milieu. Maria began life as the unexceptional offspring of a prosperous Venetian family, and her legal difficulties hold some answers. Although exempla literature has benefited from the application of literary criticism, few efforts have been made to contextualize saints’ lives in regard to laws and economic conditions. This study attempts to do that. Referred to today as tertiaries, the devout souls Caffarini sought in Venice remained in the world, that is, they were not enclosed. Each should lead an exemplary life although none presumed to achieve the heroic sanctity of the mystic Catherine of Siena, the premier saint of the day. Unlike Catherine, a devout young Venetian woman like Maria, wealthy if not patrician , exemplified ideals congruent with the devotio moderna, which spread rapidly in the prosperous Low Countries.7 The Modern Devotion lay movement stood against corruption in the church and worldliness, encouraging its largely well-to-do female followers to witness for the ascetic life. In this same spirit, the idiom of dress and possessions came to express Maria’s exceptional spirituality in the brief five years of life left to her. Maria was no sooner married than she experienced an immediate conversion to penitent; she was subsequently deserted by her husband, Giannino della Piazza. Thomas Caffarini is vague about this sequence of events, perhaps intentionally, since he constantly applauds Maria’s virgin-like traits yet it is apparent that her marriage was consummated, however reluctantly on Maria’s part. Somehow in those early days Maria managed to visit her natal home near the Dominican Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo and experienced an intense conversion; she did return to her husband’s home, having little other choice, but was soon deserted when Giannino fled.8 Maria then embarked on a saintly and chaste life in her parents’ home until her death from...

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