Matrimoni in dubbio: Unioni controverse e nozze clandestine in Italia dal XIV al XVIII secolo (review)

Controversial unions and clandestine marriages in Italy from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries are the theme of the volume under review, the second of a projected five-volume series. The first volume (2000) centered on marital conflicts and court-ordered separation of married couples. Future volumes will treat illicit relationships (concubinage, adultery, and bigamy) and the operations of regional matrimonial tribunals before and after the Council of Trent. The main focus of this research project, ably directed and edited by Silvana Seidel Menchi of the University of Pisa and Diego Quaglioni of the University of Trento, is the extensive and previously underutilized records of north Italian ecclesiastical tribunals, especially those of Feltre, Vicenza, and Padua, and the Patriarchate of Venice. Each volume comprises case histories written by both seasoned and beginning scholars.

Fifteen essays, plus introductory chapters by the editors, illuminate a wide range of lay attitudes and practices relating to the formation of the marriage bond. Premarital cohabitation, serial monogamy, and bigamy were common practices in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Banns were ignored, the solemnization of marriages in churches and by parish priests infrequent. Not surprisingly, marriages often occurred spontaneously, celebrated on balconies and before windows, as well as in stables, inns, kitchen gardens, pastures, and woods. Clandestine marriage—marriage contracted without observing prescribed conditions, such as banns and proper witnessing—was rampant. Before the Council of Trent the meaning of clandestine marriage was elastic. One union arranged through the services of a marriage broker, witnessed by members of the bride's family, their friends, and several friars from a nearby convent, subsequently sealed in a contract redacted by a public notary was classified as a clandestine marriage, because the groom's family was absent.

An exchange of marital vows in the present tense (verba de presenti) given freely and mutually by the spouses was universally recognized as the constitutive element of a valid and indissoluble marriage. Yet assessing the validity acts of verba de presenti was difficult. Should the tribunal accept a young girl's plea that her consent to marry was coerced by her parents? Should it invalidate a marriage on the grounds of the husband's plea that he was forced to marry by the angry parents of the girl whom he had seduced and considered a whore? Just as in literature, stories of seduction heard by the judges were stereotypical. The man is active, the woman passive; she puts up resistance, but gives in to the seduction when the seducer makes a promise to marry her—a promise he does not intend to keep. Ultimately, as Cecilia Cristellon argues in her informative essay on cases in fifteenth-century Padua and Venice, the decision of whether true,forced, or feigned consent was given would be decided in the forum conscientie. Judges tended to side with socially weak women against their seducers, though they looked askance, as Stanley Chojnacki argues, at women from the lower orders who used the lure of premarital sex to catch high-status men. The clear distinction in canon law between a promise to marry in the future and a promise to marry in the present tense was not sharp in the minds of the laity. Even the judges construed the expression "accipiam te in uxorem" and "accipio te in uxorem" as interchangeable.

The book's exclusive focus on marriage tribunals does not limit its ability to draw larger conclusions. Taken together, the fine individual studies confirm the growing consensus that the Italian laity resisted the application of Tridentine directives against concubinage and adultery. Concubinage persisted for the reason that many cohabitating couples delayed marriage because they could not afford nuptial expenses. The studies also confirm that the revolutionary conciliar decrees making a valid marriage dependent on its solemnization by a parish priest were not...