Matrimoni di antico regime (review)

Medieval marriage has become a fashionable topic among medieval historians during the past thirty years, which have seen the appearance of dozens of scholarly books and monographs, as well as hundreds of articles devoted to various aspects of the subject. Nor does the flood show any imminent signs of abating. Announcements of further studies that are waiting in the wings to make their appearance continue to arrive with relentless regularity.

Historians of early modern Europe have by comparison seemed slightly less eager than their medievalist colleagues to pursue studies of matters matrimonial in their period. A handful of excellent studies of Catholic marriage law during the generations that followed the Council of Trent have appeared, but they have been relatively few in number. This might perhaps reflect an assumption that the Tridentine constitutions concerning marriage settled matters definitively and that practice more or less automatically fell into conformity once the Council had adopted its new canons. If so, that is unfortunate, for unwavering conformity to the Tridentine marriage rules seems likely to have been the exception, rather than the rule, in many parts of the Catholic world.

The appearance of this new study by Daniela Lombardi of the University of Pisa is a major addition to the literature on early modern marriage in Catholic Europe. It is likewise a sharp reminder of just how varied observance of the new matrimonial regime proved to be, how tenaciously remnants of the earlier law endured, and how radically these matters shifted between the mid-sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. Dr. Lombardi's impressive account is especially valuable because it is grounded upon extensive research in unpublished records that survive from both ecclesiastical and civil courts, especially in Florentine archives, but also in the Archivio segreto Vaticano and the bishop's archives at Fiesole. Her exploration of this material has yielded a wealth of records from actual cases, which Dr. Lombardi draws upon astutely to show how new laws, new procedures, and new assumptions about the proper approach to matrimonial problems slowly emerged in Tuscany during the two and a half centuries following Trent.

The opening section of Dr. Lombardi's book sketches a brief account of late medieval marriage law and jurisprudence and illustrates some of the problems it produced—especially clandestine marriages, bigamy, and the uncertainties that arose from the ease with which informal marriages could be contracted. The author then turns to the debates on these issues at Trent and the constitutions that the council fathers devised to deal with those difficulties.

Building on this foundation, Dr. Lombardi then turns to the heart of her work: a detailed study of the fluctuations in matrimonial practices that emerged in Tuscany during the post-Tridentine era. She details among other things how a gradual shift in jurisdictional boundaries occurred, which ultimately transferred the bulk of matrimonial litigation from the ecclesiastical courts to the courts of civil authorities. She has a great deal to say that is fresh and illuminating as well about such matters as alterations in dowry arrangements, the assertion of parents' control over the marriages of their offspring, the elaborate schemes of customary betrothal and marriage practices that became crucial for those who hoped to prove or disprove the existence of a marriage, the growth of judicial resistance to marriages across class boundaries, the decline and ultimate disappearance of presumptive marriage, and the emergence of police power over marital disputes.

Social and political historians, as well as church historians and legal historians,will find a wealth of useful information and insights in this perceptive and grace-fully written account of early modern marriage in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.