Making a Marriage in Medieval Padua

Over the course of the fifteenth century, sixty-four plaintiffs brought suit in the Paduan ecclesiastical court to enforce a disputed vow. Although the Church had established a theory of marriage that relied solely on the exchange of freely given consent, these matrimonial suits show that the laity was not content to define marriage in solely spiritual terms. In case after case, we find plaintiffs presenting a wide variety of proofs of marriage, especially the carnal consummation of vows that the Church had tried to render ancillary from the twelfth century onwards. Most striking are the instances in which plaintiffs reproduced the vows exchanged; when rendered in Latin, they are consistently formulaic, but twelve times the plaintiffs entered the vernacular words exchanged, words that show much more individuality and allow us to approach more directly their understanding of what constituted a valid marriage.