The Wealth of Wives: A Fifteenth-Century Marriage Manual ed. by Francesco Barbaro (review)

This first complete modern English translation of Francesco Barbaro's treatise on wives is long overdue. The 1415 Latin text, De re uxoria, sketched the main outlines of humanist thought promoting marriage and procreation, becoming a reference point in that tradition for subsequent authors, including Desiderius Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives. In recent times, Barbaro's work has been a mainstay of our understanding of Renaissance humanism; thanks to a partial translation in 1978 by Benjamin Kohl and Ronald Witt, it has long been a favorite in classrooms as well. Margaret L. King, an expert on Venetian humanism and the role of women in it, presents a complete new translation and a substantial introduction—about half the volume—analyzing the intellectual and social context for the work. Barbaro's text is smoothly translated and annotated to identify the numerous classical and contemporary allusions, making the work accessible to students and a broad public.

Francesco Barbaro was young and unmarried when he presented this work as a wedding gift to Lorenzo de' Medici of Florence, the younger brother of Cosimo the Elder. Despite his lack of practical experience, Barbaro resoundingly endorsed marriage and proffered advice on how to select and treat a wife. Praising marriage as beneficial to state, family, and the individual was hardly remarkable among humanists, as King acknowledges, and on this point, Barbaro remained fairly conventional. More unusual, she maintains, is the Venetian's argument that it is a wife's personal qualities, and not her dowry, that constitute her most valuable contribution to marriage and the family (17). King's translation of the title as "On the Wealth of Wives," instead of the more commonly used "On Marriage" or "On Wifely Matters," calls attention to this view.

King's introduction demonstrates the centrality of debates over marriage and dowry to the formation of the Venetian ruling class. Venetian marriage laws evolved in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to increasingly encourage aristocratic endogamy; for example, a 1506 law specified that "the nobility of sons depended on both paternal and maternal lineages" (12), not merely paternal. This put pressure on noblemen to marry local women of equal or higher rank, limiting their marriage options. The stress on the purity of the maternal line brought with it a distinctive preservation of female rights over dowries and other aspects of inheritance. King here builds on the foundational work of Stanley Chojnacki and others to show that particularly in comparison to Florence, Venetian noble-women's birth and property were more essential to the maintenance of aristocratic wealth and status.

And yet, as dowries continued to rise in the same period, marriage rates among Venetian nobles declined to the lowest in Italy. With fewer nobles entering the married state, King maintains, the praise for marriage that humanists readily drew from classical models, principally Aristotle and Xenophon, took on a new and sharper edge. Perhaps low marriage rates fuelled the urgency of the humanist praise of marriage, and with it the popularity of texts like Barbaro's, which exalted the married state for its pleasures and "sweet conversation" (69), but also stressed the importance of selecting a wife whose blood, milk, and character would mold the virtues and qualities of her children. Here, King argues, he bucked the trends of his day, by downplaying the dowry's significance and giving the mother an important role in determining her children's qualities.

In the introduction's final section, King traces Barbaro's legacy through subsequent generations: the Latin wedding orations of the fifteenth century; the burst of Italian female literary authorship and its male supporters in the sixteenth century; and Italian humanist writers and their pro-woman stance in later centuries. The first of many print editions of the Latin text appeared in 1513; vernacular translations appeared from the 1540s...