Abstract
The period from the Renaissance through the Eighteenth century was a crucial time for the evolution of marriage in Europe: the institution was at the center of debate as the Catholic Church reacted to the challenges to its authority from the Protestant movement and from civil governments. In eight essays, A Cultural History of Marriage in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age provides an overview of these upheavals and their effect on couples, families, and society at large. Each chapter approaches the topic from a different angle, with thick cross-referencing assuring that the inevitable repetitions are more of an asset than a drawback, and each chapter cites primary sources alongside recent scholarship. The book is richly illustrated throughout, with a thorough general bibliography and index.
This book is part of Bloomsbury Academic's Cultural Histories Series, six-volume set that “survey[s] the social and cultural construction of specific subjects across six historical periods, broadly: Antiquity, the Medieval Age, the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Empire, the Modern Age” (Accessed 13 June 2022. https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/series/the-cultural-histories-series/). The series has covered dozens of topics ranging from the history of shopping to the history of genocide. To include the Cultural History of Marriage only makes sense given the essential role of marriage in the construction of societies both Western and non-Western. As General Series Editor for A Cultural History of Marriage from Antiquity to the Present, Joanne M. Ferraro provides a brief but cogent preface that sets out the aims of the series: these are works “designed for both students and scholars of history, gender and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and related disciplines,” written from a European perspective but whose contributors “made strenuous efforts to make world comparisons” while reaching across disciplines (xiii). Such geographical and disciplinary breadth means that the book specialists in the early modern era will inevitably find areas that deserve more study, but a series format always imposes certain constraints. Each volume uses the same eight themes, providing easy comparison among volumes with the drawback that each theme may not be equally relevant across all six time periods.
Professor Ferraro is also the editor of this volume. The distinguished group of contributors she has assembled covers the questions brought forward in each chapter well, although five out of eight authors have Italy as their primary area of study. Given that Ferraro is the author of four well-regarded monographs about early modern Venice, this preference is understandable. In her introduction, she skillfully points out those issues that affected marriage across Europe during this period and that are addressed repeatedly throughout the book: the restrictions on marriage (for example, economic necessity among the less well off, wealth conservation among the powerful); the formation of marriage during a shift from traditional, popular practice to more central control and codification by both Church and State; the resulting necessity to replace bonds agreed to privately with public ritual; the possibility of the dissolution of marriage, especially in Reformed church regimes. Countering the popular misconception that early modern marriage was always only a financial transaction among families, Ferraro emphasizes that “The norms, doctrines, and laws imposed from above differed from confession to confession, but in principle all agreed that the free consent of the bride and groom was fundamental and binding, and parents were urged not to coerce their children into arranged marriages” (13)—and this includes Eastern Orthodoxy of the Ottoman Empire, Judaism, and Islam.
Of course, as the chapters demonstrate, behind these synthetic generalizations lie complex situations. Ferraro notes that “historians have learned to be cautious about over-generalizing” (5). For example, patterns that characterize household formation changed according to region. Trends in northwestern Europe differ from those in Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, while other practices prevailed in Middle Europe (central and southern France, parts of Italy, Austria, and southern Germany), and Eastern Europe (Albania, Bulgaria, and east to European Russia) (3). The juggling act between the general and the particular continues in each chapter, with greater or lesser degrees of success.
Chapter 1, “Courtship and Ritual” by Debra Kaplan, contributes the important insight that the tensions between new theological and legal positions on the one hand and popular traditions on the other are quite similar among Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish communities, especially those in geographical proximity to one another. Kaplan also finds that “many of the marriage reforms adopted by the Catholic Church mirror the reforms adopted by Protestants” (25), especially with regard to the public nature of weddings as decreed in the Council of Trent's Tametsi decree during its last session in 1563. A crucial document of the Catholic Counter Reformations, Tametsi emphasized the need to publish banns, obtain the consent of the bride and groom, and have witnesses to the marriage ceremony and its registration, all in an attempt to combat clandestine marriage without parental or community consent. Implementation differed greatly among regions, but not so much within regions (26).
Kaplan's remarks about the persistence of traditional practices and similarities among religions within a given geographical location are taken up in Chapter 2, “Religion,” by Cecilia Cristellon. The Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent both relegated centuries-old traditions “to the sphere of marginality and deviance” (35). The biggest change was Tametsi's denial of validity to the oral promise of marriage followed by sexual relations, “a deep rupture with customary law” (39–40).
Cristellon also explores interconfessional marriages between Muslims and Christians, Christians and Jews, Catholics and Protestants (44–8). In considering separation and divorce, she sites Enlightenment debates that helped to redefine family as a natural enterprise based on affection rather than the indissoluble bond enforced by Catholic authority, which had been weakened by state intervention in the governance of marriage. Stricter regulation of marriage on the part of both church and state rather ironically promoted the modern ideal of companionate marriage.
Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer also examines the changing roles of church and civil government in Chapter 3, “State and Law.” Her excellent pan-European overview interrogates the preoccupation of Italian humanists of the fifteenth century with the place of marriage and family in civic life, placed in the context of larger questions about the relation between ruler and ruled and the very nature of salvation. Philosophers since Aristotle and Cicero had posited the necessity of stable families as the basis for a stable state; when Luther and Calvin declared that marriage was not a sacrament, the argument that it should be regulated by civil authorities took on more weight (57). At the same time, the Catholic response was to extend the role of canon law, as it did using the decrees of the Council of Trent, especially the Tametsi decree. By the Seventeenth century, “amended law and new civil, criminal, canon, and local law codes expanded the specifics of what constituted a valid marriage and outlined how couples were to enter marriage” (53), and yet “the creation of a standard public and legal definition of marriage and a process to enter into the state of matrimony took decades and centuries, depending on the region” (54). Indeed, Plummer, like Kaplan and Cristellon, highlights the persistence of popular practices and agrees that strong local norms and customs could still prevail, and that differences among regions were often more evident than differences in religious affiliation (62–3).
Plummer alludes to “a shift in moral norms,” with regard, for example, to the acceptability of premarital sex. “This criminalization of what had been acceptable steps to marriage previously is one of the more notable developments in marriage law” (67). The “new morality” is the focus of Sara F. Matthews-Grieco in Chapter 6, “Love, Sex, and Sexuality.” Sexual experimentation during courtship was the norm in the lower and middling classes before “the marriage bed became an arena in which ecclesiastical preoccupations with carnal sin and the salvation of souls joined forces with medical precepts regarding judicious and responsible procreation” (101). This lively chapter considers the lived experience of marriage more deeply than any of the others, dealing with the body, formerly valued, as it “became increasingly a source of shame” (117).
In Chapter 4, “Ties That Bind,” Anna Bellavitis begins by addressing the rather convoluted Catholic prohibitions against marriage among kin until “something changed in the eighteenth century, when marriages between relatives … increased and family ties became stronger” apparently from a desire to avoid dividing family assets (71). Bellavitis also examines political and economic alliances through marriage among elites across Europe, economic networks constructed by marriage in merchant and industrial classes, and inheritance law. The most interesting part of this chapter treats marriage among peoples colonized by Europeans, including slaves, using the example of Brazil and the processes by which indigenous marriage could be Christianized.
The dispossessed are more keenly the focus of Chapter 5, “The Family Economy,” by Jutta Sperling. Using case studies from Florence, Venice, and Lisbon, Spurling shows how “patriarchal legal systems delivered the dispossession of wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters while also highlighting the differential access to property of Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish women” (83). The difference is striking between the regimes in Florence, where upper-class women were the most disadvantaged property owners in Europe, and Portugal where women automatically inherited from their husbands and fathers, cosigned on contracts, and were entrusted with managing businesses (84). Islamic and Jewish women were also advantaged compared to women in Christian, dowry-based regimes.
Spurling also discusses the problem of child abandonment, one result of the redefinition of marital legitimacy under the new legal, religious, and moral systems described earlier in the book. Not only exploited slaves and servants but other single mothers were excluded from financial assistance from charitable organizations. Foundling homes preferred to place infants with paid wet-nurses rather than support single mothers until the late eighteenth century (94–7). This informative chapter also touches on clandestine marriage, once again the main driver behind the Council of Trent's Tametsi decree: marriages that formerly would have been considered legitimate without parental consent and a public celebration could now be put into question, leading to more single mothers and abandoned children (92–4).
In Chapter 7, “Breaking Vows,” Martin Ingram notes that before Tametsi when union by verba da presenti was permissible “it was perilously easy to enter the state of marriage. In contrast, the exit routes were few and narrow”—especially for Christians, even Protestants (120). The subtitle of the chapter, “Adultery, Marital Ill-Treatment, and Divorce in England, 1450–1650,” points to issues that have turned up in several other chapters and yet the cross-referencing is light in this case, perhaps because of the almost exclusive focus on England.
In the final chapter, “Representation,” the art historian and curator Andrea Bayer looks at the way art celebrates marriage in the Renaissance, with Italy as the prime example. Despite the intrinsic interest of descriptions of furniture, jewelry, and paintings with marital themes, this chapter is not well linked with the others, except for the observation that “Objects provided graphic assertion of the bedrock requirement of a marriage—that participants had entered into it voluntarily, by declaring that they wished it” (139). Throughout the book, the changing nature of the notion of consent is key in the transition from the relatively informal weddings typical prior to the sixteenth century to the codified ceremonies imposed by the Tametsi decree.
Indeed, Tametsi can be considered the thread that ties most of the chapters together. Showing my own disciplinary bias, I find it unfortunate that except for brief allusions in Ferraro's introduction (11) and a single paragraph in Chapters 3 (64) and 4 (80), the French monarchy's role in forcing the Council of Trent to introduce Tametsi is barely mentioned. Tametsi could also have been the basis of concluding remarks, which are absent here, a weakness of the series format. Nonetheless, A Cultural History of Marriage in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age manages to expose and explore all of the important subjects related in marriage in the early modern era, fulfilling the mission so well laid out in the introduction.