Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice

Oxford University Press, 2001
Studies in the History of Sexuality

Winner of the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Book Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies (2002)
Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Book Prize (2002)

This fascinating book explores stories of failed intimacies that circulated in the neighborhoods and courts of late Renaissance Venice, a city whose historical record of marital litigation is extremely rich. It captures sixteenth- and seventeenth-century individuals and authorities working either to keep the last few threads of troubled marriages from unraveling, or to untie the knots that held them together. Drawing on a wealth of previously unexamined documents-depositions, ecclesiastical inquiries, and the petitions wives and husbands presented to the Venetian Patriarchal Court to either annul their marriage vows or to live separately-Joanne Ferraro brings to life a lost world of ordinary Venetians, men and women struggling with marital conflicts against a background of religious, civil, and cultural strictures.

These strikingly detailed accounts, many animated by the first-person voices of spouses, in-laws, friends and neighbors, tell of philandering, sexual problems, domestic violence, financial pressures, and incompatibility. Ferraro allows the dramas of the court investigations to unfold as stories while developing a subtle understanding of the social contexts that influenced these strife-filled narratives. She reveals that despite the regulations of Church and state, ordinary Venetians, particularly women, had more flexibility to redirect their lives and satisfy their needs for intimacy than previously documented. This engaging book makes a significant contribution to the history of attitudes toward intimacy, domestic partnership, and marital breakup.

"In an extraordinarily important study for anyone interested in the history of marriage, Joanne Ferraro mines the richly revealing archives of Venice to analyze the 'unspoken secrets and contrived lies' of broken marriages. In a book so engaging it is hard to put down, Ferraro brings to life a colorful cast of willful and humiliated wives and of abusive and ineffectual husbands, who prove that troubles within the institution of marriage are hardly new."

--Edward Muir, Northwestern University, and author of Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta in Renaissance Italy, and Ritual in Early Modern Europe

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