Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice. .

Joanne M. Ferraro. Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice.

(Studies in the History of Sexuality.) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xix + 221 pp. index. illus. bibl. $19.95. ISBN: 0-19-514496-1.

Joanne Ferrao's study of spousal struggles in Venice between 1564 and 1650 uses newly available archives to great advantage. Her insistent and recurrent theme is the ability that women, and very occasional men, had to change their lives through the judicial processes on marital unions offered by the Venetian Patriarchs' Court. Ferraro's thread is one of agency, adding a new dimension to Renaissance selffashioning. Beyond its contribution to gender and to Venetian studies, the book contributes much to discussions of the history of sexuality and medicine, to discussions of the Reformation and early state-building, and to discussions, as well, of the material Renaissance, such as those emanating from the University of Sussex.

Until a decade ago a combination of luck and wile got one into the then uncataloged and untended archives of the patriarch of Venice, a church leader appointed by state officials. In the post-Tridentine period, the patriarch heard cases regarding the dissolution, for various reasons, of marriages, exercising new ecclesiastical control over this increasingly important legal, contractual relationship. Ferraro is the first to exploit the potential of the records of depositions taken in this court, and thus to add a new dimension to the discussion of possibilities open to Venetian women, most often of the non-patrician class. She skillfully blends these new sources with the those long available in the archives of the Venetian state, especially in her final chapter, which is a tour de force of archival sleuthing.

Ferraro's introductory chapter addresses methodological concerns of using coded documents, and throughout the book she reminds the reader of problems in using these sources. The result is a demonstration of the appropriateness of this language, as the testimonies clearly are "constructed," there are predictable "tropes," there clearly are texts and "subtexts." Ferraro gives enough extended translations of her texts to demonstrate the ways in which they are responses to judicial expectations and community standards. Even "judicial gaze" (24), which might raise some eyebrows, works here, as does "discourse of impotence" (70). She sets up the expectations of the procurators and the patriarch by analysis, not only of the content of the canon law governing post-Tridentine marriage, its annulment, and separations--the two main categories of cases--but more important, perhaps, of its language. The testimonies can be shown to be a response to the latter. The constructions of texts in response to texts is a fugal and/ or contrapuntal dance.

Ferraro's first chapter's introduction to Venice, and to its magistrates and their records, is elegant, in the sense of a mathematical proof--light, lucid, and spare. It tells the reader all that is necessary to know in order to follow the argument, which makes the book unusually available to students and non-historians. Historians and Venetianists, however, will nor feel condescended to and may themselves want to borrow the excellent parish map.

The 1563 Tametsi decree of the Council of Trent established the grounds for the termination, through annulment or separation, of a marriage. Its language and provisions, alongside that of its canon law interpreters, determined the form and content of the petitions heard in the patriarchal court. Chapter 2, on forced marriage, and chapter 3, on sexual inabilities and non-consummation, address the two basic grounds for dissolution. Throughout, there is a sustained comparison, in both text and footnotes, with other Italian city-states and with Catholic and Protestant cities to the north, adding a important dimension of Reformation history to her discussions.

Chapter 3, which discusses cases in which sexual dysfunction is the basis for marriage dissolutions, is ground-breaking. The exchanges between the clerics and the petitioners, as they try to establish the reality and nature of impotence and barrenness, offer remarkable insights into the general level of sexual discussion and the role clergy as marriage/sexual counselors. They also deliver unusual insights, when interpreted by Ferraro, into societal expectations of women's and men's sexual selves. Chapter 4 takes the reader further into the realities of Venetian sexuality, with its endogamous patrician families, dealing with concubines and courtesans before the patriarchal court. Again, in keeping with Ferraro's theme, these are women who sought to change their lives through the agencies the stare and church offered them, and often did.

When the marriage disputes arrive at things dotal and material, the state courts are the first level of contestation. In chapters 5 and 6, Ferraro uses secular Venetian court records which dealt with abusive or neglectful spouses and with property. Nonetheless, when dowry disputes remained unresolved, the case often drifted again into the patriarchs' court. The material side of married life--possessions, dresses, pearls, etc.--is cataloged carefully by both sides to show neglect, either of the wife or of the husband's budget. The concluding chapter is a virtuosa performance, as Ferraro illustrates all her themes, including the difficulties in using legal documents, in pursuit of a single marital entanglement.

The first generation of American historians to try to reach women took the field of Venetian Renaissance at its then current state, with its study of political and intellectual elites, and tried to hear women's voices. Stanley Chojnacki relied on the documents of the leading class; his work of twenty years is newly collected in Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore, 2000). Margaret King's definitive study of the intellectual elite, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton, 1986), led her to locate women among the humanists, as in King and Albert Rabil, Her Immaculate Hand (Binghamton, NY, 1983), and arguably has led to the University of Chicago Press' "Other Voices" series, the latter artfully used by Ferraro.

However a second generation, in one case quite literally, has tried to push out from the elite center toward women on the peripheries of Venetian life and to place them in their institutional setting, whether the informal institutions of neighbor and class or the formal institutions of convent and house of refuge. Monica Chojnacka does the former in Working Women in Early Modern Venice (Baltimore, 2001), Jutta Sperling the latter in Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Chicago, 1999). This broader social context for women's lives is further expanded by Ferraro's use of mostly non-patrician documents to study the age-old institution of marriage. Ferraro's own evolution from her first book, Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580-1650: The Foundations of Power in the Venetian State (Cambridge, 1993), to Marriage Wars reflects this general trend among American Venetianists.

The patriarchal archives, newly opened to scholarly access, offer many avenues of investigation. Scholars can be grateful to Ferraro for opening up a vein of documentation and showing how it may be mined. Those who have studied the Renaissance because of its high culture of humanism and art may be dismayed by a discussion of such matters; others will welcome the added dimension of humanity, with all its complexity and complexes, which Ferraro has added to our common pursuit of Renaissance studies.