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Marriage, Manners and Mobility in Early Modern Venice. By Alexander Cowan

Alexander Cowan’s book sets out to examine upward social mobility through marriage, its meanings and its consequences for political as well as private lives and behaviours. Between 1589 and 1699, some 500 women applied to the Venetian magistracy of the Avogaria di Comun for permission to marry a patrician. Not any kind of woman could become the wife and mother of a patrician: in 1422 a law excluded from membership of the Great Council all sons of patricians whose mothers were either slaves or servant girls. Controls were tightened even further in the law of 1506, which established the Libro d’Oro: the identity of a patrician’s mother had to be established at birth, not when he came to enter the Great Council. The law of 1589 went on to exclude the sons of women born of fathers and grandfathers who had exercised ‘mechanical arts’ and of women of immoral life. Not only were applicants to put forward written evidence to justify women’s claims to higher social status; the Avogaria was also to carry out a formal trial through inquisition, using every possible type of evidence to bring out detailed knowledge of the status of a woman and of her father and mother. Not surprisingly, women who applied came mostly from the upper levels of Venetian society: their fathers had ‘civic’ occupations and shared the lifestyle and networks of patricians. Cowan discusses the ambiguous definition of the ‘mechanical arts’ in early modern cities. In Venetian mercantile society, long-distance trade activities were honourable occupations and merchants declared that they went to their shops only to ‘supervise the sales’. Around one in nine of all the cases which passed before the Avogadori concerned women whose fathers were patricians but who had been unable to take up patrician status themselves because they were born of concubinal relationships. It appears that illegitimacy was far from a stigma: these ‘natural daughters’ had been educated in convents alongside the daughters of the elite. Their mothers came from all social groups and even from the upper classes. Nevertheless, it is quite surprising that a social group that based its identity on honourable and legitimate birth could accept as wives and mothers women born of illegitimate relationships. Indeed this demonstrates that, despite the law of 1589, what was really important was the father’s identity and that these girls were above all the daughters of patrician men. Concubinage was a relatively common experience (even after the Council of Trent) because patrician marriage depended on family strategies and not all sons, and certainly not all daughters, could marry. The question arises as to why patrician men chose to marry ‘outsider’ wives, leaving so many legitimate patrician girls unmarried and cloistered in monasteries. Of course, the daughter of a merchant could sometimes bring to an impoverished patrician family an exceptionally high dowry, but this was not always the case. More generally, it seems that the availability of outsider brides may have permitted larger numbers of patricians to marry and to compensate for an absence of patrician wives. The reasons for this absence were less demographic than economic: a patrician girl’s dowry was too high and many families could not afford to pay it. The presence of these outsider women widened the marriage market for patricians, giving them access to new sources B O O K R EV IE W S