The edited collection Marriage in Premodern Europe: Italy and Beyond brings together eighteen essays that explore the social and legal limits of marriage during the late medieval and early modern period. Jacqueline Murray states in her introduction that “marriage was and is a mutable institution that is manifest in myriad forms” (28). She believes that this is particularly important today as North Americans debate the legal limits of marriage in their own society, grounding their arguments in the historical traditions of marriage. The historical evidence, she asserts, demonstrates that people have been pushing, looking for holes in, and outright transgressing the bounds of what families, societies, and laws deem to be appropriate marriage for centuries.
Several essays explore the topic at the level of the individual, as individuals sought to evade social norms in pursuing their own marital goals. These include Elena Brizio’s article on a sixteenth-century Sienese widow who contracted a marriage that was likely legal but certainly unacceptable to her family and the entire city. William E. Smith III’s subject, a seventeenth-century Puritan woman, similarly enters into a socially unacceptable union. Her spouse, however, is Jesus, with whom she enters a mystical union while still married to her earthly spouse. In both cases, the women encountered heavy censure from their communities.
In other essays, authors focus on larger segments of the society that use unconventional marriage patterns. Although most Italian elites married within a narrow community from the same city, Katalin Prajda, Ersie Burke, Matteo Soranzo, and P. Renée Baernstein all focus on Italian elites practicing unconventional exogamy beyond the geographic community. In each case, exogamy was intended in large part to anchor a foreigner in a new community. Similarly, Shennon Hutton, Heather Parker, and Mauro Carboni focus on families or segments of society with approaches to marriage that are in some way unconventional; intermarriage between Flemish nobles and wealthy burghers, a Scottish noble who did not pursue court marriages, and Bolognese women with an unusual amount of power in their marriages to often-absent merchants. In all of these instances, the end goal was consolidating and building power for the family. While most elites did this by marrying within their small community, these case studies highlight families that used different routes to the same ends.
Unlike individual women who rejected social conventions, larger groups headed by men had an easier time maintaining their respectability. This does not mean, though, that new or unconventional marriages did not pose problems. Jennifer Mara DeSilva examines tension within the Papal Office of Ceremonies on the occasion of marriages in the popes’ families. Reiner Leushuis’s fascinating essay similarly explores the ambiguities surrounding marriage, but focuses instead on the linguistic ambiguities of clandestine marriages in the mid-sixteenth-century novellas written by Matteo Bandello, a Dominican. In both cases, unconventional or questionable marriages create an opening for the breakdown of social norms more broadly, much to the horror of those seeking to uphold those norms.
The collection of essays is decidedly interdisciplinary, with contributors from religious studies, modern languages, and art history, as well as history. Particularly noteworthy in this respect is Sally Hickerson’s essay, which uses architecture, coinage, and archival records of the Duke of Mantua’s marriage to argue for the marginality of his foreign bride during his life and her importance after his death. The collection also includes the work of numerous scholars — many of whom are at the beginning of their career — who have made promising archival finds and used innovative approaches. The result is a fascinating array of case studies.
While the pieces do a great deal on their own, they leave it to the reader to connect the essays to one another and to Murray’s claims about the historical variety of marriage. This is unfortunate as there is a great deal of common ground between the essays and Murray’s argument, which is an important one. Exploring this common ground would have broadened the appeal of the individual essays to a wider audience and also helped with the cohesion of the volume as a whole.
That said, the collection is a useful resource on the topic of marriage but also on travel and migration, women, the intersection of legal and social restrictions, and the importance and permeability of social boundaries in the early modern period.
