society and the sexes in the venetian republic 369
the Church’s insistence that marriage, a contractual arrangement, neces-
sitated the free consent of both parties entering into it.62 Young women
violently opposed to their fathers’ choices often went to court in an effort
to obtain dissolution of marital unions into which they claimed to have
been forced. In 1628 Vittoria Cesana, whose father threatened to murder
her if she did not wed the patrician Giovanni Battista Barbaro, a man she
definitely did not want, had no alternative to doing so. Appalled by her
laments, Barbaro left her only three days after the wedding, whereupon
she sued for annulment of the marriage.63 Men, too, occasionally went
before the court claiming marriage by force (matrimonium meticulosum).
In the early 1460s, Alvise Soncin, a student at the University of Padua,
attempted—successfully, so incomplete records suggest—to persuade
two ecclesiastical courts that fear of Ursina Basso’s relatives had com-
pelled him to wed her.64
Some very young girls were forced to become child brides. The complex
case of the orphan Maddalena di Sicilia (legitimated daughter of the late
Cosma, a native of Catania who had moved to Padua to earn a law degree,
and his concubine) featured a competition over Maddalena’s conspicuous
inheritance. The legal battle pitted her alleged husband, the physically
handicapped Giorgio Zaccarotto, and his father against the Paduan con-
vent in which she had been placed for safekeeping. At the heart of the
controversy lay the question of whether Maddalena had married Giorgio
and then taken religious vows before her twelfth birthday.65
62 Cecilia Cristellon, “Marriage and Consent in Pretridentine Venice: Between Lay Con-
ception and Ecclesiastical Conception, 1420–1545,” Sixteenth Century Journal 39 (2008),
389–418; Cristellon, Carità e eros: Il matrimonio e la Chiesa veneziana nel Rinascimento
(1420–1545) (Bologna, 2010), pp. 185–248.
63 Joanne Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (New York, 2001), pp. 41–44;
Daniela Hacke, “ ‘Non lo volevo per marito in modo alcuno’: Forced Marriages, Generational
Conflicts, and the Limits of Patriarchal Power in Early Modern Venice, c.1580–1680,” in
Schutte, Kuehn, and Seidel Menchi, eds., Time, Space, and Women’s Lives, pp. 203–21; repr. in
Hacke, Women, Sex and Marriage in Early Modern Venice (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 89–118.
64 Giuliano Marchetti, “Il ‘matrimonium meticulosum’ in un ‘consilium’ di Bartolomeo
Cipolla (ca. 1420–1475),” in Seidel Menchi and Quaglioni, eds., Matrimoni in dubbio: Unioni
controverse e nozze clandestine in Italia dal XIV al XVIII secolo (Bologna, 2001), pp. 247–78;
Cecilia Cristellon, “Ursina Basso contro Alvise Soncin: il ‘consilium’ respinto di Bartolomeo
Cipolla e gli atti del processo (Padova e Venezia 1461–1462),” in Seidel Menchi and Qua-
glioni, eds., Matrimoni in dubbio, pp. 270–303.
65 See the following in Seidel Menchi and Quaglioni, eds., Matrimoni in dubbio: Cecilia
Cristellon, “La sposa in convento (Padova e Venezia 1455–1458),” pp. 123–48; Paola Benussi,
“Oltre il processo: itinerari di ricerca intorno al matrimonio controverso di Giorgio
Zaccarotto e Maddalena di Sicilia (Padova e Venezia 1455–1458),” pp. 149–73; and Giovanni
Minnucci, “ ‘Simpliciter et de plano, ac sine strepitu et figura iudicit’: il processo di nullità