370 anne jacobson schutte
Especially among peasants and others in the lowest orders, marriage
was often a casual transaction. Men who wanted to bed women exchanged
promises of marriage with them in the present tense, which they then
ignored. Women, usually pregnant, then went to court in an attempt to
establish the validity of what they claimed to be genuine nuptials. On the
men’s part, these promises were often conscious frauds; sometimes both
parties understood them to be jokes.66 If lower-class spouses did not get
along, they tended to separate without going to court, and one or both
subsequently established liaisons with or married others. The three mar-
riages of a 16th-century Veronese woman, Caterina Mantuanella, consti-
tute a case in point.67 Frequently, a married man who relocated formed
a second family in his new home. When a husband went away for occu-
pational reasons or to fight in a war and did not return, his wife—often
neglecting to obtain unimpeachable evidence that he had died—consid-
ered herself free to remarry. From the mid-1520s in Verona and toward
the end of the 16th century in other Venetian dioceses, when bishops and
priests began seriously to enforce the Tridentine rules on marriage, these
informal practices gradually became less common, but they never disap-
peared entirely from the scene.68
Life Status: Concubinage
Emlyn Eisenach’s study of marriage in 16th-century Verona provides the
fullest account of this practice. Drawing on cause matrimoniali, visitation
records, and prescriptive writings by unusually attentive bishops and their
collaborators, she identifies two forms. Elite concubinage involved a man
of high status keeping (tenere a sua posta) a woman of humble condi-
tion. Usually they did not cohabit, but sometimes he installed her in the
marital home. Non-elite concubinage featured a relationship between
partners of low status who for some reason could not or did not wish to
marry. Neighbors, ecclesiastical reformers, and on occasion concubinators
themselves referred to the women as “whores,” but in practice there was
matrimoniale vertente tra Giorgio Zaccarotto e Maddalena di Sicilia (Padova e Venezia
1455–1458),” pp. 175–97.
66 Ermanno Orlando, “Il matrimonio delle beffe. Unioni finte, simulate, per gioco.
Padova e Venezia, fine secolo XIV–inizi secolo XVI,” in Seidel Menchi and Quaglioni, eds.,
Trasgressioni, pp. 231–67.
67 Emlyn Eisenach, Husbands, Wives, and Concubines: Marriage, Family, and Social
Order in Sixteenth-Century Verona (Kirksville, Mo., 2004), pp. 54–57.
68 Eisenach, Husbands, Wives, and Concubines, pp. 169–76; Daniela Lombardi, Matri-
moni di antico regime (Bologna, 2001), esp. pp. 101–42, 243–357.