society and the sexes in the venetian republic 373
servants, especially those with children still at home, needed new wives to
run their houses and care for young ones. Furthermore, both widows and
widowers might well crave companionship and a licit outlet for sexual
urges.
As noted earlier, nearly half the patrician men in Venice never mar-
ried, most because family economic strategies precluded their doing so,
some because they chose to remain bachelors—which did not of course
prevent their keeping concubines. In part, perhaps, because they appear
to have died at an earlier age, on average they held fewer, less impor-
tant government offices than their married counterparts. Given that “the
patriarchal husband and father [was] the ideal type in patrician culture,”
bachelors constituted “a second-echelon element,” playing instrumental
roles resembling more closely those of their married sisters than those of
their married brothers.73
Patrician women who desired to remain nubile but did not wish to
become nuns had only two alternatives: remaining at home and eventu-
ally moving in with their married brothers as, in effect, unpaid servants;
or becoming unvowed and uncloistered religious. A few writers of the late
16th century sought to rationalize and gain recognition for this “third sta-
tus.” In a short treatise issued in 1577, Bishop Agostino Valier of Verona,
calling those who elected it dimesse (modest or humble ones), assigned
them to “a second perfect grade,” just below that of nuns. Two years later,
the plural noun began to be capitalized when the Observant Franciscan
Antonio Pagani founded the Congregation of the Dimesse. This unclois-
tered institute, similar to the Company of St Ursula and following the
same rule, spread rapidly in Venetian territory.74 Since the possibility of a
fully secular independent status for single women, eloquently articulated
in the Venetian writer Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne (1600), would
have required an independent income and “a room [or better, residence]
of one’s own,” it remained only a dream.75
At least to my knowledge, the proportion of male and female non-elites
who never married is impossible to say. Some but certainly not all sol-
diers and sailors remained single. That marriage was a requirement for
73 Chojnacki, “Subaltern Patriarchs,” quoted phrases at pp. 247, 252.
74 Gabriella Zarri, “The Third Status,” in Schutte, Kuehn, and Seidel Menchi, eds.,
Time, Space, and Women’s Lives, pp. 181–99, quoted phrase at p. 189; Cox, “The Single Self,”
pp. 544–50.
75 Cox, “The Single Self,” pp. 564–69, 576; Moderata Fonte [Modesta Pozzo], Il merito
delle donne (1660), ed. Adriana Chemello (Mirano [VE], 1988), pp. 17–23.