wayfarers in wonderland 547
have been the sites of festive gatherings where a young foreigner could
find young Venetian noblewomen at play and courting. We will return
to such convents later in this essay, but for now the point is that in the
wonderland that young Giulio sought, things sexual were not quite as they
might at first seem or we might expect from a modern perspective.
a similar question might be asked about the noble Valiera who had
attracted Giulio’s love. What was a young newlywed doing flirting with
foreigners in the first place, never mind at a convent party? according to
the ideal of marriage in renaissance Venice, and the renaissance more
generally, she should have been safely locked up at home pregnant or,
better yet, already raising the children that would be her contribution to
her husband and her marital family. her days of youthful parties, in theory
always limited and carefully chaperoned, should have ended with her mar-
riage to an older, powerful, and important noble, referred to simply in the
comedy as “the old lord.” yet Valiera’s youth and her husband’s reported
old age open a window on another significant and slightly off-kilter reality
of the sexual life of renaissance Venice, marriage. Marriage, of course, was
the institution that prescriptive literature and christian theology saw as
the ideal place for sex, for the “yoke of matrimony,” as it was often referred
to at the time, disciplined the dangerous passions associated with sexual
desire and provided the nucleus of the family that would raise and support
the children produced by the “correct” use of sex.8 according to christian
theology, within marriage those passions were so carefully contained in
fact that they might not even quite fit the label of sex. Theologians follow-
ing in the footsteps of church fathers such as st augustine had long held
that sexual intercourse within marriage was for procreation alone and was
governed by the doctrine of marital debt. as a debt or service without pas-
sion or pleasure beyond the pleasure of meeting God’s goal of reproducing
and filling the earth, the marital debt was hardly sex at all but, rather, a
form of contractual obligation. from this perspective, what might be seen
as the home of correct sex, marriage, even in the physical intercourse of
partners, ideally at least was more about duty than the erotic.
8 for a brief discussion of the yoke of matrimony see Guido ruggiero, The Boundaries
of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (oxford, 1985), pp. 14–15; for a quick
overview of the more general vision of the marital unit as the social and moral base of
society in the renaissance see ruggiero, “Marriage, love and sex,” especially pp. 10–16. for
a more general discussion, see daniela lombardi, Matrimoni di antico regime (Bologna,
2001); and Joanne ferraro’s overview essay “family and clan in the renaissance World,”
in Guido ruggiero, ed., A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance (oxford, 2002), pp.
173–87.