548 guido ruggiero
already sex in marriage seems to be sliding away from modern ways of
seeing marriage.9 But moving beyond prescriptive literature and christian
ideals, in Venice as in most other renaissance cities, sexual relationships
within marriage were colored by a number of very important social customs
that also made marriage a rather different institution from the modern one
that goes by the same name. Tellingly Valiera is described as “young” and
her husband “old” and therein lies a tale. upper class brides in renaissance
Venice were usually married shortly after they reached puberty between
approximately 12 and 15 years of age.10 Much beyond 15, an upper-class
woman began to become less marriageable and risk becoming a “zitella,”
a Venetian term indicating a woman who was unmarried and perceived
as unmarriageable. Many factors stood behind this early marriage age.
Perhaps most importantly, there was a general fear that once young girls
reached puberty they were dominated by strong and hard-to-control pas-
sions that were seen as sexual. if they acted on those passions outside of
wedlock, they lost that special sexual distinction, virginity, that was seen
as a virtual necessity for a first marriage for an upper-class woman. Part
of what stood behind this was the general concern that non-virgin brides
could contaminate the husband’s lineage with children that were not his
if she came to a marriage already pregnant by another man. adding to
this concern was a widespread notion that in intercourse where concep-
tion occurred, a woman supplied merely the matter—usually seen as
drawn from her menstrual blood—while the male provided the form—
which was contained in his semen.11 Thus a wife impregnated by another
man was not only breaking a family line of descent but also introducing
literally the very form of another family.
9 yet in catholic theology and lying behind more fundamentalist visions of marriage
and sex within marriage, the marital debt still obtains as an ideal and still explains how
sex in marriage can be without sin. of course, some theologians and most prescriptive
literature in the renaissance allowed the idea that some physical pleasure might be
enjoyed in sexual relationships within marriage, as long as the partners kept to the fore
the real purpose of sexual intercourse.
10 for a discussion of when puberty occurred in the renaissance see ruggiero,
Boundaries of Eros, pp. 13–14, 148–53. see also, for age distinctions relating to marriage,
laura Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss: Imagining Gender, Sex, and Marriage in Italian Renaissance
Comedy (Toronto, 2009); and for a comparative perspective, see Konrad eisenbichler, ed.,
The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society 1150–1650 (Toronto, 2002). see also n. 18 below.
11 for this see ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Women: A Study in the Fortunes
of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (cambridge, 1980), pp.
28–46; and Valeria finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration
in the Italian Renaissance (durham, n.c., 2003).