wayfarers in wonderland 551
returning to marriage, marrying young, being a virgin, and requiring
a large dowry meant also that marriages were seldom love matches or
based on sexual attraction. in Venice as elsewhere, they were moments of
interfamily alliance that were ideally arranged, usually by fathers or the
most important male relatives of the two families that were uniting in a
marriage alliance. ideally the negotiations for a marriage also involved
considerations of the match to be made, and both members of the couple
had formal veto power over their families’ desires that left some room for
their own. in theory it could be hoped that this would mean that a cer-
tain affection would grow up between well-matched couples, and there
is growing information to suggest that this was indeed the case for some.
in turn, the criminal records report regularly accounts of young couples
running off together to form love matches against their families’ wishes,
and ecclesiastical courts offer a number of cases where wives or husbands
attempt to annul their marriages, claiming that their consent was forced
by their families rather than given freely.15 But in fact, this meant that at
upper social levels there was little anticipation that love and passionate
desire would be a significant part of sexual relationships within marriage.
The companionate ideal of marriage that made sex within marriage not
just legitimate but meaningful and central to the emotional happiness of a
couple is a largely modern ideal. in renaissance Venice, sexual intercourse
in marriage at best might be pleasurable for some and the minor sin that
Boccaccio saw it being, although even he virtually never envisioned it as
having much of anything to do with marriage.
This rather harsh picture is softened a bit if we leave the upper-class
world of Valiera and her “old lord” husband behind to move down the
social scale. for at lower social levels in Venice the yoke of matrimony,
strange to say, was not so driven by desires to form social and economic
alliances between families and thus had more potential to be an emo-
tional alliance between partners that involved sex, pleasure, and passion.
at lower class levels, women married later, and although they were still
required to provide a dowry, they were usually seen as bringing more to
15 for adultery cases involving love, see ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, pp. 65–69; for
dissolutions of marriage based on lack of consent with the implication that there was an
ideal of love matches, see Joanne ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (new
york, 2001), especially pp. 33–68. see also the interesting essays in silvia seidel Menchi
and diego Quaglioni, eds., Matrimoni in dubbio: Unioni controverse e nozze clandestine in
Italia dal XIV al XVIII secolo (Bologna, 2001); and see the classic study by Gaetano cozzi,
“Padri, figli e matrimoni clandestine (metà sec. xVi—metà sec. xViii),” La Cultura 15
(1976), 169–212.