552 guido ruggiero
a marriage, especially skills that might contribute to a family’s survival.
Marriages were often still arranged, but there was also more room for a
form of courtship that allowed the individuals and families involved to
evaluate how a pairing might work even at an emotional level. in fact, it
seems that sex before marriage was often an option with young couples
experimenting with sexual relationships, often in the name of love. usu-
ally this turned on a declaration of love and a promise of marriage by
the young man in return for sexual intercourse. if pregnancy occurred,
in theory, the couple married. This probably followed similar patterns of
premarital sex in the countryside—many lower-class workers were recent
immigrants to Venice—and there family and neighbors usually stepped in
to make sure that promises were kept. in a city like Venice, however, the
criminal records demonstrate that at lower class levels especially, where
larger family structures were weaker or nonexistent, it was relatively easy
for young men to disappear if they decided not to honor their promise.
still, at this level of society from the 15th century on, we find in the Vene-
tian criminal records much more discussion of love in marriage and many
accounts of people running off from unhappy relationships to build new
ones based on love and sexual attraction.16
While Valiera, as a young bride and a newlywed, was almost certainly
not much older than 15, her husband, as noted earlier, was labeled “old.”
old was a rather vague and relative term then as now, but in Venice for the
upper classes it implied someone well along in their forties at the young-
est and more likely someone quite a bit older.17 This suggests another
aspect of marriage that made it a considerably different arrangement than
one normally associates with the institution today. husbands were signifi-
cantly older than their spouses: at the upper class levels men usually had
to wait to marry until their late twenties or early thirties and at lower class
levels until their early twenties. This meant that at upper class levels the
difference in age between spouses ranged from around 14 years and up
to 20 years or more, while for the lower classes the disparity could be as
few as three or four but was often more. Given high death rates in child-
birth for women and significant rates of remarriage for upper-class men,
16 for this, see ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, pp. 70–88; and ruggiero, Binding Passions,
pp. 24–129.
17 for age distinctions in Venice, see robert finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice
(new Brunswick, n.J., 1980), pp. 130–34; and chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance
Venice, pp. 227–43; for a more general discussion of old age, see ruggiero, Machiavelli in
Love, pp. 109–10, 122–25, 155–62, 203–205; and creighton Gilbert, “When did a Man in the
renaissance Grow old?” Studies in the Renaissance 14 (1967), 7–32.