366 anne jacobson schutte
staircases, at wells in courtyards and campi, and through windows looking
down into streets and squares and across to other apartments, neighbors
could easily see and hear what was going on in other people’s lives. Eager
to share their observations with friends and neighbors, they contributed
to an ample stock of common knowledge (pubblica voce e fama) about
people and events. When called to testify in court, they rarely hesitated to
reveal everything they knew and surmised about the principals in judicial
proceedings—not only their peers but also their betters.50
Life Status: “Regular” and “Irregular” Marriage
Among Venetian patricians, marriage in the 16th through 18th centuries
was far from universal. Legislation enacted in the 15th and early 16th
centuries, as Stanley Chojnacki has shown, mandated the careful scru-
tiny and registration of credentials for young men’s admission to official
noble status: legitimate birth to patrician fathers and patrician or at least
well-born mothers.51 Moves in the mid-16th century toward restricting to
one or or at most two the number of sons in a patrician family permit-
ted to take wives—a development that occurred all over Italy—increased
the proportion of patrician men, already in the 15th century some 43 per
cent, who never married.52 One of the reasons for this limitation may
have been strictly political: should unchecked marriage and a plethora of
progeny lead to the expansion of the ruling group, as the Milanese writer
Ludovico Settala warned in his Della ragion di stato (1627), an aristocratic
republic might degenerate into a popular regime.53 Preserving the patri-
mony so that the bulk of it would pass to a sole heir, however, constituted
an even more compelling reason for limiting marriages of both male and
female patricians. The difficulty or impossibility of paying ever-inflating
dowries—the most often cited reason for Italian elites’ arranging mar-
riages for few or none of their daughters and placing most or all of them in
convents—formed merely a subset of this compelling patrimonial logic.
Although Venetian patrician men could marry wealthy women outside
their own social set, the options for their female peers seem to have been
50 Schutte, Aspiring Saints, pp. 138, 183–84.
51 Stanley Chojnacki, “Subaltern Patriarchs: Patrician Bachelors,” in his Women and
Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore, 2000), pp. 246–
48; Alexander Cowan, Marriage, Manners and Mobility in Early Modern Venice Aldershot,
2007).
52 Chojnacki, “Subaltern Patriarchs,” p. 249.
53 Cox, “The Single Self,” p. 531.