religious life 393
persistence.36 The decrees of the Council of Trent interrupted an ongoing
dialogue over matrimonial matters between the patriarch and the faithful.
Before Trent decreed the publicly celebrated union in church in the pres-
ence of a parish priest to be the only valid marriage, the laity had been
legitimated in either supporting or censuring a union in the presence of
ecclesiastical authorities according to parameters established by a code
of signs and communal values. The entire community was attentive to
the formation and dissolution of the couple and could be called upon to
attest to the existence of a marriage that received formal recognition in
the sentence of an ecclesiastical judge, acting as an arbiter between the
two sides. After Trent, the marriage judge needed to consider only the
respect of the necessary formal criteria that validated the bond and which
were verifiable simply by consulting the parochial registers without any
involvement of the community.
Before the Council of Trent, nuptial consent could ultimately only be
verified in conscience. This made sure that patriarchs and vicars having
to investigate the existence of a marriage entered into particularly intense
dialogues, often assuming the tone of a confession. This was particularly
true when the need to determine a party’s will brought the arbiters face
to face with young brides, sometimes even children, who were easily sub-
ject to parental authority and influence. The establishment of document-
able and systematically verifiable criteria for determining a valid marriage
deprived the patriarch and his vicars of that access to the female con-
science and transferred to confessors alone the functions, such as the veri-
fication of consent, which had previously been a terrain shared with the
ecclesiastical judge.
- Devotion
Venetian religiosity had some constant characteristics that were mani-
fested above all in terms of popular piety, and some that were more vari-
able due to the influence of historical and political contingencies. With
regard to the cult of innumerable saints that animated the Venetian
36 on the words and gestures of affection that constituted presumption of matrimony,
see Cecilia Cristellon, “Public Display of Affection. The Making of Marriage in the Venetian
Courts before the Council of Trent (1420–1545),” in sara f. Matthews, ed., Erotic Cultures of
Renaissance Italy (Burlington, Vt., 2010), pp. 173–98. on the strategies and linguistic aspects
of post-Tridentine “rape” trials, see georgia Arrivo, Seduzioni, promesse, matrimoni. Il pro-
cesso per stupro nella Toscana del Settecento (Rome, 2006).