| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Joanne M. Ferraro. Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice. (Studies in the History of Sexuality.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. xi, 221.

In Family and Public Life in Early Modern Brescia, 1580–1650: The Foundations of Power in the Venetian State (1993), Joanne M. Ferraro focused in on several themes that bridged the political and the social: to what extent the Brescian republic was able to maintain its own institutions under Venetian domination; how the elite maintained power; how families manipulated marriage and property arrangements to secure social and political power. Ferraro's new book has a narrower focus. It is not concerned with the state, or with families, or very much with men. It is a study of the attempts at self-determination before civil and patriarchal courts by Venetian women caught in failed marriages in the period 1563–1650. Its message is that these women exhibited energy and resourcefulness in seeking their rights and liberty and were often successful in predicaments that, despite the different issues of long ago (strict sexual regulation, intense religiosity), often appear surprisingly modern. She executes this mission with admirable lucidity and treats the reader along the way to some thirty narratives of private life that are precious in their detail and vigor. 1

Ferraro's examination of the 210 fully documented investigations by the patriarchal court during an eighty-seven-year period looks at women of all social groups from the nobility to the common prostitute. The women had three main objectives. The first was to gain an annulment of a failed marriage on the grounds that the marriage was coerced (through parental threats of violence or disinheritance), or that it was not consummated, or that the spouse was bigamous. The second was to gain a decree of separation, without a dissolution of the marriage, on the grounds of spousal violence or failure to provide support (food, clothing, appurtenances pertaining to rank). The third was to compel the spouse to respect his wife's dowry rights. . . .

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