The single self: feminist thought and the marriage market in early modern Venice

Renaissance Quarterly, Autumn, 1995 by Virginia Cox

THE POLICY OF MARRIAGE LIMITATION IN VENICE AND ITS SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS

The sixteenth century saw a decisive change in the economic life of the Venetian patriciate, a shift from the commercial activities through which the Serenissima's wealth had been accumulated to safer and less speculative investment in the farmlands of the mainland.(43) The chronology of this process, its motives and effects are still a matter for discussion: landed investment was already becoming common in the Quattrocento, and it has been suggested that, by the early Cinquecento, Machiavelli's well-known characterization of the Venetian nobility as merchants rather than genuine gentiluomini reflects an outsider's view of a reality which was already undergoing change.(44) In the early period of land purchases on the mainland, however, investment in real estate seems to have gone hand in hand with a continued commitment to commerce. The real change occurred in the later decades of the Cinquecento, when increased investment in land coincided with a large-scale withdrawal from trade.(45)

Moderata Fonte's Il merito delle donne reflects the social realities of an economy in transition. The dialogue opens with an impassioned tribute to Venice as a city of the sea, and a later passage reveals the speakers' appreciation of the "important science" of shipbuilding and their imaginative engagement with the travails of the merchant sailor.(46) There are frequent mentions as well, however, of the pleasures and pains of life in villa, ranging from expressions of concern for the tribulations of tenants in the recent bad harvests to appreciations of the dancing of local shepherdesses and gleeful anticipation of the bird-hunting season.(47)

One consequence of the economic retrenchment of which the shift to landed investment was both a symptom and a cause was an increasing preoccupation with the conservation of family wealth. This concern with wealth conservation was reflected in changes in inheritance patterns during this period. It had long been customary in Venice for a father's estate to be divided equally between his sons, who then continued to live and trade together in fraterna.(48) This practice had had advantages when Venice was a great trading power as it maximized the possibilities for entrepreneurial activity. By the late sixteenth century, however, when increasingly large portions of patrician estates were in immobili, this practice of division threatened patrimonies with dispersion. Since custom forbade a simple transition to the practice of primogeniture practiced elsewhere in Italy, the means adopted were, firstly, to entail the estate; secondly, to limit the succession to a single line of descent by ensuring--it seems by informal agreement--that only one male member of the family married.(49)

More hung on the practice of marriage limitation than simply the fortunes of individual households: the future of the Venetian patriciate as a ruling class was perceived as being at stake. The dangers that would result for the Venetian state from a failure to keep patrician marriage rates down are clearly exposed in Ludovico Settala's Della ragion di stato (1627):