Download WORLD HISTORY AST # 23 Marriage in the Renaissance

WORLD HISTORY
Greer
ASSIGNMENT #23
DO NOT WRITE ON THIS HANDOUT! IT IS PART OF A CLASS SET!
INSTRUCTIONS: Read this handout carefully. Write a three-paragraph essay comparing/contrasting
marriage during the Renaissance with marriage in our own time (what you know of it). Be sure to use
standard English. Punctuation, grammar, and spelling ALWAYS count!
Do You Take This Woman...Marriage in the Renaissance
Ah, June...If spring is the time when the young turn their thoughts to love, June is the month when many couples
make their love legal. Wedding bells may be ringing across the globe, but how did the people of Renaissance Italy
celebrate this very personal, very public, and very crucial ceremony?
Much of the information we have on marriage comes from descriptions of weddings of wealthy or noble people-hardly
typical of an everyday Italian in the Renaissance. But there were some common factors between the wealthy and the poor
who entered the bond of matrimony.
Choosing a partner had little to do with love and much to do with opportunism. For the wealthy and powerful,
marriage was a prime weapon of diplomacy. Mercenary general Francesco Sforza married a daughter of the ruling
Visconti family in Milan. When he took power in the city, he used that marriage as a justification for establishing his own
dynasty.
In most cases, the parents of young people negotiated a contract, which hammered out the conditions of the
dowry. The dowry was something of a nest egg the bride brought to the marriage. It often became a good part of her
husband's family's assets. A marriage contract laid out how much the dowry would be, when it would be delivered and
how much of it would be returned to the bride or her family in the event that the husband died.
Maids and other girls who worked as servants sometimes had contracts that bid them work a certain number of years
before the master paid them a modest dowry. The poorest girls with no financial support could appeal to the charitable
brotherhoods that existed in many Italian cities at the time. In Florence, Venice and elsewhere, these charities built
hospitals, visited the condemned in prison, and sometimes gathered together funds to provide dowries for poor girls. For
without a dowry, a girl had little chance of finding a husband.
The couple itself may have met briefly, with a chaperone of course, or perhaps they glimpsed one another only
from afar. Wealthier girls sat in the windows of their houses and the young men passed in the street below-a Romeo and
Juliet situation that existed in urban Italy because of the strict limits wealthier girls had on their movements. By age 12 or
so, noble girls could only go out of the house for church or family occasions, and then only with an escort. Dropping
handkerchiefs and scarves from the windows of their houses were often the only ways these sheltered girls made contact
with potential beaux.
In less wealthy families, a girl may have worked outside the home, but marriage was still something that both sets
of parents had to agree to. Many sources report that on average, girls were married by 18, while men tended to be in their
mid or late 20s.
Once a contract was negotiated, there were several stages before a bride moved into her husband's home. In
Tuscany, there were three stages. The husband first took an oath that he would take the lady in question as his wife. Then,
in the presence of a notary, the husband would give the blushing bride a gold or gold-plaited ring. By the 11th century or
so, marriage had become the only sacrament that didn't require a priest. After the dowry was delivered, the husband would
send a receipt to the bride's family, and the girl would go off to her new home. It smacks of a financial transaction, a
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purchase of a bride, but Italians at the time thought that love was something that grew as a husband and wife lived
together. Finances at the start of a marriage were more important than sentiment.
The wife was required to have children. If she did and her husband died, she found herself in an excruciating
situation. Beyond the grief, she had to make a choice: leave her husband's family with her dowry but without her children;
or stay as a widow with her children in her husband's family, unable to return to her own family or marry again. Widows
could not legally take children from a previous marriage into a new marriage. This unfair legal system produced quite a
large population of widows who had to be supported either by their husband's family, their own family or charitable
organizations. Few women were self supporting. Being a woman in the past was even harder than it is today.
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