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Do you take this woman... Marriage in the Renaissance

© Anika Scott

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.