Husbands, Wives, and Concubines by Emyln Eisenach

Author:Emyln Eisenach [Eisenach, Emlyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS037090 History / Modern / 16th Century
ISBN: 9781935503446
Publisher: TrumanStateUP
Published: 2016-10-26T05:00:00+00:00

[126] GEOGRAPHY AND CLANDESTINE MARRIAGE

The majority of clandestine marriages about which there is information originated outside the city of Verona itself, in the rural villages of the diocese. The small size of the sample of suits does not permit any conclusions about the actual geographical distribution of clandestine marriages in the diocese. Most of the surviving suits, however, and thus most of the information about clandestine marriage, come from two zones of the diocese. In these regions it appears that the broad social and economic changes occurring across the Italian peninsula (as well as the rest of Europe) shaped how people used clandestine marriage.

Traditionally people have understood the territory of Verona—the boundaries of which did not exactly coincide with the diocese of Verona—to have been divided into several zones widely varying in topography and environment, and thus in agricultural practices (see map 3.1). The exact number of zones they have chosen has varied, but all rely on the basic division of mountains, hills and valleys, and plain. A division into five regions proves most useful for this analysis. From north to south, these zones are the high hills and mountains; the lakeshores; the foothills and valleys; the moraine; and the fertile low plains known as the bassa veronese.99 This work focuses on two of these zones, the high hills and mountains and the bassa veronese. The bassa and the mountain zone each produced a large number of the surviving disputes involving clandestine marriages and together they produced over two thirds of the total (see table 3.2).

In the sixteenth century, two well-recognized, long-term historical processes influenced all the zones of the diocese: the proletarianization of the peasantry and the increasing investment and interest in land by the urban noble and merchant elite. As the European population rebounded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries following the Black Death, pressure on land in rural areas, including the Veronese diocese, increased. Emigration from rural to urban areas helped somewhat to lessen this pressure, but the fragmentation of peasant holdings, which in the absence of primogeniture were divided over the generations among descendants into ever smaller and scattered pieces, continued relentlessly. Along with other responses to the population pressure, like deforestation and the reclamation of other marginal lands, this resulted in the long-term shifting of resources within—and out of—rural society, and thus in changes in rural social organization. The most notable change was the impoverishment of small landowners, who [128] increasingly lost their land to urban investors and richer peasants and began to work for others, becoming what some have called an agricultural proletariat.

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