Reconsidering Matrimonial Practices and Endogamy in the Early Modern period. The Case of Central Italy (San Marino, Romagna and Marche)

International audienceThis paper aims at reconsidering the increase in family endogamy towards the end of the early modern period that has repeatedly been stressed in historiography. What underpins our considerations is the systematic study of a vast archive documentation regarding around thirty central Italian parishes (San Marino and within the provinces of Rimini/Pesaro) that we used to entirely reconstruct their populations. Questioning the rise of endogamy between the 17th and 18th century, we cross and confront the sources by an informatical analysis of our genealogical dataset (circa 30,000 individuals) changing levels of analysis and insisting upon the necessity to set interpretations in the respective local context in order to fully understand the given data. Our results show that, when taking the whole of marriages into consideration, there is no considerable relational augmentation of marriages between close relatives in this part of Italy. Neither is there one in terms of consanguinity, nor in terms of affinity. Finally, we demonstrate how those close unions must be analyzed taking the demographic, economic and social particularities into account