Women's reputation and marriage disputes in Protestant and Catholic Europe, 1500-1800

The essay deals with religious influences on marriages and families at the time of Protestant and Catholic Reform (16th - 18th centuries). In that period a new model of marriage emerged. No more a private act, which didn't require a specific religious ceremony, marriage became a public ceremony in front of the church, and pastors or priests assumed a central role in it. Public authorities imposed a stricter control over the formation of the couples. Recent scholarship in the field enlarged from a national toward an European perspective. A comparative approach allowed a focus on similarities, more than differences between Protestant and Catholic reformers. Scholars stressed that reformers shared the same goals: to impose a public and sacral wedding ritual, to punish sexuality outside marriage, to maintain the family cohesion (divorce, introduced by protestant reformers, was rare). Comparison needs to be further enlarged. The essay considers some major Protestant and Catholic European countries in order to argue about: 1. The competition/collaboration among different power systems to discipline marriages and sexual behaviors: families and kinships, neighbourhoods and local communities, state and church courts, calvinist concistories, etc. The legal pluralism and the multiplicity of control paths need to be taken into account: so we can highlight the disciplinary efforts, but we can also focus on demands for justice issued by both women and men. One can argue that in a context of legal pluralism men and women were able to promote strategies in order to guard their social and sexual reputations. 2. The widespread popular resistance to the disciplining of premarital sex. The binding character of the marriage promise explains that resistance. In the medieval canon law the exchange of the promise constituted the first step in establishing the marriage bond, so that sexual intercourses were largely tolerated, because they presumed a forthcoming wedding. One turned to an ecclesiastical judge to compel her or his partner to the final step, the cohabitation, or to a definitive break. It was primarily pregnant women who asked for the enforcement of a promise. Canon law offered a concrete protection for seduced and abandoned women. This issue is a crucial one in order to understand the role of sexual honor in matrimonial conflicts, in Mediterranean Europe as well as in Northern European countries. Using the language of canonical marriage promise, women protected their reputation. The essay highlights how Protestant and Catholic authorities tried to abolish or limit that ancient legal guardianship of women, and how women reacted. Archival sources: matrimonial disputes in ecclesiastical and civil courts in Florence, Italy (16th -18th century). Printed sources: legal and theological treatises. Secondary literature on Reformation and Catholic marriages in Germany, Switzerland, Holland, France, Spain and Italy