Financing marriage in early modern Italy: innovative dowry funds in Florence and Bologna

Abstract

Dowering maidens was a common concern in Renaissance and Early Modern Italian cities. As urban society recognized in un-dowered young women a potential threat to its moral and social stability, what had been a pious private effort became the business of specialized agencies, with the establishment of dowry funds. This paper examines the development of marriage endowment systems from the Florentine Monte delle doti, which in the main underwrote the marriage arrangements of the elite, to the Bolognese Monte del matrimonio, which was tailored to give respectable lower income families an opportunity to assemble dowries for young girls by investing their own savings. Finally, it focuses on the broad diffusion of charitable dowry funds, which dispensed dotal bequests through careful selection and scrutiny of recipients. Helping fathers to dower their daughters, dowry funds acted as a powerful stabilizing force, shoring up the pillar of early modern Italian society, the family, where it was weakest, i.e. among the urban lower classes. At the same time they were innovative institutions, bridging kinship, charity and finance.