The Power to Decide: Battered Wives in Early Modern Venice^*

Abstract

Historians of the Family in Renaissance Europe have devoted much attention to its patriarchal orientation. For the northern Italian cities, intense monographic study of elite behavior has illuminated the guiding principles behind strategies that preserved and enhanced family status. Those principles also occupy a prominent position in the prescriptive writings of contemporary jurists, humanists, and moralists; from them historians have argued that women's powers of decision in the urban environment of Renaissance Italy were severely limited. Similar conclusions have been reached for the Reformation period.

Sleeping with the Enemy: Infertility and Wife Murder in a Miracle of St. Peter Martyr

“…Another type of source scholars have examined are women's petitions for separation on the basis of marital cruelty. On these petitions, see Ferraro (1995) and Guzzetti (1998). 6 On this issue, see Dean (2004).…”

‘A king in his own household’: domestic discipline and family violence in early modern Europe reconsidered

“…On the question of the church court versus secular jurisdiction, the findings show that women had a very high success rate of obtaining a divorce or separation in the church courts while the secular courts were reluctant to acknowledge assault as a single cause for separation (Lottin, 1974;Phillips, 1980, pp. 108-124;Ferraro, 1995;Roper, 1989, pp.185-194;Williams, 1993;Muravyeva, 2011). 3.…”