* Much of the material used in this essay was gathered in Venice in 1970 with the support of a grant from the American Philosophical Society, to which I express my thanks. I would also like to thank my colleagues, Professor Louise Tilly and Professor Stanley Brandes of, respectively, the History and the Anthropology Departments of Michigan State University, for reading an earlier draft of this essay.

1 Cecchetti, B., ‘La donna nel medioevo a Venezia’, Archivio veneto 2 (1886), 33–69 Google Scholar, 307-349. This essay is a rather loosely organized series of descriptions of various aspects of the feminine situation in Venice. Although Cecchetti applies little analysis, there is a good deal of interesting and useful material, culled from archival sources, in the essay.

2 Ibid., p. 344.

3 E. Power, ‘The Position of Women’, in The Legacy of the Middle Ages, eds. G. C. Crump and E. F.Jacob (Oxford, 1932), p. 433; Herlihy, D., ‘Land, Family and Women in Continental Europe, 701-1200’, Traditio 2 (1962), 89 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Herlihy's more comprehensive recent statement, Women in Medieval Society. The Smith History Lecture, 1971 (Houston, 1971).

4 M. Petiot, as quoted in P. Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York; paperback edition, n.d.), p. 356.

5 See R. Goldthwaite, ‘The Florentine Palace as Domestic Architecture’, American Historical Review, LXXII (1972), 1011. Discussing household relations during this period, David Herlihy notes the contemporary view that the upbringing of children was ‘too much dominated by women”, with unfortunate results for the children's characters. In any case, Herlihy goes on, a wife, usually years younger than her husband, ‘enjoyed a more intimate, and usually a longer contact with her children’; moreover, wives normally survived into a grandmotherly widowhood, during which they ‘lived with their married sons, aided in the management of their homes and the raising of their children’. Herlihy, does not, however, state this as a recent development. ‘Some Psychological Roots of Violence in the Tuscan Cities’, in Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities, 1200-1500, ed. Martines, L. (Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1972), pp. 148–149 Google Scholar.

6 On women and the effect of Germanic and Roman law on them, see Herlihy, ‘Land, Family and Women’, pp. 89-91; Pertile, A., Storia del diritto italiano, 2nd ed. (Turin, 1894)Google Scholar, III 232-244; and above all the monograph of Ercole, F., ‘L'istituto dotale nella pratica e nella legislazione statutaria dell'Italia superiore,’ Riuista italiana per le scienze giuridklie 2 (1908), 191–302 Google Scholar; XLVI (1910), 167-257 (I shall abbreviate the two parts of this article ‘Istituto dotale’, I, and ‘Istituto dotale’, II). There is also some useful information on the property rights of women in Brandileone, F., ‘Studi preliminari sullo svolgimento storico dei rapporti patrimoniali fra coniugi in Italia’, in Scritti di storia del diritto priuato (Bologna, 1931), 1 Google Scholar, 229-319.

7 The rules governing succession to intestate individuals are found in the Venetian statutes. I use the following edition: Volumen statutorem, legum, ac iurium D. Venetorum . . . (Venice, 1564). The succession rules are in Bk. rv, chs. 24-27, pp. 70V-74V.

8 The main source on the fraterna is C. Fumagalli, 77 diritto di fraterna nella giurisprudenza da Accursio alia codificazione (Turin, 1912). See also Besta, E., Lafamiglia nella storia del diritto italiano (Milan, 1962), pp. 207–209 Google Scholar; Pertile, Storia del diritto, III, 282; and, on Venice, Ferro, M., Dizionario del diritto cotnune e veneto (Venice, 1779) v, 276–278 Google Scholar.

9 ‘… filie … sint contente dote sua… .’ Volumen statutorum, Bk. rv, ch. 25, p. 73V. See also Ercole, ‘Istituto dotale,’ 1, 212-222.

10 This question has been discussed most recently, and with full bibliographical references, by F. C. Lane, ‘The Enlargement of the Great Council of Venice’, in Florilegium Historiale: Essays Presented to Wallace K. Ferguson, eds. J. G. Rowe and W. H. Stockdale (Toronto, 1971), esp. pp. 252 ff. On the degree of restrictiveness of the measures, see S. Chojnacki, ‘In Search of the Venetian Patriciate: Families and Factions in the Fourteenth Century”, in Renaissance Venice, ed. J. R. Hale (London, 1973), pp. 52-58. Throughout this essay, my use of the terms ‘family”, ‘lineage”, and ‘clan’ is ramer precise. ‘Family' refers to the conjugal (or nuclear or elementary) domestic group made up of parents and children, married or unmarried. ‘Lineage’ is a consanguineal kin group whose members' knowledge of their relationships with one another stems from their knowledge of their descent from a common ancestor; a branch of a clan, for example, may be a lineage.‘Clan’ is a consanguineal kin group whose members exhibit a sense of community, but whose common ancestor is too far back in the past to be traced accurately; hence clan members’ precise relationships to each other are often not known; the older Venetian patrician clans conform to this sense. Cf. R. Fox, Kinship and Marriage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 36-40, 49-50; and Murdock, G.P., Social Structure (New York- London, 1949) pp. 1 Google Scholar ff., 46-75.

11 The evolving requirements for demonstration of patrician status are in Archivio di Stato, Venice (henceforth, ASV), Avogaria di Comun, Reg. 14, fs. 3r-12v; and in Biblioteca Marciana, Venice (henceforth, BMV), codici italiani, classe vii, 196 (8578), fs. ir-5r. Some of the legislation is summarized in Merores, M., ‘Der grosse Rat von Venedig und die sogenannte Serrata vom Jahre 1297’, Viertaljahrschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 2 (1928), 76–81 Google Scholar; Lane, ‘The Enlargement’, pp. 254-258; Chojnacki, ‘In Search’, pp. 52-53.

12 On class-consciousness among the patricians, see Cecchetti, B., ‘I nobili e il popolo di Venezia’, Archivio veneto 2 (1872), 428 Google Scholar ff.

13 ASV, Archivio notarile, Testamenti, Busta (all henceforth abbreviated NT) 571, Giorgio Gibellino, ‘carte varie’, dated 28 April 1401. Another example: in a will of 1416 Nicolo di Giovanni Morosini instructed that his unmarried sister be given some money so that she could marry ‘cum honore et prout congruit conditionem domus mee honorificentius’. NT 1234, Francesco Sorio, no. 509.

14 The notarial records are full of evidence of such affinal relationships. See below, pp. 181-183 and notes.

15 The sample is taken from a group of 305 wills written by members of the Morosini clan or by wives of Morosini men. I simply selected the first fifty married males and the first fifty married females alphabetically. The total number of bequests is 235 for the men, 215 for the women. The wills are in various funds of the ASV, especially NT; Archivio notarile, Cancelleria inferiore (henceforth abbreviated CI); and the commissarie in the archive of the Procuratori di S. Marco (abbreviated PSM).

It should be noted that in several cases one testator (or testatress) wrote more than one of die wills in the sample. Thus the fifty women's wills were written by diirty-seven women, and the fifty men's wills were written by forty-four men. For present purposes, however, the way legacies were finally paid is less important dian testators’ intentions. And the evidence of wills written at different points in die testators’ life cycles and in those of dieir beneficiaries makes the sample even more representative. See also the following paragraph.

16 This can be seen more easily in tabular form:

It should be noted diat diese bequests to kinsmen dominated in women's wills. Occasionally, a woman would make a small bequest to a friend—e.g., Orsa Morosini's 1425 legacy of twenty ducats to ‘amice mee’ Chiara Contarini (CI 24, Rolandino Bernardo, 16, c. 75V, ho. 209). But except for such rare exceptions, and more frequent nonkinship bequests listed in the category of pious charity, most feminine bequests remained within the web of kinship.

17 The specificity of men's bequests to children, as compared with the generality in women's wills, suggests that men had more specific plans for the economic destinies of their children. See the following paragraph.

18 See Pertile, A., Storia del diritto italiano, 2nd ed. (Turin, 1893)Google Scholar, IV, 128-133; Ferro, Dizionario, rv, 316-320. This argument is re-inforced by the fact that men's bequests to mothers and sisters outnumbered those to fathers and brothers by 16-4. For thefraterna in action in Venice, see Lane, F. C., ‘Family Partnerships and Joint Ventures in the Venetian Republic’, Venice and History (Baltimore, 1966)Google Scholar p. 37 and passim.

19 Two of the women and four of the men with living spouses mentioned previous marriages. It should be noted that women married younger than men did and tended to survive their husbands more frequently than the reverse; this was a general trend, not just reflected in thesewills, so widowed women would tend to be younger than widowed men. See above, p. 177, n. 5 and n. 57.

20 On the developmental cycles of families, see the comments of Meyer Fortes in Ins 'Introduction’ to Goody, J., ed., The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 2–4 Google Scholar, and elsewhere in the volume. See also P. Laslett's ‘Introduction’ to Household and Family in Past Time, eds. P. Laslett and R. Wall (Cambridge, 1972), PP- 32-34.

21 Women were legally entided to full restitution of their dowry upon the death of their husbands; however, many men still specifically authorized repayment of the dowry in the wills, presumably to spare their future widows the inconveniences involved in the dowry restitution procedure. In addition, large numbers of men made bequests to their wives beyond restoring the dowry, as an inducement to them not to remarry, so that the children of the marriage would be cared for by their mother, and without a stepfather from another lineage; in such bequests the condition diat the widow not remarry is quite explicit. On widows’ rights to dowry restitution, see Ercole, ‘Istituto dotale,' n, 222-223 ff.

22 The statutes did require mothers to contribute to their sons, however. Pertile, Storia del diritto, rv, 91-95; Volumen statutorum, Bk. rv, ch. 28, p. 74V.

23 Fortes, M., “The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups”, American Anthropologist, 2 (1953)Google Scholar 32.

24 Ibid., p. 33.

25 Compare men's bequests to natal male kin with those of women to the same categories of kin:

Pertile, Storia del diritto, rv, 76-79, discusses the principles behind favoring male kin in succession beyond the elementary family. In fact, the sons of a dead brodier were en titled, collectively, to one share of their paternal grandfather's patrimony—their father's share; they did participate legally in that sense in the joint patrimony with their father's brothers.

26 These patterns can be more clearly seen in tabular form:

I interpret the relatively large number of bequests by men to their primary natal female relatives as an indication of the interest men had—and legally were obliged to have—in their sisters’ dowries, and to their desire to provide for their widowed mothers’ well-being.

27 Ercole, ‘Istituto dotale’, I, 212-213, 231-235; Ferro, Dizionario, rv, 383.

28 Ercole, ‘Istituto dotale’, 1, 238-246; Ferro, Dizionario, IV, 385. Volumen statutorum, Bk. H, ch. 8, p. 17V; Bk. IV, ch. 25, pp. 71V-72V. I discuss this question of dowry responsibility at length in an article, ‘Dowries and Kinsmen in Early Renaissance Venice’, forthcoming in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

29 Volumen stalutorum, Bk. IV, ch. 28, p. 74V: ‘… tarn masculis, quam foeminis virginibus, maritatis, & viduis, omnium mobilium & immobilium aequaliter successio deferatur.’

30 On wives’ property in general, see Pertile, Storia del diritto, III, 320-332; Ercole, ‘Istituto dotale’, II, 179-190. Pertile makes the general observation (Storia del diritto, rv, 92-95) that men were favored over women as heirs to their mothers. But in Venice this does not seem to have been the case.

31 Volumen statutorum, ‘Liber promissionis maleficii’, chs. 2-3, p. 129V; Bk. VI, ch. 79, p. 125V.

32 ASV, Signori di Notte al Criminal, Processi, Reg. 7, fs. 2r-3r; Reg. 8, f. 39V.

33 Cecchetti notes cases where feminine beauty appeared to have an influence on official activity: a fine was reduced for a father who had a daughter who was ‘bella e nubile’ (Cecchetti's emphasis); a man who cut famputavit’) the hair of a woman against her will was fined 100 lire. ‘La donna nel medioevo a Venezia”, pp. 38-39.

34 Nolentes igitur ubi de iure tractatur inter mares, & feminas, quibus natura parem subministrat affectum, differentias praeiudiciales inducere, sed potius mulierum fragilitati quadam humanitate consulere… .’ Volumen statutorum, consultum no. 39, p. 169V. On women and the law in general, see Pertile, Storia del diritto, III, 232-244.

35 On the general Italian preference for keeping real property in the hands of males, for both familial and political purposes, see Ercole, ‘Istituto dotale’, I, 289-294; Pertile, Storia del diritto, III, 239; Niccolai, F., ‘I consorzi nobiliari ed il Comune nell'alta e media Italia’, Riuista di storia del diritto italiano 2 (1940), 318 Google Scholar.

36 See the discussion of the tradition of male tutela, and its apparent weakening already in the late Roman period, in Herlihy, ‘Land, Family and Women’, pp. 89-91. Pertile (Storia del diritto, III, 232 ff.) discusses the Germanic mundium, or protective power over women, and its endurance in the Middle Ages. He notes, however (pp. 239-240, n. 37), that there is no mention of it in the statutes of the Veneto region.

37 ‘ … mulier … quae non steterit cum eius viro, et ipsa de predicto eius viro, conquesta fuerit… .’ Volumen statutorum, consultum no. 8, p. 144V.

38 CI 114, Marino, S. Toma, protocol 1335-1350, no pagination: on 1 January 1340 (1339, Venetian style), Beriola, wife of Marco Erizzo, made out a receipt to her husband for 121/2 soldi di grossi, ‘quos mihi dare tenebatis pro mia provisione victus et vestitus de medio anno presenti … prout patet per quandam breviarem legis cartam … subscriptione dominorum judicum procuratorum’. The document referred to was dated 10 December 1317.

39 ‘ … alegavit quod duricia et asperitas ac nequicia ipsius Michaleti Mauroceno viri sui talis et tanta erat, quod ipsam Catarinam uxorem suam de domo expulebat. Nee cum ipso Michaleto vult ipsa stare et habitare, et quod ad hue secum libenter astandum dummodo a sua duricia et iniquitate removetur et earn secum tenere et tractare ut conveniens est vellet.’ PSM de Citra, B. 179, Micheletto Morosini, parchment dated 9 June 1343. The Giudici del Procurator, die magistracy involved in this case as well as the one mentioned in the previous note, had competence in matters dealing with the financial arrangements between spouses. See A. da Mosto, L'Archivio di Stato in Venezia, Bibliothèque des ‘Annales institutorum’, vol. v (Rome, 1937), 1, 93.

40 ‘… dixit quod dicta Catarina uxor sua numquam secum staret, nee ipsam modo aliquo reciperet in domo sua. PSM de Citra B. 179, he. cit.

41 His will is dated 15 May 1348. Ibid., parchment no. 1. The will also alludes, very unclearly, to a dead child. In Caterina's will of 1352 there is no reference to any children, living or dead. NT 1023, Ariano Passamonte, no. 17.

42 There is a large literature on women's property and its status during marriage. The fullest discussion is in Ercole, ‘Istituto dotale’, n, 167-190. See also Brandileone, ‘Studi preliminari’, pp. 274-289 and passim; Pertile, Storia del diritto, III, 320-361; Besta, La famiglia, pp. 143-169. On Venice, see the observations in Mueller, R. C., ‘The Procurators of San Marco in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: A study of the office as a financial and trust institution’, Studi veneziani 2 (1971), 175–184 Google Scholar.

43 ‘… etiam sine consensu viri sui… .’ Volumen statutorum, Bk. I, ch. 39, p. 19V. See also Pertile, Storia del diritto, III, 327, 352. Ercole seems to suggest that in Venice this right of women did not extend to the ‘parafernal goods'—i.e., the corredum or trousseau—that accompanied the dowry; ‘Istituto dotale’, 1, 204-205. According to him, the husband had control over such possessions; however, the statutes that Ercole cites (p. 205, n. 1) do not seem to me to sustain this conclusion.

44 CI 242, Giacomo Ziera, 5, protocol, f. lv. Giovanni had no sons himself, although he was generous in his will to his brothers’ sons. The main study of the Venetian funded debt is the ‘Introduzione’ to G. Luzzatto, ed., I prestiti delta Repubblica di Venezia. Sec. XH-XV, Documenti finanziari della Repubblica di Venezia, ser. III, vol. 1, pt. 1 (Padua, 1929). The introduction has been reprinted as II debito pubblico della Repubblica di Venezia (Milan, 1963).

45 For interest payments on Monte shares, see F. C. Lane, ‘The Funded Debt of the Venetian Republic’, in Venice and History, p. 87.

46 A couple of other examples: in a will of 1348 Andreasio di Michele Morosini bequeathed fifty lire to each of his five married daughters. PSM Misti 182a, Andreasio Morosini, protocol (no pagination). In the same year, Andrea Morosini cavaliere bequeathed to his married sister the income from 2000 lire in Monte shares during her lifetime. PSM de Citra 180, Andrea Morosini, protocol I, is. 5r-11r.

47 Of the 305 wills in the sample, 196 were written by wives or widows. Of these, seventy-four clearly identified living daughters in their wills, among whom there were forty clearly identified as married.

48 Volumen statutorum, Bk. I, ch. 39, p. 19V. More generally, Ercole, ‘Istituto dotale’, I, 197-198; Besta, La famiglia, pp. 143-151.

49 Pertile put it in a nutshell: ‘Delia dote la moglie conservava la proprieta, tanto che in qualche luogo ne faceva suoi anche i frutti, in tutto o in parte, secondo che gli sposi avean convenuto; ma comunemente l'usufrutto della dote spettava al marito giusta le leggi romane ad sustinendum antra matrimonii.’ Storia del diritto, III, 324.

50 In his will of 1349, Goffredo di Francesco Morosini bequeathed to his wife a lifetime annuity of fifty ducats as interest for his use of her dowry. NT 576, Giovanni de Comasini, no. 95. Ercole observes that ‘come moglie e madre essa [i.e., the wife] aveva diritto di partecipare di fatto, durante il matrimonio, del godimento della sostanza dotale’. ‘Istituto dotale’, II, 181.

51 For the general obligation, see Volumen statutorum, Bk. 1, ch. 34, p. 17V: ‘omnia bona viri sunt obligata mulieri… .’ On the deposit, see ibid., Bk. III, ch. 29, p. 49V bis (erroneously paginated sov), and Bk. VI, ch. 31, pp. 101V-102V. If the obligated property was real estate and the husband wanted to sell it, he was to offer it to his wife first; if she declined it, he could make the sale to a third party, but the payment would have to be deposited with the Procurators. On a related matter, see Mueller, ‘The Procurators’, pp. 175-176. Pertile discusses the husband's obligation under the term antefactum (Storia del diritto, III, 327-334). Brandileone (‘Studi prelirninari’, pp. 273-274) suggests that the antefactum amounted to a fraction, usually one-half, of the dowry amount; this was not true of Venice.

52 The cosigner was usually a relative. E.g., Elena Morosini cosigned with her son Andrea, 2 April 1384. CI 21, Giovanni Boninsegna, protocol 2, f. 51V. Leonardo Morosini cosigned with his brother Paolo, 2 May 1352. ASV, Raccolta Stefani, Archivio genealogico, Cassa 33, ‘Morosini'

53 The statutes were clear on the obligation of the widow's father-in-law when the husband was unemancipated. Volumen statutorum, Bk. I, ch. 56, p. 26v; see also Ercole, ‘Istituto dotale’, n, 236-237. But in practice the fathers of emancipated sons also were assessed the balance. E.g., when Marina, widow of Pangrazio da Molin, filed for restitution of her dowry in 1368, the estate of her father-in-law, Benedetto da Molin, was required to satisfy the deficiency in Pangrazio's estate, even though the latter had been divisus. CI 114 Marino, S. Toma, protocol 1366-1391, dated 10 May 1368.

54 In 1371, Bernardo Bon was required to pay to the estate of his late father's widow what was lacking in his father's estate for repayment of the dowry, even though Bernardo had been divisus. (It it not clear whether the widow was Bernardo's mother or stepmother.) Ibid., dated 19 March 1371.

55 ‘Ut amodo nulla quaestio oriatur … ipsa [i.e., the wife] sit prior caeteris credito:ibus.’ Volumen statutorum, Bk. I, ch. 34, p. 17V. This was reaffirmed in 1471; ibid., Consultum no. 47, pp. 175V-176V. See also Ercole, ‘Istituto dotale’, n, 222-223, 255-257.

56 ‘ … dabitur potestas mulieri in iudicatu suo de proprietatibus & bonis viri tollendis. … ‘ Volumen statutorum, Bk. 1, ch. 56, p. 26v. Moreover, the judges awarding the property were to ‘omnem cautelam adhibeant, ut eas possessiones appretientur, quae coniunctae sunt, vel utiliores pro mulieribus’; ibid., ch. 61, pp. 27V-28V.

57 Parents in their wills usually sought to have their daughters marry in their early teens, at 12-14 years in the mid-fourteenth century, at 14-15 years in the mid-fifteenth. This corresponds to practice prevailing in Tuscany; see Herlihy, ‘Some Psychological and Social Roots of Violence’, p. 146. Regarding husbands predeceasing their wives, this general demographic tendency is documented in the dowry restitution records; if the husband died first, his widow received her dowry, if the wife died first, her heirs received it. Of 110 patrician marriages indicated in this source as terminated between 1366, and 1380, seventy-seven ended with the death of the husband, only thirty-three with the death of the wife. CI 114, Marino, S. Tomà, protocol 1366-1391, passim.

58 Tomasina's investment is in CI 20, Giovanni Bon, fascicle 4, dated 21 March 1380. Beria's will is in NT 574, Giorgio Gibellino, no. 595.

59 This largesse, already noted in wills, extended to business contracts too. E.g., Pietro Zane got an investment loan of 240 lire from his mother, Beriola, in 1337. CI 11, Bartolomeo prete, protocol 1, dated 25 August 1337. Nicolò Dolfin received a similar loan, in the amount of 1000 lire a grossi, from his mother, Cecilia. CI 14 Nicol6 Betino, protocol 4, dated 25 April 1353.

60 Cf. Herlihy, Women in Medieval Society, pp. 5-6. On Florence, see the comments of Martines, L., The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 1390-1460 (Princeton, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar Pp. 37-38. Dante was censorious about a rise in dowries already in his time; referring to the time of his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, he wrote:

61 The mid-century dowry average was extracted from fifty patrician marriages contracted between 1346 and 1366; the later average was extracted from twenty-five patrician marriages contracted between 1370 and 1386. All of these were found in CI 114, Marino, S. Toma, protocol 1366-1391, passim, which provides records of dowry transactions as the basis of widows’ claims to dowry restitution. I have been unable to find a similar source for the fifteenth century. The dowry bequest of 1000 ducats in 1338 mentioned in Mueller, ‘The Procurators’, p. 181, seems abnormally large. For some examples of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century dowries, see Lane, F.C., Andrea Barbarigo, Merchant of Venice 1418-1449 (Baltimore, 1944), pp. 28–29 Google Scholar; idem, ‘Family Partnerships’, pp. 37-38; A. da Mosto, ‘Il navigatore Andrea da Mosto e la sua famiglia’, Archivio veneto, 5m ser., II (1927), 176, 192.

62 The act is reproduced in Marco Barbaro, ‘Libro di nozze patrizie’, BMV, codici italiani, classe vii, 156 (8492), f. a. It is also digested in ASV, Compilazione leggi, B. 186, fasc. 1, fs. 104XV. For references to similar measures elsewhere in Italy, see Pertile, Storia del diritto, III, 322. Pertile notes that the intent of such measures was to prevent sons’ being deprived of their rightful shares of the patrimony by dowry increases for their sisters. 63 Ercole, ‘Istituto dotale’, I, 282-284. It will be recalled that the dowry's purpose was to enable the husband to bear the onera matrimonii.

64 There is evidence, which I propose to treat in a full-length study of patrician kinship relations, of increasing self-consciousness on the part of the oldest patrician clans in the century and a half after the ‘leveling’ of the patriciate in the Serrata, and, on the other hand, of resentment toward these old clans by the newer ones. See, briefly, Chojnacki, ‘In Search’, pp. 49-50. On the matter in question, incomplete evidence suggests that there was a disproportionate amount of endogamy among the twenty-four older clans, called case vecchie. For a Florentine instance of dowry-engineered social mobility, see Brucker, G., ‘The Medici in the Fourteenth Century’, Speculum 2 (1957), 10–11 Google Scholar.

65 See Cessi, R., ‘Le relazioni commerciali tra Venezia e le Fiandre nel secolo XTV’, in Politica ed economia di Venezia nel Trecento (Rome, 1952), pp. 71–178 Google Scholar, for a discussion of difficulties occasioned Venetian trade by events in transalpine Europe. See Luzzatto, G., Storia economica di Venezia dall'XI al XVI secolo (Venice, 1961) pp. 141 Google Scholar ff., for a discussion of the state fisc's rapacity in levying forced loans at moments of political crisis. The resulting shares in the state debt (the Monte) could be negotiated as dowry payments.

66 The exact figures, based on bequests explicitly for dowry purposes, are in the following table:

For a fuller discussion, see the forthcoming Chojnacki, ‘Dowries and Kinsmen’.

67 In tabular form:

Some allowance must be made, in considering diese figures, for the accident of survival and for the fortunes of research. But the tendency seems unmistakable.

68 According to Beloch, the plague struck Venice eleven times between 1347 and 1400. Beloch, K.J., Bevolkerungesgeschichte Italiens, III (Berlin, 1961) pp. 3–4 Google Scholar.

69 It should be noted that these multiple women's wills, whatever their other implications, do not account for mothers outstripping fathers in fifteenth-century dowry bequests (above, n. 66). Among all the testators who bequeathed dowries to their daughters there were two men and only one woman who wrote two wills—dius making, in each case, two bequests to jhe same daughter, of which one of course canceled the other out.

70 Of the 305 Morosini wills examined, eighty-seven, more than one-quarter of the total, were written by thirty-six individuals who drew up more than one will. Of these thirty-six, twenty-eight were women.

71 E.g., in 1138 Ratolica Giustinian invested in a colleganza with her son-in-law, Enrico Contarini. R. Morozzo della Rocca and A. Lombardo, , eds., Documenti del commercio veneziano nei secoli XI-XIII (Turin, 1940), 1 Google Scholar, 74. For a discussion of Genoese women's business dealings in the early thirteenth century, see Bonds, W. N., ‘Genoese Noblewomen and Gold Thread Manufacturing’, Medievalia et Humanistka 2 (1966), 79–81 Google Scholar.

72 E.g., Alice Contarini was active in the small loan business in 1320. CI 73, Egidio, S. Sofia, protocol l, acts dated 15 April and 20 November 1320. Caterina Michiel made at least one loan of 300 lire. CI 79, Gasparino Favacio, protocol, dated 14 February 1360 (1359, Venetian style).

73 In 1420 Ingoldise Morosini entered into partnership with one Giovanni di Spagna in the soap-making business ('contraximus in simul socie.tates seu compagnias in arte saponarie’). CI 24, Rolandino Bernardi, protocol II, f. 56rv.

74 Palma Signolo made such an investment in 1311. CI 10, Michele Bondemiro, protocol, f. 3v. Leonarda Morosini received in 1348 a return on her investment in an earlier voyage to Alexandria. CI 114, Marino, S. Tomà, protocol 1335-1350, dated 5 August 1348. On the state-run galleys, see various works of F. C. Lane: ‘Venetian Ships and Shipping during the Commercial Revolution’ and ‘Family Partnerships’, both in Venice and History.

75 See above, p. 193.

76 NT 670, Alessandro Marino, no. 126.

77 Some examples: In 1439, Caterina, wife of Moise Contarini, bequeathed 3000 ducats’ worth of Monte shares to her father, to be distributed to her brothers. NT 1155, Benedetto dalle Croci, no. 68. In 1389 (1388, Venetian style), Crisrina, wife of Giovanni Morosini, willed 1000 ducats to her husband. NT 921, Nicolo Saiabianca, no. 494. In 1426, Maria, wife of Nicold Morosini, bequeathed 2000 ducats for her daughter's dowry. NT 746, Marciliano de’ Naresi, no. 83.

78 Friedl, E., ‘The Position of Women: Appearance and Reality’, Anthropological Quarterly, 2 (1967), 108 Google Scholar. Her main thesis accords widi much of what I have written here: a formal structure, male-dominated, still leaves room for feminine influence, largely because of economic power. My dianks to Professor Stanley Brandes of Michigan State's Anthropology Department for this reference.

79 For just one of numerous examples, Piero di Giovanni Morosini, in his will of 1383, named his wife Franceschina as one of his executors and bequeathed her some Monte shares and die income from his real estate—all on the condition that she not remarry. NT 571, Giorgio Gibellino, no. 169.

80 NT 108, Giovanni Boninsegna, no. 296 (22 October 1388).

81 ‘… pro salute anime sue et mee.’ In another place she asked him to free the slave 'ob amorem dei et salutem anime sue’. Ibid. For a discussion of the sexual activity between masters and their female slaves—and of the resultant resentment felt by the ladies of die house—see Origo, I., ‘The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in die Fourteenth and Fifteendi Centuries’, Speculum 2 (1955), 343–344 Google Scholar.

82 NT 1233, Pietro Zane, fs. 14IV-142V (5 August 1417).

83 See die interesting comments on diis dieme in a Florentine context in Golddiwaite, ‘The Florentine Palace’, p. 1011.

84 Afratema, lasting legally for two generations, would thus embrace several families of die same line—brothers’ families and those of dieir sons. See Lane, ‘Family Partnerships’, p. 37; Pertile, Storia del diritto, m, 282. On the Florentine case, Goldthwaite, R.A., Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence: A Study of Four Families (Princeton, 1968)Google Scholar, should be read in conjunction widi Starn, R., ‘Francesco Guicciardini and His Brodiers’, in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, eds. Molho, A. and Tedeschi, J. A. (Florence and Dekalb, 111., 1971), pp. 411–444 Google Scholar.

85 This is one of the elements of the ‘myth of Venice’, on which there is a large literature. See, for example, Fasoli, G., ‘Nascito di un mito’, in Studi storici in onore di Gioacchino Volpe (Florence, 1958)Google Scholar, I, 455-479; Gaeta, F., ‘Alcune considerazioni sul mito di Venezia’, Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 2 (1961), 58–75 Google Scholar.

86 See, for example, Fortes, ‘The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups’, p. 26: ‘The more centralized the political system the greater the tendency seems to be for the corporate strength of descent groups to be reduced or for such corporate groups to be nonexistent.’ See also Duby, G., La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (Paris, 1953)Google Scholar, as quoted in this regard by Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, p. 355. For the invocation of this principle in Italy, see Goldthwaite, Private Wealth, p. 253; and Tamassia, N., La famiglia italiana nei secoli decimoquinto e decimosesto (Milan, 1910) p. 111 Google Scholar.

87 NT 721, Andrea Marevidi, no. 226.

88 Marriage contracts among nobles are hard to find, in my experience. However, one between the Sanudo and Morosini families in 1344 (1343, Venetian style) illustrates very well the complex interweaving of two families’ economic interests in the connection. Museo Correr, Venice, Codici Cicogna, no. 3427/11.

89 ‘Family Partnerships’, pp. 38-39.

90 ‘… per grande amor e raxion chio o portado sempre a quella caxa.’ NT 1062, Lorenzo della Torre, no. 300. Gasparino's first wife, die sister of these beneficiaries, was dead already in 1371, when Gasparino returned her dowry to her family. CI 114, Marino, S. Tomà, protocol 1366-1391, dated 17 December 1371. By the time of the 1374 will Gasparino had remarried.

91 See the example of Andrea Barbarigo and his affines from the Cappello family. Lane, Andrea Barbarigo, pp. 27-30. Especially interesting is Andrea's relationship widi his mother-in-law (p. 29).

92 Barbaro, ‘Libro di nozze patriae’, fs. 322V-3261:, 39v-40r, I03r-104.v. S10 * This paper was presented at the Columbia University Seminar on the Renaissance on 3 April 1973.