ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how women and men in early modern Venice made use of the city's civil magistracies and the Patriarchal Court in order to improve their personal and marital life circumstances, as well as how these authorities responded to the needs of the population. It also explores the precise implications of the long-term transformation of control over marriage and sexuality by the state and the Church. Case studies have opened many and fascinating insights into the ways in which men and women appropriated dominant ideals of Christian marriage culture within the urban communities of early modern Venice. The study has, moreover, shown that men were vulnerable in their authority: domestic patriarchy could be challenged by sexually assertive wives and by the loss of male sexual ownership. Whereas imprisonment or exile destroyed marriages and households, the flexibility of secular magistracies in judging cases of adultery was aimed at restoring families, household economies, neighbourhood harmony and, thus, Venice's broader social order.
