ABSTRACT
Few institutions mattered more to Venetian patricians than marriage. If individual family units, many of them conforming to the stem-family rather than the nuclear-family model lay at the heart of the patriciate at any one time, then marriage was the key to continuity. Successive marriages consolidated existing social, economic and political relationships through the creation of new kinship networks, operating at both a personal and a family level. This chapter concludes the importance of marriage as an institution to individual patricians, to the Venetian state, and to the post-Tridentine church, and lays particular emphasis on the process of getting married, the location of the ceremonies, the social range of those who were present and their functions, and the degree to which there was communal involvement. The primary evidence for such registrations depended on testimony from guests at the weddings to demonstrate that a ceremony had taken place and that consequently any sons born to the couple were legitimate.
