ABSTRACT
In Renaissance Italy, marriage was an institution which placed the interests of the family above those of the individual. Women were normally given in marriage while still in their teens to husbands who had been chosen for them by their male kinsmen and who would be considerably older than themselves. Two works explicitly urged wives to seek sexual pleasure with a lover. One was Alessandro Piccolomini's Dialogo de la bella creanza de le donne, printed in 1538 and widely read in the Cinquecento. From the 1550s onwards, though, the overall picture of advice on love and marriage underwent changes of emphasis and gained some significant new elements. Firstly, in the sterner moral climate of the Counter-Reformation the idea of any kind of extramarital love could no longer be accepted. Secondly, there was a corresponding stress on the ideal of amore maritale, a love that was something stronger than companionship though also to be distinguished from mere physical passion.
