ABSTRACT
Our analysis of the social origins of outsider brides between 1589 and 1699, seen through the perspective of the prove di nobilt, has already established that these women came from a limited social circle. This chapter examines these social groups in greater detail in order to establish why the social background of these women should have been considered appropriate by Venetian patricians, given the well-established social distinctions in use at that time, which placed the patriciate in an exalted position. It will argue that each of these social or occupational groups belonged to a category which we may call huomini civili, to borrow a term already in circulation in seventeenth-century Venice. In other words, Venetian patricians recognised that they did not have a monopoly of the qualities of 'civility', even within their own society, and that this permitted them to consider other families as ideologically sound and worthy of associating with through marriage.
