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Overview & Synopsis

Is it possible to talk about autonomy in romantic relationships in Sicily in the late Middle Ages? This is the first research on the theme of marriage and illicit relationships in the diocese of Catania between the late fourteenth and late sixteenth centuries, considered from a comparative perspective both with other areas of the island and with areas outside it. The study of the Sicilian context enriches the historiographical debate on both the formation of the couple and the links between affections, sexual behaviour and control policies promoted by the ecclesiastical and secular authorities. Choices made and thwarted, fears and petitions, disciplinary strategies and refusals make up the tangle that unravels here. The socio-political analysis, based on a wide range of unpublished documentary sources, reconstructs a hitherto unknown world, made up of individual stories reflecting far-reaching processes. The volume identifies the pressures on individuals interested in asserting their will, and delineates a vital society by documenting the weakness of the historiographical model of systematic subordination of women. Finally, it is emphasized that the Council of Trent defined at the legislative level processes that had begun at a much earlier stage, in a gradual development of tensions and confrontations in which the need to ensure order in the family organization and to defend the sacrament of marriage also became a limitation on the principle of freedom that canon law had helped to establish.