Keeping It (Too Much) in the Family: Annulment by Reason of Affinity in Eighteenth-Century Venice

Abstract Although divorce was increasingly available through religious and civil courts in 18th-century Europe, the Catholic Church still considered marriage indissoluble. Thus, the only legal route out of a marriage was annulment. Historians have noted several strategies for annulments in premodern Europe, most often claims of lack of consent. One less common but interesting way to seek annulment was to claim affinity by fornication, in which one spouse claimed a premarital sexual relationship with a close relative of the other. Couples could also make a similar claim of a violation of public honesty, in which a person was originally betrothed to one person but then married their close relative. Both constituted impediments to marriage according to canon law. In 18th-century Venice, the Patriarchal tribunal heard a steady stream of these cases. Couples, along with their families, friends, and neighbors, provided detailed testimony to the tribunal to attain annulments. This article argues that the narrative structures and testimonies in these cases demonstrate that 18th-century Venetians thought that bad marriages should not be indissoluble, in spite of the Catholic Church’s refusal to allow divorce, and were willing to push the boundaries of truth to work around the legal restrictions they faced.