Processetti

This historical research programme analyses the interactions between an institution and a practice: on the one hand, marriage, a sacrament of the Church and a crucial step in setting up as a professional, transmitting property and integrating society; on the other, mobility, understood in both spatial and social terms. This programme’s field of study is modern Venice, which was both a very large city of more than 150,000 inhabitants at the end of the 16th century, and a world-city whose mixed population came from around the Mediterranean basin and the Transalpine countries. Venice is therefore an excellent vantage point for studying interconfessional marriages (between Catholics and Orthodox), marriages between foreigners, and marriages between natives and immigrants. This project relies on a massive volume of documentation: the processetti matrimoniali. These enquiries were made by the Catholic Church to ensure that future spouses were indeed either single or widowed. Initially, these enquiries were carried out for all individuals whose marital status was in doubt, especially non-native Venetians. They were based on witness testimony, and recorded in 340 registries between 1592 and 1807. This serial and diachronic documentation will be used to create a collaborative database developed using a project hosting platform (symoghi.com) with support from the Digital History Unit of LARHRA. The database input will consist of one-third of the processetti collection (120 registries, i.e. around 10,000 enquiries). This unique documentation will be processed in two ways. Firstly, the processetti will be studied as the central component of a system that the Catholic Church set up in an attempt to reconcile human mobility with the respect of marriage rules. The analysis of this process will be expanded to the Italian peninsula and to the Greek world under Venetian dominion in order to gain a better understanding of the circulation of ecclesiastical norms and practices. Then, we will regard the processetti as a source of information for grasping marriage as a pivotal moment in a migratory trajectory and an integration process. The processetti lend themselves to both a quantitative and qualitative approach that enables a full range of migratory trajectories to be reconstructed, including for example migrations by women (who leave little trace in the sources typically used for research). Lastly, we will examine how, at the end of a migratory trajectory, marriage could be an instrument for social integration (by looking at the significance of exogamous and interfconfessional marriages) – and for social mobility (paying special attention to the sequence of events surrounding the 1630 plague outbreak, which appears to have opened up matrimonial and economic opportunities). This research programme aims to better understand what inclusion and social mobility mean in an open, cosmopolitan city that is still affected by legal, religious and social barriers. This project is underpinned by a partnership between LARHRA-University of Lyon 2, the University of Padua, the French Schools of Rome and Athens, and the National University of Athens.