This article addresses the Maltese traditional family, taking St. Mary’s (Qrendi) as a test case. It results that couples married in their early twenties, while a high proportion of men and women never married at all. Marriage was not popular so that one-fifth of all marriages were remarriages. Very few widows remarried and it was only for some economic reason that they sought another man. There is no evidence though that a high rate of celibacy resulted in flagrant promiscuity even if there is evidence that the Qrendin were not so particular about their sex life. No birth control was practiced within marriage and children followed one another regularly. This brings into relief the parents’ unconcern for their offspring’s future as well as the inferior status of women because husbands made their wives several offspring. Relations between the spouses were poor so that dissatisfied couples went their own ways.
Maurice Eminyan, Il-Papa lill-Familja Maltija [The Pope to the Maltese Family] ( Malta: Jesuit Publications, 1992 ), 70.
3.
Archives of the Inquisition, Malta, Memorie 21, f. 120r.
4.
National Library, Malta, Università 181 (Suppliche 1770-1782), ff. 16v, 85r-v, 125r, 188r, 191v-192r, 194r, 288v, 291r, 349v-50r.
5.
E.A. Wrigley, Population and History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 116-19.
6.
For these listings see for Malta, Frans Ciappara, Marriage in Malta in the late Eighteenth Century (Malta: Associated News, 1988), 15-18. For Italy, A. Bellettini, ‘‘Gli Status Animarum: Caratteristiche e Problemi di Utilizzazione nelle Ricerche di Demografia Storica,’’ in Le Fonti della Demografia Storica in Italia vol. 1, part I (Rome: CISP, 1972), 3-42. Peter Laslett laments that ‘‘no document headed Liber Status Animarum has yet come to light in England, but in this, as in much else to do with numerical recordings, we seem to have been unfortunate.’’ See his Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 54. See also, however, his ‘‘The Study of Social Structure from Listings of Inhabitants,’’ in An Introduction to English Historical Demography: From the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, ed. E. A. Wrigley (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 160-208.
7.
Calculated from data in Curia Episcopalis Melitensis, Status Animarum 16, no. 9.
8.
For this process, see Michel Fleury and Louis Henry, Nouveau manuel de dépouillement et d’exploitation de l’état civil ancien (Paris: L’Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques, 1965). See also E. A. Wrigley, ‘‘Family Reconstitution,’’ in An Introduction to English Historical Demography, 96-159.
9.
Ciappara, Marriage in Malta , 33-34.
10.
John Knodel , ‘‘Two and a Half Centuries of Demographic History in a Bavarian Village,’’Population Studies24, no. 3 ( 1970): 361.
11.
J. Hajnal, ‘‘European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,’’ in Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, ed. D. V. Glass and E. V. C. Eversley (London: Arnold , 1965), 108-114.
12.
On incentives to marriage see R. Schofield, ‘‘English Marriage Patterns Revisited,’’ Journal of Family History 10 (1985): 2-20. See also Wrigley, Population and History, 95-106.
13.
Pierre Bourdieu , ‘‘Marriage Strategies as Strategies of Social Reproduction,’’ in Family and Society, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 117-44.
14.
For such a practice in eighteenth-century-Austria, see Lutz K. Berkner, ‘‘The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household: An Eighteenth Century Austrian Example,’’ American Historical Review 77 (1972): 398-405.
15.
J.K. Campell , Honour, Family and Patronage. A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1964): 82-88.
16.
Calculated from data in Curia Episcopalis Melitensis, Status Animarum 16, no. 9.
17.
Karin Wall, ‘‘Peasant Stem Families in Northwestern Portugal: Life Transitions and Changing Family Dynamics,’’ Journal of Family History 19, no. 3 (1994): 237-59. For a description of the Indian joint family, see Prafulla Mohanti, My Village, My Life: Nanpur (London: Pimlico, 1973), 96-97. See also W. J. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York: The Free Press, 1970), 238-54. At Vasilika, a Greek village at the foot of mount Parnassos on the Boeotian plain, a farmer’s family settles in the man’s village, usually in the home of his parents. E. Friedl, Vasilika: A Village in Modern Greece (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 61. For the different forms of the family across the centuries, see Michael Mitterauer and Reinard Sieder, The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982).
18.
Desmond Gregory, Malta, Britain, and the European Powers, 1793-1815 (Madison : Fairleigh Dickinson U. P., 1996 ), 29.
19.
Pierre Goubert, The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1986 ), 66.
20.
Hajnal, ‘‘European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,’’101-106.
21.
Timothy Guinnane , ‘‘Re-Thinking the Western European Marriage Pattern: The Decision to Marry in Ireland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,’’Journal of Family History16, no. 1 (1991): 47-64.
22.
Archiepiscopal Archives, Malta, Status Animarum 23A, no. 84, f. 1v.
23.
Notarial Archives Valletta, 22/924 (Not. Tommaso Magri), ff. 56r-v, October 30, 1773. On the wider topic of female-centered households without male suzerainty, see John Cashmere, ‘‘Sisters Together: Women Without Men in Seventeenth-Century French Village Culture,’’ Journal of Family History 21, no. 1 (1996): 44-62.
24.
Calculated from data in Parish Archives (Qrendi), Liber Defunctorum ii.
25.
Calculated from data in Archiepiscopal Archives, Malta, Status Animarum 23A, no. 84.
26.
E. A. Wrigley and R. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 258-59. See also Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), 56.
27.
For this general presumption of suspicion and mistrust, see David Noy, ‘‘Wicked Stepmothers in Roman Society and Imagination,’’ Journal of Family History 16, no. 4 (1991): 345-61. See also the perceptive book by Brenda Maddox, The Half-Parent: Living with Other People’s Children (London: Deutsch, 1975).
28.
Joseph Aquilina , A Comparative Dictionary of Maltese Proverbs (Malta: Malta University Press , 1972), 177, no. 34.
29.
Archiepiscopal Archives, Malta, Status Animarum 23A, no. 84, ff. 3v-4r.
30.
Parish Archives (Zurrieq), Liber Matrimoniorum iv, f. 159r.
31.
For mobility at Qrendi, see Frans Ciappara, ‘‘Religion, kinship and godparenthood as elements of social cohesion in Qrendi, a late-eighteenth-century Maltese parish,’’ Continuity and Change 25, no. 1 (2010), 161-84.
32.
Aquilina, A Comparative Dictionary of Maltese Proverbs, 39, no. 59.
33.
Parish Archives (Qrendi), Liber Matrimoniorum ii, f. 68r. Parish Archives (Qrendi), Liber Defunctorum ii, f. 77r.
34.
Parish Archives (Qrendi), Liber Matrimoniorum ii, f. 93r. Parish Archives (Qrendi), Liber Defunctorum ii, f. 97r.
35.
National Library, Malta, Università 180, f. 128v.
36.
On widows of master craftsmen, see Janine M. Lanza, From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris: Gender, Economy, and Law (London: Ashgate, 2007).
37.
Barbara J. Todd , ‘‘The Remarrying Widow: A Stereotype Reconsidered,’’ in Women in English Society 1500-1800 , ed. Mary Prior (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), 54-92.
38.
Wendy Gibson, Women in Seventeenth-Century France (London: Macmillan, 1989), 95.
39.
For this means of popular control, see M. Ingram, ‘‘Ridings, Rough Music and the ‘‘Reform of Popular Culture’’ in Early Modern England,’’ Past and Present 105 (1984), 86-88.
40.
For Tertullian’s belief that they were a form of adultery, see Claudio Moreschini, ed., Opere Scelte di Quinto Settimio Florente Tertulliano (Turin: UTET, 1974), 1045-47, 1069.
41.
1 Cor. 7: 9. For the debate on celibacy in England and America see Erik R. Seeman, ‘‘It is Better to Marry Than to Burn: Anglo-American Attitudes Toward Celibacy, 1600-1800,’’ Journal of Family History 24, no. 4 (1999): 297-419.
42.
Archivum Cathedrale Melitense, Miscellanea 56, f. 64r.
43.
1 Cor. 7: 39-40. See also St. Augustine, ‘‘La Dignità dello Stato Vedovile,’’ in S. Agostino, Matrimonio e Verginità, ed. A. Trapè (Città Nuova: Rome, 1978), 167-219.
44.
San Francesco di Sales, Introduzione alla Vita Devota ( Milan: Rizzoli, 1999), 310-14; Ruth1: 19-21.
45.
NAV, 4/924 (Not. Tommaso Magri), f. 116v, 10 August 1729.
46.
For solidarity among the parishioners see Frans Ciappara, ‘‘The Parish Community in Eighteenth-Century Malta,’’ The Catholic Historical Review 94, no. 4 (October 2008): 674.
47.
Archiepiscopal Archives, Malta, Registrum Supplicatiorum 10, f. 741v.
48.
For the same idea in an Italian context, see David I. Kertzer and Nancy Karweit, ‘‘‘The Impact of Widowhood in Nineteenth-Century Italy,’’ in Aging in the Past. Demography, Society and Old Age, ed. David I. Kertzer and Peter Laslett (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1995), 237. The same point is also made by Ida Blom, ‘‘The History of Widowhood: A Bibliographic Overview,’’ Journal of Family History 16, no. 2 (1991): 197.
49.
1 Tim 5: 7-8.
50.
Archiepiscopal Archives, Malta, Status Animarum 23A (1779), no. 84, f. 1r. For solidarity among the Qrendin, see Ciappara, ‘‘Religion, Kinship and Godparenthood,’’ 161-84.
51.
Parish Archives (Qrendi), Liber Baptizatorum iii, f. 80r (25 January 1759).
52.
For a fine study of the topic see for England ch. 3 of Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love, 102-59. For France, see Jacques Depauw, ‘‘Illicit Sexual Activity and Society in Eighteenth-Century Nantes,’’ in Family and Society, 145-91.
53.
Aquilina, A Comparative Dictionary of Maltese Proverbs, 171, no. 6.
54.
Parish Archives (Mqabba), Liber Baptizatorum iv, p. 63.
55.
E. Neufeld, Ancient Hebrew marriage laws, with special reference to general Semitic laws and customs (London: Green Longmans , 1944), 135-41.
56.
R.W. Lee , The Elements of Roman Law ( London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1956), 66; P.E. Corbett, The Roman Law of Marriage ( Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 8-23.
57.
John A. McHugh and Charles J. Callan, eds. and trans., Catechism of the Council of Trent for Parish Priests (Rockford, Illinois : Tan Books, 1982), 341.
58.
Parish Archives (Qrendi), Liber Matrimoniorum iii, f. 62v; Parish Archives (Cospicua), Liber Matrimoniorum 6, f. 150r; Curia Episcopalis Melitensis, Acta Originalia 687, ff. 311r-320v. For clandestine marriages in England, see E. A. Wrigley, ‘‘Clandestine marriage in Tetbury in the late 17th century,’’ Local Population Studies 10 (1973), 15-21 and T. C. Smout, ‘‘Scottish Marriage, Regular and Irregular, 1540-1940,’’ in Marriage and Society, ed. by R. B. Outhwaite (London: Taylor and Francis, 1981), 117-36.
59.
Curia Episcopalis Melitensis, Acta Originalia 696, f. 286r.
60.
F. Ciappara, Marriage in Malta, 76-77; Angelo Turchini, Clero e Fedeli in Età Post-Tridentina (Rome: Herder, 1978), 107-108; Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1976), 145-50; P. E. H. Hair, ‘‘Bridal Pregnancy in Rural England in Earlier Centuries,’’ Population Studies, no 20 (1966), 233-43; G. Wyatt, ‘‘Bastardy and Prenuptial Pregnancy in a Cheshire Town during the Eighteenth Century,’’ Local Population Studies, no. 49 (1992), 38-50.
61.
Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 148; Pierre Valmary, Familles Paysannes Au XVIIIe Siècle en Bas-Quercy: étude demographique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), 130.
62.
For a discussion of family size, see Edward J. Hedican, ‘‘What Determines Family Size? Irish Farming Families in Nineteenth-Century Ontario,’’ Journal of Family History 31, no. 4 (2006): 315-34.
63.
Archives of the Inquisition, Malta, Proceedings 132A, ff. 219r-v.
64.
Parish Archives (Qrendi), Liber Baptizatorum iii, f. 74v (6 Dec. 1756).
65.
Frans Ciappara , ‘‘Perceptions of Marriage in late-eighteenth-century Malta,’’Continuity and Change16, no. 3 (2001), 393.
66.
‘‘Quello che usa carnalmente non è peccato perchè se fosse peccato Iddio non l’avrebbe fatto al mondo’’-Archives of the Inquisition, Malta, Proceedings134A, f. 450r.
67.
Archives of the Inquisition, Malta, Proceedings135B, f. 597r.
68.
Archives of the Inquisition, Malta, Proceedings125C, ff. 1203r-v.
69.
Del Dritto Municipale di Malta (Malta: Gio. Mallia, 1785), 174, 296.
70.
For the popular belief that a pregnant woman must always satisfy her craving: J. Cassar-Pullicino, Studies in Maltese Folklore (Malta: Malta University, 1976), 210-11.
71.
Archiepiscopal Archives, Malta, Edicta Labini 12, f. 175r.
72.
E. A. Wrigley, ‘‘Family Limitation in Pre-industrial England,’’ The Economic History Review, second series, vol. xix, no. 1 (1966), 82-109. For the contrary thesis that contraceptive uses were unknown in Europe if not until recently, see Philippe Ariès, Histoire des populations françaises et de leurs attitudes devant la vie depuis le XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Self, 1948).
73.
The reference is to Gen. 38: 8-10. Onan had violated the levirate law which provided that a brother must beget children from a dead brother’s widow. But was he killed because he ‘‘let the seed be lost to the ground’’ or because he disobeyed his father, or for a combination of these faults? It was St. Epiphanius who first used the story of Onan to condemn contraception, which was endorsed by St. Augustine, ‘‘This is what Onan did, and God killed him for it’’-John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap P., 1965).
74.
Noonan, Contraception, 168.
75.
Archives of the Inquisition, Malta, Proceedings 111B, ff. 805r-v.
76.
Archives of the Inquisition, Malta, Proceedings 131A, ff. 169r, 172v.
77.
Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village. Terling, 1525-1700 (London: Academic Press, 1979), 49-56.
78.
Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (London: Collins, 1976), 200. See also Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Towards Death (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
79.
Evelyne Sullerot , Women, Society and Change ( London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 62.
80.
Archives of the Inquisition, Malta, Proceedings 84B, f. 523r.
81.
Parish Archives (St Dominic’s, Valletta), Lib. Bapt viii, 7 Feb. 1750, April 9, 1754, December 13, 1755; Liber Baptizatorum ix, March 1, 1769, December 27, 1769, February 21, 1771, June 27, 1774, October 6, 1777, February 19, 1778.
82.
Claude Delasselle , ‘‘Abandaoned Children in Eighteenth-Century Paris,’’ in Deviants and the Abandoned in French Society, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 47-82.
J.L. Flandrin , Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 217.
86.
Parish Archives (Qrendi), Liber Baptizatorum iii, f. 118r, Liber Defunctorum ii, f. 72r.
87.
Archives of the Inquisition, Malta, Proceedings 93A, ff. 245r-82v.
88.
Archives of the Inquisition, Malta. Proceedings 73A, f. 108r.
89.
Archives of the Inquisition, Malta, Proceedings 113B, f. 404r.
90.
Adriano Prosperi, ‘‘Science and the Theological Imagination in the Seventeenth Century: Baptism and the Origins of the Individual,’’ in Christianity and Community in the West. Essays for John Bossy, ed. Simon Ditchfield (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 206-40. For St. Augustine’s condemnation of these infants to hell-fire, see R. De Simon, ‘‘Modern Research on Saint Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin,’’ Augustinian Studies 11 (1980): 205-28 and J. Baun, ‘‘‘The Fate of babies dying Before Baptism in Byzantium,’’ in The Church and Childhood, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwells, 1994), 115-25.
91.
Archiepiscopal Archives, Malta, Edicta Labini, vol. 12, f. 175r.
92.
Archives of the Inquisition, Malta, Proceedings 11B, ff. 658r-v.
93.
Eph. 5: 22-26. Catechism of the Council of Trent, 351-52.
94.
Aquilina, A Comparative Dictionary of Maltese Proverbs, 157, no. 44; 206, no. 127.
95.
Catechism of the Council of Trent, 354.
96.
National Library, Malta, Università 55, August 4, 1763.
97.
Archives of the Inquisition, Malta, Proceedings 133C, f. 1240r.
98.
Archiepiscopal Archives, Malta, Registrum Supplicatiorum 1, ff. 205r-v.
99.
Archives of the Inquisition, Malta, Proceedings 131B, f. 453v.
100.
Hannah Gavron, The Captive Wife. Conflicts of Housebound Mothers (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pelican, 1968).
101.
Richard Colt Hoare, Recollections from Abroad During the Year 1790 (London , 1817), 192.
102.
The churchwarden Don Celestino Camilleri leased a one-room house to Antonio Haxach in 1776-NAV, 9/817 (Not. Michel’Angelo Farrugia), ff. 134r-35v, 31 March 1776.
103.
Jean-Louis Flandrin, ‘‘Contraception, Marriage, and Sexual Relations in the Christian West,’’ in Biology of Man in History , ed. R. Forster and O. Ranum, (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 32-45.
104.
Tob. 6: 16-22.
105.
Noonan, Contraception, 76.
106.
Ibid., 241-42.
107.
Cited in Flandrin, Families in Former Times, 162.
108.
McHugh and Callan, Catechism of the Council of Trent for Parish Priests, 248, 355. I Kings 21: 3-5.
Parish Archives (Qrendi), Liber Matrimoniorum iii, ff. 41r, 43r.
112.
Vem L. Bullough, ed., Encyclopedia of Birth Control (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC CLIO, 2001), 54-55.
113.
Jessica Warner and Allyson Lunny, ‘‘Marital Violence in a Martial Town: Households and Wives in Early Modern Portsmouth, 1653-1781,’’Journal of Family History28, no. 2 (2003): 258-76.
114.
Frans Ciappara , Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta (Malta: PEG, 2001), 158-62.
115.
Curia Episcopalis Melitensis, Status Animarum 16, no. 9.
116.
Archives of the Inquisition, Malta, Proceedings 137, ff. 217r-18r.
117.
Archivum Cathedrale Melitense, Miscellanea 56, f. 64r-v.
118.
Archiepiscopal Archives, Malta, Edicta Labini 12, ff. 11r-v.
