Unwilling Grooms in Fourteenth-century Lucca

Abstract

Quantitative studies of tax and court records have suggested that medieval Italian marriage negotiations involved a powerful older groom who might easily dominate his much younger bride. This article complicates this picture by qualitatively analyzing two marriage disputes from fourteenth-century Lucca featuring young boys depicted as passive victims of arranged marriages and forced consent. These unwilling grooms, who lacked the power and agency belonging to the average medieval Italian man, reveal that litigants and their representatives constructed the identity of unwilling grooms from a palette of options relying on the intersection of age, gender, and social status.