Cecilia Cristellon offers a rigorous and important study of the judicial records relating to marital conflict of the patriarcato (office of the patriarch) of Venice and related archival fondi for the period 1420 to 1545 – from the emergence of Venice as a northern Italian territorial power and centre of Renaissance culture to the opening sessions of the Council of Trent. She analyses 706 cases, most of primo grado, from within the diocese of Venice, the others appeals from neighbouring jurisdictions. The plaintiffs come from a cross-section of social groups extending from the nobility to those of servile rank, while the testimony recorded makes audible the candid voices of ordinary, often very young, women. The author surveys the entire process of the inquisition into marital conflict, including the steps from petition to sentence and summary, the forms and mechanisms of testimony, the role of the judges and, above all, the prevalence of mutual consent as the test of marital validity, as canon law required throughout pre-Tridentine Catholic Europe. About 40 per cent of the cases (270 of the 706) involve inquiries into the validity of existing marriages, about half (145) initiated by men and half (125) by women; most were affirmed to be valid. Another 20 per cent of the cases (133 of 706) involve petitions for nullification of marriage, nearly twice as often (85 to 47) initiated by women as by men; most were annulled, for such reasons as previous marriage, clerical profession, close affinity, absence of consent, minor or servile status, failure to consummate and impotence. Another 17 per cent (118 of 706) involve petitions for separation, more often initiated by men than by women, who were more often denied their petitions and ordered to return to cohabitation. These data and more provide a comprehensive view of marriage in Venice during a crucial long century, revealing the extent to which the Church exercised social control through its privilege of jurisdiction.

Cristellon also considers the secular tribunals which also dealt with cases of marital conflict, but which focused more on patrimonial matters than on marital validity or dissolution, along with the related issues of bigamy, adultery and premarital sexuality. Cristellon's is the first substantial study of the judicial management of marital conflict in Italy in the pre-modern period, and joins the far more extensive historiography, with which she is in ‘constant dialogue’, for English, French and German settings.