Marriage: A Loveless Look at Dowries

While touring Tuscany and enjoying the rich culture found there we have had many opportunities to examine the culture of today and how it relates to the culture of the 14^th and 15^th century. I was quite surprised to find out that dowries were common place until only a few decades ago. I was selected to present the ideas of an article examining dowries and the various ideas surrounding them.

 Dowries are sums of wealth transferred from the family of a bride to the family of the groom upon marriage. These transactions play a very substantial role in 15^th century Italy, as they represent significant (nearly nine times the average annual salary) movement of economic power between families often to a family of a lower class than the bride. In the 15^th century every single woman was expected to have dowry. Examples were given that there were public funds generated by wealthy persons leaving a portion of wealth to be used as dowries for orphans. A family would even be expected to have a dowry set aside for women who entered convents to become nuns. Dowries are interesting also because while the transfer of wealth is from one family to another at the time of marriage the bride retains ownership of the dowry even if her father in law is expected to manage it.

This paper looked at dowries in two different but related ways. The first from a net value perspective. The second is from an altruistic perspective.

From a net value standpoint the entire marriage arrangement was based on the value of a woman as compared to her expected benefit to the married household during her expected lifetime which essentially broke down to the older she is the less productive she will be. Thus the older a woman the larger her dowry would have to be to compensate for lost productivity in the marriage household. This creates a very strong pressure to marry young because the longer she lives with the parents the more she costs the parents (both in living expenses and a larger dowry) and the harder it is for her to find a “suitable” husband

This pressure in addition to a general shortage of women and a very small percentage of the population holding a large percentage of the country’s wealth leads women to often “marry down” selecting a man who would not necessarily be of the same social, political or financial status.

In the altruistic model the parents of the bride, caring about the future of their daughter, would provide a larger dowry proportional to how far she “married down” in order to ensure that the newly married couple would be able to get established and enjoy the same standard of living that the woman was used to but may be impossible for a lower class husband to provide.

Now there were many problems with this study the largest of which is that it had a relatively small sample size consisting primarily of the upper class. The data collected by this study was from census data and compared against often illegible marriage contracts. The author expressed a desire to examine the archives in Florence where a larger more complete collection of census data exists in order to gain a better understanding of the role that dowries played in early Italian economics