The Church, Marriage, and Sex in Late Medieval Sicily

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>How much freedom did late medieval people have to arrange their emotional and sexual lives? Focused on the diocese of Catania, this is the first monograph on the subject of regulation, marriage, and illicit relationships in Sicily from the end of the fourteenth century to the end of the sixteenth, and it places its evidence in a wider Italian and European context. This Sicilian-based study enriches the historiographical debate on betrothal and marriage formation and on the links between affections, sexual behaviour, and control policies promoted by ecclesiastical and secular authorities. In its pages, we find personal plans frustrated and accomplished, fears and complaints, strategies of discipline and rejection. The sociopolitical analysis, based on a wide range of primary sources, sheds light on an unknown world, made up of individual stories and reflecting social dynamics that extended far beyond the couple. The book reconstructs the pressures exerted on people to act against their will and desires, and outlines a lively society, revealing—contrary to the historical stereotype—the absence of systematic female subordination. Finally, it emphasizes that the Council of Trent merely added legal definition to processes which had begun at a much earlier stage. Tensions over the need to ensure order in family organization and to defend the sacrament of marriage began to limit the principle of freedom of choice that canon law had helped to establish.</jats:p>