Mujeres y conflictos en los matrimonios de Andalucía occidentalel Arzobispado de Sevilla durante el siglo XVII

Abstract

The defence of the modem marriage model, built around the principies of monogamy and indissolubility, was fundamental in order to guarantee the continuity of the stratifíed social order and to control the conduct of the individuáis in the ancienrégime. The institutions holding the power and certain social groups made an effort to introduce an institution that was compact in its structure and strict in its functioning, and also tried to delimit the space of the affection and love of couples. However, practices like cohabitation, adultery, seduction, rape, bigamy, or incest, were so deeply rooted in Early Modem society, that they survived, going thus against Divine law and against the principles of the Civil law. The purpose of this project was to broaden what is known so far about marital conflicts in the archbishopric of Seville in the sixteen hundreds. In other words, we have dealt with the troubles arising among couples in one of the most populated and dynamic territories of the Spanish Monarchy in a particularly turbulent century, the seventeenth, which was characterized by a series of structural deficiencies and unusual disasters that, in a synergic way, motivated the appearance of conflicts in every sphere of daily life, including that of gender relationships. Our final purpose was then: to delve into the model of marriage regulations in Seville, to show a correct analysis of the conflicts related to conjugal life, to study the regulations introduced to tackle the problems of couple relationships, and to develop a discourse about their evolution based on the economic, demographic, social and political circumstances of the Archbishopric. Thus, as our project has to do with the private sphere and the transgressions of the nuptial bond and its starting point is the reflection of the matrimonial model established by the Session 24 of the Council of Trent (1563), we have tried to value the clash of the different positions and interests: what the institutions that held the power imposed, and what the individuals actually did. All this was done in an attempt to: get to know the degree of observance and compliance with the Tridentine dispositions; to think about the degree of success of the programme of the Catholic Church to shape the social organization; and to evaluate whether “love” was important enough to lead people to rebel and to make the established matrimonial model collapse. In order to carry out this comparative study between the rules and the actual everyday practice (that is, about the degree of compliance or transgression regarding the cultural and juridical norms imposed on men and women in the Early Modem Age), we have used sources coming from the legal action of the Sevillian Church during the time chosen. The aim of our analysis of the discourse contained in each of the documents of the revised series, and of other texts of a varied nature (legal, doctrinal, moral, and fiction) was: to better understand the doctrinal definition of concepts like statutory rape, cohabitation, divorce, or adultery, as well as their historical evolution; to get to know the view that the people immersed in these legal processes had of seduction, cohabitation, unfaithfulness and other transgressive conducts; to elaborate a typology of conflictive behaviour; to identify the discourse used by litigants, lawyers, and jurists in these litigations, paying special attention to the means and strategies employed in the defence and the accusation, and to the gender differences that appeared in these discourses; to determine the answer given by the justice to the problems that were posed; and to show the flexibility in the imposition of norms and the plurality of the transgressions, the adaptation of the moral parameters over time, the coexistence of a regulatory rigour with a relative freedom of practice, and the multiplicity of “unions” that coexisted with the catholic model. To put it briefly, through the reconstruction of multiple and diverse marriage stories, we have confirmed that conflicts were common in Seville in the 17th century. We have been able to: illustrate how couples (first unmarried and then married) faced their problems; to consider the diversity of conjugal models, and the enormous ability of some, especially of women, to find resources with which to face their difficulties, by arousing feelings of solidarity among the people close to them, or going to court to find protection; to get to know which changes were undergone by the society of the time regarding these topics all along the century, as well its malleability Fsrnpla de Pnrtnrarin depending on the circumstances; and to identify the influence of the church ideology or the compliance to social codes like that of honour on the collective mind. Before concluding, we should clarify two aspects. First: even if the existence of conflicts is evident, we think of it as an incentive for advance and development. All along our research, we have understood conjugal problems as sources of vitality that motivate regeneration, and not as an impediment that leads to decadence and decline. Second: to defend that all the married people wished to rebel against a system that ensured social and economic pre-eminence to them in spite of not looking for a correspondence of personal feelings does not seem very truthful. We shouldn't forget that our study deals with what is exceptional; most of the promises, matrimonial contracts, and relationships between spouses were developed under normal circumstances. In fact, we can assure that questioning the system was not in the minds of those who transgressed the norm, their motivations being very different from that.