Sources for the Study of Clerical Concubinage: The View from Italy

The aim of my contribution will be to discuss the source base for the study of clerical concubinage in medieval Italy. Records of episcopal visitations to ecclesiastical institutions or parishes are a popular source for such studies since they provide a broad view of the concubinary landscape in individual communities. Before the fifteenth century, however, Italian visitation records are often laconic, noting only the names of those involved in such relationships, and revealing little, in particular, about clerics' concubines. In contrast, the registers of ecclesiastical notaries from several cities in northern Italy (Treviso, Padua, and Bergamo) during the fourteenth century contain a wide array of documents in which clerics and their concubines both appear. These documents include clerics' testaments, inter vivos donations from clerics to their concubines, and guardianship agreements for children born into these relationships. Analysis of the notarial records, which differ in their form and their content from one community to another, enables us to identify both similarities and differences in the practice of clerical concubinage in the towns and countryside of Italy and, more broadly, the Mediterranean, during the later Middle Ages.