This is a solid work on a subject of great interest for the social historian: marriage as a personal and social experience. Nizza da Silva examines the ideological and the legal framework of marriage; its rituals as both a civil and a religious ceremony; and the dysfunctions and eventual dissolution of the marital bonds. She has surveyed laws, theological treatises, and a considerable number of personal cases brought before the bishopric of São Paulo. Despite its title, this is a regional study, and other areas of colonial Brazil could and should be explored by other researchers.
Nizza da Silva has based her work on the assumption that the process of population starts with marriage and the formation of families. Although the prevailing customs in colonial Brazil were imported from Europe via Portugal, certain popular understandings and rituals of personal unions were of pre-Columbian origin. Thus, the study starts with an examination of the practices of indigenous societies, as a preamble to the study of the European marriage patterns. The latter unfold with the themes of choice of partners, concepts of virginity, seduction and elopement, betrothal, marriage rituals, dispensations and impediments, conjugal life, sexuality within marriage, marital problems, and divorce.
The society reflected in this work is largely that of persons of European descent. The author has made efforts to include other ethnic groups, but her sources have an implicit bias towards those who actually married. It is more than mere assumption that marriage itself was a status symbol, practiced mostly among the social elite in São Paulo, while a large sector of the population lived in consensual unions and escaped the socioreligious controls examined in this work. Class, gender, and ethnic consciousness were important factors in determining not only the choice of partners but the course of marriage itself, as this work makes abundantly clear. The examination of attitudes was one of Nizza da Silva’s concerns and, in addition to a wealth of informative material on the institution of marriage, she stresses the ambiguities in the definition and practice of personal and social relations between the sexes.
This work presents marriage as something more than a demographic phenomenon and, by doing so, it enriches our view of colonial society in Brazil. The section on female education is not totally relevant to the book’s objectives, and the lack of a final synthesis is also disappointing. However, we are indebted to the author for meticulous research and a sensitive treatment of one of the most basic of all social institutions.
