Who married whom in the late XVth century at the Barcelona Area

Miquel Amengual, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Joana-Maria Pujadas-Mora, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Anna Cabré, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Our contribution will focus on marriage and social reproduction in the Barcelona area at the end of the Middle Age, using the information relative to 3.828 marriages celebrated in all the 90 parishes of the Barcelona area between May 12th, 1481 and April 29th, 1499. The data are extracted from the Barcelona Historical Marriage Database (BHMD) built through the project Five Centuries of Marriages (5CofM) in which all the authors are participating. It is also remarkable that the social and economic level of the couples are signalled by the different tiers of the licence fees, thus making possible the assimilation of cases showing different occupations but identical fees and the discrimination of cases with the same occupation but different fees. In order to approach intermarriage, social reproduction and intergenerational mobility, we will compare the occupations of the groom and the bride’s father, when she is a maid (1.908 cases) and the occupations of the groom and the deceased husband when she is a widow (399 cases). A secondary purpose of the study, that is still on-going, is the comparison of the geographic origins of the spouses along three consecutive six-year periods, searching for possible short-term and longer-term effects of the Sentence of Guadalupe (in 1486, peasants left to be tied to the land).