Impediments to marriage and prohibited degrees of kinship

Impediments are conditions which would prevent a couple from making a legal or ecclesiastically valid marriage. Besides obvious matters such as already having a living spouse, these include ecclesiastical prohibitions such as being excommunicate and therefore unable to take part in sacraments such as marriage.

Wedding ceremonies were routinely preceded by formal ecclesiastical enquiries (the so-called processetti). In cases where dispensation might be required there can be quite exhaustive examination into the moral and physical `purity' of the couple. Although the formulae used to seek dispensations were often standardised, the information given by processetti witnesses - on dowry, emigration, residential arrangements, family genealogies, sexual experience of the couple and courtship - provides anthropological insight into courtship and marriage practices in the early modern and modern period.

An important set of impediments related to marriage with close kin. It was forbidden to marry any person within certain 'degrees' of kinship, either consanguinal ('blood' kin through father or mother), affinal (through previous marriages) or spiritual (related through one's baptismal godparents).

Ecclesiastical authorities used a system of `degrees' of kinship to calculate prohibitions. Each generation from the couple up to their common ancestor represented one degree. By this system, the children of siblings were related at the 2nd degree, and the grandchildren of siblings at the 3rd degree. Affinal and spiritual kinship prohibitions worked in the same way but with the consanguinal kin of a former spouse or godparent.

Dispensations from these prohibitions could be obtained from senior ecclesiastical authorities for a fee commensurate with the seriousness of the impediment. It could take a long time for the papers to arrive back at the local parish. This is clear from statements in a will made by a man in Corsica as he was about to migrate to the continent. He states that if the dispensation for kinship arrives while he is absent, his brother should stand proxy for him at his wedding to his wife [sic]. The couple have been living together as man and wife for some time and have two children. They belong to the local elite.

A request for dispensation from Quenza, southern Corsica

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