I was researching Lucrezia Borgia, and I found it interesting that according to most sources, she had at least one lover (Pietro Bembo) while married to her third (very powerful) husband, Alfonso d'Este.
So my question is, was there some kind of unspoken understanding that married women from patrician families occasionally had affairs? Yes, there were some like Eleonora di Garzia di Toledo who, when suspected of adultery, were pretty much left at the mercy (or lack thereof) of their husband, but I doubt punishment-by-death was the norm.
Was it not a big deal merely because no one knew about their affair when Lucrezia was alive, or because the benefits of a political alliance allowed her husband to overlook infidelity? How much does socioeconomic class come into play here?
Any thoughts?
Something even more interesting for you, OP! After Lucrezia "broke up" with Pietro Bembo, she had a pretty steamy affair with Francesco Gonzaga -- the husband of Isabella d'Este. Who is Alfonso d'Este's sister. And thus Lucrezia's sister-in-law. So all those rumors about incest? Technically true (according to the moral standards of the time) but Lucrezia was into her brother in-law, as opposed to her brother Cesare or something. :9 ^despite ^what ^Assassin's ^Creed ^and ^most ^Borgia-themed ^media ^would ^tell ^you.
The thing is about Lucrezia's fling with Bembo in particular was that it was actually pretty in line with the idea of courtly love popular at the time. Courtly love played a huge role in dictating the norms of a behavior between (noble)men and women, and this was especially true if there was a male party who was, say, an artist in need of patronage. Bembo was a poet, and Lucrezia was his patron and muse. She was his boss. Any flowery poems or prose he wrote for her were as much (the Renaissance equivalent to) cute-flirty-texts-with-monkey-emojis as they were paid work. It may look like adultery to our modern eyes, but in reality it was probably far more nuanced, and chaste, and economically-driven.
That's not to say that adultery is out of the realm of possibility. Once Lucrezia's husband Alfonso d'Este caught wind of this, however, Bembo pretty much hightailed it out of Ferrara. ^which ^is ^like. ^lol.
Lucrezia's affair with Francesco Gonzaga was a little trickier. He was a powerful nobleman roughly on par with Alfonso d'Este. He was married to Isabella d'Este. Though Lucrezia and Francesco kept the steamier parts of their affair relatively discreet; being married to a d'Este sibling made them related, and probably justified a lot of their more "official" correspondence. And because this marital dodecahedron was much more politically-charged, Alfonso d'Este probably couldn't just intimidate Francesco Gonzaga into leaving/quit being in a relationship with Lucrezia like he did Pietro Bembo.
probably tl;dr -- there were avenues dictated by Renaissance gender roles and (courtly) social norms where noblewomen were allowed flirtatious behavior. Sometimes, depending on the circumstances, this led to affairs, which might've been the case with Lucrezia. Even so, it remained very dangerous for noblewomen to be as open about it as noble men were about their mistresses.