1
The great majority of women in the Middle Ages married at least once, and sometimes several times. Marriage was key to medieval understandings of sexuality, religious faith, and childbearing. In this chapter we will examine the major influences on the concepts of marriage and sexuality to understand how they shaped the everyday lives of medieval Christian and Jewish women.
Not surprisingly, religious writers disapproved of sex outside of marriage. The word they used for it was fornication, which was considered a serious sin throughout the Middle Ages. Fornication was a large category that covered a multitude of sexual behaviors, including premarital sex, adultery, homosexuality, masturbation, oral sex, and even “unnatural” sexual positions. Medieval authorities tried to control marriage, gender identity, sexual orientation, and extramarital sexual intercourse, arguing that the anger of God would be let loose upon the world if such behaviors were allowed to continue. Medieval writers—who were frequently men and women vowed to chastity and part of a small, educated elite—found it in their interest to suppress behaviors and people they considered to be sinful or aberrant. They also enforced strong binary categories in their understanding of medieval sexuality, so that they condemned those people who did not fall into approved gender roles for men or women.
LATE ANTIQUE AND EARLY MEDIEVAL MARRIAGE
Early medieval Christian writers based their understanding of marriage on the biblical book of Genesis. In Genesis chapter two, God created Adam (man) first, and then Eve (woman) second. The reason Adam needed Eve, according to the text, was that God thought Adam should not be alone: he needed a “helper” or “companion.” God then created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. After living for a time in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve chose to eat a fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which God had forbidden them to eat. Therefore, they were cast out of Eden with harsh punishments: Adam was doomed to a life of hardship and manual labor, and Eve was cursed with pain and suffering during childbirth. She was also cursed to be subordinate to her husband and to be plagued by sexual desire: “To the woman he said, ‘I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you’” (Genesis 3:16).
The Genesis story formed the basis for the medieval Christian view of women and of marriage. One interpretation argued that the knowledge that Adam and Eve received after eating the forbidden fruit included knowledge of their own bodies and of sexual desire. Sexual desire, according to late antique and early medieval writers, was the result of this Original Sin, and, therefore, those who wanted to be completely faithful to God should abstain from sex. This belief fed into the growth of vows of celibacy by monks, nuns, and other ascetics in the period. Sex was permissible only within marriage, though marital sex was believed to be less virtuous than total abstinence. This positive view of celibacy came in part from the New Testament and the writings of Paul of Tarsus (ca. 4 BCE—ca. 64 CE), an important early Christian writer who believed that abstaining from sex was preferable to marriage because abstinence left Christian men and women free to contemplate and serve God. Paul was forced to admit, however, that if there were no sex and no marriage, then the faith would die out (1 Corinthians 7: 1–11), The tension between celibacy and the need to carry on the faith continued throughout the Middle Ages and influenced the way European Christian women understood their lives.
The tension also led to some sexual stereotypes. Male writers believed women to have stronger sexual desires than men and to be less able to resist sexual temptation. Men, so the reasoning went, were more intellectual and spiritual, and women more emotional and physical. For some religious writers among the early Christians, the Genesis story served as proof that Eve, and therefore all women, were guilty of the sin that had caused mankind to displease God and, by association, required the sacrifice of Jesus. This harsh view led to a strongly misogynist trend. The Christian writer Tertullian (155–240 CE) wrote a work in which he accused all women of being responsible for the death of Jesus because of their vanity and lustfulness: “Do you not know that you are Eve? . . . Because of what you deserve, that is, death, even the Son of God had to die” (Blamires 1992, 51).
The story of Adam, Eve, and the apple provided a deeply conflicted view of sexuality in the Catholic Church, and that conflict also affected the view of marriage among Church writers. But there were also examples from the Gospels to provide meaning to marriage. In a famous story from the Gospel according to John, Jesus attended a wedding in Cana of Galilee with his disciples and performed his first miracle by turning water into wine (John 2: 1–11). Christian writers took this to be an explicit message that God approved of marriage as long as it was undertaken in the proper religious spirit. Unfortunately, there was no example of a ceremony in Christian writ to give instructions for a standard ritual, so Christian marriage was largely patterned on marriage as practiced in local populations as they gradually converted to Christianity.
ROMAN MARRIAGE
One model for marriage came from ancient Rome. In republican Roman culture, a woman was considered to be under the legal control of either her husband or her father. The term for this was in manu, “in the hand.” There were three types of ceremonies in which a woman moved from the control of her father to the control of her husband. The most common ritual required five adults to witness the groom handing a few symbolic bronze coins to the bride’s father in return for the loss of his daughter. Afterward, the assembled guests accompanied the bride and groom to the groom’s house. At that point, the bride was considered to be a part of her husband’s family and not her own. Another, more elaborate ritual, reserved only for upper-class families, required the bride and groom to give bread as an offering to the god Jupiter before ten witnesses and a priest. Both types required the payment of a dowry from the bride’s family to the groom’s. Sometimes called the falcidian quarter, the dowry was defined as one-quarter of the bride’s family’s wealth and was equivalent to her inheritance from her family. It was also possible for a couple to have a common-law marriage: if a young woman cohabited with a man for a year and a day, she was considered to be married and in her husband’s manus. A wife in a marriage in manu did not control her dowry or any of her personal possessions, and she could not divorce her husband. He could divorce her, in which case she returned to her father’s manus.
A woman did have the option of staying in the manus of her family by contracting a “free” marriage. If she stayed at her father’s house for three days every year, she could remain under her father’s manus, and, therefore, her father would not give up control of her dowry. Some families likely chose this option to avoid giving too much control over their property to another family and to keep their daughters connected to their birth families. Women who were still in their fathers’ manus when their fathers died could control their own property, so this “free” type of marriage had significant benefits for women. This type of marriage became very popular in the imperial period (ca. 100–400 CE) as some of the older types of marriage fell out of use (Herlihy 1985, 8–9).
GERMANIC MARRIAGE
The earliest description of Germanic marriage comes from the Roman writer Tacitus (ca. 50–126 CE) in his work Germania. He wrote approvingly that Germanic marriage customs were strict and military in character. “The wife does not bring a dower to the husband, but the husband to the wife . . . gifts not meant to suit a woman’s taste, nor such as a bride would deck herself with, but oxen, a caparisoned steed, a shield, a lance and a sword” (Murray 2001, 11). Tacitus’s work should be read with care because he was a Roman writing about customs that were not his own, but his observations give us our only clues as to what early Germanic peoples may have done.
By the fifth and sixth centuries, Germanic law codes provide us with more information. Like the Roman marriage, early medieval Germanic marriage customs had three aspects. The betrothal of the bride and groom was a festive occasion in which the families had a large dinner and drew up a formal contract for the marriage. The dower, or gifts to the bride and her family, made a second occasion. As in Roman marriages, there was an exchange of a few coins from the groom to the bride’s father, but the most important part of the dower was the money and gifts given to the bride herself. By the eleventh century, she received not only an amount of money or possessions as a dower but also the Morgengabe, a “morning gift” given the day after the wedding, after the marriage had been consummated. A wealthy bride could expect lavish gifts as her Morgengabe. The third occasion was the official transfer of the wife into the husband’s home, similar to the Roman custom. A Germanic wife was subject to the Munt, or legal power, of her husband and could not divorce him, but he could divorce her if he issued a decree nullifying their marriage contract (Herlihy 1985, 49–51; Brundage 1987, 128). A year of marriage without conceiving a child was considered to be one reason to divorce (Brundage 1987, 131).
From the sixth to the tenth centuries, marriage was probably promoted in part by a family’s ability to provide money to their son—sometimes as much as a quarter of the family wealth, depending on local custom. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, the parts of Europe that gave the Morgengabe gradually changed over to the Roman dowry system, in part because of the new prominence of Roman law, and money began to flow from the bride’s family to the groom’s instead. This change affected the rights of women to their own property, because while a wife had complete control over her Morgengabe, the control of dowry property, although technically hers, often rested with her husband and his family. The Roman-style dowry system gradually spread throughout Europe between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. By the end of the Middle Ages, the dowry had become a prominent feature of marriages all over Europe (Stuard 2013).
AGE AT FIRST MARRIAGE
We often imagine a medieval couple marrying very young by modern standards, and it is true that both the Catholic Church and Jewish law set the minimum ages of marriage at twelve for girls and fourteen for boys. However, ages of marriage varied according to custom and social and economic pressures. In the early Middle Ages, age at first marriage tended to in the teens for both husband and wife; the high risk of death to both children and mothers demanded that young women reproduce early and often to keep the population steady. After the year 1000, when the population stabilized, food supplies improved, and invasions ended, age at first marriage increased into the twenties, especially for peasants, who could now afford to marry later. Noble young women tended to marry early in most time periods to maximize their fertility, but upper-class young men often waited to marry until their fathers had died and they had become the heads of their own households. This often made them significantly older than their brides (Ferraro 2012, 61–62).
THE CHRISTIAN INFLUENCE ON EARLY MEDIEVAL MARRIAGE
The secular nature of traditional rituals, the common use of divorce, and the lack of concern over sexual mores in Roman and Germanic marriage customs left Christian writers dissatisfied. Over the first centuries of Christianity, they adopted Christian symbolism into the marriage ceremony by layering it on top of the ceremonies that communities already practiced. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE), a major writer of the fifth century, wrote that marriage had three great positive attributes, fides, proles, and sacramentum: faithfulness, children, and permanent union, a formulation that allowed Christian marriage to be linked to the practices of the time (Herlihy 1985, 11). Gradually, church officials formalized the rituals of marriage into a tripartite structure: engagement (which could be a formal betrothal), consent (usually a statement given in a ceremony with witnesses), and consummation (when the bride and groom had sex) (d’Avray 2008, 58). Christians kept a number of the old Roman and Germanic customs, the most important of which was the use of the dowry. Germanic communities continued to practice the dower and the Morgengabe until the eleventh century.
Over the course of the early Middle Ages, the church encouraged couples to exchange their consent to their marriages before groups of witnesses, either in or just outside a church. In Italy, most of these ceremonies took place on the steps of the church building before the bride and groom went to their new home. The French approach had the couple lie in bed together while the priest spoke a blessing over their marriage bed. In both cases, the consummation of the marriage was considered to complete the marriage and make it permanent (Brundage 1987, 88).
SEX IN MARRIAGE—FOURTH THROUGH ELEVENTH CENTURIES
Marital sex posed a problem for Catholic Church writers through the early Middle Ages because of the church’s strong emphasis on virginity being desirable for the avoidance of sin and for right service to God. Ever since Adam and Eve had sinned sexually, they reasoned, it was almost impossible to have sexual intercourse without sinning, even within marriage. Virginity was, therefore, to be prized. Saint Jerome (ca. 347–420 CE) remarked bluntly, “I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but only because they give me virgins” (Amt 2010, 17). As far as Jerome was concerned, marital sex should be limited to brief encounters that were strictly for procreation. Under his influence, later church authors began to place rules on when and how married couples could have sex without sinning. Caesarius of Arles (ca. 470–542 CE), an influential writer of rules for Christians, forbade couples to have sex during Lent (the forty days before Easter), on the vigils for feast days (the nights before religious holidays), on Sundays, and during menstrual periods and pregnancy (Brundage 1987, 91–92).
Ironically, this conflicted with another church prescription, the idea of the marriage debt, in which either spouse was required to have sex when asked, on the grounds that their bodies belonged to each other. Augustine of Hippo allowed husbands and wives to have sex without fear of sin, but other church writers were not so accommodating (Brundage 1987, 93). However, Augustine, one of the most important Christian writers of the period, was particularly harsh on the subject of birth control, because he believed that anyone who used birth control was engaging in sex for pleasure rather than procreation. Augustine’s point of view provided the basis for the church’s negative view of contraception throughout the Middle Ages.
Between the sixth and eleventh centuries, some Christian authors wrote handbooks to help the clergy understand when sexual sin had occurred and how to issue penance for it. These handbooks were called penitentials. Taking their cue from earlier writers, the writers of the penitentials took a very strict view of marital sex: not only did they restrict the days during the year on which married couples could licitly have sex, they also encouraged married couples to abstain from sex at regular intervals. Otherwise, they reasoned, the marriage was not a marriage at all, but a celebration of lust. Some writers even required newlyweds to wait three days after the wedding before having sex. Married couples were also to abstain during menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation (nursing), as well as on particular days of the week: Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Those couples who observed all these prohibitions would have been restricted to having sex only four or five times a month (Brundage 1987, 154–60). It is impossible to say, however, how closely married couples followed—or even knew about—all the restrictions of the penitential literature. The birth rate in the period, as far as can be told, does not reflect a strict use of the rules among married couples.
CONCUBINAGE AND POLYGYNY
Christian authorities in the early Middle Ages were particularly troubled by the Germanic acceptance of polygyny (having more than one wife). Germanic chieftains could have multiple wives and also kept concubines, women who were not wives but were recognized as legal consorts. Roman law also recognized a class of women who were not prostitutes but were not quite wives—frequently partners of a lower social class than the man—as concubinae, meaning “women who share the bedroom.” The distinction between marriage and concubinage was not always clear, as the children of both wives and concubines could inherit property from their fathers (Brundage 1987, 135). From the early sixth century, when Germanic groups began to convert to Christianity, church officials worked to encourage the Germanic peoples to understand marriage as a permanent and exclusive arrangement. Germanic kings, however, continued to practice concubinage and multiple marriage. The Frankish king and later emperor Charlemagne (d. 814 CE) had many wives and concubines and a range of children by both. Although Charlemagne never had more than one wife at a time, he was never without at least one concubine, whose position in the royal household was expected to be slightly below his wife’s. His biographer, Einhard, listed Charlemagne’s children by both his wives and his concubines but confessed that he could not remember all the concubines’ names—some evidence that there were many of them (Einhard and Notker the Stammerer 2008, 31).
Upper-class men continued to take concubines and mistresses throughout the Middle Ages, despite the church’s strong disapproval of the practice. Such relationships were usually between wealthy men and women of a much lower social class. Church courts tried forcing men to give up their mistresses with only partial success. Count William IX of Aquitaine was excommunicated for his liaison with Dangereuse, the viscountess of Châtellerault, in the early twelfth century, but instead of repenting, he installed her in a tower at his castle in Poitiers and proceeded to live with her openly for many years (Flori 2007, 20–21). The laws of Las Siete Partidas of Alfonso X of Leon and Castile (1221–1284 CE) even drew up regulations for the keeping of concubines. “Any man who is not hindered by membership in a religious order, or by marriage, can keep a concubine without fear of temporal punishment” (Amt 2010, 55).
Such laws provided that both parties would be legally protected, particularly if the man then wanted to marry someone else. In 1228, Countess Aurembiaix of Urgel made a contract with King James I of Aragon that detailed how they would own their property and how they would care for any children born of their union. It seems all that distinguished this contract from a marriage contract was that there was no marriage involved (Brundage 1987, 370).
Concubinage was also widespread among upper-class Jews in Spain. Even though Jewish religious law generally forbade men to keep concubines, the social practices of upper-class people permitted and even encouraged men to keep concubines or, in Muslim Spanish legal context, to take more than one wife. Some men who bought slaves to keep as concubines later freed and married them. Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), an important Jewish thinker in Spain and later in Egypt, ruled that freeing a concubine and marrying her was permitted, not because the practice was approved under Talmudic law, but because it was less sinful to marry a concubine than to have children with her out of wedlock (Grossman 2004, 137). Customs about what relationships were legal or illegal varied greatly depending on the social contexts in which they operated.
HIGH MEDIEVAL MARRIAGE AND SEXUALITY
Church Reform
In the eleventh century, the Catholic Church began a series of reforms that were aimed at consolidating the power of the church and emphasizing church law over the civil legal customs of the various nobilities of Europe. In doing so, the church incorporated much law taken from the Roman period, especially the laws compiled under the emperor Justinian (ca. 482–565 CE) and known as the Justinianic Corpus. Reforming popes such as Leo IX (pope 1049–1054 CE) and Gregory VII (pope 1073–1085 CE) sought to increase papal power and to reform those areas of the church that governed sexuality, particularly sexuality among the clergy (Brundage 1987, 178). Over the course of the twelfth century, papal power and Roman legal reasoning led to changes and adjustments in the understanding of marriage and sexuality. These changes led to new everyday expectations for medieval women.
Clerical Celibacy and Lay Marriage
Although the church’s attitude toward virginity had always been approving, and taking vows of celibacy had long been a requirement for monks and nuns, the secular clergy—those priests and clerics who cared for the population—had never become entirely celibate, and many priests had even married or entered into out-of-wedlock relationships with women. Canonist reformers, experts in church law, of the eleventh century advocated a much stricter view of marital relationships that excluded all religious professionals, not just monks and nuns, from marriage and, therefore, from any kind of sexuality. The word concubine then changed to mean a woman in a sexual relationship with a man to whom she was not married, especially if that man was a priest. Sexuality, the reformers maintained, could only lawfully take place within marriage and only for the purpose of procreation. Joined to this was a much stricter definition of marriage: it was to be entirely monogamous, indissoluble, and freely contracted between the parties (Brundage 1987, 183). From the twelfth century on, the church was the chief arbiter of whether a marriage was legally valid.
Marriage throughout the Middle Ages, however, was not just the concern of the bride and groom: it was a contract between families and sometimes their secular lords and also concerned the church, which wanted the marriage to be as binding as possible. Historian Georges Duby, in a classic work, argued that between 1050 and 1300, two models of Christian marriage were taking shape that were fundamentally in conflict with one another. The first was a secular, family-based model that was primarily concerned with lineage and property. These marriages were often done without much attention to the opinions of the bride and groom but were rather predicated on what made the most sense in regard to land and allegiances. The second model was an ecclesiastical model in which the church’s definition of marriage was primary. This model was not concerned with lineage or property but emphasized consent of the bride and groom over the consent of the family (Duby 1978). High medieval marriages eventually adopted a number of requirements to meet both the community’s and the church’s understanding of what made marriage valid. There were many local customs and practices, but the overall patterns were similar.
A royal bride and groom, escorted by attendants, are blessed by a bishop. (The British Library)
Here is an English example. A marriage usually began with the financial arrangement that led to the betrothal. A woman was expected to bring a dowry that represented her inheritance and claim to family property; sometimes that was land and sometimes goods and cash. She expected to maintain a claim to her dowry should she ever become widowed. A betrothal ceremony followed the financial settlement, often with many witnesses, in which the betrothed promised to marry one another in the future. After the betrothal, the banns, public proclamations of the coming wedding, should be called to make sure there were no legal impediments to the marriage. The wedding ceremony itself took place at the church door, where vows were exchanged, and the groom gave the bride a symbolic gift of money on a book or a shield to signify her dower. The groom also gave the bride a ring blessed by the priest. A mass followed inside the church, and then a wedding feast, after which the bridal bed and bedroom were blessed. The couple then got into bed together before witnesses (Leyser 1995, 107–109). A prayer from the Liturgy of Marriage in the Sarum missal, dating from the thirteenth century, blesses the woman in this way: “Let her be amiable to her husband like Rachel, wise like Rebecca, long-lived and faithful like Sara . . . May she be fruitful in child-bearing, excellent, and innocent” (Murray 2001, 267–268).
Consent and Sex
The combination of custom and church law made marriages from the twelfth century on more binding than they had ever been before. Although the church’s definition of marriage emphasized consent, in general, European laypeople throughout the Middle Ages believed that consummation was one of the requirements for a valid marriage. Archbishop Hincmar of Reims (806–882 CE) described it this way in about 860 CE: a marriage was an agreement made between free persons, with parental consent, and was made valid with a dowry and sexual intercourse (Brundage 1987, 136). During the twelfth century, however, some church thinkers reconsidered this rule. Peter Lombard (ca. 1096–1160 CE), bishop of Paris, wrote in his work The Sentences that a marriage was complete when the bride and groom consented—that is, as soon as the bride and groom announced that it was their intention to be married. At that moment, they were married; sex was not required. The reason for this was theological. Peter Lombard and others worried that if marriages that were unconsummated were not real marriages, then the marriage of the Virgin Mary to Joseph would not have been valid, and neither would marriages in which the couples were unable or unwilling to have sex. His reasoning appealed to Pope Alexander III (Pope 1159–1189 CE), who encouraged others to adopt the view (Brundage 1987, 264).
Although this theological position solved the problem of Joseph and Mary, it posed a number of problems for families. Since consent could be given in private or in secret, valid marriages could be made without public betrothal or even the knowledge of the bride’s and groom’s families (Herlihy 1985, 81–82). This meant that families who were accustomed to having the last word in their children’s choices of marriage partners could be undercut by a taking of vows in secret. During the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, church authorities patched this loophole by requiring that the banns be called three times in the couple’s parish church on successive Sundays or feast days before the wedding. The expectation was that if anyone in the community knew of a reason why the couple should not be married, such as incest or a previous marriage, they would have the opportunity to come forward. Thus, the marriage would have no reason to be contested later (Finch 1990, 190). Public consent continued to be a main requirement for a religiously valid marriage throughout the Middle Ages, and church courts called witnesses to attest that the taking of vows had occurred.
Indissolubility
During the twelfth century, church courts became the arbiters of marriage and its legitimacy. Pope Alexander III was responsible for the definition of marriage promulgated during that time. A valid marriage could be made by present consent, using words such as “I take thee as my husband,” which meant that the parties were officially married. It could also be made by betrothal followed by sexual intercourse. Once the marriage was consummated, it was permanent. The reform canonists agreed that a marriage, once legally contracted in this way, could not be dissolved (Donahue 2007, 1–2), Divorce was forbidden, and annulment, the declaration that a marriage had never existed, was used rarely. Only a few instances provided consistent grounds for the separation of married couples: impotence (the inability to perform sexual intercourse); consanguinity (incest by blood relationship); and affinity (incest by marriage relationship). For some writers, such as Bishop Ivo of Chartres (bishop 1091–1116 CE), adultery also provided a reason for a separation. Separation, however, did not always mean divorce in the sense that the parties would be allowed to marry again: they were allowed to live apart (a practice called divortium, the root of our modern word divorce) but not to remarry, unless the marriage was declared annulled. Husbands and wives who decided to become monks or nuns were able to separate, but the spouses left behind could not remarry (Brundage 1987, 200–201, 334). Remarriage was often left to the few (usually noble) couples who were fortunate enough to petition for annulment in church courts that were less strict.
Impotence
The inability of a man to perform sexual intercourse was one factor that could lead to the annulment of a marriage. Since the Catholic Church defined marital sex in terms of procreation, the inability to procreate posed an intellectual problem. However, there was no one point of view on impotence in the early Middle Ages. In general, the canonists, such as the twelfth-century author Gratian, were of the opinion that impotence could cause a marriage to end (Rousseau 2014, 414). Church authorities worked on a case-by-case basis to determine whether impotence allowed for the dissolution of marriages. In the later Middle Ages, the church set a requirement that three years of impotence must be proven. If it was, the marriage could be declared annulled. Some courts required that the man who claimed impotence be tested by sex workers or matrons to see if he responded sexually to a woman who was not his wife. Women could also demand to be examined to prove that their marriages had never been consummated because of a husband’s impotence. Lucrezia Borgia (1480–1519), the daughter of Pope Alexander VI, claimed in 1497 that her marriage to Giovanni Sforza had never been consummated and offered to be examined to prove that she was still a virgin. Sforza himself refused to be examined, so a church court under two cardinals declared the marriage invalid. Both parties later married again (McLaren 2007, 35–36).
Many medieval people believed that impotence could be caused by magic. Archbishop Hincmar of Reims (802–884 CE) suggested that any couples who were worried that magic might be at work in their relationship should immediately devote themselves to prayer and fasting so that the spell could be removed. Impotence by magic became a widely discussed public issue in 1193, when Philip Augustus, king of France (king 1180–1223 CE) married Princess Ingeborg of Denmark. Immediately after the marriage ceremony, Philip developed an aversion to Ingeborg and attempted to have the marriage annulled on the grounds of incest, because Ingeborg was related to his first wife. This was unsuccessful, so Philip claimed that he was unable to consummate the marriage because he was bewitched. Ingeborg, however, steadfastly argued that the marriage had been consummated. Philip appealed to Pope Innocent III (pope 1198–1216 CE), who advised him to wait the three years before attempting to end the marriage. In the end, the pope took Ingeborg’s side, and Philip’s attempt to annul the marriage did not work; his marriage to Ingeborg stood until 1223, Philip’s own death (Rider 2006, 34, 72–74).
Consanguinity and Affinity
Church authorities were unanimous that a marriage made between people with consanguinity—sharing the same blood—was incest and, therefore, an impediment to a legal Christian marriage. This included those who were related by affinity, which came about through marriage; for example, it would be incest for a man to marry a close relative of his wife or his sister-in-law. In the early Middle Ages, to determine whether two people were too closely related to marry, a Germanic calculation was used: if the spouses were related within seven degrees of separation, they could not marry. Calculating the degrees of separation meant starting on a family tree at the first spouse, counting backward to the common ancestor, and then down to the second spouse, counting one for each person. If the number was less than seven, the marriage would be incestuous. Effectively, this meant that first cousins and even second cousins could not marry.
In the twelfth century, after the doctrine of indissolubility was taking hold, nobles could seek the dissolution of marriages on the grounds of consanguinity and be allowed to remarry. Since so many noble families were closely intermarried, it was often possible to discover a link between two married people either through their blood relatives or to one another’s relatives by marriage. One well-known example of this strategy was at work in the end of the marriage of Eleanor, the duchess of Aquitaine, to the king of France, Louis VII, in the twelfth century. Louis and Eleanor were married for fifteen years and had two daughters but made the decision to seek annulment of their marriage on the grounds of their blood relationship, for which they had received papal permission when they married. It is likely that it was their lack of sons, instead, that drove the separation. The marriage was dissolved in March 1152 by a church council called for the purpose. Louis and Eleanor were both then allowed to remarry. Eleanor became the queen of England when she married Henry II in May of 1152, and Louis remarried two years later to his second wife, Constance of Castile (Flori 2007, 54–55). Louis and Eleanor’s divorce is one example of how the doctrine of indissolubility did not always work out in practice. During the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the rule of consanguinity was reduced to four degrees, which reduced the number of marriages that would fall under prohibition, and such cases became rarer (Brundage 1987, 354).
SEX IN MARRIAGE—TWELFTH TO FIFTEENTH CENTURIES
In the High Middle Ages, the severe attitude of the Penitentials toward sex inside of marriage loosened a bit. Sex in marriage was permissible, as it paid the marriage debt, and it was not considered a sin if the intent of the couple was procreation. Moralists still advised that “immoderate” or “unnatural” sex positions were sinful, and so was having sex for pleasure, but sexual intercourse was still necessary for a valid marriage. Church courts even sentenced married couples to sex if their relationship was estranged. One court ordered a man “to pay the conjugal debt to the plaintiff [his wife] in her father’s house one night each week” (Brundage 1987, 505). On the whole, church courts enforced the marriage debt as a way to ensure the morality of the faithful within marriage. The French bishop Jacques de Vitry (ca. 1160–1240 CE) cautioned married men to be sure that they kept their wives satisfied so they would have no excuse to stray. Women who were widowed were presumed to be sexually experienced and, therefore, more in danger of becoming wanton.
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE VIEWS OF SEX
Outside of church jurisdiction, couples, we must suppose, continued to have sex without observing all the strict rules and regulations the church attempted to put in place. Two fourteenth-century English examples can demonstrate the difference between views of sex. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400, introduced a character called the Wife of Bath, who had been married multiple times and was quite open about her love of sex: “My husband’s going to have it night and day,” she declared to her audience of astonished pilgrims (Blamires 1992, 203). The Wife’s boast that she had married—and worn out—five husbands was intended to amuse, but the prologue to her tale was full of lusty praise for the “marriage debt.”
In contrast, Margery Kempe, a middle-class woman who lived in England in the fourteenth century, was persuaded that abstention from sex was what God wanted and proposed to her husband that they have a celibate marriage. She was so horrified by marital sex (despite having borne fourteen children) that “she would rather have eaten or drunk the slime from the gutter than consent to any sexual contact, except out of obedience [to God]” (Bale 2015, 15). Eventually, Kempe persuaded her husband into taking a vow of chastity and went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Kempe’s view of marital sex was extreme for the period, but it illustrated the effect on everyday life of some of the religious teachings that were common at the time.
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE VIEWS OF MARRIAGE AND WOMEN
Outside the realm of church law, popular texts sometimes spoke of marriage in negative terms for different reasons than the church writers. The basis for much anti-woman and anti-marriage writing in the Middle Ages was a work criticizing marriage by an author named Theophrastus, which was quoted at length in Saint Jerome’s fourth-century work Against Jovinian. Theophrastus criticized both women in general and wives in particular:
“To support a poor wife is hard; to put up with a rich one is torture . . . If she has a bad temper or is a fool, if she has a blemish or is proud, or has bad breath, whatever her fault may be—all this we learn after marriage” (Blamires 1992, 71).
Theophrastus may have been arguing satirically, but Jerome took him seriously. In an effort to convince his readers that celibacy was better than marriage, he used Theophrastus’s points: wives were a financial drain; a wife was liable to be a bad bargain because she could not be “tried” before marriage; and all women were so lustful that they would be unfaithful, whether they were beautiful or ugly. Those points appeared over and over in anti-marriage and anti-woman literature throughout the Middle Ages. Notably, the same points were used in Jean de Meun’s section of the fourteenth-century Roman de la Rose, a work in which all the stereotypes of marriage were used to great effect. De Meun had a character called the “Jealous Husband” lament: “Would that I Theophrastus had believed and never wed!” (de Lorris and de Meun 1962, 173).
De Meun’s section includes a diatribe in which the Jealous Husband railed about his wife’s love of luxury, her wanton behavior, and her lack of regard for his desires or comforts. These criticisms were part of an overall negative stereotype of women in the Middle Ages: they were portrayed with a desire for wealth, fine clothes, and jewels; lustfulness; and love of talking. Such stereotypes were often deployed humorously to tease women, to tease men about their wives, or to mock the desire to marry, but they were also used to support and proliferate negative stereotypes of women and wives.
Not all writers, however, had such a dim view of married life. The anonymous fourteenth-century author of the Ménagier de Paris wrote a work for a young wife in which he extolled the benefits of marriage and educated her about her duties and cares in her married life. “Certainly,” he wrote, “a man, no matter what his position, noble or not, can have no better treasure than a wife who is virtuous and wise” (Bayard 2001, 45). The twelfth-century bishop and poet Marbode of Rennes (ca. 1035–1123) agreed: “Of all the things which are seen to have been bestowed through God’s gift to the advantage of humanity, we consider nothing to be more beautiful or better than a good woman, who is part of our own flesh, and we part of her flesh” (Blamires 1992, 228).
Authors who wrote positively about marriage, almost without exception, emphasized chastity as part of the good wife’s virtues, but what they meant was faithfulness to her husband rather than celibacy. The author of the Ménagier de Paris was unwilling to go into much detail about married sex, but he made it clear that a wife should guard her chastity very carefully: “It is certain that all good things forsake a girl or woman who is found wanting in virginity, continence, and chastity. Nothing—neither riches, beauty, wisdom, high birth, nor any other asset—can erase talk of the contrary fault” (Bayard 2001, 45). A reputation for sexual continence was key to keeping a respectable social position in a medieval community.
JEWISH MARRIAGE AND SEXUALITY
In European Jewish communities, a slightly different set of customs prevailed for marriage. Jewish parents arranged marriages for their children as Christian parents did, at similar ages, and the couple’s wishes were not a factor in the arrangement, although a bride did have the right to refuse a marriage. Husbands paid a bride-price, or mohar, to the bride’s family, and the bride also contributed a dowry, often consisting of jewelry and household items. Although religious interpretations varied across the Jewish communities of Europe, some customs applied across national boundaries. The marriage was made by the signing of a legal document called a ketubah. As in Christian ceremonies, the wedding ceremony often took place outdoors. Sometimes a prayer shawl (called a tallith) was draped over the bride and groom as a sort of tent, the ancestor of the modern huppah (canopy). A rabbi chanted prayers and blessings while the bride received a ring on her right hand. At the end of the ceremony, the bride and groom each took a ceremonial drink from a cup of wine. Sometime in the Middle Ages, the custom began of breaking the cup from which the wine was drunk. A week’s worth of feasting and celebration then occurred, depending on the resources available to the families.
As in Christian law, Jewish law prohibited sex outside of marriage, but sexual intercourse within marriage was not shaped by the ambivalence that characterized Christian thought. Jewish law generally recognized that marital sex should be fulfilling and satisfying for both parties and that mutual affection should be required. A woman might, in some communities, declare that she found her husband repugnant and ask for a divorce. Divorce was also possible in cases of infidelity, though some rabbis insisted that a woman could not be divorced without her consent. Although not all relationships were successful, Jewish law did provide a woman with security through her ketubah for many marital problems. Abuse was not tolerated and could be grounds for divorce; forcing a woman to move houses without her consent was also prohibited. On the whole, Jewish women were provided with more recourses in the case of an unhappy marriage than their Christian counterparts (Roth 2005, 43–54). Unfortunately, the sources do not survive to give us comparable information about Muslim women at the same time.
RAPE AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE
Writing the history of rape and sexual violence is difficult, because our modern ideas about rape and about the ownership of the body are very different from the ideas of the past. Particularly complex is the use of the word raptus, which has come into English as the word rape, but which could also mean abduction in historical texts. Both Romans and Germanic peoples in the early Middle Ages recognized marriage by abduction, which the Romans called raptus and Germans called Raubehe (Brundage 1987, 129). Both involved the kidnapping of a woman and (presumably) her sexual assault, which was considered to function as the consummation of the marriage.
In some situations, the penalties for abduction and rape were severe but largely financial. The Burgundian Code, written in the fifth century, assessed the penalty for abduction as a fine of nine times the woman’s normal wergild to her family and a fine of twelve shillings to the king, an amount so high that it would seem impossible for anyone to pay it. If, however, her kidnapper did not rape her and she was returned unharmed, the wergild was only multiplied by six. If the man could not pay the sums of money involved, the law handed him over to the girl’s parents “that they may have the power of doing to him whatever they choose” (Drew 1972, 31). Although these laws were clearly written to discourage rape, they also recognized the possibility that women might choose to marry without their families’ permission. If a woman chose to have sex with a man willingly, he only owed three times her wergild to the person who held her Munt (Drew 1972, 31). A woman who married by elopement in this way did not transfer her Munt to her husband but kept it within her own family (Brundage 1987, 129). Similarly, in Frankish culture, the sixth-century Salic law provided the same penalty for “stealing” a wife as for killing a man, which was 200 solidi (Wemple 1981, 34). Large as these amounts may seem, it is worth remembering that the monetary compensation was not paid to the woman herself but to her family and was adjusted to reflect her overall worth in the society according to her age, fertility, and sexual status.
It is often difficult to tell when, how, and for what reason different punishments were promulgated, how often they were used, and whether the laws that were written about rape and abduction actually reflected how medieval people responded when confronted with a case of rape. Aelfred’s laws, an Anglo-Saxon compilation from the ninth century, gave these instructions: five shillings’ compensation was due to a lower-class woman for a touch on her breast, while a rape demanded a compensation of sixty shillings. The law went on to say, “If another man has lain with her before, the compensation is then to be half that”—that is, 30 shillings (Saunders 2001, 40). It is important to notice the role that social class played in the laws: the woman was to be compensated according to her status in society. It is also clear that the woman who was raped was expected to be a virgin. If she was not, the compensation dropped by half. Much of the burden of proof, therefore, lay on the victim. In the late-twelfth-century English law code called Glanvill, the law gave very strict instructions for a rape victim: “A woman who suffers in this way must go, soon after the deed is done, to the nearest vill and there show to trustworthy men the injury done to her, and any effusion of blood there may be and any tearing of her clothes” (Saunders 2001, 53). The injuries of the victim, the emphasis on her chastity, and her social level were all frequently used to evaluate the victim’s claims of having been raped.
Rape figures prominently in popular stories about the Middle Ages. Many movies and books include a custom called jus primae noctis, or the right of the first night, in which a medieval lord had the right to have sex with the bride of one of his men before her husband did. Scholarship has firmly proven that this right did not exist. Writers refer to it to show that the people of the Middle Ages were barbaric and cruel in comparison with the customs of their own time and place. Fiction writers have persistently used the right of the first night for dramatic plots. It should be noted, however, that although there was no law allowing a lord to have sex with his vassal’s new wife, we know that such rapes certainly could and did occur. Gregory of Tours (538–594), a historian and bishop, recorded an interesting example in his History of the Franks. A nobleman named Amalo lusted after a young freeborn girl. He ordered his men to bring her to him, and he beat her before attempting to rape her. The girl got free long enough to draw Amalo’s sword and kill him. She then escaped and made a difficult thirty-five-mile journey to Chalons-sur-Saône to beg the king for mercy. Impressed, the king not only granted her forgiveness but ordered Amalo’s family not to seek revenge against her. Gregory wrote that he was happy to learn that “with God to guard her she did not lose her virginity at the hands of her brutal ravisher” (Thorpe 1974, 514). Gregory’s point of view was that the young girl’s escape was a miracle; that, in itself, may suggest to us that such rapes took place in sixth-century France.
Some high medieval laws prescribed very harsh punishments for rape, even making it a capital crime. The twelfth-century laws of Henry I of England (1068–1135) listed rape under the heading of crimes that were so bad that compensation could not be paid for them, which eventually came to be called felonies. The chronicler William of Malmesbury (ca. 1095–1143) remarked approvingly that “[Henry I] followed his father’s example . . . ordaining that convicted offenders should lose their eyes and testicles” (Saunders 2001, 50). Some laws imposed blinding, castration, flogging, or the death penalty on rapists. Even so, we have few examples of these punishments being put into practice. The woman’s family connections negotiated any punishment or settlement, if any, that happened afterward. The most common punishments were flogging and fines. In some places, women could be married to their rapists as part of the settlement (Scarborough 2012).
Bringing a charge of rape could also be dangerous. It was not considered possible, because of the marriage debt, for a woman to be raped by her husband, as she was expected to provide sex on demand. Furthermore, women who were raped were sometimes judged even more harshly than their attackers. In 1391 France, Bertin Quenet raped Alicia, widow of Jean Hoquet, after breaking into her house. When they appeared before the local court at Cerisy, Bertin was fined only five sous, but Alicia was fined fifteen sous for having sex out of wedlock. Conversely, records from the seignorial court at Saint-Martin-des-Champs in Paris told the story of how, in 1337, a tailor named Jean Agnes raped two twelve-year-old girls and was dragged through the streets before being hanged (Gravdal 1991, 127, 129).
The chronicler Jean Froissart (ca. 1333–1400) told the story of a knight’s wife who was raped by another knight while her husband was away. Her husband and family pursued the case to the highest court in France, which ruled that, because the two parties had no evidence to prove guilt or innocence, the matter could only be decided by an ordeal by combat, or a duel. The lady’s husband dueled the accused man while the lady waited, dressed in black. Froissart wrote, “You will understand that she was in great anxiety . . . for if her husband got the worst of it, the sentence was that he should be hanged and she burnt without appeal.” The lady’s husband won the battle. It is easy to see, however, why even noble women might have decided not to pursue rape charges, if death by burning was a possibility. Froissart wrote pensively, “I do not know . . . whether she had not often regretted having gone so far with the matter that she and her husband were in such grave danger” (Brereton 1978, 314).
The differences between these cases illustrate the challenges of understanding medieval rape: were the cases different because of their locations, the social classes of those involved, different laws, or something less tangible? Custom and local practice are probably at least part of the answer to these questions. Rape was situational: a woman’s marital status, virginity, religious vows, or property ownership shaped whether she could bring a charge of rape. Altogether, rape cases tried in courts show “a long-standing tradition of indifference to male violation of a woman’s sexuality and legal personality” (Gravdal 1991, 131). When a woman was married, however, her status as the dependent of her husband challenged this indifference. We will discuss adultery and its relationship to rape more closely in chapter six.
DOMESTIC ABUSE
Many modern people are familiar with a practice known as the rule of thumb—the belief that sometime in the past, husbands were allowed to beat their wives with a stick, as long as the stick was no thicker than the husband’s thumb. This, however, appears to have been a myth that was popularized in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. There are no medieval records that reflect such a practice (Kelly 1994). Still, medieval society generally accepted that some level of physical abuse between husband and wife would take place. Violence supported the hierarchy of men over women and was, at times, overtly encouraged in literature. Medieval women were taught that their husbands were masters over their everyday concerns and activities and that obedience was always required (more discussion of obedience is in chapter four).
Geoffrey Chaucer’s (ca. 1340–1400) famous “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” part of his larger work the Canterbury Tales, featured an introduction in which the character of the Wife of Bath described her own experiences during her five marriages. She recounted a physical fight in which her fifth husband rendered her deaf in one ear with a blow. There was a later fight during which she was struck to the ground. The whole episode, however, was played for laughs. The message was that the wife deserved to be beaten and that her husband—whom she manipulated into apologizing to her—had not been keeping her under control as he should. The Wife even added that she loved her fifth husband more than any of the others because she dominated him, a statement that would have made Chaucer’s audience laugh with appreciation for its absurdity (Weisl 1998).
In court records from late medieval Europe, when the record keeping is better than in earlier periods, there are sometimes visible cases of domestic violence. Altogether, such cases show that women were only able to call on courts for help after particularly violent or bloody incidents in which the husband was the aggressor. Otherwise, medieval laws recognized the husband’s right to beat his wife. The Glossa Ordinaria of the early thirteenth century cautioned the husband that he was allowed to beat his wife “only insofar as the law allowed,” however far that might be. Otherwise, he might be fined up to one-third of his marital property. An upper-class woman might also bring a case of marital cruelty to a church court in an effort to seek a legal separation, or divortium. A separated couple was not required to live together, but they could not marry again (Brundage 2000, 187).
Husbands were frequently the defendants when women were murdered, although no study is possible on overall rates across Europe. In cases of female homicide, gleaned from late medieval Bolognese courts, a “small but significant” number of wife murders was a constant across the fourteenth century (Dean 2004, 529). When women harmed their husbands, medieval courts were harsh. In 1352, an English law covering treason defined women’s murder of their husbands as a form of treason, similar to a subject attempting to kill a king or a servant their master. The punishment for these crimes was execution: men were hanged, drawn, and quartered, while women were burned at the stake (Hanawalt 2000, 197).
Women accused of murdering their husbands were often charged with using poison, magic, or both (we will discuss magic more in chapter seven). In 1394 Provence, a woman named Margarida de Portu was accused of having poisoned her husband, Johan Damponcii. He died after eating a stew she had prepared for their lunch. He complained of not feeling well while working in the field and returned home, only to crawl into his bed and die. His brother, a local notary, insisted that Margarida, who was very young and suffered from epilepsy, had either poisoned his brother or killed him with sorcery. Epilepsy was regarded as a suspicious, partially supernatural disease. Margarida’s family and friends countered by calling witnesses to attest that the entire family had eaten the stew together. Her brother-in-law tried repeatedly to have her questioned under torture, but, fortunately, the court would not agree. Eventually Margarida was acquitted of murder, and she countered with a suit for defamation, for which we do not know the verdict (Bednarski 2014). This case is unusually well documented, but it follows the pattern of other, less well documented cases in which the support of the family and their connections enabled the accused person to win acquittal.
Accusations of physical violence by women against men also occurred. In a case from Bologna in July 1398, a woman named Ursolina was charged with beating her husband, Carlo, to death. Since there were no witnesses, the court called neighbors to prove that Ursolina was likely to commit such a crime because of her violent personality. The neighbors summoned to testify in the case, six women and two men, asserted that the couple had a volatile relationship in which Ursolina often shouted at and beat her husband. The two male witnesses testified that Carlo had told them both that his wife hated him and wanted to kill him. Witnesses summoned by the defense, however, stated that Carlo had really died of a fever and had no bruises or marks on his body when he was laid out to be buried. Furthermore, it was “not the custom of wives to hit their husbands” (Dean 2004, 537). This line of reasoning led to Ursolina’s acquittal.
CONCLUSION
Most of the relationships that shaped the lives of medieval women were based in the family: women were mothers, daughters, aunts, and especially wives. Marriage was not only a place where companionship and reproduction were shared, but ideas about marriage regulated sexuality, property ownership, social status, and law. In the next chapter, we will explore how reproduction and child-rearing also shaped women’s everyday lives.