Letters and Love in Colonial Latin America

Introduction: The Transit of Venus

Is love a modern invention? This question is perhaps not quite as ludicrous as it might appear. For nearly three decades scholars have been exploring whether contemporary ideas about love are in fact as ancient as we might believe. As a result of these investigations, some historians have concluded that our current attitudes towards love date from no earlier than the seventeenth century. This opinion was expressed most forcefully by Lawrence Stone in his 1977 The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. In this path-breaking study Stone argued that recognizably modern ideas about marriage did not emerge in England until the seventeenth century.¹ Only then did what he called "companionate marriage" develop. "Companionate marriage," as described by Stone, was characterized by certain distinguishing features. Firstly, a companionate couple expected their relationship with each other to be their most important emotional connection. Companionate husbands and wives, in other words, viewed each other not only as sexual and economic partners, but also as "bosom friends." Affection was thus an essential element of a successful companionate marriage. Moreover, from the eighteenth century on such affection was increasingly regarded as a necessary precursor to, and indeed motive for, marriage, at least among the English elite who formed the subject of Stone's analysis. The focus on companionship tended to undermine patriarchal rhetoric of wifely subjugation and obedience. "I don't take the state of matrimony to be designed . . . that the wife is to be used as an upper servant in the house," insisted Daniel Defoe in 1726. "Love," he maintained, "knows no superior or inferior, no imperious command on the one hand, no reluctant subjugation on the other."² Finally, these trends placed increasing pressure on parents to allow their children to choose their own marriage partners, so that they might select spouses with whom they felt some degree of emotional affinity.

To complement his picture of companionate marriage in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Stone described several very different types of family relationship, which, he claimed, had preceded the development of companionate marriage, and which he regarded as typical of family structures in many parts of Western Europe for perhaps as much as a millennium previously. These earlier models of marriage he called the "Open Lineage Family," in which a married couple's primary emotional attachments were towards their blood relatives, or neighbors, rather than each other, and the awkwardly-titled "Restricted Patriarchal Nuclear Family." The latter, which according to Stone was characteristic of the early modern period, saw the reduction of influences by kin and neighbors, and a corresponding increase in the authority of the male patriarch. In neither of these family types, Stone maintained, did love between husband and wife play much of a role, and in neither model did husband and wife expect to derive companionship from marriage. Marriage was instead intended to provide economic and status maintenance.

The theories articulated in The Family, Sex and Marriage have been challenged on many fronts, but their most contentious aspect remains Stone's claim that intimate, affectionate relationships were relatively uncharacteristic of the English family prior to the mid-seventeenth century. It is his bleak picture of pre-companionate marriage that has drawn most fire from fellow historians, particularly early modernists, some of whom insist that romantic love was a distinguishing feature of the English marriage from at least the fourteenth century, and who dispute Stone's claim that romance was essentially an eighteenth-century invention.³ Undeterred by such criticisms of Stone's analysis, scholars studying other parts of the world have taken up the Stone model, and have attempted to extend it beyond England. A number of historians working on Britain's colonies in North America have argued that that region experienced an analogous development. Suggesting that Stone's work translates well to the United States, Stanley Mintz and Susan Kellogg have claimed that from the...