Hopes for Better Spouses: Protestant Marriage and Church Renewal in Early Modern Europe, India, and North America by A. G. Roeber (review)

Roeber has provided an interesting examination of competing Lutheran ideas about marriage during the early modern period. He has consulted a wide range of published and archival sources, concentrating on people associated with Pietism, a movement within Lutheranism that arose in the late seventeenth century and reached its peak in the mid-1700s (in fact, the title of this book is misleading, since this book is more a study of Pietists’ views on marriage than a broad examination of Protestant marriage on three continents). Roeber notes that, in regard to the formation of marriage, Protestants required parental consent and the blessing of each union in church by a clergyman. Protestants generally stressed the need for discipline, thus supporting the submission of wives to husbands, but Roeber contrasts these official views with those of certain Pietists. He looks closely, for example, at Philipp Jakob Spener (d. 1705), a Pietist who championed the idea, previously supported by Martin Luther, that marriage was a partnership “in which the couple pursued holiness together” (xi). Disregarding the importance of procreation, Spener insisted that at its core, marriage was supposed to help husbands and wives to attain salvation.

Looking at Europe and beyond, Roeber finds that Moravian missionaries, inspired by Nikolous Zinzendorf, emphasized friendship and cooperation in marriage; representing Christ’s relationship to the church, marriage purportedly provided the possibility of union with God, a belief that yielded some odd practices, such as venerating the circumcised penis of Jesus. Henry Melchior Mühlenberg (d. 1787), the Lutheran patriarch in North America, was particularly interested in how marriage promoted the interior sanctification of spouses, even though such ideas seemed to hint at righteousness attained by good works, a doctrine that was anathema to Lutherans. In India, however, the Pietist emphasis on friendship in marriage failed to gain much traction. The missionary Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg fought against widespread concubinage there and displayed great distrust toward Tamil women, holding them responsible for illicit sexual activity and insisting that female converts to Christianity had to be subordinate to their husbands. Ultimately, Roeber finds that the attempt to promote a more companionate relationship between spouses ultimately failed in all regions.

Roeber is well grounded in theology. He effectively shows, for example, how Luther borrowed ideas from late medieval mystics. Quite surprising, though, is the fact that no mention is made of Martin Bucer, the reformer with the most radical ideas on marriage. Bucer proclaimed companionship to be the most fundamental element of the Christian marriage, and, with his emphasis on mutual love, he even supported the possibility of divorce by mutual consent. Although Roeber adroitly discusses the relevant ideas of Christian Thomasius and Samuel von Pufendorf, both of Lutheran background, the book might have benefited from more discussion about their advocacy of Natural Law.

Readers hoping for a study that borrows heavily from sociology or anthropology will be disappointed. Certain Pietist thinkers may indeed have championed conjugal companionship, but ample research has shown that the growth in wage labor helped to facilitate the companionate marriage by reducing the importance of property in the formation of marriage.