Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature

NOTES

NOTES Introduction 1. This phrase comes from a passage in De Consensu Evangelistarum in which Augustine discusses the marriage of Mary and Joseph. See Saint Augustin: Sermon on the Mount, Harmony of the Gospels, Homilies on the Gospels, trans. William Findlay, 1st ser., vol. 6, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954), 102–3. A fuller citation of this passage can be found in my N-Town chapter. 2. A number of tensions within medieval marriage are aptly traced by Conor McCarthy in Marriage in Medieval England: Law, Literature and Practice (Rochester, NY, and Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2004). Some of the other tensions McCarthy notes are: (1) the contrast between marriage as individual consent and as family alliance, and (2) between the courts’ emphasis on verbal formulae and the notion of intentionality inherent in marital consent. 3. Robert of Brunne’s “Handlying Synne,” ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, part 1, EETS, o.s. 119 (London: Oxford University Press, 1901), 58. There are many examples of this same paradox. One is in a sermon by Honorius of Autun which instructs, “Let husbands love their wives with tender affection; let them keep faith with them in all things . . . In the same way, women should love their husbands deeply, fear them and keep faith with a pure heart.” See D. L. d’Avray and M. Tausche, “Marriage Sermons in Ad Status Collections of the Central Middle Ages,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 47 (1980): 78. A fictional version can be found among other commonplaces of marital teaching in Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale (ll. 925–35). See The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 321. 4. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 3–4. 5. On the outlawing of clerical marriage, see James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), esp. 214–22, and Jo Ann McNamara, “Chaste Marriage and Clerical Celibacy,” in 161 Lipton 05.notes 6/8/07 12:44 PM Page 161 Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1982), 22–33. 6. The fuller quotation from 1 Corinthians 7:8–9 (DV) is: “I say to the unmarried and to the widows: It is good for them to continue, even as I. But if they do not contain themselves, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to be burnt.” 7. On the marital debt, see Pierre J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 89–97; Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, esp. 241–42, 358–60, 505–7; Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1977), 170–74; and Elizabeth M. Makowski, “The Conjugal Debt and Medieval Canon Law,” Journal of Medieval History 3 (1977): 99–114. 8. Saint Augustin: Anti-Pelagian W ritings, trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, 1st ser., vol. 5, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), 268. 9. On the development of the marriage sacrament, see G. Le Bras, “La doctrine du mariage chez les théologiens et les canonistes depuis l’an mille,” Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, ed. A. Vacant et al., vol. 9, II, cols. 2123–2317; Seamus P. Heaney, The Development of the Sacramentality of Marriage from Anselm of Laon to Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963); and Edward Schillebeeckx, Marriage: Human Reality and Saving Mystery, trans. N. D. Smith (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965). On marital affection, see John T. Noonan, Jr., “Marital Affection in the Canonists,” Studia Gratiana 12 (1967): 479–509; and Michael Sheehan , “Maritalis Affecto Revisited,” in The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex and Marriage in the Medieval W orld, ed. Robert R. Edwards and Stephen Spector (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 32–56. 10. Hugh of Saint Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1951), 326. 11. Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval W edlock (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1993), 141 and 132–94; McNamara, “Chaste Marriage and...