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

Introduction: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval Culture

Introduction The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval Culture Recent controversies over gay marriage have highlighted the important place of marriage in the complex nexus of civic and religious authority in modern life. We have suddenly been reminded that marriage is a deeply political institution. Although contemporary conservative voices have critiqued the political appropriation of marriage as a “perversion” of “traditional ” values and of a “holy institution,” my book argues that a similar politicized negotiation of social and religious authority can be found in late medieval England where an emergent lay middle strata of society used the sacramental model of marriage to exploit contradictions within medieval theology and social hierarchy. This model, derived from Saint Augustine and later codified in the twelfth century, defined marriage not as consummation but as the “affections of the mind,” arguing that marriage was inherently virtuous.1 According to the sacramental definition adopted by 1 Lipton 00.intro 6/8/07 12:44 PM Page 1 twelfth-century theologians and canonists, the substance of the sacrament of marriage was the mutual love between the two members of the couple; this love in turn was both the sign and substance of God’s grace. Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature traces the unprecedented popularity of the sacramental model of marriage as a literary topic in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to its role as a contested category in the ideological conflicts between the laity and clergy, and between the members of the middle strata and the aristocracy . My book explores the ways that sacramental marriage was used to debate questions of authority in the period in a diverse group of late medieval texts, including the romance of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, John Gower’s lyric ballad sequence Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz (Treatise for Exemplifying Married Lovers), the autobiography of the bourgeois mystic Margery Kempe, and the N-Town plays. I argue that the existence of a body of literature in late medieval England that was preoccupied with sacramental marriage can be linked to two key changes in the structure of contemporary society: the growth of lay piety, and the increased size and power of the middle sections of society. In late medieval England, the lay middle strata were a growing part of society whose members sought to share and appropriate the privileges of both the aristocrats and the clerics. Members of the middle strata began to encroach on aristocratic prerogatives: non-noble landowners acted as parliamentary representatives, merchants purchased country estates and coats of arms, and, while the knightly class declined, esquires were elevated to gentle status. These new political and social roles for the middle strata threatened the traditional hierarchical status of the aristocracy. Similarly, the growth of vernacular literature and lay devotional practices changed the relationship between lay and clerical authority. Clerical prerogatives became a subject of explicit debate in polemics exchanged between Lollard and orthodox proponents over such questions as the nature of the sacraments and the idea of a priesthood of all believers. It is the primary contention of this book that late medieval English literature presented sacramental marriage as a model for such values as lay spirituality and mutuality in social relations, and in doing so, helped both to express and create values for the members of the emergent middle strata, as well as helping them to construct an identity for themselves and understand themselves as a social group. 2 Affections of the Mind Lipton 00.intro 6/8/07 12:44 PM Page 2 Sacramental marriage was one element of a wide range of complex, contradictory , and contested ideas about medieval marriage. Although there were many tensions within medieval marriage, two are especially important for my argument here.2 Complicating the sacramental definition of marriage as consent, medieval theologians also taught the doctrine of the marital debt that required couples to engage in marital sex if the other partner required it. Another tension was between an understanding of marriage as a partnership based in love, a vision linked to the sacramental model, and a depiction of marriage as the rule of the husband over his wife. Robert of Brunne’s early fourteenth-century Handlying Synne, for example , paradoxically asserts that the husband is “No to be mayster, but felaw,” only to continue a few lines later to instruct that...