Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages

Notes

N o t e s Abbreviations AN Paris, Archives Nationales BL London, British Library EETS Early English Text Society MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica PL Patrologia Latina SSRG Scriptores rerum germanicarum Introduction 1. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005). 2. E.g., Charles J. Reid, Jr., Power over the Body, Equality in the Family: Rights and Domestic Relations in Medieval Canon Law (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004); see my review in the Journal of the History of Sexuality 14 (2005): 474–79. 3. Cordelia Beattie, “Living as a Single Person.” 4. E. Kathleen Gough, “The Nayars and the Definition of Marriage,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 89 (1959): 33–34. 5. Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage. 6. John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York: Vintage, 1995); for an example of critique, see Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “Introduction” and “Ritual Brotherhood in Western Medieval Europe,” Brent Shaw, “Ritual Brotherhood in Roman and PostRoman Societies,” and Claudia Rapp, “Ritual Brotherhood in Byzantium,” all in Traditio 52 (1997): 261–382. See Dyan Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell. 7. James Brundage, Sex, Law, and Marriage in the Middle Ages; Elliott, Spiritual Marriage ; Christopher Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), and Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest. 8. Ginger Frost, Living in Sin: Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), provides a similar study of another time period. She recognizes three groups: those who could not marry, did not marry, 216 notes to pages 8–14 or would not marry because they were opposed to the institution. Heloise is the only medieval example I can adduce of a woman in the last category. Many of the couples Frost describes cohabited because of factors that made their ceremony invalid, and a ceremony was crucial in the creation of a bond in that context. The group who could not marry, because of previous marriages or consanguinity, was by far the largest. 9. See James A. Schultz, “Heterosexuality as a Threat to Medieval Studies,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15 (2006): 14–29, and Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies, xix–xxii. 10. D. Catherine Brown, Pastor and Laity in the Theology of Jean Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 217. Gerson cited Hugh of St. Victor; Bonaventure said much the same thing. I am grateful to Sara McDougall for this point. 11. See Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell; Megan McLaughlin, Sex, Gender, and Episcopal Authority in an Age of Reform, 51–91. 12. Nor does marriage seem to have been a religious institution elsewhere in the ancient Near East. Karel van der Toorn, From Her Cradle to Her Grave: The Role of Religion in the Life of the Israelite and the Babylonian Woman, trans. Sara J. Denning-Bolle (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 59–76, argues that it was, in fact, a religious institution; although he does point out some religious aspects, the argument is not convincing overall. 13. Simon B. Parker, “The Marriage Blessing in Israelite and Ugaritic Literature,” Journal of Biblical Literature 95 (1976): 23–30. 14. Riffat Hassan, “Islamic Hagar and Her Family,” in Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children : Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives, ed. Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 149–67, and Rudi Paret, “’Ismā‘īl,” Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Berman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 15. “The Laws of Hammurabi,” trans. Martha Roth, 144–46, 170–71, in The Context of Scripture, vol. 2, Monumental Inscriptions from the Biblical World, ed. William W. Hallo et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 344–46; Raymond Westbrook, “Old Babylonian Period,” 381. 16. Glossa Ordinaria to Gen. 16:1, in PL 113:121d. The gloss is attributed to Hrabanus Maurus. See also Marcia Colish, Peter Lombard, 2:663–64, on the development of this question among other theologians. 17. Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, 3:12:20, Select Library of Nicene and PostNicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 2, ed. Philip Schaff, http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/ jod/augustine/ddc3.html. 18. Elizabeth Clark, “Interpretive Fate and the Church Fathers,” in Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children, ed. Trible and Russell, 127–47, here 128. 19. Glossa Ordinaria, 122b. See McLaughlin, Sex, Gender, and Episcopal Authority, 127–28. 20. Corinna Friedl, Polygynie in Mesopotamien und Israel, 140. 21. Louis Epstein...