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I n t r o d u c t i o n Marriage and Other Unions Histories of marriage are inevitably teleological: they put “marriage” as we know it at the center, and they evaluate all other forms of union in terms of that model. It is understandable, of course, that people want to know how an institution that is so important in contemporary society came to be the way it is. Given the contested nature of marriage today—between groups who think that it is primarily a bond between two people who love each other and should therefore be available to all such couples, and groups who think that it is primarily a way of creating a family environment in which to bear and rear children and should be limited to opposite-sex couples—tracing the history to see how we got to where we are can be very useful. Of course, history may be more relevant to those who base their claims on “tradition” than to those who argue that cultural change necessitates changes in marriage as well. However, even people who do not wish to see a return to “traditional marriage” can benefit from understanding the history of the institution and alternatives to it, if only to be able to identify where claims from historical truth are distorted or tendentious. Only by historicizing marriage can we see the inherent illogic of claims that there is only one “real” form. Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History is a good example of a book that looks at marriage in the past with an eye not to the unchanging elements of “tradition” but of what changed and why over the centuries.1 But it is still concerned with the present, using the past to make clear what is distinctive about today’s marriages. Other work, on medieval marriage specifically, has regarded marriage largely as a legal contract or as a sacrament. It remains both these things for many people, and since many of both the theological and contractual elements of marriage can be traced to the medieval period, it makes sense to study them, especially for those who find the medieval views important and binding as precedent.2 2 Introduction But if the history of marriage is the history of how we got to where we are today and focuses on those elements that are seen as important today in constituting marriage—the exchange of a binding vow, the blessing by a clergyman , the sexual union—we lose sight of the elements that fell by the wayside. History’s blind alleys—the customs and practices that did not continue, or that continued but were not deemed important or mainstream—were a part of the medieval experience as much as those aspects that became the roots of contemporary institutions. If we consider marriage a legal contract, we will follow one trajectory in tracing its history; if we consider it a sacrament, another trajectory; if we consider it a personal commitment, a third; and if we consider it an avenue for channeling sexual activity, yet a fourth. But even if we could agree on what marriage is today, looking for the roots of that institution would exclude relationships that were of central importance in their own societies but look very different from modern Western marriage. The question “What is marriage?” is being asked today in a way that it never has before. Biblical texts that are normative in Christian and Jewish traditions take marriage as a given and do not explicitly define it. There are some contexts in which medieval people discussed the question of what made a marriage, but for the most part, the line between what was marriage and what was not was not sharply drawn. I do not propose to sharpen it, to impose categories on medieval society that it did not impose itself, but to demonstrate its fuzziness and the different ways in which various sexual unions were understood by different groups of people and defined in different discourses. But we need to remember that even though medieval people did not always define the line sharply between what was marriage and what was not, they persisted in the belief that such a line did exist. There was indeed a variety of statuses. Cordelia Beattie suggests that we should envision a variety of statuses approaching marriage as a continuum of singleness.3 It could also be seen as a continuum of types of pairings. However, either way, a continuum...

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