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

1. The Church and the Regulation of Unions between Women and Men

C h a p t e r 1 The Church and the Regulation of Unions between Women and Men The traditions discussed in the Introduction took on new configurations as the Western church claimed control over marriage. The Hebrew Bible allowed one man to have several permanent partners, either several women with full wifely status or one woman as primary and the rest secondary but with all the children having inheritance rights. Ancient Roman law, however, did not: Roman marriage was monogamous, and only the children of a wife could inherit . Prehistoric Germanic forms of union are, as we have seen, very difficult to document, but the evidence points to a pattern more like that of Rome, where one woman and her children were privileged; the idea that there once existed a separate form of full marriage that allowed for the free choice of the parties, not their families, and that was later devalued by the church, is largely a myth. The standard story that scholars tell about the effects of the church on the formation of legitimate sexual unions is true to this extent: in trying to assert the exclusive legitimacy of marriage, and in doing so claim control over it, the nascent church legal system attempted to assert its authority to draw a sharp line, declaring certain unions to be valid marriages and all others to be invalid, and lumping together all other types of unions. The church did not speak with a unified voice, and in every dispute over the validity of marriage, there were churchmen and laymen on both sides. Whatever side they took in individual cases, however, churchmen tended to devalue any sort of sexual union outside of marriage, both for men and for women, although the weight of tradition and enforcement made this weigh much more heavily on women. This process began in the Christian Roman empire, but the motives behind it were not 26 Chapter 1 the same across the medieval millennium, nor were the types of unions that appeared as alternatives. Because a number of other scholars have written in eloquent detail about the history of Christian marriage, this chapter does not attempt a full narrative overview but focuses on those unions that were not considered marriage and the church’s attempts to draw a line. Late Antique Christianity Christian views on approved and unapproved sorts of unions as they developed in the late antique period drew heavily on both biblical and Roman law and traditions, but they also brought several innovations. Perhaps surprisingly to us, in light of the relative ease of Roman and Jewish divorce compared with later Christian law, the idea that marriage differed from other unions in its permanence was not the major change. Christian emperors did make it harder for a man to divorce his wife without cause, but although Augustine of Hippo (whose later views on marriage may or may not have been influenced by his earlier experience with the mother of his child, discussed below) argued strongly that even in the case of divorce for cause the parties could not remarry, this did not become entirely accepted in the church until the Carolingian period.1 Rather, the important Christian innovations were the expectation of fidelity on the part of men as well as of women (which is not to say that all Christian men or women lived up to this expectation) and the idea that marriage was now a religious institution, even if it was not yet formally a sacrament. Both these factors worked toward the valorization of marriage as opposed to other types of union. Marriage was no longer mainly an institution for the allying of families and the procreation of heirs, although that remained part of it; it was also the only legitimate outlet for sexual desire and a way for the spouses to participate together in devotion to God. The ascetic impulse toward the restriction of desire was not unique to Christianity; it was also found in a number of pagan Roman thinkers.2 What was particularly Christian was the idea that the kind of relationship that two laypeople had with each other defined their relationship to God, and that only one form was acceptable. The adoption of a nuptial blessing or other specifically Christian rituals that went along with marriage was part of the new understanding of marriage, although such blessings were not required for a valid marriage.3 Marriage retained an important secular aspect in terms of inheritance rights for...