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  • Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature
  • Nancy Partner
Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature. By Emma Lipton. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Pp. x + 246. $32.

The interpretive theme informing Emma Lipton's book, Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature, is that "marriage is a deeply political institution" (p. 1). The strength and interest of Lipton's study rest in the nearly universal appeal of marriage, however practiced, as a trope (more precisely, a synecdoche) for the structure of relations and affections in the larger society; celebrated or deplored, marriage looks like a microcosm ready-made for social analysis, satire, and utopian or dystopian critique. Greeks and Romans saw it that way, and Christian marriage, first Catholic and later Protestant, served the same rhetorical purposes: marriage seems endlessly "good to think with." So Lipton's book places itself as an interesting addition and variant in a long established genre. She draws an initial parallel between current debates over gay marriage with what she proposes as an analogous, though not precisely similar, set of social and religious tensions in late medieval England played out discursively through the institution of marriage. Naturally enough, when connections of this sort are discerned by medievalists, they tend to become stretched to a rather fine thread and the medieval level of controversy is inevitably far more subtle and oblique than the out-front wrangles of our own society. Persuading readers that a certain subject matter explored in certain rhetorical ways or dramatically expressed in literature constitutes a social controversy, or thought-world intervention, in the extra-textual world is the author's challenge in this sort of study. Lipton grounds her large-scale social/political analysis in close readings of three fictional texts (The Franklin's Tale; Gower's Traitié; The N-Town Mary Plays) and one nonfictional text, Margery Kempe's book, which is deeply influenced by hagiographic conventions. Her textual readings and the particular argument she wants to make about marriage practices and the evolving, thickening social strata of medieval society are worked out as consequences of the one major change in marriage regulation in post-Roman Christian society: the body of canon law that recognized marriage as a sacrament when the marital bond was formed under certain specific conditions between two individuals. This undoubtedly momentous change in marriage law and custom proceeding from the eleventh-century reform movement in the Church is the deep background with and against which the literary texts arguably make their case; Lipton maps out this marital territory in her introductory discussion, "The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval Culture."

The definition packed into "sacramental marriage" has to carry a lot of interpretive weight in this study. Lipton places great stress on the non-sexual spiritualized form of love associated with Augustine's De bono coniugali: "The sacramental [End Page 413] model of marriage had its roots in the writings of Augustine, who argued that marital affection instead of sexual relations defined marriage" (p. 5). The sexual relations within marriage were, of course, governed by Paul's advice in 1 Corinthians about the mutual obligation of husbands and wives to comply with one another's sexual demands. "Eventually, under Alexander III, consent between two legitimate parties, informed by marital affection, became the sole criterion of a fully legal and fully sacramental marriage" (p. 6). Sexual relations were the expected consequence of a marriage, but were not necessary to maintain a licit union, if neither spouse complained. Lipton sees the consequences of this mode of marriage law playing out in domestic life and expanding into social identities and negotiations of power between laity and clergy. She is very struck by the ideas of mutuality, equality, and consent implicit in the sacramental model, and the way that the power of male guardians and whole families, and even the clergy, was swept away by the canon law that made a legal and binding marriage dependent on mutual words of consent uttered by a willing man and woman. This strong suggestion of...

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