Papacy, Monarchy and Marriage, 860–1600 by D. L. D’Avray (review)

David D’Avray brings together here two themes that have featured in his written work: medieval marriage and the role of rationality (or rationalities) in history. He observes that, from the thirteenth century, it became ever easier for monarchs to obtain papal dispensations allowing marriage within forbidden degrees; yet it became more difficult to annul marriages once they were created. Previous scholarship, he notes, has explained both these developments as occasioned by the papacy’s desire to exert authority and control over the marriages of the laity, and particularly kings and their alliances. This, he argues, will not do: “one cannot have it both ways and see both the rigidity of annulment law and the flexibility of dispensation law as instruments of papal domination” (p. 24). Rather, the two phenomena are based on two different modes of thought. The indissolubility of marriage was based on what he calls a “value rationality”—“the absolute indissolubility of consummated Christian marriage was woven into the fabric of thirteenth-century theology” (p. 209)—and there could be no exceptions to it. The forbidden degrees in marriage, on the other hand, were based on an “instrumental rationality,” not on the incest taboo (which operated only in regard to marriage between very close relations, like siblings or parent and child) but on the promotion of “social charity” (p. 210). Therefore, the pope had the ability to dispense from them to reach the same goal.

The limiting of the prohibited degrees at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) made it more difficult to discover or invent previously unknown or unmentioned impediments and thereby annul marriages. At the same time, the papacy retained the right to dispense from the newly defined degrees. Although based on “soft rationality” (p. 229), the dispensation—demonstrated by D’Avray through both narrative and an extensive appendix of documents—developed a great deal of formal legal precision. Because of that precision, dispensations tailored to the case (as opposed to general ones) were very difficult to overturn, and marriages based on them could not be annulled.

D’Avray tells good stories; there is some coverage here on well-known cases such as that of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, and more on lesser known cases such as Wladislaw of Poland and Barbara of Brandenburg (pp. 161–69). One need not be a professional medievalist to find these stories fascinating, and they are combined with an admirable clarity of terminology. The appendix of documents will likely be of interest largely to specialists, but D’Avray uses typographical conventions to identify the points in the text important to particular parts of his argument, so readers are not left to figure it out. A previous companion volume, Dissolving Royal Marriages: A Documentary History, 860–1600 (Cambridge, UK, 2014), focused on the annulment side, whereas the documents in this book come from dispensation cases.

Scholars not interested in marriage specifically can also learn a great deal from this volume, because one of D’Avray’s most important arguments concerns not the formation and de-formation of royal marriages but rather the nature of historical cause and effect. Taking from Quentin Skinner the lesson that “we do not need to be sure about sincerity before we estimate the effects of principles on actions” (p. 25), he demonstrates that a certain cynicism about papal motivations is not incompatible with taking seriously the legal and theological ideas and the rhetoric they used to justify their decisions. Legal formality in both the annulment and dispensation process served the papacy well.