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: The Reforms of Bishop Pedro de Lepe Dorantes (–) Because many in this our bishopric, especially in the mountains, betroth one another, and later from some displeasure that occurs between them, they litigate in our court to part with and leave one another . . . and the judges are [then] in much doubt, not knowing what, with good conscience, they should determine. —Synodal Constitutions of the Bishopric of Calahorra, ¹ As the earliest synods took up questions of matrimony, canon law on marriage became increasingly elaborated, with glosses and enumerations of edicts on laws. Occasionally, movements of legal reform prompted church canonists to make canon law clearer and more concise. The church’s decisions regarding questions on the sacrament of matrimony became absolute after the Council of Trent. But how such laws were received, understood, and used by communities and couples in towns and parishes is far murkier. Historians of marriage often suggest that the church foisted an alien concept of marriage on Christians and then molded their behavior into the form that the church chose. This chapter suggests a model of mutual adjustment and reciprocity between church law on marriage and the people who married. Individuals manipulated canon law as much as its statutes shaped their behavior. When they needed to use the courts Spaniards accommodated their own diverse marriage customs to the legal requirements and opportunities presented to them by their local vicars and priests. Using the services of the ecclesiastical court, for instance, a wife who already lived separated from her husband might also be able to force him to return her dowry and half the goods of her marriage. Even if the church affected social behavior with Christian ideology, instilled through confessional literature for instance, church dogmas like marital indissolubility and sexual chastity had to overcome long-held, stubborn customs that clashed with these ideas. Bishop Pedro de Lepe Dorantes’ attempt at reform during the late seventeenth century strongly suggests that diocesan mechanisms of social control were completely inept at policing people’s sexual behavior. The seventeenth-century synodal legislation on matrimony in the Diocese of Calahorra and La Calzada was a discrete and distinctive body of local canon law. Yet, though the diocesan laws maintained distinct local charac- teristics, such as special provisions for translators for trials in the Basquespeaking provinces, the laws were fundamentally based on wider European matrimonial canon law. The theological and legal conflicts that resulted in one European-wide ecclesiastical law on marriage, as valid in Cologne as it was in Calahorra, occurred in universities and cathedrals far removed from the cities of northern Spain. One of the most comprehensive trends in European history since the late Middle Ages and into the seventeenth century was the ever increasing ability of larger governments, secular and religious , to affect the lives and harness the resources of common people.² This tendency is clearly demonstrated by the development of marriage law in the late medieval period. When a man and woman legitimately married in seventeenth-century Spain, they did so in obedience to many higher powers. Not only was their relationship sanctioned by each other, but it was also made legitimate by their families, neighbors, local clergy, and ultimately by the larger institution of the Roman Catholic Church. The changes that brought the various methods of medieval marriage to the strictly defined and state-endorsed matrimony of the seventeenth century began with the elaboration of ecclesiastical law on marriage in the twelfth century. Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries church leaders developed comprehensive answers to the prickly questions raised by European matrimonial dilemmas. The Roman Catholic Church’s greatest asset was a universalized ideology that it then used to claim dominion over every aspect of the temporal and spiritual world. The church utilized its authoritative Christian doctrine, extensively elaborated over the centuries by theologians from Saint Augustine toThomas Aquinas, in persistent attempts to affect the behaviors of medieval Europeans. Marriage and human sexual comportment were clearly within the purview of ecclesiastical theologians and functionaries. Church elites in medieval Europe, for instance, influenced by biblical teachings, promoted celibacy and sexual continence among the clergy and throughout society. Yet the degree to which the church could have actually changed sexual behavior remains open to vigorous debate. Early church convictions regarding matrimony often conflicted with local marital traditions and laws. Some of these local traditions may have originated , for example, from Germanic or Celtic rites, or were part of Roman or Jewish traditions.³ Generally, canonists looked to the Bible, especially the New...

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