Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  18 Ibid.; Jo-Marie Claassen, “Documents of a Crumbling Marriage: The Case of Cicero and Terentia,” Phoenix 50 (1996); Judith Evans Grubbs, “ ‘Pagan’ and ‘Christian’ Marriage,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994).

  19 Lefkowitz and Fant, Women’s Life, pp. 164-65. See also Judith Hallett, Fathers and Daughters in Roman Society: Women and the Elite Family (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Studies of connubial epitaphs show that Roman husbands’ description of their departed wives were much more individualized than Greeks’, recording specific endearing qualities rather the conventional phrases. R. B. Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1942).

  20 Quoted in Craig Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 52.

  21 For this and the following paragraphs, see Gordon Williams, “Representations of Roman Women in Literature,” in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds., I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1996), p. 133; Donna Hurley, “Livia (Wife of Augustus),” in Online Encyclopedia of Roman Emperors, www.romanemperors.org/livia.htm#N_2.(1999). Accessed April 25, 2002.

  22 Suetonius Tranquillus, Lives of the Caesars, Book III, Tiberius, VII:2, trans. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964-65), pp. 302-03; Treggiari, Roman Marriage, p. 47.

  23 The Augustan legislation discussed here and in the following paragraphs is described in detail in Treggiari, Roman Marriage, and Dixon, Roman Family. See also Will Durant, Caesar and Christ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944).

  24 Grubbs, “ ‘Pagan’ and ‘Christian’ Marriage.”

  25 Treggiari, Roman Marriage.

  26 Durant, Caesar and Christ, p. 230 and note 40, p. 686.

  27 Williams, “Representations of Roman Women,” p. 133.

  28 On Hindu beliefs, see Mani Ram Sharma, Marriage in Ancient India (Delhi: Agam Kala Prakashan, 1993); V. V. Prakasa Rao and V. Nandini Rao, Marriage, the Family and Women in India (New Delhi: Heritage Publishers, 1982). On marriage and the history of Judaism, see Carol Meyers, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Alan Segal, Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); Norman Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1979); Michael Coogan, ed., The Oxford History of the Biblical World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Naomi Steinberg, Kinship and Marriage in Genesis: A Household Economics Perspective (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993); Arlene Swidler, ed., Marriage Among the Religions of the World (Lewiston, Maine: Edward Mellen Press, 1990); Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, pp. 131-61 (see chap. 2, n. 16).

  29 There were dissenting voices. In the late fourth century the monk Jovian scandalized most other Christian scholars by arguing that there was no real difference in the virtue of a virgin and that of a married person. “Be not proud,” Jovian admonished the virgin, for “you and your married sisters are members of the same church” and share the same merit. But Jovian’s beliefs were officially repudiated by church synods in Rome and Milan. David Hunter, Marriage in the Early Church (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), pp. 16-21. Pope Gregory, quoted in Pierre Guichard and Jean-Pierre Cuviller, “Barbarian Europe,” in Burguière et al., Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds, p. 331. My sources for the discussion of Greece, unless otherwise noted, include Sarah Pomeroy, Families in Classical and Hellenistic Greece; Lacey, The Family in Classical Greece; Katz, “Daughters of Demeter”; Marilyn Arthur, “ ‘Liberated’ Women: The Classical Era,” in Bridenthal and Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible; Ehrenberg, The Greek State; Arnheim, Aristocracy in Greek Society; Starr, The Economic and Social Growth of Early Greece; Glotz, The Greek City and its Institutions; Ehrenberg, The People of Aristophanes; Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores; Giula Sissa, “The Family in Ancient Athens”; Patterson, The Family in Greek History; Cox, Household Interests.

  Chapter 6. Playing the Bishop, Capturing the Queen

  1 On Byzantium, see Angeliki Laiou, “Sex, Consent, and Coercion in Byzantium,” in Laiou, ed., Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1993); Dion Smythe, “Behind the Mask: Empresses and Empire in Middle Byzantium,” in Anne Duggan, ed., Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 1995); Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Lynda Garland, Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium AD 527-1204 (New York: Routledge, 1999); Janet Nelson, “Gender, Memory and Social Power,” Gender & History 12 (2000). On royal wives in the West, see Duggan, Queens and Queenship and Pauline Stafford, Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers: The King’s Wife in the Early Middle Ages (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983).

  2 For an in-depth study of eunuchs, see Katherine Ringrose, The Perfect Servant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

  3 Among the works I have drawn on for this and the following discussion, in addition to those cited in specific notes, are: Lisa Bitel, Women in Early Medieval Europe, 400-1100 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002); John Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship and Royal Monasteries in Early Medieval Germany, c. 936-1075 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Goetz, Life in the Middle Ages (see chap. 1, n. 4); Julia Smith, “Did Women Have a Transformation of the Roman World?,” Gender and History 12 (2000); John Parsons, ed., Medieval Queenship (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); Joyce Hill and Mary Swan, eds., The Community, the Family and the Saint: Patterns of Power in Early Medieval Europe (Brepols, Belgium: University of Leeds, 1998); Stafford, Queens, Concubines; Francis and Joseph Gies, Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages (New York: Harper & Row, 1987); Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974); Susan Stuard, Women in Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976); Wemple, Women in Frankish Society (see chap. 3, n. 31); David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985) and Women, Family and Society in Medieval Europe (Providence: Bergmahn Books, 1995); C. Warren Hollister, Henry I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Jenny Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995); Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: New Left Books, 1974); Mark Bloch, Feudal Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961); Maurice Keen, The Pelican History of Medieval Europe (New York: Penguin Books, 1978); Derek Baker, ed., Medieval Women (Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, 1978); Jacqueline Murray, ed., Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999); Lees, Medieval Masculinities (see chap. 1, n. 4); Linda Mitchell, ed., Women in Medieval Western European Culture (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999).

  4 F. L. Attenborough, ed., The Laws of the Earliest English Kings (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), p. 85 and passim.

  5 For example, the Norman aristocracy that conquered England in 1066 had been methodically constructed through local “peace-weaving” marriages between the feuding Viking families that had settled in northern France during the ninth century. Eleanor Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840-1066 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

  6 Stafford, Queens, Concubines, p. 50.

  7 See, for example, Wemple, Women in Frankish Society.

  8 Pauline Stafford, “Sons and Mothers: Family Politics in the Early Middle Ages,” in Baker, Medieval Women.

  9 For the story of Charlemagne and his family, see Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, pp. 76-80; Livingstone, “Powerful Allies,” in Mitchell, ed., Women in Medieval Western European Culture, p. 18; Stafford, Queens, Concubines, pp. 60-62.

  10 Scott Waugh, The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics, 1217-1327 (Princeton: Princet
on University Press, 1988); Ivan Ermakoff, “Prelates and Princes,” American Sociological Review 62 (1997).

  11 For more on this story, see Charles Edward Smith, Papal Enforcement of Some Medieval Marriage Laws (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kenniket Press, 1940); Wemple, Women in Frankish Society; Searle, Predatory Kinship; Stafford, Queens, Concubines.

  12 Searle, Predatory Kinship, p. 249.

  13 Mayke de Jong, “To the Limits of Kinship,” in Jan Cremmer, ed., From Sappho to de Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1991); Peter Fleming, Family and Household in Medieval England (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

  14 Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 24. As historian Christopher Brooke remarks, these rules “were at once a marvelous excuse for cynics and a sad burden on tender consciences.” Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 125. Why did the church support such unrealistic rules? Anthropologist Jack Goody suggests that the multiplication of such barriers to marriage was part of a deliberate strategy to limit the number of male heirs among the aristocracy, thus maximizing the chance that individuals would leave their property to the church. Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983). But whatever its material interests, the church had sincere reasons for encouraging people to broaden their marriage networks. Beginning with Jesus himself, Christianity encouraged people to build a community of love and fellowship that reached beyond the tightly defined loyalties of family ties. Islam also tried to widen the circles of cooperation by establishing categories of people with whom one could not mate. Although marriage between cousins was accepted, there was an incest taboo for “milk relatives,” people who had been wet-nursed by the same woman. Steven Epstein, “The Medieval Family: A Place of Refuge and Sorrow,” in Samuel Cohn and Epstein, eds., Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 168.

  15 Smith, Papal Enforcement, p. 163.

  16 Constance Bouchard, “Those of My Blood”: Constructing Noble Families in Medieval France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).

  17 Georges Duby, Dominique Barthelemy, and Charles de la Ronciete, “The Aristocratic Households of Feudal France,” in Arthur Goldhammer and Georges Duby, A History of Private Life, vol. 2, Revelations of the Medieval World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1987), pp. 135-36; Bouchard, “Those of My Blood,” pp. 40, 56; Stafford, Queens, Concubines, p. 81.

  18 Smith, Papal Enforcement.

  19

  During the seventh century, Arab Muslims conquered most of the former Roman territories in the Middle East, as well as North Africa, most of Spain, and the former Persian Empire, leaving the Byzantine Empire with control of only Asia Minor. In Arab society, marriage conferred important economic and political benefits on men. The first four political successors to Muhammad all were linked to him by marriage, either as father of one of his wives or as husband of one of his daughters. But as in Byzantium, marriage in Islam was much less important in building political alliances than in the West. Descent was more rigidly traced along the paternal side, and the aim of marriage was to keep wealth and property within the family rather than to create wider alliances. Even today women are often expected to marry their paternal first cousins. This pattern creates tight, male-based solidarity networks rather than far-flung political alliances.

  The role of marriage alliances in Islamic politics constricted further as Islam extended its empire into the Middle East and adopted the already widespread pre-Islamic customs of veiling and female seclusion. By the middle of the eighth century upper-class women were sequestered entirely from the public life of the court. They could sometimes manipulate the men around them by force of personality or by temporarily acting in the place of men, but their own political ties or bloodlines counted for little. Paradoxically, however, women in Islam had significant economic rights. They could draw up prenuptial contracts, and they could inherit property that they held separately from their husbands. For sources on Islam, see Tucker, Gender and Islamic History (see chap. 2, n. 16) and “The Arab Family in History,” in Tucker, ed., Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Arnold, A History of Celibacy (see chap. 1, n. 28); Arlene Swidler, Marriage Among the Religions of the World (Lewiston, ID: E. Mellen Press, 1990), p. 80; Eric Wolf, “The Social Organization of Mecca and the Origins of Islam,” Southwest Journal of Anthropology 7 (1951); Thierry Blanquis, “The Family in Arab Islam,” in Burguière et al., Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds; Stearns, Gender in World History, pp. 38-42; Amira El Azhary Sonbol, Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991); Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (see chap. 3, n. 38); Jonathan Berkey, “Women in Medieval Islamic Society,” in Mitchell, ed., Women in Medieval Western European Culture; Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (New York: Warner Books, 1991); Denise Spellberg, Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

  20 Guinevere quote from Constance Bouchard, Strong of Body, Brave and Noble: Chivalry and Society in Medieval France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 4.

  21 Stafford, Queens, Concubines.

  22 Ibid.

  23 Duby, Barthelemy, and La Ronciete, “The Aristocratic Households of Feudal France.”

  24 W. S. Mackie, ed., The Exeter Book, Part II, Poems IX-XXXII (London: Oxford University Press, 1934); Marion Facinger, “A Study of Medieval Queenship: Capetian France, 987-1237,” Studies in Medieval Renaissance History 5 (1968).

  25 John Parsons, “Mothers Daughters, Marriage, Power,” in Parsons, ed., Medieval Queenship; Constance Owens, “Noblewomen and Political Activity,” in Mitchell, ed., Women in Medieval Western Culture.

  26 Bitel, Women in Early Medieval Europe.

  27 Stafford, Queens, Concubines.

  28 John Gillingham, “Love, Marriage and Politics in the Twelfth Century,” Forum for Modern Language Studies: Interdisciplinary Medieval Studies 25 (1989).

  29 Georges Duby, The Chivalrous Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), and The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France (New York: Pantheon, 1983); Bitel, Women in Early Medieval Europe.

  30 In 1328 the Capetians forbade female inheritance of the kingdom through the Salic Law, which they claimed was a traditional Germanic law. It was in fact a new invention. For more on the complex history of women’s inheritance rights, see Sarah Lambert, “Queen or Consort: Rulership and Politics in the Latin East, 1118-1228,” in Duggan, ed., Queens and Queenship; Bitel, Women in Early Medieval History; Susan Stuard, “The Dominion of Gender,” in Bridenthal, Stuard, and Wiesner, eds., Becoming Visible; See also Janet Nelson, “Medieval Queenship,” in Mitchell, ed., Women in Medieval Western European Culture; Stafford, Queens, Concubines; Searle, Predatory Kinship; Theodore Eversgate, ed., Aristocratic Women in Medieval France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) and “The Feudal Imaginary of Georges Duby,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 (1997); David Herlihy, “The Making of the Medieval Family,” Journal of Family History 18 (Summer 1983); Thomas Bisson, ed., Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).

  31 Janet Nelson, “Medieval Queenship,” in Mitchell, ed., Women in Medieval Western European Culture, p. 205.

  Chapter 7. How the Other 95 Percent Wed

  1 Stafford, Queens, Concubines, p. 80 (see chap. 6, n. 1); Gies, Marriage and the Family, p. 56 (see chap. 6, n. 3); Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, p. 87 (see chap. 3, n. 31). See also Grubb, “ ‘Pagan’ and ‘Christian’ Marriage” (see chap. 5, n. 18).

  2 For this and the next paragraph, see Bitel, Women
in Early Medieval Europe (see chap. 6, n. 3).

  3 For this and the following paragraphs on church history, see Anne Barstow, Married Priests and the Reforming Papacy (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982); James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Michael Sheehan, Marriage, Family and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); R. M. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (see chap. 6, n. 14); James Brundage, “Concubinage and Marriage in Medieval Canon Law,” Journal of Medieval History 1 (1975); Martin Ingram, “Spousal Litigation in the English Ecclesiastical Courts, c1350-1640,” in R. B. Outhwaite, Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981) and Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Constance Rousseau and Joel Rosenthal, eds., Women, Marriage and Family in Medieval Christendom (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1998); Philip Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage During the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods (New York: E. J. Brill, 1994); Georges Duby, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Vern Bullough and James Brundage, eds., Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996); Janice Norris, “Nuns and Other Religious Women and Christianity in the Middle Ages,” in Mitchell, Women in Medieval Western European Culture (see chap. 6, n. 3); Pauline Stafford, “Queens, Nunneries and Reforming Churchmen,” Past and Present 163 (1999); Fleming, Family and Household in Medieval England (see chap. 6, n. 13).

  4 Ingram, “Spousal Litigation in the English Ecclesiastical Courts,” p. 40.