Medieval Marriage

In his Medieval Marriage Georges Duby posits an ongoing struggle between the noble and royal houses of twelfth-century France and the Catholic Church over the definition of the terms of marriage -- the marriage pact, the degrees of consanguinity within which marriage was permissible, the grounds and methods of dissolution of marriages, and other points. The Canons of the Lateran Council of 1215 demonstrate the ecclesiastical-legal grounds on which the Church's definition of marriage was eventually consolidated. These rules were the outcome of the struggle Duby describes and represent the final thinking of the Church after an extended period in which the Church's version gained ascendancy over that of the nobles. The memoirs of the Abbot Guibert of Nogent demonstrate both the effects that the nobility's attitudes toward marriage had on individuals and the growing strength of people's adherence to the Church as an authority on such questions -- both in the case of his mother whose life and religious experiences he chronicles at some length. The fourth item, the excerpt from the Historia Pontificales, includes selections that deal with the Church's (i.e., Pope Eugenius III's) responses to the possible divorce of Louis and Eleanor.

In the account in the Historia Pontificales it is easy to see the decision that Eugenius made regarding the whole matter as a decision to defend the indissolubility of marriage over and against the necessity of preserving the rule regarding deg

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shments. This is the version of Church-dominated marriage that triumphed over the nobility's version in the twelfth century. The memoirs of Guibert demonstrate the manner in which the nobility were gradually allowing the Church's influence to enter into marriage questions -- largely when it suited their own purposes. Guibert's account of his mother's resistance to remarriage is a good example of this. He shows his mother's great devotion to his father with the account of her reactions when he was taken prisoner. This is followed by what appears to be devotion to his memory. When her husband's kinsmen gathered to plot to take away her possessions (her son was only a year old) she withdrew to the Church and one of the plotters found her there. When he asked her to come and hear their decision she said she would hear it "only in the presence of my Lord" thus deliberately confusing, it appears, her husband and God, to produce the embarrassment the man felt when, on asking what Lord?, Guibert's mother gestured to the crucifix in the church. Later she reverted to a single, secular Lord when a nephew, urging her to remarry so that he could take possession of the patrimony (which would revert to the wider family on her remarriage

Category: History - M