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"Marriage (Canon law) -- History -- To 1500"
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Unmarriages
The Middle Ages are often viewed as a repository of tradition, yet what we think of as traditional marriage was far from the only available alternative to the single state in medieval Europe. Many people lived together in long-term, quasimarital heterosexual relationships, unable to marry if one was in holy orders or if the partners were of different religions. Social norms militated against the marriage of master to slave or between individuals of very different classes, or when the couple was so poor that they could not establish an independent household. Such unions, where the protections that medieval law furnished to wives (and their children) were absent, were fraught with danger for women in particular, but they also provided a degree of flexibility and demonstrate the adaptability of social customs in the face of slowly changing religious doctrine.Unmarriagesdraws on a wide range of sources from across Europe and the entire medieval millennium in order to investigate structures and relations that medieval authors and record keepers did not address directly, either in order to minimize them or because they were so common as not to be worth mentioning. Author Ruth Mazo Karras pays particular attention to the ways women and men experienced forms of opposite-sex union differently and to the implications for power relations between the genders. She treats legal and theological discussions that applied to all of Europe and presents a vivid series of case studies of how unions operated in specific circumstances to illustrate concretely what we can conclude, how far we can speculate, and what we can never know.
eBook
Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne
The institution of marriage is commonly thought to have fallen into crisis in late medieval northern France. While prior scholarship has identified the pervasiveness of clandestine marriage as the cause, Sara McDougall contends that the pressure came overwhelmingly from the prevalence of remarriage in violation of the Christian ban on divorce, a practice we might call \"bigamy.\" Throughout the fifteenth century in Christian Europe, husbands and wives married to absent or distant spouses found new spouses to wed. In the church courts of northern France, many of the individuals so married were criminally prosecuted.In Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne, McDougall traces the history of this conflict in the diocese of Troyes and places it in the larger context of Christian theology and culture. Multiple marriage was both inevitable and repugnant in a Christian world that forbade divorce and associated bigamy with the unchristian practices of Islam or Judaism. The prevalence of bigamy might seem to suggest a failure of Christianization in late medieval northern France, but careful study of the sources shows otherwise: Clergy and laity alike valued marriage highly. Indeed, some members of the laity placed such a high value on the institution that they were willing to risk criminal punishment by entering into illegal remarriage. The risk was great: the Bishop of Troyes's judicial court prosecuted bigamy with unprecedented severity, although this prosecution broke down along gender lines. The court treated male bigamy, and only male bigamy, as a grave crime, while female bigamy was almost completely excluded from harsh punishment. As this suggests, the Church was primarily concerned with imposing a high standard on men as heads of Christian households, responsible for their own behavior and also that of their wives.
eBook
Proving woman
Around the year 1215, female mystics and their sacramental devotion were among orthodoxy's most sophisticated weapons in the fight against heresy. Holy women's claims to be in direct communication with God placed them in positions of unprecedented influence. Yet by the end of the Middle Ages female mystics were frequently mistrusted, derided, and in danger of their lives. The witch hunts were just around the corner.
While studies of sanctity and heresy tend to be undertaken separately,Proving Womanbrings these two avenues of inquiry together by associating the downward trajectory of holy women with medieval society's progressive reliance on the inquisitional procedure. Inquisition was soon used for resolving most questions of proof. It was employed for distinguishing saints and heretics; it underwrote the new emphasis on confession in both sacramental and judicial spheres; and it heralded the reintroduction of torture as a mechanism for extracting proof through confession.
As women were progressively subjected to this screening, they became ensnared in the interlocking web of proofs. No aspect of female spirituality remained untouched. Since inquisition determined the need for tangible proofs, it even may have fostered the kind of excruciating illnesses and extraordinary bodily changes associated with female spirituality. In turn, the physical suffering of holy women became tacit support for all kinds of earthly suffering, even validating temporal mechanisms of justice in their most aggressive forms. The widespread adoption of inquisitional mechanisms for assessing female spirituality eventuated in a growing confusion between the saintly and heretical and the ultimate criminalization of female religious expression.
eBook
Intermarriage between Christians and Jews in Medieval Canon Law
How did canon law view sexual relations between Jews and Christians? Gratian discusses this question in some twenty canons. By 1234, Gregory IX's \"Decretals\" added twenty more canons to the discussion. The Church condoned Jewish marriage, although it did not recognize its validity, since Judaism recognized divorce and, at least as the canonists understood it, polygyny. Christians could not marry Jews. A major problem was the conversion of a Jewish spouse to Christianity. Could such a mixed union be maintained? This question received no clear answer, although in 1199 Innocent III ruled that a convert to Christianity could remarry if his spouse refused to become a Christian. But what of a convert to Judaism? Could his Christian spouse remarry? Once again, Innocent III decided the issue, this time negatively. Canonists were especially exercised by questions of sexual contact between Jews and Christians, which figured in numerous canons. Harsh penalties were established, although they were rarely applied. Such contact, churchmen feared, would compromise Christian purity. /// [Abstract in Hebrew].
Journal Article
The 1899 Cuban Marriage Law Controversy: Church, State and Empire in the Crucible of Nation
In this essay, a battle over canon and civil marriage that took place during the first U.S. occupation of Cuba, 1899–1902, is examined. The controversy surrounded the publication of a marriage law that declared that henceforth only civil marriages would be recognized by the state. The debate is discussed from the point of view of three key sets of actors: the Cuban nationalists who championed the law, the outraged Catholic prelates who opposed it, and the U.S. military administrators who ultimately decided the outcome of the controversy.
Journal Article