Love And Marriage In The Middle Ages

The author argues that the structure of sexual relationships took its cue from the family and feudalism - both bastions of masculinity - as he presents his interpretation of women, what they represented and what they were in the Middle Ages

"A great virtue of this reader is the length of its selections--not just snippets, but long enough portions for students to get a real sense of how the text works." - Ruth Mazo Karras, University of Minnesota

This volume addresses the current fashion for research on the family and domesticity in the past. It draws together work from various disciplines - historical, art-historical and literary - with their very different source materials and from a broad geographical area, including some countries - such as Croatia and Poland - which are not usually considered in standard text books on the medieval family. This volume considers the various affective relationships within and around the family and the manner in which those relationships were regulated and ritualized in more public arenas. Despite their disparate approaches and geographical spread, these essays share many thematic concerns; the ideologies which structured gender roles, inheritance rights, incest law and the ethics of domestic violence, for example, are all considered here. This collection originates from the Leeds International Medieval Congress in 2001 when the special strand was entitled Domus and Familia and attracted huge participation. This book aims to reflect that richness and variety whilst contributing to an expanding area of historical enquiry.

Examining the poetry and practice of courtly love and the mores of aristocratic marriages, Duby shows the Middle Ages to be male-dominated. Women were regarded as symbols, as figures of temptation who paradoxically had no desires of their own. Duby argues that the structure of sexual relationships took its cue from the family and from feudalism - both bastions of masculinity

In this volume a variety of perspectives reevaluate the nature of friendship, desire, and the olde daunce of love in the Middle Ages. Challenging earlier scholarly notions about medieval marriage, this book suggests and explores the legitimacy of marital friendship, affection, and mutuality. The authors explore the relationship of medieval love to companionship, equality, and power, and relate medieval expressions of love to a number of issues including creativity, reading and writing, voyeurism, chastity, violence, and even hate. The book reconsiders the theological, philosophical, and legal background of medieval attitudes toward marriage, analyzes expressions of love and desire in European vernacular literature, and considers several implications of Chaucer's treatment of love, marriage, and sexuality.

This book is concerned with the social and gendered meanings of love in medieval Norway and Iceland. In the Viking Age, to love would most often imply a submissive social position, while being loved by a woman could elevate a man above the status of her family. Women were supposed to love upwards in the social hierarchy, but could also use their desire to negotiate the social position of men. A close reading of the skaldic poetry shows the dilemma men faced when longing for women's love and approval. These ideas of love relations shaped Norse interpretations of courtly love and marriage formation by consent in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. However, new ideas of sexuality, gender and aristocratic culture changed several aspects of love and marital affection in the later middle ages. Men became the loving subject, but in a way that did not challenge the social order. For women, ideal love was attached to humility and submission to parents and husband. But even though the new ideology of love and marriage to some extent neutralized the tensions between consent and parental control, the sources show that both men and women could use the new conceptions of love to serve their own marital and social strategies.

Including many texts available for the first time in modern English translation, Conor McCarthy brings together a wide array of writings as well as informative introductions and explanations, to give a vivid impression of how love, sex and marriage were dealt with as central issues of medieval life. With extracts from literary and theological works, medical and legal writings, conduct books, chronicles and love letters, the writings range from well known texts such as the Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales to less familiar sources such as church legislation or court case proceedings. An indispensable sourcebook for all students and teachers of medieval history, literature and culture, Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages contains a wide breadth of material showing the diverse and sometimes disparate approaches to love, sex and marriage in medieval culture, brilliantly illustrating contemporary attitudes and ideologies.

Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900-1300 contains an analysis of the experience of married life by men and women in Christian medieval Europe, c. 900-1300. The study focusses on the social and emotional life of the married couple rather than on the institutional history of marriage, breaking it into three parts: Getting Married - the process of getting married and wedding celebrations; Married Life - the married life of lay couples and clergy, their sexuality, and any remarriage; and Alternative Living - which explores concubinage and polygyny, as well as the single life in contrast to monogamous sexual unions. In this volume, van Houts deals with four central themes. First, the tension between patriarchal family strategies and the individual family member's freedom of choice to marry and, if so, to what partner; second, the role played by the married priesthood in their quest to have individual agency and self-determination accepted in their own lives in the face of the growing imposition of clerical celibacy; third, the role played by women in helping society accept some degree of gender equality and self-determination to marry and in shaping the norms for married life incorporating these principles; fourth, the role played by emotion in the establishment of marriage and in married life at a time when sexual and spiritual love feature prominently in medieval literature.