Marriage, a History (64 page)

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.

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.

5
The legal cases in this and the next paragraph are reported in Henrietta Leyser,
Medieval Women: A Social History of Women in England, 450-1500
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 112-16.

6
The examples in this and the following paragraph are taken from Shannon McSheffrey,
Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London
(Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1995), passim, and Leyser,
Medieval Women,
pp. 112-13. I thank Professor McSheffrey for clarifying the stories and their outcomes for me (personal communication, December 3, 2003). For more accounts of such suits and the predominance of male plaintiffs in them, see Jeffrey Watt,
The Making of Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Neuchâtel, 1550-1800
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992) and Ingram,
Church Courts, Sex and Marriage.

7
Paul Griffiths,
Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560-1640
(Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1996).

8
Werner Rosener,
Peasants in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1985); Leyser,
Medieval Women.
My discussion of peasant marriage is based largely on Rosener,
Peasants;
G. G. Coulton,
Medieval Village, Manor, and Monastery
(New York: Harper & Row, 1960); Beatrice Gottlieb,
The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); G. C. Homans,
English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942); Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowalski, eds.,
Women and Power in the Middle Ages
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988); Mavis Mate,
Women in Medieval English Society
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Barbara Hanawalt,
The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Judith Bennett,
Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock Before the Plague
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error
(New York: Vintage, 1979); Zvi Razi,
Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen, 1270-1400
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Bouchard,
Strong of Body, Brave and Noble
(see chap. 6, n. 20); Fleming,
Family and Household in Medieval England;
and Christopher Dyer,
Making a Living in the Middle Ages
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). David Cressy,
Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England
(Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1997) provides a wealth of information on both rural and urban family life.

9
Madonna Hettinger, “So Strategize: The Demands in the Day of the Peasant Women in Medieval Europe,” in Mitchell, ed.,
Women in Medieval Western European Culture.

10
Judith Bennett,
A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344
(Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998).

11
Ladurie,
Montaillou,
p. 180.

12
Homans,
English Villagers;
Razi,
Life, Marriage and Death.

13
John Gillis,
For Better, for Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

14
Cressy,
Birth, Marriage, Death;
Homans,
English Villagers;
Judith Bennett, “Public Power and Authority in the Medieval English Countryside,” in Erler and Kowalski, eds.,
Women and Power.
For an Italian example of the responsibilities that husbands gained, both over and for other people, as a result of marriage, see Susan Stuard, “Burdens of Matrimony,” in Lees, ed.,
Medieval Masculinities
(see chap. 1, n. 4).

15
Bennett,
A Medieval Life.

16
Amy Erickson,
Women and Property in Early Modern England
(New York: Routledge, 1993).

17
Pierre Bonnassie, “A Family of the Barcelona Countryside and Its Economic Activities Around the Year 1000,” in Sylvia Thrupp, ed.,
Early Medieval Society
(New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967).

18
Hanawalt,
Ties that Bound;
Homans,
English Villagers;
Leyser,
Medieval Women;
Judith Bennett, “Medieval Women, Modern Women,” in David Aers, ed.,
Culture and History 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing
(New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992); Linda Mitchell,
Portraits of Medieval Women
(London: Palgrave, 2003).

19
Shannon McSheffrey, “Men and Masculinity in Late Medieval London Civic Culture,” in Jacqueline Murray, ed.,
Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), p. 245.

20
Susan Stuard, “The Dominion of Gender” and Merry Wiesner, “Spinning out Capital,” in Bridenthal, Stuard, and Wiesner, eds.,
Becoming Visible
(see chap. 3, n. 39).

21
Gottlieb,
Family in the Western World,
p. 54.

22
Martha Howell,
Women, Production and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Marion Kaplan, ed.,
The Marriage Bargain: Women and Dowries in European History
(New York: Haworth Press, 1985); Mark Angelos, “Urban Women, Investment, and the Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages,” in Mitchell, ed.,
Women in Medieval Western European Culture;
P. J. P. Goldberg,
Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c 1300-1520
(Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1992).

23
Bennett, “Medieval Women, Modern Women.”

24
Fleming,
Family and Household;
Louise Collis,
Memoirs of a Medieval Woman: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe
(New York: Harper & Row, 1964).

25
Michael Sheehan, “The Formation and Stability of Marriage in Fourteenth-Century England: Evidence of an Ely Register,”
Mediaeval Studies
33 (1971); Alan Macfarlane,
Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840
(Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1986).

26
Jacqueline Murray, “Individualism and Consensual Marriage: Some Evidence from Medieval England,” in Rousseau and Rosenthal, eds.,
Women, Marriage and Family;
Geneviève Ribordy, “The Two Paths to Marriage: The Preliminaries of Noble Marriage in Late Medieval France,”
Journal of Family History
26 (2001).

27
Anthony Molho,
Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp.128-29.

28
Fleming,
Family and Household.

29
For this and the other Paston family stories described below, see H. S. Bennett,
The Pastons and Their England
(London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), along with Gies and Gies,
Marriage and the Family,
pp. 258-68.

30
Diana O’Hara,
Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England
(Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 32; Shannon McShreffrey, “I Will Never Have None Ayenst My Faders Will”: Consent and the Making of Marriage in the Late Medieval Diocese of London,” in Rousseau and Rosenthal, eds.,
Women, Marriage, Family,
p. 156. See also David Hopkin, “Love Riddles, Couple Formation, and Local Identity in Eastern France,”
Journal of Family History
28 (2003).

31
See, for example,
A Medieval Home Companion,
trans. and ed. Tania Bayard (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992).

32
Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford,
Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720
(Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 10.

33
The tale was written down in Italian by Boccaccio in 1353, as well as retold and translated into Latin by Petrarch. Latin was still the international language of Western Europe, so the tale spread across Germany and France into England. Griselda’s story appeared in several French versions, one of which was a treatise on domestic economy entitled
The Goodman of Paris
(c. 1393). The quote comes from the version in
The Goodman of Paris,
by A Citizen of Paris (c. 1393), translated by Eileen Power (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1928), p. 140.

34
Ibid., pp. 137, 140.

35
Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Canterbury Tales,
trans. into modern English by Nevill Coghill (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), pp. 370-71.

36
Ibid., pp. 288-96.

37
“The Book of Vices and Virtues,” in Emilie Amt,
Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook
(New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 89.

38
Quoted in Barstow,
Married Priests and the Reforming Papacy,
pp. 61-62. See also Pauline Stafford, “Queens, Nunneries and Reforming Churchmen,”
Past and Present
163 (1999); Louise Mirrer, “Women’s Representation in Male-Authored Works of the Middle Ages,” in Mitchell, ed.,
Women in Medieval Western European Culture,
p. 316; Katharine Rogers,
The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966).