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2 Introduction
important factor in the later Middle Ages, with backing from the
Church. Marital a·ection was a social reality (as common sense
would suggest), and it was strongly encouraged by influential texts.
None of this is at all new, though clearly a reminder is not superfluous.
This book aims to bring out a di·erent dimension of the
social history of medieval marriage, correcting from another angle
the idea that it was driven mainly by the landed ambitions of families.
Social and legal practice was infused with marriage symbolism.
Symbolism gave meaning to practice and a·ected it, not least by
helping to create a combination of monogamy and indissolubility
probably unique in the history of literate societies.
Marriage symbolism in religions
The theme, then, is marriage symbolism’s e·ect on social practice.
Symbolism was crucial in the theory of marriage first, and even
before the Middle Ages began. Central to the meaning of marriage,
symbolism eventually became part of marriage law and changed
behaviour through law, the decades around 1200 marking a turning
point.
I shall start with a rapid glance at the comparative religious history
of the topic. Then I shall briefly indicate the kind of work
that has already been done on medieval Western marriage symbolism.
That will be balanced by the most rapid tour d’horizon
of recent work on the social history of medieval marriage, since
I aim to bring it together with the history of marriage symbolism.
Like food, love and marriage are the basis of strong religious
symbolism. In the study of comparative religion there is a keyword
for it: ‘sacred marriage’ or hieros gamos. An important variety is
parallelism between the marriage of two gods and the marriage of
Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics 1217–1327 (Princeton
etc., 1988).
See below, pp. 124–9.
F. M. Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward: The Community of the
Realm in the Thirteenth Century (2 vols.; Oxford, 1947), i. 157 n. 1.
See below, pp. 69, 129; also A. MacFarlane, Marriage and Love in England, 1300–
1840: Modes of Reproduction (Oxford, 1986), 182–3, to show that a non-medievalist
can get it right. Scholars have known all this for a long time: see e.g. H. A. Kelly,
Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer (Ithaca, NY, 1975).
K. W. Bolle, ‘Hieros Gamos’, in M. Eliade (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Religion,
vi (New York etc., 1987), 317–21.