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148 Chapter 3
amarriagecouldbeblessedifitwasthefirsttimeforthebride
even if not for the bridegroom. This practice does indeed seem to
have been found ‘in some churches’. Bernard of Pavia notes it, as
does Hostiensis. The same evidence proves that it was not the
general rule. The practice might be explained also in terms of
the patriarchal assumption that properly speaking ‘man is polygamous,
woman is monogamous’. Aquinas finds a quite di·erent
meaning in it.
Meaning and reception: the ‘inner side’ of ritual
This raises the crucial question: do meanings imposed a posteriori—as
this turn at least in Aquinas’s argument may well have
been—have any relevance to social history? I would suggest that
the answer is: ‘sometimes but not always’ . For example, most of
Aquinas’s analysis is really relevant to the social history of bigamy,
while the idea just mentioned—the explanation of why a marriage
could be blessed when it was the wife’s first marriage—may be
interesting for the intellectual historian but not for the social historian,
as being too much of an afterthought, too remote from
practice.
To decide what is relevant to social history one needs to ask
further questions. One was used in the preceding section, which
suggested the following criterion: was the internal rationale used
casuistically, as a way of classifying dicult or marginal practical
cases? If it was doing that, then it was a·ecting practice, not just
redescribing it. Here are two more questions. Was the new understanding
of the social practice so widespread as to change it so to
speak from the inside? Is this inner change revealed by external
symptoms, minor in themselves but indicative of the new thinking
that was altering the social meaning?
The notion that social practice has an ‘inner side’ which is the
real object of the social scientist’s (or historian’s) research has been
around for a long time. In the second half of the twentieth cen-
See Esmein, Le Mariage en droit canonique, ii. 124–5, with references.
Nor did it receive general approval. Hostiensis disapproved (see ibid.), and
the interesting, probably fake bull attributed variously to Pope John XXII and
Pope Benedict XII generously allowed the maximalist interpretation that if either
of the couple in a second marriage had not been blessed in a previous marriage, the
new marriage might be blessed: see the discussion by Johannes de Burgo, below,
Document 3. 9. 5.