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Consummation 169
marry told him that she was still a virgin, he set in motion a formal
legal enquiry to establish her virginity. It was not her virginity
as such that he was worried about. He wanted to establish ‘the
privilege of his tonsure’.
These are quirky cases, exotic curiosities. Bizarre-seeming behaviour
by people in other cultures is always a cue for historical
analysis, a challenge to make sense of it by ‘thick description’. In
the cases just examined, the inner logic is the rationality of marriage
symbolism, and consummation is at the centre of the symbolism.
The Church’s endorsement of marital sex
It is worth pausing to reflect on the implications of this. The ideas
and practices discussed in this chapter amount to a massive objection
to the widespread assumption that the medieval Church
tolerated sex only grudgingly, as a lesser evil. This modern view is
so deeply embedded in unscholarly and even scholarly writings that
it will probably always survive the overwhelming evidence against
it, but there is no real excuse for retaining it as a generalization.
There is an excuse for the misconception. Medieval religious
writers were indeed ambiguous about pleasure as a motive for sex,
but in the thirteenth century and after, pleasure was deemed legitimate
as an e·ect of marital sex. (An analogy would be the instinct
quite current today that it is natural to feel good after performing
a kind act but wrong to perform a kind act in order to feel good
about oneself. Their attitude was Kantian, avant le mot.) From
Peter Abelard on, medieval scholasticism moved away from Augustine’s
view that sexual pleasure did not exist before original sin.
Grand coutumier, quoted by G‹enestal, Le Privilegium fori,i.74n.2.
Here it is worth quoting P. Tox‹e, ‘La copula carnalis chez les canonistes m‹edi‹evaux’,
in M. Rouche (ed.), Mariage et sexualit‹e auMoyenA^ge: accord ou crise?
(Cultures et civilisations m‹edi‹evales, 21; Paris, 2000), 123–33 at 129: ‘Si les canonistes
ont r‹epugn‹e ›a une conception trop spiritualiste du mariage qui ne serait
fond‹e‹e que sur le seul ‹echange des consentements, ce n’est pas seulement pour faire
droit ›alamentalit‹e ou aux m¥urs du temps pour lesquelles la copulatio joue un r^ole
majeur, mais aussi et surtout ›a cause d’une conception symbolique, spirituelle de
l’acte charnel, dans le mariage. Quoiqu’on en dise, il y a une valorisation positive de
cet acte qui n’est pas n‹ecessaire ›a l’union des c¥urs (les th‹eologiens et canonistes sont
d’accord sur ce point et citent l’exemple du mariage de la Vierge Marie) mais qui
peut l’exprimer et aider ›a yparvenir.Lacopulatio a pour ces auteurs une dimension
symbolique, spirituelle, sacramentelle, et c’est pourquoi elle n’est pas un ‹el‹ement
parmi d’autres des obligations du mariage. . . . L’union charnelle seule, signifie
l’union du Christ et de son ‹Eglise, indissoluble. Et c’est pourquoi l’union dont le
mariage consomm‹e estd‹esormais le signe ne peut ^etre dissoute.’