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