Untitled

The implications of Alexander III’s decision
Consummation 175
Alexander III’s emphasis on consummation has long been recognized
as decisive for the long-term history of marriage in the
Catholic Church. Even so, there is room for clarification, since
the point has not been spelt out in two of the best books on the
history of marriage, one linking it too closely for complete clarity
with the distinct issue of annulment on grounds of impotence (distinct
because in the cases just discussed there is no indication of
impotence), another just missing it out, though mentioning annulment
for impotence and impediment of anity. So it is worth
re-emphasizing that although all cases of impotence must have been
non-consummation cases, the converse does not hold. With many
non-consummation cases the ability of the spouses to consummate
the marriage was not in doubt and not the issue.
The idea that the marriage of Mary and Joseph was in a certain
sense imperfect because unconsummated percolated down from
speculative to pastoral theology. We find it in the late fourteenthcentury
priests’ manual discussed above and also in connection with
‘Bigamy’: the Pupilla oculi, by Johannes de Burgo, chancellor of the
University of Cambridge. The passage is printed and translated
below, as Document 4. 6. These remarks would have reached a
relatively wide public, far beyond that of academic theologians and
theology students, for it was well adapted to its task, and transmitted
in many manuscripts and then later in print.
It seems likely that papal case law prompted by actual situations
Cf.e.g.G.H.Joyce,Christian Marriage: An Historical and Doctrinal Study
(London etc., 1933), 428–9, 449–63.
C. N. L. Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford, 1989), 132–3 and
n. 37.
D. Lombardi, Matrimoni di antico regime (Annali dell’Istituto storico italogermanico
in Trento, Monografie, 34; Bologna, 2001), 30: ‘La questione di pi ›u
dicile soluzione era quando una persona, dopo aver contratto matrimonio per
verba de praesenti, ne contraeva un altro, con un secondo partner, e lo consumava.
Quale dei due vincoli era valido? Le risposte date da Alessandro III mostravano
ancora qualche segno di incertezza. In diverse decretali expresse la validit›a del
primo, puramente consensuale, . . . In altre decretali, invece, Alessandro insistette
sul valore della consumazione. Stabilݤ che il rapporto sessuale intervenuto tra il
partner e un parente dell’altro, prima del matrimonio, impedisse la conclusione del
matrimonio. O, ancora, che la non consumazione, a causa dell’impotenza di uno dei
coniugi, rendesse nullo il matrimonio.’ Nothing here about the dissolution of the
matrimonium ratum sed non consummatum.
W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century, 2nd edn. (1962;
repr. Toronto etc., 1980), 213–14 (and on Johannes also above, pp. 156–7 and 172).