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188 Chapter 4
would be a declaration that it had never existed. Non-consummated
marriages were real marriages from the moment the words of present
consent were spoken. Thus their dissolution was more like a
divorce in the modern sense. (The medieval word divortium normally
means either an annulment or a legal separation.)
So much for the legal di·erence. The social di·erence is that the
couple had probably never lived together in non-consummation
cases. We have seen that a variety of situations explain why that
might be so.
Thus there is every reason to think that delay was a common occurrence,
and consequently that the late twelfth-century decision
of Alexander III opened up an option for a larger proportion of
newly married couples than one might initially suppose. From the
fifteenth century on the opening was widened. Reflection in the intervening
period on the symbolic rationale for Alexander’s decision
would open the way to a wide papal discretion to dissolve (rather
than annul) unconsummated marriages.
(d) Long-Term Developments
Holy orders
The symbolic rationale continued to work like a yeast within medieval
marriage doctrine, producing practical consequences for which
the thirteenth-century papacy clearly did not feel ready. Symbolism
was a powerful and active intellectual ingredient, stimulating
speculation by the Church’s intellectuals. In the early fourteenth
century the Dominican theologian John of Naples considered the
question of whether holy orders dissolved an unconsummated marriage
just as entering a religious order did, concluding that a future
papal decision was needed to settle the problem. A decision by Pope
John XXII did in fact follow: holy orders did not dissolve an unconsummated
marriage unless the man also entered a religious order.
The pope’s decision marked the di·erence between the priesthood
and the religious life, but perhaps left open the further question of
whether a pope could change the law so that in future entry into
the priesthood had the same e·ect as becoming a religious: we are
on a borderland between doctrine and law here. So this flurry of
In the foregoing I have plagiarized my own discussion in D. L. d’Avray, ‘Christendom:
Medieval Christianity’, in P. Byrne and L. Houlden (eds.), Companion En-