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202 Conclusion
lysed throughout this book is not about gender specificity so much
as unity and indissolubility. Some of the texts used in this study
could certainly bear a little more gender analysis in the context of
a di·erent investigation, but it might be somewhat peripheral to
their principal significance.
Narrative
It is an interesting exercise to rerun in pr‹ecis form the preceding
(primarily) analytical and social history as a narrative, including
the ‘great men’. An obvious starting point would be Augustine of
Hippo, c.400. With clarity and force he linked marriage symbolism
and indissolubility. He also set out lucidly the principles behind the
rules about ‘bigamy’ in its technical sense.
Next would come Hincmar, in the mid-ninth century. He put
consummation in the foreground as crucial to the meaning of marriage.
He anticipated later developments and had an influence on
them. Like so much about the Carolingians and their ‘renaissance’,
future transformations are adumbrated without being actualized,
except transitorily.
Then come Peter Lombard and Gratian in the mid-twelfth century.
They helped put the ideas of Augustine and Hincmar before
the ‹elite who ran the western Church. After the Lombard’s
Sentences had become a standard textbook, every serious theology
student would be likely to come across Augustine’s ideas about
symbolism and the nature of Christian marriage. The symbolic
reasons for thinking consummation changed the meaning of marriage
were inescapably available in Gratian’s Decretum. Hemade
Hincmar’s line of thought widely accessible, and almost certainly
as the man or Christ as the woman: ‘vidue, id est, corrupte, quia licet fuisset vidua,
dummodononcorrupta,nonprohibetur...Sedquareexigiturmaiorcastitasin
uxore quam in viro, quia maritus corrupte, si cum ea una caro eciatur promoveri
non potest . . . Sed ille qui habuit concubinam post [potest ms.] uxorem vel ante
promoveri potest, ut xxxiiii. [xxiiii ms.] Di.Fraternitatis. H. [=Huguccio?] dixit
quod vir significat ecclesiam, que in parte recessit a Christo adulterando recedendo
a fide, etsi in parte virgo fuerit, et ideo non deest significatio sacramenti in viro
quamvis non sit virgo. Uxor *vero significat Christum, qui numquam ecclesiam
dimisit,...Aliidicunt,etvideturmelius,quodvirsignificat Christum qui primo
copulavit sibi sinagogam et postea ecclesiam, scilicet de gentibus, *militantem, in
qua sunt boni et mali, et ideo non nocet si vir non fuerit virgo; uxor vero significat
ecclesiam triumphantem in qua non est macula’ (Bernard of Parma, glossa ordinaria
to Decretals, at X. 1. 21. 5, Debitum, inMSBLRoyal9.C.I,fo.35RB, right-hand
lower margin).