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Introduction 11
Clairvaux has also been thoroughly examined. Perhaps a majority
of the writers on all these topics have a background in literature
or religious studies (defined to include theology and canon law).
That is no defect: it has doubtless sharpened their perception of
religious subtleties and nuances. The present study has a somewhat
di·erent and complementary aspect because it comes from a historian
formed in an age when the social history of marriage was the
hottest of historiographical topics.
Before the 1970s not much of the history of marriage was written
from history departments. Excellent work was done by church
lawyers: catholics like Esmein and Dauvillier, but also Protestants
like Sohm and Friedberg, engaged in a controversy about
the introduction of civil marriage into Prussia, whose resonances
seem faint today. (The contribution of German Protestants to medi-
the starring role in this love story, they had to adopt a feminine persona—as many
did—to pursue a heterosexual love a·air with their God. It might be assumed that
when women began to compose their own mystical texts, they could more easily
havefollowedthepathalreadylaidoutbymen.But...somewomenforgeda...
less stereotypical way that allowed them a wider emotional range’, adopting the
discourse of fin amour which ‘could encourage women writers to experiment with
gender roles just as monks did within the Song of Songs tradition’ (138). (C. W.
Bynum is almost certainly an inspiration behind this kind of analysis: see e.g. her
‘“And Woman his Humanity”: Female Imagery in the Religious Writings of the
Later Middle Ages’, in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the
Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991), 151–79 at 176–9.) Or again
Keller, My Secret is Mine: ‘Bernard of Clairvaux’s e·orts to re-establish the bridal
metaphor in the monastic life of both sexes mark precisely the beginning of the
definitive exclusion of monks from the concept’ (35); ‘Precisely the history of the
motif of the bride of God itself, both its gender-specific fixing of the role of the bride
of God and its attempts to force open such narrowings make clear that the human
world of the sexes and its historically-determined mechanisms push their way into
spiritual eroticism by the back door’ (263). Keller’s bibliography is a good guide
to recent literature on marriage/bridal symbolism. For an exemplary analysis of
gender in marriage symbolism see A. Volfing, John the Evangelist and Medieval
German Writing: Imitating the Inimitable (Oxford, 2001), 138–60.
J. Leclercq, Le Mariage vu par les moines au XIIe si›ecle (Paris, 1983), ch. 7, is an
especially important study. See too his Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France:
Psycho-Historical Essays (Oxford, 1979).
A. Esmein, Le Mariage en droit canonique ed. R. G‹enestal and J. Dauvillier, 2nd
edn. (2 vols.; Paris, 1929–35).
J. Dauvillier, Le Mariage dans le droit classique de l’‹eglise depuis le D‹ecret de
Gratien (1140) jusqu’›a lamortdeCl‹ement V (1314) (Paris, 1933).
R. Sohm, Das Recht der Eheschlie¢ung aus dem deutschen und kanonischen Recht
geschichtlich entwickelt: Eine Antwort auf die Frage nach dem Verh•altniss der kirchlichen
Trauung zur Civilehe (Weimar, 1875).
E. Friedberg, Verlobung und Trauung, zugleich als Kritik von Sohm: Das Recht
der Eheschlie¢ung (Leipzig, 1876).