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Introduction 13
pulse of his time’s historiography, was writing from a monastery
rather than a history department. Hubertus Lutterbach comes from
theology. Students of vernacular literature like Schumacher and
Burch have done thought-provoking work. Cartlidge’s study,
mentioned above under the rubric of symbolic marriage, talks
about perceptions of real human marriage as well. Perhaps the
most important recent historian of medieval marriage and sexuality,
R•udiger Schnell holds his chair in a department of Germanistik,
though he has mastered the bibliography in all medieval
fields on these topics to an astonishing degree. Only the historian
Brundage, on whom below, can come near him as a guide to this
practically endless sea of secondary scholarship.
Brundage is one of a substantial number of historians employed
in history departments who have added to this tower of scholarship
recently, holding their own with colleagues from other sectors of
academe. They are not necessarily more impartial—indeed, in this
field historians tend to make their ideological aliations as evident
as historians of monasticism used to before the First World War.
Moreover, some have continued to use the same types of evidence as
scholars from other disciplines: Payer’s The Bridling of Desire is
in the tradition of historical theology and Brundage’s opus magnum
is based above all on penitentials and canon-law commentaries so
far as primary sources are concerned, although, as just noted, he
is remarkably successful in getting a grip on the enormous mass
H. Lutterbach, Sexualit•at im Mittelalter: Eine Kulturstudie anhand von Bu¢b•uchern
des 6. bis 12. Jahrhunderts (Cologne etc., 1999). Although the style is detached,
there are signs that he is himself fighting a battle within the world of Catholic
theology.
M. Schumacher, Die Auffassung der Ehe in den Dichtungen Wolframs von Eschenbach
(Germanische Bibliothek, 2. Abt., Untersuchungen und Texte, 3. Reihe,
Untersuchungen und Einzeldarstellungen; Heidelberg, 1967).
S. L. Burch, ‘A Study of Some Aspects of Marriage as Presented in Selected
Octosyllabic French Romances of the 12th and 13th Centuries’ (unpublished Ph.D.
thesis, University College London, 1982).
See above all R. Schnell, Sexualit•at und Emotionalit•at in der vormodernen Ehe
(Cologne etc., 2002).
Theopus magnum is J. A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval
Europe (Chicago etc., 1987). Brundage’s publications on medieval marriage and sex
are too numerous to list here, but special mention must be made of his ‘The Merry
Widow’s Serious Sister: Remarriage in Classical Canon Law’, in R. R. Edward and
V. Ziegler (eds.), Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society (Woodbridge,
1995), 33–48, which is directly relevant to Chapter 3.
P. J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages
(Toronto etc., 1993).