Untitled

14 Introduction
of secondary scholarship about medieval marriage in three or four
academic languages. Conversely, the analyses of actual court records
by Weigand and Helmholz take us firmly beyond the world of ‘book
texts’, if one may so put it. By and large, however, the professional
historians have helped to root the subject more firmly in social
history—converging with some of the lawyers in this respect.
Christopher Brooke was very early in the field, including sections
on marriage in a general survey, a historian somewhat ahead
of his time. In a series of subsequent publications, he brought to
bear on the history of marriage a knowledge of central medieval
social history that owed much to his involvement with the Oxford
Medieval Texts editorial project. The present study takes up a
question that he put more clearly than any of the other historians
who made up the wave of writing on medieval marriage: namely,
what was di·erent about the Christian marriage of the Middle
Ages? The Christianization of marriage in the twelfth century has
been a central thread. Georges Duby used his remarkable architectonic
literary gifts to develop an elegant and still broadly valid
schema: an aristocratic model, favouring legitimate marriage but allowing
easy divorce, and tolerating the marriage of close relatives,
opposed to a clerical model emphasizing indissoluble monogamous
marriage—exogamy. The endogamy/exogamy part of the thesis
requires further commentary out of place in this argument, but
the notion that the two models grew closer together in the early
thirteenth century is broadly right. The lay nobility came to accept
indissolubility, and the Church reduced the circle of forbidden
degrees of relationship, allowing closer relatives to marry. All this
needs to be put in the context of a rationality perhaps not fully
understood by Duby. It should also be noted that he was able to
draw on some crucial discoveries made earlier by John Baldwin
about the thinking behind the changes in marriage law e·ected
by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. In general Duby’s work
tends to leave the impression that the medieval Church took a nega-
C. N. L. Brooke, Europe in the Central Middle Ages 962–1154 (London, 1964;
3rd edn. Harlow, 2000): in first edition 245–7 and index s.v. ‘Marriage’.
His results were drawn together in The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford,
1989), still probably the best way into the subject.
Duby, Medieval Marriage; id.,Le Chevalier, la femme et le pr^etre: le mariage
dans la France f‹eodale (Paris, 1981).
J. W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the
Chanter and his Circle (2 vols.; Princeton, 1970), i. 332–7, ii. 222–7 (classic pages).