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Introduction 15
tive view of marriage, a view corrected in friendly fashion by Jean
Leclercq (and as we shall see quite contrary to copious evidence
of which he was unaware). Dyan Elliott’s study of ‘Spiritual Marriage’
(understood not in the usual sense of symbolic marriage but
as marriage without sex) used saints’ lives alongside theological and
canon-law texts, and tried to reconstruct actual practices. David
Herlihy traced the change from an early medieval society where
the rich and powerful had more than their fair share of women to a
society where the husband-and-wife couple was the norm at all levels
of society: the slimness of his Medieval Households is in inverse
proportion to its achievement. Michael Borgolte has set the medieval
Church’s e·orts to enforce monogamy and indissolubility in a
comparative framework by showing how its sphere of influence was
ringed with an outer sphere of polygyny, among the Muslims and
Jews outside the borders of Latin Europe but also among Christians
who came in contact with them or who maintained a polygynous
subculture.
The general trend of most recent work has been to emphasize the
growing though always limited influence of the Church’s models
on the social history of marriage (indeed, Borgolte emphasizes it
too). This is particularly but not exclusively true of the work by
scholars in history departments. This study will draw heavily on
their results, especially the findings of scholars who have studied
ecclesiastical court evidence.
The argument
The specific aim of the present study is to draw together the social
history of marriage and the history of marriage symbolism. I
am not quite the first historian to have seen the connection, for
D. Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton,
1993). Her use of ‘spiritual marriage’ to mean marriage without sex is perhaps
confusing since the phrase often means marriage as metaphor, but there is a pedigree
behind her terminology: see P. de Labriolle, ‘Le “mariage spirituel” dans l’antiquit‹e
chr‹etienne’, Revue historique, 137 (1921), 204–25.
D. Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, Mass., etc., 1985).
M. Borgolte, ‘Kulturelle Einheit und religi•ose Di·erenz: Zur Verbreitung
der Polygynie im mittelalterlichen Europa’, Zeitschrift f•ur historische Forschung,
31 (2004), 1–36; for aristocratic polygyny in regions or cultures within Christian
Europe see ibid. 7 n. 23 from p. 6 (referring to the work of Jan R•udiger).
Ibid. 11, 13.
As an example see the able survey by D. O. Hughes, ‘Il matrimonio nell’Italia
medievale’, in M. De Giorgio and C. Klapisch-Zuber (eds.), Storia del matrimonio
(Rome etc., 1996), 5–61, notably 18–24, 44–9.