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Mass Communication 73
has to be provisional until more research on early medieval preaching
has been published, everything points to a watershed shortly
after 1200, when university-trained clergy and above all the friars
started preaching and producing model sermon collections. The
sermons tended to include a marriage sermon in which propaganda
for human marriage was combined with marriage symbolism.
Something similar might have come about much earlier if the
Carolingian experiment had not fallen apart in the ninth century,
owing to invasion, succession crises, and lack of a firm economic
infrastructure for government. Weak economic infrastructure may
also be the ultimate reason for the generally low level of clerical
education, which would have limited the amount of preaching
from model marriage sermons even if they had been available. The
infrastructural frailties of the period before 1200 are the main reason
why marriage symbolism had relatively little impact in the lay
world before that date.
Even if it had done, the symbolism would have been undermined
by marriage practices. Before the pontificate of Innocent III, the
Church’s ocial religious emphasis on the indissolubility of marriage
had been undermined by the easy annulments. The male lay
‹elite now accepted the principle and the authority of the Church’s
courts where the validity of marriage was concerned. Still they
managed to change wives quite easily when they wanted to by discovering
real or imaginary impediments which enabled them to get
the marriage annulled. Before the Church courts gained a monopoly
of such cases it had probably been even easier to end a marriage
with a nominal annulment. All that changed in the thirteenth century,
and as it happened marriage symbolism seems to have been
a powerful force behind the change, which drastically a·ected the
whole social institution of marriage.
I have argued that marriage symbolism became a social force
when preaching became a medium of mass communication in the
thirteenth century, but so far this has meant a force on people’s
minds, rather than on their behaviour. In the remainder of the
book I shall look at the ways in which marriage symbolism worked
through law to a·ect social practice. The chronology is roughly the
same, the period around 1200 being decisive.