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86 Chapter 2
‘conseilleur matrimoniale’, as Gaudemet called him. The crisis
led him to write a lengthy and important treatise on marriage.
Hincmar played an even more central role in another high-profile
marriage case, that of Stephen of Auvergne.
That case anticipates the high Middle Ages in more than one
respect. It suggests that the Church’s rules had penetrated the
consciousness of the higher nobility; it anticipates the emphasis
on the mystical significance of consummation which became an
essential element of marriage law and theology from the late twelfth
century on; finally, it shows the power of symbolic reflection to
shape the course of events.
Stephen of Auvergne had got himself into a position where he
seemed doomed to choose between incest and the dissolution of a
marriage to which he had consented. The woman’s father brought
him before a church council (Tusey). Hincmar extricated Stephen
from the mess, arguing that it was morally impossible to consummate
the marriage, which was thus necessarily null. The case and
the way it was resolved show that the Church was on the way to becoming
the rule-maker in marriage matters. We shall look again in
a later chapter at the place of consummation in the argument. For
the moment, however, we must note that ‘Beyond the social aspect
of marriage he sees a Christian mystery that reflects the Incarnation
and Christ’s marriage with his Church; and he sees it much
as Augustine had seen it. Marriage, in a word, was a signum of the
great and true mystery of Christ’s incorporation in the church . . .
a unique and irreversible gift’. Hincmar was continuing the wellestablished
tradition of taking marriage symbolism seriously, but
Theutberga des Inzestes •uberf•uhrt wird’ (Hincmar, De divortio, 19). But he ‘•au¢ert
allerdings schwere Bedenken gegen das bisherige Verfahren und starke Zweifel an
der Stichhaltigkeit der Vorw •urfe. Solange der Sachverhalt nicht gekl•art sei, betont
er, d•urfe die Ehe nicht gel•ost werden’ (ibid.).
Gaudemet, Le Mariage en Occident, 125. On Hincmar and Lothar’s divorce, see
e.g. ibid. 126–7; McNamara and Wemple, ‘Marriage and Divorce in the Frankish
Kingdom’, 108–11.
Hincmar of Reims, De divortio.
For a full analysis see Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, 348, 351,
354–61; for a di·erent perspective, Nelson, Charles the Bald, 196–7.
Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church, 410.
Cf. Gaudemet, Le Mariage en Occident, 120 (speaking about Hincmar but not
about the particular case of Stephen of Auvergne): ‘l’insistance mise sur le sacramentum,
le symbole de l’union du Christ et de l’ ‹Eglise renforcent encore la doctrine
de l’indissolubilit‹e. D‹ej‹a Isidore de S‹eville avait qualifi‹e lemariaged’“inseparabile