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Ethelflaeda Lecture St. Ethelflaida Lecture, 2012. Marriage-resister saints of the 11th and 12th centuries Since the whole topic of marriage and its meanings, particularly in relationship to Christianity, is so much up for grabs at the moment, I thought this might be a good time to go and attempt to revisit a subject that has engaged me for some time now and explore another period of significant change in the understanding of marriage the 11th and 12th centuries in Europe, and look at how that impacted on women. Before I begin though it seems proper to clarify that I am not a theologian (except in the sense that we all are) and I am not a historian either. I am a writer. This means that the connections I am looking for and at are not “academic” or causal; they are cultural, suggestive, imaginative and – perhaps above all – narrative. I am going to tell you some stories and what I make of them. This does not mean that they are less true (or more true) than other ways of looking at things – it does mean though that they are subjective, and they come through the subjectivity of a woman who has been (in alphabetical order) a Christian, a feminist and a writer for forty years – and a writer who has focussed particularly on myth and folk-lore and fairy stories (as well as on God.) You have been warned! The second half of the first millennium CE was a time of great turmoil for what is now Europe. The Roman Empire fragmented and collapsed. In 410 Rome was sacked by the Visigoths under Alaric ending very nearly 1000 years of unbroken dominance. It had no real successor in Western Europe as wave upon wave of new inhabitants poured in from the North E: Angles and Saxons and Jutes and Goths and Vikings and general purpose “Norsemen” – essentially pagan and with a totally different model of governance and culture. The Eastern Empire centred in Byzantium came under threat from the south east where Islam was expanding rapidly and effectively. In the early 8th C. African Moslems captured most of what is now Spain and Portugal. The Christian Church, which had – surprisingly perhaps – inherited something of the mantle of Rome in terms of both law and learning, was under great pressure. By 1000 however it had basically re-converted northern Europe, had begun the re- conquest of Iberia and was entering a period of relative stability: not so much peace, but internal wars between peoples all playing by approximately the same rules. This led to sufficient space time and prosperity for academics to return to focus on serious theology. This was to see its full flowering in the 13th century with the establishment of the Dominicans in 1216 and the work, particularly, of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274); but obviously this did not spring suddenly from nowhere at all. One of the principle areas of energetic development was in Sacramental Theology. This began with attempts to explain the nature of the Mass: what are called the “Eucharistic polemics” of the 10th and 11th century – trying to work out (without the help of Aquinas’ Aristotelian vocabulary) what was happening in or to the elements during consecration. Because travel within Europe was now much easier than it had been and therefore much more communication between various scholars in religious houses and the emergent “universities” there was some hope of universal agreement and therefore an increasing militancy about heresy – this sharpened minds if nothing else. Inevitably then, the subject opened up a wider discussion about the sacraments – and the 11th and 12th centuries saw an extraordinary – and mostly rather lovely – development in Sacramental Theology more widely, in both the theory as it were and the ritual practice. What developed was a clearer – and more mystical, more spiritual – understanding of the sacraments and of the necessary role of the Church’s authority in their validity. The fly in ointment was marriage. There are both theological and historical reasons why marriage created difficulties in this Church centred theological endeavour. Theologically the other six sacraments (just to remind ourselves: Eucharist, baptism, confirmation, reconciliation, ordination and unction (last rites)) were exclusively and specifically Christian – and by a fairly small stretch for the mediaeval narrative approach to scripture could be seen as having been instituted – even invented or created – by Jesus himself and witnessed to by the Gospels. Marriage was quite different – anyone could see that it figured in the Old Testament, that it existed in various forms in the alarming pagan cultures that had barely been disposed of and had virtually no role at all in the Gospels. The two domestic households Jesus was close to – his own and the household of Martha, Mary and Lazarus in Bethany were demonstrably not “proper” marriages. Attempts were made to link the sacrament to the miracle at the Wedding feast in Cana – as some fundamentalist hermeneutic does to-day – but it really was not satisfactory, because the couple never appear in John’s account and because Jesus was clearly there as guest not host. You could argue that Jesus approved of weddings, but not that he instituted them in any sacramental way. Historically the early church had been luke-warm, at best, about marriage. Virginity was greatly to be preferred; being married to a pagan was no bar to the faith; despite Paul’s ecstatic imagery of the Bridegroom and the Church, in practice all he does is mutter a bit scathingly about it being slightly better to marry than to get distracted by lust; and by and large during the Roman period the Church had treated marriage as the business of the Roman State, or contract law and social good order. Of course as a Christian you should keep promises you had made; you should be chaste and faithful within marriage and treat your spouse with love and respect – but those sorts of moral requirements do not in and of themselves amount to a “sacrament” or anything like one. There were no set rites for marriages and although by the 4th century it was normal to have a marriage blessed by a priest, this was not required nor seen as any part of the marriage’s validity. (Bear in mind that blessing things was a much more usual practice than now) and in fact the Western Church recognized as valid marriages contracted without a priest or any witnesses until 1907. So although by 1000 it was clear that many people did see marriage as a “holy estate” it remained a matter of good order, and – especially in those areas where women had chattel status at law – the good order had more to do with the families as a whole than with the couple and their sacred bond. Marriages were arranged by fathers, not by couples (which is why children could be betrothed at birth, especially if it furthered peace between states and made individual families of power and wealth more secure.) On the other hand the early church had defended the goodness of marriage against the Gnostics and Antinomians and Augustine had referred to marriage as sacramental – he used the word “sacramentum” explicitly: he distinguished three “goods” in marriage: fidelity, which is more than sexual; offspring, which "entails the acceptance of children in love, their nurturance in affection, and their upbringing in the Christian religion; and sacrament, in that its indissolubility is a sign of the eternal unity of the blessed.” Nonetheless it was not until this renewal and development of sacramental understanding in the 11th and 12th centuries that the matter seems to have become pressing. And in fact the first official declaration that marriage was a sacrament did not occur until 1184 at the Council of Verona. However there were still problematic issues involved. If marriage was to be a sacrament it had to be as far as possible aligned with the other sacraments: it needed an outward and visible sign or “mark” and because it existed in a “natural” as well as a supernatural form the sign had to be “natural” too. The sign of marriage became the vows that the couple took + sexual consummation. And this meant that the role of the priest was tricky, since he could neither take the vows (only witness them) nor be implicated in the sexual act. A rather clever solution to this was to declare that the couple, the spouses, are jointly the ministers of the sacrament (as well as the matter of it). Basically so long as each spouse intends to contract a true marriage, and they have sex with each other after that, the sacrament is performed. This bestows the effect of the sacrament: an increase in sanctifying grace for the spouses, a participation in the divine life of God. But now you have a new problem. If you want to see marriage as a sacrament, as a mystical reality, you have to wrest it away from its contractual basis and its socio-legal nature. If the partners to the marriage are going to be the ministers and matter of the sacrament they have to be free to form that intention – or else it is not going to work. Marriage cannot be a contract of association, or a treaty between two rulers – it has to be a free choice of the spouses. This is not a major problem in the case of the groom, but it is a serious difficulty in the case of the bride, who may well have no legal existence in her own right, no capacity to witness at law or even take oaths (as opposed to vows), own no property and be, in essence, the chattel of her father – to be counted as it were with his other possessions.
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