The Canon Law On the Formation of Marriage and Social Practice in the Later Middle Ages

Abstract

The legal rules concerning the formation of marriage adopted by Pope Alexander III (1159-1181) gave considerable freedom to marriage partners to form a marriage without the consent of their parents or lords. A preliminary survey of the surviving records from the medieval church courts in both England and France suggests that there were substantial differences in the types of marriage-formation cases being heard in the two countries. The difference in types of cases, in turn, suggests that by the end of the Middle Ages, French parents were having more success than English in controlling the marriage choices of their children.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 93 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.