The Making of Marriage in Medieval France

Abstract

Georges Duby described medieval, Catholic marriage as the product of two competing groups of people, clergy and nobles, each with their own conflicting ideas of marriage. Clergy wanted indissoluble and monogamous marriage, while nobles wanted to divorce and remarry at will. This widely influential idea of marriage is extremely misleading. Clergy and nobles did not comprise distinct and competing camps, nor did they have opposing ideas of marriage. Instead, together, as members of the powerful families that dominated medieval Europe, these men and women created and implemented Christian marriage as monogamous and indissoluble. Using as a case study the scandalous marriage of a twelfth-century abbess, this article will demonstrate the flaws in Duby’s argument, and also we can learn about medieval marriage, and medieval society more broadly, by applying this new approach.

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