A History of the Wife (10 page)

before the bishop, who decided in her favor. She would be allowed to fulfill a childhood vow to remain a virgin and enter the religious life, “to keep herself for God to serve Him freely and for no man besides.”
9

Despite religious decrees during this period pressing for church weddings, they had not yet become mandatory or even customary for the faithful. In Germanic countries, peasants continued to marry under the auspices of a family member, and in Romanized countries like Italy and France, even among the upper classes, marriages continued to be performed in secular settings. In the face of widespread resistance, Pope Alexander III (1159–1181) was forced to abandon his attempts to force Christians to marry in church. The following French nuptial scene, recalling the primitive practice of “bedding” the bride and groom, offers a competing model.

In 1194, Arnoud, the eldest son of the count of Guînes, was married at home. One of the officiating priests left behind this record: “when the husband and wife were united in the same bed, the count called us—another priest, my two sons and me” into the room. Note that the priest himself was married and the father of two sons, both of whom were priests. The count ordered that the newlyweds should be sprin- kled with holy water, the bed perfumed with incense, the couple blessed and entrusted to God. Then the count himself invoked God’s blessings, asking that the couple “live in His divine love, persevere in harmony, and that their seed multiply with the length of their days.” Here the ceremony takes place in the bedroom of the newlyweds, with the father directing the proceedings and presiding alongside the priests.
10
The bride—the only woman present in this assemblage of six people—may have felt frightened in a strange bed, away from her own female enclave. She would certainly have felt the solemnity of the occa- sion, and especially her obligation to produce an heir for her new fam- ily.

Gradually, however, religious pressure to publicize marriages and conduct them in church began to take effect throughout Europe. Thus in 1231, the emperor Frederick II of the kingdom of Sicily (which included much of Southern Italy), promulgated the following law: “we order that all men of our kingdom and especially the nobles who desire to contract marriage must have the marriage celebrated solemnly and publicly, with due solemnity and a priestly blessing, after the betrothal has been solemnized.”
11

To celebrate the marriage “publicly,” banns were to be read in church during three successive weeks, a period of time considered sufficient for objections to be made. For example, someone might claim that the prospective bride or groom already had a spouse, or a jealous rival might disclose that that the engaged couple were first, second, third, or fourth cousins—degrees of consanguinity prohibited by the church. But barring objections, the wedding would then take place “at church.” “At church” commonly meant “at the church’s door”—at the entrance or one of the side porches. This is the meaning of the words that describe the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
: “Husbands at church door she had five.” According to Latin liturgies used in England and France, the bride and the groom would stand together before the church door, the man on the right of the woman, and the woman on the left of the man, in the presence of the priest and witnesses.

The service performed at York in England (similar to those per- formed in Sarnum and Hereford, as well as Rennes in France) gives us the feel of this ancient ceremony.
12
It should take only a slight effort to follow the priest’s archaic language as he addresses the people: “Lo, bretheren we are comen here before God and his angels and all his halowes, in the face and presence of our moder holy Chyrche, for to couple and to knyt these two bodyes togyder.... If there be any of you that can say any thynge why these two may not lawfully be wedded togyder at this tyme, say it nowe.”

Then the priest says to the man: “Wylt thou haue this woman to thy wyfe and loue her and keep her, in sykenes and in helthe, and in all other degrese be to her as a husbande sholde bae to his wyfe, and all other forsake for her, and holde the only to her to thy lyues ende.”

The man answers: “I wyll.”

The priest then uses similar language for the woman, with the addi- tional words “and to be buxum to hym, serue hym,” which means to be obedient to him and serve him.

The woman answers: “I wyll.”

At this point the priest asks: “Who gyues me this wyfe?” The woman is usually given away by her father. This part of the marriage ceremony recalls the ancient assumption that a daughter was “gifted” by her father to her husband.

Then the groom takes the bride by the right hand with his right hand—as in the Roman ceremony—and pledges his troth, saying after

the priest: “Here I take the [Name] to my wedded wyfe, to haue and to halde, at bedde and at borde, for fayrer for fouler, for better for warse, in sekeness and in hele, tyl dethe us departe.” And the woman makes the same vow in the same words.

Now the groom places gold, silver, and a ring upon a shield or a book, and the priest blesses the ring, which the groom then places upon the fourth or middle finger of the bride. Holding his bride by the hand, he says after the priest: “With this rynge I wedde the, and with this golde and siluer I honoure the, and with this gyft I dowe thee.” The priest next asks about the bride’s dowry—the money or property she brings to the husband.

The ceremony ends with prayer and a benediction, followed by entrance into the church for celebration of the bridal mass. The mass itself, however inspiring, did not add to the validity of the nuptial cere- mony, which was considered complete and binding before the church door.

Church weddings, were, of course, not intended for the scattered Jew- ish communities living in Europe, who were subject to their own laws and rituals. Yet, however self-contained, these Jews were also influ- enced by the majority Christian culture. Consider, for example, how the Christian insistence on monogamy influenced the Jewish popula- tion. By the end of the first millennium, Askanazi Jews, following the custom of their adopted countries in Eastern and Western Europe, were practicing monogamy, whereas Sephardic Jews in Spain under the Moors and in the Near East were still polygamous. While an official ban on polygamy issued by Rabbi Gershom ben Judah of Worms in 1040 put an end to the practice among German and French Jews, Sephardic Jews maintained the right to polygamy for almost another millennium. An all-inclusive ban was not pronounced until the mid-twentieth cen- tury, after the formation of the State of Israel.

A considerably more limited example of Jewish acculturation to European modes is found in a thirteenth-century Hebrew-French wed- ding song, intended for performance during the marriage festivities of a Jewish couple. The song, written in both Hebrew and Old French and representing the voices of the bride, bridegroom, and chorus, combines images from traditional Hebrew nuptial poetry and the French feudal warrior world. A line from Isaiah evoking the sun and the moon as sym-

bols of the two lovers is followed by the military command “Surrender your castle”—an order derived from medieval warfare, which estab- lishes the central metaphor of the groom’s assault on the bride’s fortress. In the translation by medievalist Samuel Rosenberg, French and Hebrew (the latter indicated in italics), sacred and secular, licentious

and dignified allusions playfully vie with one another:

To the Hill of frankincense

Our
hatan
[groom] has come.
Light of the sun, light of the moon!
Surrender your castle,

For in his hand is a blood-red sword.

If you resist his advance, No one can save you.

. . . .

Gazelle, graceful dancer,

I have come to court you

Or else in a great war

I will come to defy you—

....

My armed and raging passion

Will beat its way along your path.

Let me just die now.

....

The bridegroom’s voice came forth

And to his attendants said

Even a beautiful song grows stale.

—
Lift
hatan
and
kallah
[bride] up on their thrones!
13

This admixture of Hebrew and local culture was a given in the lives of European Jews, who sought to preserve their religious identity despite the restrictions imposed upon them by Christendom.

From the Middle Ages onward, when priests began to participate more regularly in wedding ceremonies, the church gained greater pres- ence in all aspects of marriage, beginning with the conjugal bed, where consummation was mandatory if the union was to be considered bind- ing. According to Christian doctrine, spouses were supposed to copu- late only for the benefit of procreation. This position, taken by the

fourth-century church fathers, had become dogma by the Middle Ages. Intercourse, for the sheer sake of pleasure, was vehemently denounced. Wives, especially, were admonished to avoid enjoying themselves; it was sufficient to welcome one’s husband as a passive recipient, but to share his ardor was expressly forbidden.
14
Sexual relations were consid- ered a
debitum conjugale
—a solemn duty that each spouse owed the other, but not an approved pleasure in its own right, as we hold today. For most couples, whether they followed such instructions reli- giously or not, they would have been made to believe that sex, even in marriage, carried the taint of original sin. While a few Christian thinkers, like the fourth-century churchmen Jovinian and Saint John Chrysostome, had defended marriage and argued that a wife was not an obstacle but an aid to salvation, and that married life was just as worthy as the celibate one, it was the more sinister view of their younger con- temporaries, Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine, that had won out. Medieval theology insisted that flesh was prone to evil, and that mar-

riage was, at best, a necessary evil.

Christian theologians presented married life as a lesser state than either widowhood or virginity, since chaste widows and virgins abstained from sex. Saint Jerome had stated unequivocally: “Let mar- ried women take their pride in coming next after virgins.”
15
This value judgment was made graphically clear in a twelfth-century German manuscript (
Der Jungfrauspiegel,
preserved by the Rheinisches Lan- desmuseum in Bonn) that shows, allegorically, three levels of female worth. At the top are the virgins harvesting numerous sheaves of wheat. In the middle are the widows with lesser crops. And at the bottom are wives with their husbands, reaping minimal rewards.
16

It is hard for us today to imagine the extent to which the ideal of chastity was glorified and spread among the faithful. Just as we are bombarded by commercial images proclaiming the value of sexual activity, so too medieval Christians were surrounded by model images of famous ascetics. Lives of the saints, sung or recited to illiterate audi- ences, extolled those who had taken vows of chastity. One of the first examples written in Old French, the
Life of Saint Alexius
(circa 1050), made this point explicit: the protagonist’s ascension to sainthood began when he abandoned his wife on their wedding night and fled to live in poverty.
17
The moral for men was clear: it was better to leave your wife and live ascetically than to be a devoted husband. Similarly, female

saints who refused to marry or who abandoned their offspring for the religious life were highly praised. Most female saints were virgins, often martyred for resisting rape despite torture and the threat of death.

The sculptures adorning the many new churches that sprang up after 1100 glorified martyred saints, displaying their wounds or hold- ing their decapitated heads in their hands. Couples were less in evi- dence, except for the notorious case of Adam and Eve. A medieval girl and boy, looking up at their images, would have been reminded that they, too, even in marriage, were capable of the sins of the first human couple. If they wanted to be more certain of salvation, it was better to enter a convent or monastery.

Members of the clergy, living within the church close or in monas- teries, were not supposed to marry or have concubines or engage in any sexual activity. The church had been trying to enforce sexual purity for the clergy ever since the Council of Nicaea in 325. Pope Leo IX condemned clerical marriage in 1049, and further Lateran councils in the early twelfth century pronounced priestly orders an impedi- ment to marriage, and vice versa. But in the early Middle Ages, a sig- nificant number of priests still lived with concubines—an arrangement generally accepted by their parishioners—and some priests were even officially married, despite the knowledge that mar- riage would prevent their rise upward in the hierarchy of the church. We know from the letters of Héloïse and the famous cleric Abelard that they were married in church, in the presence of a canon and sev- eral witnesses. While the personnages in question were exceptional in so many ways, their letters written long after their marriage attest to sex and love among the clergy and the pressures brought to bear upon a cleric and his wife.

THE STORY OF HÉLOÏSE AND ABELARD

The history of Héloïse and Abelard, nine hundred years old, still has the shock value of a romance– cum–horror story; yet, according to our best evidence, it is a true story.
18
Abelard was an eldest son who renounced his rights of primogeniture for the sake of study. He soon rivaled all the other peripatetic practioners of philosophy, becoming famous in his twenties both for his public discourses and his good looks. By his early thirties, he was a master of theology. It was during

his Parisian residence, when he was thirty-seven years old, that he met Héloïse. She was probably fifteen.

In the letter known as “The Story of My Misfortunes,” written in Latin and widely circulated among his contemporaries, Abelard recalled the beginnings of their liaison:

There was in the city of Paris a very young woman named Héloïse, the niece of a canon named Fulbert. He cherished her to the greatest degree and put all his zeal into pushing her as far as possible in the study of every science. . . . The rarity of literary knowledge among women added even more to the value of this young woman and made her celebrated throughout the kingdom. I saw in her all that usually seduces lovers and judged that it would be feasible for me to share her bed. I thought I could do this very easily: I had such renown at that time, I was so remarkable for my youth and beauty that I did not fear being rejected by any woman whom I judged worthy of my love.