The Knight, the Lady and the Priest
Helmholz, R.H.
Matrimonial developments THE KRICHT, THE LADY AND THE PBIEST Georges Duby Translated by Barbara Bray Pantheon, $16.95, 311 pp. R.H. Helmholz THE HISTORIAN of Europe before 1200 must have an...
...He cumulates examples of marriages that raised the opposition between secular and clerical views...
...It makes sense of much human action that otherwise seems incomprehensible...
...The evidence is equivocal...
...Much of the evidence is equally compatible with a less dramatic view of the evolution of marriage, one with occasional disagreement inside a shared tradition, with frequent lapses from the ideal, and with gradual evolution of both clerical and lay views about the nature of marriage...
...He shows the process by which the clerical positions came to prevail, at least on the level of theory...
...To point to the element of imagination in Duby's "models" of marriage is not, however, to condemn his work...
...If a man determined to repudiate his wife, for reasons worthy or unworthy, the clergy had no coercive power to stop him...
...However, by 1215 laymen and clerics had come to hold the same views of what marriage ought to be...
...The second was a secular "model" now obscured by clerical domination of the written evidence, but a coherent and sensible position nevertheless...
...First, marriage was essentially a secular matter, both in its inception and its dissolution...
...It is faithful to the evidence, even if alternate readings are possible...
...Was this a sop to the priests, covering a belief that dissolution of a marriage needed no justification but family convenience...
...Dispensations to permit marriages between kin were given...
...Even the clerical view is not always clear...
...Priests had a tiny role to play, limited to trifles like blessing the nuptial bed...
...By the end of the period the two had coalesced, mostly (though not completely) by the triumph of the clerical position...
...The "model" had four principal features...
...Or did both orders accept the same rules, but manage to manipulate them just as men and women today manipulate rules of law for their own benefit...
...Fourth, the notion that sexual practice should be confined to legitimate marriage was a monkish platitude, -unrelated to real life...
...Since the laymen who held it were illiterate and left no memorials, we can only judge it from the writings of the clerics who opposed it...
...Re-creation of the secular "model" is the accomplishment of this book...
...And it illuminates the history of marriage...
...It is noi always easy to say whether layman and cleric held radically different views of the indissolubility of marriage or whether they agreed on the basic rules but disagreed on the application of the rules in individual cases...
...His subject is the evolution of modern marriage...
...To this end, the kinship disqualifications beloved of the clerical order could be disregarded except for the closest relations, and to this end marriages could readily be put asunder...
...Duby says the former, but the latter is possible...
...This re-creation of the past owes much to imaginative reconstruction...
...For instance, although some men undoubtedly repudiated their wives, they invariably justified this action by alleging one of-the church's rules of kinship disqualification...
...Monks held nothing like the modern view that the sexes were equal, and many bishops co-operated with laymen in dismissing their barren or inconvenient wives...
...The sources from which he can draw are few, and what sources exist were compiled by a clerical elite whose preoccupations with the supremacy of the spiritual conceal as much as they tell about the realities of life...
...But there is no 11 January 1985: 27 doubt that any reader will come away from these pages with fresh insights into the long and tangled history of matrimony...
...According to the secular "model," there was legitimate room for open concubinage, for easy license by young men, for forcible abduction of desirable women, even for high-minded adultery...
...Unless he is to become a slave to his sources, the medieval historian has no choice but to rely on a trained imagination...
...Women were pawns in the serious game of marriage...
...Their opposition was not, of course, total...
...Helmholz THE HISTORIAN of Europe before 1200 must have an imagination...
...A tenth-century layman would have found equality of rights in marriage an idea subversive of right order...
...The working assumption is that, at the start of the period, there were two quite distinct "models" of marriage...
...That is what Duby does...
...He has no choice but to image the past, and he passes the only fair test...
...The method is the accumulation of vignettes from sources of every possible character...
...Whether a reader will be entertained by this book may depend upon a liking for social history told through a collection of vignettes...
...Duby does not claim that all the church's rules ever came to be fully observed in practice...
...Georges Duby passes this test with colors flying...
...The only fair test of his success will be whether he has used it coherently, with fidelity to all the evidence, and so as to illuminate the past...
...Against these positions stood the clergy...
...The time is the north of France between the tenth and early thirteenth centuries...
...There was no such thing as an indissoluble union...
...What had disappeared was the separate lay "model" of marriage...
...Duby shows the conflict between these ideals in profuse detail...
...But struggle between the two there was, forming one part of the conflict which it has become almost normal to call "the Papal Revolution...
...Clerics stood on both sides of disputes over repudiation...
...No«sensible person could claim that...
...The first, and the only one for which we have direct evidence, was the clerical...
...The story is coherent...
...Third, men were firmly in control...
...Second, marriages were properly used to further the honor, the glory, and the wealth of the family...
Vol. 112 • January 1985 • No. 1
