Who Gets to Consent?

The knight in shining armor is one of the most evocative modern images of the Middle Ages, and it dominated the minds of contemporaries  as well. However, the medieval idea of who was – and wasn’t – allowed to reject a man’s advances was decidedly different from ours. Take, for example, the different depictions of consent in the late tenth-century Life of Mathilda and the twelfth-century lai “Equitan” by Marie de France. At first glance, these texts seem decidedly different. After all, they don’t share a genre or even a time period – one is a saint’s life, and the other is a fictional poem written a century and a half later.

However, their similarities actually outweigh their differences. The authors of the texts are quite obscure, but both are believed to have been written by women. The Life of Mathilda was likely composed in a convent by a female cleric, and Marie de France identifies herself within her lais (Marie de France, “Guigemar,” 53). The texts also have quite similar audiences. The Life was written at the behest of Mathilda’s descendants, and Marie de France dedicates her Lais to a King Henry of England – either Henry II or his ill-fated son, Henry the Young (“The ‘Older Life,’” 71; Marie de France, “Guigemar,” 51, f. 1). Both texts also involve a nobleman pursuing an aristocratic woman (a common trope of the romance genre, but quite unorthodox for a saint’s life).

These similarities between the texts’ authors, audiences, and plots warrant comparing them. But to understand why depictions of consent exist as they do across these two texts, we should first establish what consent was for people of the medieval period, which is steeped in the Biblical view of marriage. Paul treats consent as a mutual agreement between spouses to abstain from sex, and otherwise sex is expected (1 Cor. 7:5, 4). However, he says nothing of consent before marriage. Consent in the Life of Mathilda is quite different; Mathilda’s consent as an individual is never mentioned, but the consent of her family is highly prized. Mathilda is whisked away by her future husband “unbeknownst to any of her relatives, save for her grandmother” and married (“The ‘Older Life,’” 74). In the eyes of a modern reader, this depiction of a marriage is horrifying – a young woman is kidnapped from her grandmother’s care and made to marry her kidnapper! However, the narrative itself does not highlight Mathilda’s lack of consent, but her family’s. It is made even more clear that this is the controversial aspect of Mathilda’s marriage. In a later Life of Mathilda, her grandmother explicitly protests to Henry that she cannot allow the marriage because “‘it is not our place to give her in marriage without the advice and consent of her family’” (“The ‘Later Life,’” 93, emphasis added). These two stories of Mathilda’s marriage are radically different, which can be explained by a stigma about a woman eloping without her family’s permission.

“Equitan” by Marie de France shows the opposite end of the spectrum of consent. In that lai (a short romance composed in verse), King Equitan proposes an affair to the wife of his provincial administrator (Waters, “Introduction,” in The Lais, 9; Marie de France, “Equitan,” 107). The wife is initially resistant, citing that she does not have the wealth or social position to ensure her own self-sufficiency, should Equitan end the affair (Marie de France, “Equitan,” 107). She eventually acquiesces, but the king must persuade her to “[grant] him her body” (Marie de France, “Equitan,” 109). This depiction of consent is starkly different from that in the Life of Mathilda. The affair is dependent on the wife’s individual consent, and that consent relies on independence from her lover. What accounts for this discrepancy between the texts? The most obvious difference between the two is the nature of the relationships. The Life depicts a marriage, which is both a public affair as well as an asset transfer between two families, as the Life demonstrates with Henry’s dowry to Mathilda (“The ‘Older Life,’” 75). As such, the consent of the families is as important – if not more – than that of the individuals involved. The relationship in “Equitan,” by contrast, is a courtly love affair, which is private in nature and much more tenuous, which the wife herself is well aware of. Women, then, are granted much more power in a love affair than in a marriage, since consent lies solely with them, rather than with their whole family.

The discrepancies between the Life of Mathilda and “Equitan” highlight the nuanced state of consent in the high Middle Ages. Consent was seen not as the mutual agreement between two people that is familiar to readers today, but rather a multi-layered and socially-influenced network of agreements that depended on different contexts.

Works Cited

Marie de France. Lais of Marie de France: Text and Translation. Edited and Translated by Claire M. Waters. Broadview Press, 2018.

Queenship and Sanctity: The Lives of Mathilda and the Epitaph of Adelheid. Translated by Sean Gilsdorf. Catholic University of America Press, 2004.