One
of the great difficulties in studying a past society is that, try as we might
to draw comparisons between our own time and that of a bygone age– be it in
terms of morality, political ideologies, questions of faith, class structures,
the realities of daily life, etc. – we always find ourselves on one side of a
frustratingly impassible rift between the past and the present. When approaching the topics of love, sex, and
marriage as they were defined in medieval Europe, it is important to keep in
mind this rift between the Western world as we know it today and the social and
moral fibers which made up the Europe of the Middle Ages. While we may see echoes of the medieval
within our own cultural mindset today, taking a closer look at the relationship
between love, sex, and marriage can remind us that the medieval person had, in
certain respects, a very different way of seeing and operating within the world
than modern individuals do. In the West
today, we tend to presuppose that love, sex, and marriage will (under the right
circumstances) all converge – you marry someone because you love them, you have
sex with the person you’re married to, and romantic feelings often lead to
sex. The expansive scope of human
emotions, sexual drives, and societal expectations make the whole situation a
bit more complex than this, but the basic premise still stands that these three
elements are all somehow interlocked.
In order to deconstruct how medieval
people conceived of the notions of sex, love, and marriage, I will approach the
issue from two opposing perspectives.
First, there is the position of Christian scripture and the Church
Fathers (namely Jerome and Augustine), who generally considered marriage to be
a means to an end – avoiding fornication and allowing socially-acceptable
procreation – which assumed an intrinsic link between sex and marriage but left
love more or less out of the equation altogether. Then there is the polar opposite of this
view, the ideal of courtly love, which combined love and sex but did so
strictly outside the bounds of marriage.
The triangulation of love, sex, and marriage took on very different
meanings depending on the context in which it was viewed. The Church and the courtly milieu each had
their own opinions on how love, sex, and marriage should be seen to fit
together (or how they should not or could not fit together). By turning to each of these viewpoints in
turn, one can glimpse how these disparate viewpoints interacted with one
another to form a complex, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory understanding
of medieval notions of the interpersonal relationships formed by the marriage
bond, by sexual attraction, and by feelings of romantic attachment.
“Better to Marry Than
to Burn”: Early Christian Notions of Marriage
The foundation for the medieval idea
of marriage comes out of a passage from Paul’s First Letter to the
Corinthians. Paul offers a rather stark
view of marriage, claiming that in fact marriage is really only a fail-safe. The ideal state for a Christian to live in is
one of perpetual virginity and chastity, but if this is not possible, then it
is better to satisfy one’s sexual urges in the marriage bed than to fall into
the sin of fornication.[1]
Paul never considers love between two individuals to be an impetus for marriage.
Instead, Paul seems to see most people (at least those who are unable to remain
virgins) as fundamentally flawed creatures driven by physical desires.[2] If
a person is unable to purge their need for sexual gratification through the
fervor of faith, then at In this respect, Paul’s understanding of marriage
seems to be rather fraught. On the one hand, it has the potential to make a
normally sinful act (sex) into an acceptable activity, but at the same time the
fact that marriage is thus inherently linked to sex makes the marriage bond
subject to scrutiny. How then can marriage be sacred if it is so strongly
correlated with sex?
The fourth-century Church Father and
theologian Jerome was one of the first Christian writers to pick up on this
paradox in Paul’s logic. In the same
vein as the author of 1 Corinthians, Jerome’s Letter To Eustochium intrinsically links marriage with sex, but
emphasizes the negative aspects of intercourse within the marriage bed far more
than Paul does. Jerome was himself an extreme
ascetic, and believed that to be a true Christian required a life of intense
self-denial and a complete rejection of worldly desires. Succumbing to the pleasures of sex, even in
the context of marriage, was therefore equated as an immense failure, a sign of
weakness and subservience to the body while neglecting the soul. Moreover, Jerome seems to have perceived sex
as being a particularly dangerous vice, which if indulged in would lead a
Christian towards total corruption of his or her soul. The only way to avoid falling into spiritual
destitution, then, was to renounce sex altogether and remain a virgin, a
physical state which Jerome saw as exemplifying the highest form of Christian
virtue.[3] In fact, the only positive comment Jerome
seems to make on the issue of marriage is that the offspring produced from the
union between a man and a woman would create more virgins to devote to the
Christian faith.
But Jerome pointedly overrides even
this one potential benefit of marital intercourse by informing his readers that
the Old Testament commandment to “be fruitful and multiply” no longer applies;
with the return of the Savior, the end of the world is nigh and so there is no
longer any need for reproduction. For
Jerome, then, the institution of marriage does not fall definitively into the
category of “good” or “bad”, “salubrious” or “deleterious” – it is simply a
non-issue. Jerome was heavily influenced
by the eschatological leanings of early Christianity – the idea that the world
would soon come to an end -- and his overarching argument against the existence
of marriage and sex was simply that, since Jesus would soon return to Earth to
redeem the souls of the faithful, it was time to turn away from the trappings
of earthly life and focus on achieving true Christian salvation.
Jerome’s opinions on the issue of
sex and marriage did not have much of a lasting effect on the medieval attitude
towards the marital bond. Although his
arguments on sexual renunciation and the ascetic ideal may have carried some
weight with his followers (Jerome was known to be quite popular among the Roman
elite of the fourth century), it was ultimately Augustine’s treatise The Excellence of Marriage which became
the Church’s primary argument for the vindication of Christian marriage. While Augustine also looked upon celibacy as
a highly honorable state of being, he challenged Jerome’s denunciation of
marriage as a mere cop-out for those Christians whose will was not strong
enough to allow them to renounce sex altogether. For Augustine, marriage was the primary
social bond which held the fabric of Christian society together, without which
society would inevitably crumble. Like
Jerome, Augustine also equated marriage with sex, but he did not perceive this
to be an ostensibly negative outcome; rather, the sacrament of marriage allowed
Christians to procreate without falling into the sin of fornication. . Finally, and most importantly, Augustine
solidified his argument for the sanctity of marriage by likening the marital
bond between a man and woman to the bond between God and the faithful. It is here that we see the earliest
instantiation of marriage as a sacrament, as a reflection of the mystical
relationship between the divine and humanity.
Ultimately, it was Augustine’s validation of marriage (and sex within
marriage) which would reappear in countless discourses on the marital bond
throughout the Middle Ages. It would be
anachronistic to say that Augustine was a “sex positive” figure – while he
approved of sexual relations within marriage, he also promoted the idea of
chastity within marriage. In order to
maintain the purity of the marital bond, a married couple was not to engage in
sex merely to satisfy lustful urges, nor was any married person to engage in
any sort of sexual activity by which it was biologically impossible to produce
a child. Still, Augustine offered a much
more reasonable approach to the issue of sex than did Jerome, for Augustine was
able to strike a compromise between sanctity and sexuality. For the medieval
Christian, the married state was not only an acceptable way to live one’s life,
but a necessity if one had not chosen to devote oneself to a life of
celibacy. Sex within marriage was sanctioned
by God, while indulging in carnal pleasures outside the marital bond not only
raised moral qualms, but (according to the Augustinian model) could threaten
the stability of an entire society. One should keep in mind, however, that this
was strictly the ecclesiastical position on marriage and sexual practice, and the
realities of romantic and sexual relationships could and did differ from the
ideal model envisioned by the Church.
The Phenomenon of
Courtly Love
In the late eleventh century a genre
of courtly literature emerged which, contrary to the Church’s ideal of marital
chastity and the restriction of sex to the marriage bed, glorified and ennobled
the existence of love and sexual desire outside of the bond of marriage. Some of the earliest notions of courtly love
as distinct from the relationship between a husband and a wife are outlined by
the troubadours of Occitania. In the
poetic compositions of troubadours such as Jaufre Rudel, Marcabru, and
Cercamon, love is valued as something which can only exist in its own
absence. The objects of the troubadours’
love are always noblewomen, whom the poems’ narrators gaze upon and admire from
afar, yet with whom they never have direct physical or verbal contact. Often there is not only a psychological, but
a physical distance between the woman and her besotted admirer – a classic
example of this can be seen in Rudel’s famous poem, Lanquan li jorn son lonc e may, in which the troubadour goes on at
length to describe both the painful ardor and the delight which he experiences
when contemplating a love who is impossibly far away, in the land of the
Saracens.
Interestingly, the ideal of courtly
love exemplified by the troubadours seems strikingly sterile; troubadour poetry
does not overtly mention sex or adultery, even when sexual desire might be
implied in the troubadours’ lengthy verses in praise of a lady’s physical
perfection and nobility of character. For
the troubadours, the concept of love is envisioned as an exalted state of
being, in which a man is so enamored of a woman that he is rendered
“lovesick”. He may suffer from bouts of
confusion and intense emotional distress, which can just as quickly turn into
heartwarming contemplation of his beloved.
Yet ultimately, the troubadour’s love is never to come to fruition in
either marriage or sexual gratification, for if the woman of his affections
should suddenly become attainable, his love for her would dissipate.
Yet elsewhere in the corpus of
courtly literature, we do find evidence for the idea of courtly love being
explicitly linked to adulterous behavior.
The lais of Marie de France
were well known in courtly circles as early as the twelfth century, and dealt
explicitly with scenarios in which love and sexual desire emerge (and in some
instances are consummated) outside the bond of marriage. In the story of Lanval, a young knight stumbles upon a fairy settlement and takes
as a lover the Fairy Queen, a romance which is carried out without the couple
ever having any intention of marriage.
The plot of Laustic is driven
by the secret love between a married woman and a young knight. In this instance, Marie hearkens back to the
troubadour model of courtly love, for the lovers of Laustic never consummate their relationship, but are limited to the
covert sending of messages over a stone wall.
Yet in the tale of Equitan,
Marie quite blatantly illustrates a case of adultery. The Breton king Equitan is smitten with
desire for the wife of his seneschal, and despite his initial misgivings begins
a sexual relationship with her, until such time as the seneschal’s wife devises
a plot to murder her husband so that she may marry Equitan. The plan backfires miserably, however, when
the seneschal comes upon Equitan and his wife in flagrante delecto. In his
shame, Equitan plunges himself into the bath of boiling water reserved for the
murder of the seneschal, and the seneschal then proceeds to drown his wife in
the same bath as punishment for her licentiousness.
While one could argue that a story
such as Equitan with its gruesome and
tragic ending is actually censuring adulterous behavior, the fact that the lais of Marie de France and the romantic
musings of the troubadours were highly popular in courtly circles suggests that
in everyday life, the austere model of marital chastity upheld by the Church
did not enjoy the same veneration from the laity that it did from the clergy. After all, the Augustinian notion of marriage
did not allow for the existence of romantic love or sexual passion; the only
sort of love which might exist in marriage was the love which the married
couple felt for God, and sex was limited to the need for procreation.
In the twelfth-century guidebook to
courtly romance entitled The Art of
Courtly Love, the author Andreas Capellanus explicitly states that love
cannot exist within marriage, but may only come to fruition outside of the
marital bond. Capellanus’ explanation
for this phenomenon is that the pursuit and maintenance of love requires two
lovers to give of each other freely, without compulsion; yet the sacrament of
marriage binds two individuals together in lifelong obligation to one another,
and so the fulfillment of sexual desire within marriage is necessarily divested
of love.[4] Furthermore, Capellanus claims that no woman
may be in love with two men, and so if a woman should seek a man’s affections
or a man seek to take a woman as his lover, it must be done outside the bonds
of wedlock. To a modern audience, this
particular argument may seem like something of a non sequitur, for Capellanus pointedly avoids the suggestion that a
couple may fall in love and then marry. Yet
one should bear in mind that the idea of marrying for love did not exist in the
Middle Ages. Marriages were ultimately
contracts used to further a person’s social standing (or that of their family),
solidify fortunes or property rights, and ensure the security of one’s wealth
and estate by the production of heirs.
In a society where marriage reflected a social rather than an emotional
bond, it was therefore considered natural that a person seeking love or
affection might do so outside of the marriage bed.
The dichotomy which emerges between
the idealization of courtly love and extramarital liaisons and the Church’s
counsel to rein in sexual desires and sanitize them through the sacrament of
marriage, can best be explained by realizing that for the average medieval
person, love and marriage were too entirely unrelated states. Sex, on the other
hand, could and did exist both within marriage and without, with various moral
implications. Sex outside of marriage
was considered reprehensible, and certainly even more so if a married person
engaged in sex with someone other than their spouse. Yet just as marriage was extolled as a great
virtue by Augustine, so too did love hold an exalted position in the medieval
mindset. The troubadours took great
pains to present love as a sublime state of being, which maintained a degree of
purity in that the love never came to fruition in sexual union. Even in Capellanus’ text, which aims much
more explicitly at teaching a man to attract a female lover, love is
personified as a king and Capellanus places great emphasis on the pursuit of
love as an exceedingly noble occupation, one which ameliorates an individual’s character
and brings out the best in a man as he strives to prove himself worthy of a
lady’s affection.[5] In this way, the equation of love with
extramarital sexual acts is not portrayed as demoralizing. While it certainly steps outside the bounds
of the Augustinian idea of marriage and sexual restraint, the elaborate game of
courtly love did not (at least among the laity) gain a reputation as an
un-Christian or sinful practice. The
ecclesiastical perspective on marriage and the courtly vision of love and
romance may appear to run counter to one another, but medieval lay society did
not seem to have had any qualms about appreciating both the Christian virtues
of marriage and the noble pursuit of courtly love.
Conclusions: Love, Sex,
and Marriage in Medieval Europe
As we have seen thus far, love and
marriage were for the medieval person completely separate entities. Marriage was considered a social contract and
an obligation, in both a spiritual and a temporal sense. According to the Church Fathers, marriage was
an earthly manifestation of the bond between the Church and God, one which paid
homage to the presence of the divine on Earth.
Just as importantly, marriage allowed a Christian to engage in sex
without falling into the sinful state associated with fornication or
adultery. Beyond the concerns for a
person’s spiritual health, marriage also served a societal function, forming
bonds of fidelity and forging lines of inheritance between families. Thus, marriage was the framework upon which medieval
society was organized and continued to thrive.
If one wanted to fall in love, then, it was necessary to transgress the
marital bond. As exemplified in the
literature of courtly romance, the physical and emotional expression of love
could only occur when two people were not already forced into bonds of
obligation to one another through marriage. Courtly love was depicted as a pure
and noble occupation (though there was the underlying understanding of sexual
gratification), and the reprehensible nature of adultery did not seem to be an
impediment to the glorification of love.
Ultimately however, one should bear
in mind that courtly love was as much an idealization of love as the
Augustinian view of marriage was an idealization of a social contract. The writings on courtly love and on Christian
marriage were composed by individuals in different walks of life and with
opposing perspectives to how one should deal with certain human impulses. While there is an obvious disparity between
the two viewpoints, the fact that they were able to co-exist within medieval
society testifies that there is no simple answer to how a medieval person would
connect love, sex, and marriage. What is
clear, however, is that medieval Europe was a world of striking complexity
which was in many respects quite foreign from a modern perspective. We must therefore not fall into the trap of
believing that, as our religious and cultural antecedent, the Europe of the
Middle Ages was simply a forebear to the Western world of modernity. Medieval society functioned according to its
own rules, its own moral code, and its own cultural and religious values, which
do not map neatly onto our own. With so
many centuries dividing the medieval from the modern, it now falls to the task
of the historian to attempt to reconstruct the Middle Ages, not to impose
modern expectations on a time long past, but to lend to the medieval its own
voice and its own agency, however challenging that may be.
[1] See 1
Corinthians 7:1-2: It
is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” But since sexual immorality is occurring,
each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with
her own husband.”
[2] Interestingly, Paul doesn’t lump himself into
this same category. See 1 Corinthians 7:7: I wish that all of you were as I am. But
each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that.
Paul was completely capable of renouncing sex altogether, but concedes that not
everyone is as ‘gifted’ as he in this matter.)
[3] “Let not the faithful of Sion become a harlot,
I pray you; let not the demons dance and sirens and satyrs nest in the place that
once sheltered the Trinity…As soon as lust begins to tickle the senses and the
soft fires of pleasure envelop us with their delightful warmth, let us break
forth and cry: ‘The Lord is on my side: I will not fear what the flesh can do
unto me.’”
[4] “We declare and
we hold as firmly established that love cannot exert its powers between two
people who are married to each other.
For lovers give each other everything freely, under no compulsion of
necessity, but married people are in duty bound to give in to each other’s
desires and deny themselves to each other in nothing.”
[5] “O what a
wonderful thing is love, which makes a man shine with so many virtues and
teaches everyone, no matter who he is, so many good traits of character!”
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