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MEDIEVAL MARRIAGE

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Medieval Marriage 

 

Symbolism and Society 

D. L. d’AVRAY

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UXORI CARISSIMAE


Acknowledgements 

The following are among those who have earned my gratitude. The 

Archivio Segreto Vaticano Prefect and sta·, Louis-Jacques Bataillon, 

Nicole B‹eriou, John Blair, Paul Brand, Paul Brennan, Martin 

Brett, the British Academy for a Research Readership to work on 

this project and for microfilm, Christopher Brooke, Jim Brundage, 

Peter Clarke, Stephen Davies, Trevor Dean, Sally Dixon-Smith, 

Gero Dolezalek, Charles Donahue, Jenifer Dye, Barbara Harvey, 

Julian Hoppit, Olwen Hufton, Robert Lerner, my Love and Marriage 

Special Subject classes, in which some brilliant students have 

taught me a lot, David Luscombe, Patrick Nold, the ocials of the 

Penitenzieria Apostolica for permission to use their archive, Catherine 

Rider, Kirsi Salonen, Ludwig Schmugge, R•udiger Schnell, Julia 

Walworth (both as uxor carissima and as Merton Fellow Librarian), 

John Wa‹s, Chris Wickham, and Anders Winroth. 

D.L.d’A. 

December 2004


Contents 

Note on Transcriptions xii 

Abbreviations xii 

Introduction 1 

1. Mass Communication 19 

(a) Preliminaries 19 

(b) TheEarlyMiddleAges 20 

(c) Mass Communication in the Age of the Friars 37 

(d) The Message about Marriage 58 

2. Indissolubility 74 

(a) From the Roman Empire to the Carolingian Empire 74 

(b) c.800–c.1200 82 

(c) The Age of Innocent III 99 

(d) Indissolubility in Practice 108 

3. Bigamy 131 

(a) Bigamy and Becoming a Priest 131 

(b) The Marriage Ceremony 141 

(c) Clerics in Minor Orders 157 

4. Consummation 168 

(a) Consummation and the Medieval Church’s Idea of 

Sex 168 

(b) The Dissolution of the Unconsummated Marriage: 

From Hincmar to Alexander III 176 

(c) The Social E·ects of Alexander III’s Decision 180 

(d) Long-Term Developments 188 

Conclusion 200

x Contents 

DOCUMENTS 

Chapter 1 

1. 1. Marriage symbolism in the Bavarian Homiliary 208 

1. 2. Homily on the text ‘Nuptiae factae sunt’ (John 2: 1) in 

the Bavarian Homiliary 211 

1. 3. Marriage symbolism in the Beaune Homiliary 214 

1. 4. Nonconformist variants in Hugues de Saint-Cher 217 

1. 5. Nonconformist variants in Jean de la Rochelle 217 

1. 6. Nonconformist variants in Pierre de Saint-Beno^§t 218 

1. 7. Nonconformist variants in G‹erard de Mailly 218 

1. 8. Nonconformist variants in Guibert de Tournai 219 

1. 9. A sermon on marriage by Jean Halgrin d’Abbeville 219 

1. 10. A sermon on marriage by Konrad Holtnicker 223 

1. 11. A sermon on marriage by Servasanto da Faenza 226 

1. 12. A sermon on marriage by Aldobrandino da Toscanella 

(Schneyer no. 404) 232 


(Schneyer no. 48) 238 

Chapter 2 

2. 1. Proof in ‘forbidden degrees’ cases: Hostiensis attacks 

laxity 242 

2. 2. Proof in ‘forbidden degrees’ cases: the rigorism of 

Hostiensis 246 

Chapter 3 

3. 1. Johannes de Deo, De dispensationibus, on bigamy 249 

3. 2. Innocent IV (Sinibaldo dei Fieschi) on Decretals of 

Gregory IX, X. 5. 9. 1: bigamy and loss of clerical 

status 250 


Gregory IX, X. 1. 21. 5: the symbolic understanding 

of bigamy 251 

3. 4. Bull of Pope Alexander IV to the prelates of France 253 

3. 5. Bull of Pope Gregory X to King Philip III of France 254 

3. 6. Bull of Pope John XXII to King Philip V of France 254 

3. 7. Bull of Pope John XXII to King Charles IV of France 255 

3. 8. Questions on marriage in MS London, BL Royal 

11. A. XIV 256

Contents xi 

3. 9. Passage on bigamy in the Pupilla oculi of Johannes de 

Burgo 262 

3. 10. A ‘bigamy’ case from the gaol delivery rolls (6 June 

1320) 265 

3. 11. The case of Five-Wife Francis, from the archive of the 

Apostolic Penitentiary 267 

3. 12. The case of Petrus Martorel, from the archive of the 

Apostolic Penitentiary 269 

Chapter 4 

4. 1. Consummation and its consequences in a canon-law 

commentary: a link to late medieval papal dissolutions 

of ratum non consummatum marriages 270 

4. 2. Ricardus de Mediavilla: marriage and entry into a 

religious order before consummation 273 

4. 3. Ricardus de Mediavilla on the marriage of Mary and 

Joseph 275 

4. 4. A consummation case in the papal registers 

(John XXII) 276 

4. 5. Consummation and indissolubility in the Oculus 

sacerdotis of William of Pagula 282 

4. 6. Johannes de Burgo on the marriage of Mary and Joseph 283 

4. 7. A case from the archive of the Apostolic Penitentiary: 

Constance of Padilla 285 

4. 8. Another non-consummation case from the archive of 

the Apostolic Penitentiary 286 

Bibliography 288 

Index of Manuscripts 310 

General Index 312

Note on Transcriptions 

My transcription conventions are explained in detail in previous 

books (The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Di·used from Paris 

before 1300 (Oxford, 1985), xi; Death and the Prince: Memorial 

Preaching before 1350 (Oxford, 1994), 7–8; Medieval Marriage Sermons: 

Mass Communication in a Culture without Print (Oxford, 

2001), 43). An asterisk before a word indicates the presence of an 

error too trivial to deserve specifying. In the present volume I normalize 

‘d’ to ‘t’ in ‘sicut’, and ‘t’ to ‘d’ in ‘sed’; and ‘n’ to ‘m’ in 

words like ‘comprobatum’, ‘imprecatur’, ‘immo’, and ‘tempore’. 

The problem arises because the letter is often swallowed up in an 

abbreviation and there is no standard classical or medieval orthography. 

I have normalized in these cases even where, as occasionally 

happens, the other form is written in full: e.g. sicud or inprecatur. 

Abbreviations 

BAV Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana 

BL British Library 

BN Biblioth›eque Nationale de France 

Migne, PL J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 

MS/ms. Manuscript 

X. Decretals of GregoryIX (X. 2. 20. 47 =book 2, titulus 

20, chapter 47 of the Decretals)

Introduction 

How the modern intellectual sees medieval marriage 

For centuries in Europe, formal marriage was a private contract between 

landed families, designed to insure that property remained within a particular 

lineage. In the upper classes, families essentially married other families, 

forging political alliances and social obligations among relatives and kin. 

It was during the Reformation, with the emergence of the early Protestant 

idea of ‘companionate marriage,’ that the emotional bond between husband 

and wife came to be seen as an end in itself. As the social historian 

Lawrence Stone noted, this was a marked departure from the Catholic idea 

of chastity, which considered earthly marriage a more or less unfortunate 

necessity meant to accommodate human weakness; ‘It is better to marry 

than to burn,’ St. Paul had said, but he made it sound like a close call. So 

when the Puritans wrote of husbands and wives as mutually respectful and 

a·ectionate partners they were moving towards a new understanding of 

marriage as a kind of spiritual friendship. 

It is too easy for scholars to forget what the non-specialist intelligentsia 

thinks about their field, and the New Yorker is a good place 

to find out. Such a caricature in such a high-quality magazine reminds 

one of the time lag between research and general educated 

awareness. Not everything is wrong. Marriages were a mechanism 

for linking families and family fortunes in the Middle Ages as 

in subsequent ages up until and including the nineteenth century. 

Still, most of the rest is wrong. It was not always the family that had 

power. In some periods and regions lords controlled marriages of 

those who held land from them. Free choice by individuals was an 

A. Haslett, ‘A Critic at Large’, New Yorker (31 May 2004), 76–80 at 76. 

See e.g. R. Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075–1225 

(Oxford, 2000), 549–51; A. Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence 

(Cambridge, Mass., etc., 1994), passim. 

See e.g. Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075–1225, 

547–9; R. Boutruche, Seigneurie et f‹eodalit‹e: l’apog‹ee (XIe–XIIIe si›ecles) (Paris, 

1970), 229–30; G. Duby, Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century 

France, trans. E. Forster (Baltimore etc., 1978), 97–8 (there was no published French 

edition); J. B. Freed, Noble Bondsmen: Ministerial Marriages in the Archdiocese of 

Salzburg, 1100–1343 (Ithaca, NY, etc., 1995); S. L. Waugh, The Lordship of England:

2 Introduction 

important factor in the later Middle Ages, with backing from the 

Church. Marital a·ection was a social reality (as common sense 

would suggest), and it was strongly encouraged by influential texts. 

None of this is at all new, though clearly a reminder is not superfluous. 

This book aims to bring out a di·erent dimension of the 

social history of medieval marriage, correcting from another angle 

the idea that it was driven mainly by the landed ambitions of families. 

Social and legal practice was infused with marriage symbolism. 

Symbolism gave meaning to practice and a·ected it, not least by 

helping to create a combination of monogamy and indissolubility 

probably unique in the history of literate societies. 

Marriage symbolism in religions 

The theme, then, is marriage symbolism’s e·ect on social practice. 

Symbolism was crucial in the theory of marriage first, and even 

before the Middle Ages began. Central to the meaning of marriage, 

symbolism eventually became part of marriage law and changed 

behaviour through law, the decades around 1200 marking a turning 

point. 

I shall start with a rapid glance at the comparative religious history 

of the topic. Then I shall briefly indicate the kind of work 

that has already been done on medieval Western marriage symbolism. 

That will be balanced by the most rapid tour d’horizon 

of recent work on the social history of medieval marriage, since 

I aim to bring it together with the history of marriage symbolism. 

Like food, love and marriage are the basis of strong religious 

symbolism. In the study of comparative religion there is a keyword 

for it: ‘sacred marriage’ or hieros gamos. An important variety is 

parallelism between the marriage of two gods and the marriage of 

Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics 1217–1327 (Princeton 

etc., 1988). 

See below, pp. 124–9. 

F. M. Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward: The Community of the 

Realm in the Thirteenth Century (2 vols.; Oxford, 1947), i. 157 n. 1. 

See below, pp. 69, 129; also A. MacFarlane, Marriage and Love in England, 1300– 

1840: Modes of Reproduction (Oxford, 1986), 182–3, to show that a non-medievalist 

can get it right. Scholars have known all this for a long time: see e.g. H. A. Kelly, 

Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer (Ithaca, NY, 1975). 

K. W. Bolle, ‘Hieros Gamos’, in M. Eliade (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Religion, 

vi (New York etc., 1987), 317–21.


ordinary men and women. It can be found in ancient Mesopotamia, 

and it has been studied quite recently as living religion in a south 

Indian temple. In the second case we know a lot about it. The 

marriage ritual between the two gods is represented by statues in 

the temple. If the gods do not consummate the marriage regularly, 

the female becomes a dangerous force and a general threat. 

This temple ritual belongs to one of the main types of marriage 

symbolism in the world history of religions: the union of a male and 

a female god, mirroring the union of man and woman in marriage. 

There are a number of such marriages or sexual relationships in 

the Hindu pantheon: notably Rama and Sita, Vishnu and Laksmi, 

Siva and Parvati, Krishna and Radha. With the last two pairs 

at least the female partner can be presented as human or quasihuman, 

as we shall see. However, the motif of the marriage of two 

unambiguously divine beings has in itself only a loose relation to 

the argument of this book. Analogy between the marriage of two 

gods and marriage of human to human is not the same as analogy 

between human union with God and marriage of human to human. 

Non-Christian cases of this second sort of symbolism are harder 

to find. Some promising possibilities turn out on inspection to be 

very di·erent from the symbolism with which we are concerned. 

There is a scholarly literature on what looks at first like the same 

kind of thing in ancient Mesopotamia: a mythical human hero, 

represented by a king, who wins the love of a goddess. The story 

has even been connected with the Song of Songs, subject of St 

Bernard’s famous sermons, which would bring it even closer to 

our theme. However, the stories or putative rituals may have had 

another meaning—say the celebration of the king’s prowess in love 

as in everything else—and the whole subject is too fraught with 

controversy to be drawn into our argument. 

G. Leick, Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature (London etc., 1994), 

ch. 12. 

C. J. Fuller, ‘The Divine Couple’s Relationship in a South Indian Temple: 

Minaksi and Sundare‹svara at Madurai’, History of Religions, 19 (1980), 321–48. 

For an interesting analysis of di·erent types of relationship see F. A. Marglin, 

‘Types of Sexual Union and their Implicit Meanings’, in J. S. Hawley and D. M. 

Wul· (eds.), The Divine Consort: Radha and the Goddesses of India (Berkeley, 1982), 

298–315. 

S. N. Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite: Aspects of Faith, Myth, and Ritual in 

Ancient Sumer (Bloomington, Ind., etc., 1969), esp. ch. 5. 

Leick, Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature, ch. 11, on ‘“Words of 

Seduction”: Courtly Love Poetry’, argues against ‘the neo-primitive “fertility rite”


The ancient Greek stories in which gods and humans mate do 

not on the whole look like symbols of non-sexual love betweeen 

thedivineandthehuman. A possible exception is the marriage 

of the god Dionysus to the ‘Basilinna’, the wife of the Archon 

Basileus (‘ruler-king’, literally, the member of the panel of rulers at 

Athens most especially responsible for sacred a·airs). In this case 

a marriage ritual may stand for the union of human and divine. 

In Hindu India at least marriage can represent the union of 

human and divine. There is even a specific name for this kind 

of passionate devotion to a god: ‘Bhakti’. The love of Radha and 

the god Krishna is particularly relevant. Radha would stand for 

the human side. There is a problem: Radha herself has a ‘claim 

to divinity’. Still, at least sometimes the idea of Radha seems 

to gather up in it the idea of a devout person’s union with the 

divine. As one historian of religion has commented: ‘As the feminine 

worldward side of the masculine–feminine Radha–Krishna she is 

the tie between deity and all souls, since she is one with the gopis 

[milkmaids or cowgirls, co-lovers with Radha of Krishna] and thus 

with those whom the gopis represent, namely all humankind.’ The 

notion that the construct of Sacred Marriage implies’ (129; on the king’s prowess, 

109–10). If she is right, one cannot use without reservation the conclusions of 

Kramer. For further references on the debate about ‘sacred marriage’ in ancient 

Mesopotamia see A. Kuhrt, ‘Babylon’, in E. J. Bakker, I. J. F. De Jong, and H. 

van Wees (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Herodotus (Leiden etc., 2002), 475–96 at 492 

n. 37. In the foregoing (not only on Mesopotamia) I have been helped by Kuhrt’s 

clear distinction between two kinds of sacred marriage: ‘one is the marriage of two 

gods, represented by their statues; the other a ceremony during which the goddess 

of erotic love, Inanna/Ishtar (represented by a priestess?), and the king in the guise 

of her mythical lover, Dumuzi, had intercourse’. It is the second kind which is the 

subject of dispute. 

On the whole subject see A. Avagianou, Sacred Marriage in the Rituals of Greek 

Religion (Europ•aische Hochschulschriften, ser. 15, 54; Berne etc., 1991). 

‘We could explain this strange and unique ritual in Greek religion as the legitimized 

σµµειξις of divine and human via marriage’ (Avagianou, Sacred Marriage 

in the Rituals of Greek Religion, 200). 

Cf. Hawley, ‘A Vernacular Portrait: Radha in the Sur Sagar’, in Hawley and 

Wul·, The Divine Consort, 42–56 at 56. 

N. Hein, ‘Comments: Radha and Erotic Community’, in Hawley and Wul·, 

The Divine Consort, 116–24 at 120, commenting on Hawley’s paper. Max Weber 

has some good remarks on the love of Krishna, and his parallel with Pietism is helpful: 

‘Was der alten klassischen Bhagavata-Religiosit•at zun•achst noch fehlte oder 

jedenfalls—wenn es in ihr schon existierte—von der vornehmen Literatenschicht 

nicht rezipiert wurde, war die br•unstige Heilandsminne der sp•ateren Krischna- 

Religiosit•at. A• hnlich wie etwa die lutherische Orthodoxie die psychologisch gleichartige 

pietistische Christus-Liebe (Zinzendorf) als unklassische Neuerung ablehnte’


role of these gopis accentuates the human side. 

There are other problems. The love of Krishna and Radha (not 

to mention the other gopis) is sensual in the extreme—too much so 

for a divine message? Perhaps not. Look at the following passage 

from Mechtild of Magdeburg, a thirteenth-century female mystic 

in the spiritual tradition of Bernard of Clairvaux. 

‘Stay, Lady Soul.’ 

‘What do you bid me, Lord?’ 

‘Take o· your clothes.’ 

‘Lord, what will happen to me then?’ 

‘Lady Soul, you are so utterly formed to my nature 

That not the slightest thing can be between you and me.’ 

... 

Then a blessed stillness 

That both desire comes over them. 

He surrenders himself to her, 

And she surrenders herself to him. 

What happens to her then—she knows— 

And that is fine with me. 

But this cannot last long. 

When two lovers meet secretly, 

They must often part from one another inseparably. 

At least since St Bernard a surface sensuality has been part of the 

discourse of Christian mysticism. 

It might be objected that the love a·air of Krishna and Radha is 

extra-marital. Then again, she is one of many lovers of Krishna. 

Does his polygyny nullify the analogy with the medieval West? 

(Die Wirschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Hinduismus und Buddhismus (1916–20), 

repr. in Gesammelte Aufs•atze zur Religionssoziologie, ii. Hinduismus und Buddhismus 

(T •ubingen, 1988), 198). Weber also mentions the ‘br•unstige kultische Minne zu 

pers•onlichen Nothelfern, welche als Fleischwerdung gro¢er erbarmender G•otter 

galten’ (ibid. 202) of the popular ‘orgiastic’ religion rejected by Brahman intellectuals. 

There is a large literature on Mechtild. See e.g. A. Hollywood, The Soul as 

Virgin Wife: Mechtild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Studies 

in Spirituality and Theology, 1; Notre Dame etc., 1995), 1–2, and chs. 3 and 7; 

H. E. Keller, My Secret is Mine: Studies on Religion and Eros in the German Middle 

Ages (Leuven, 2000), 107–10, with further bibliographical references. Mechtild’s 

Flowering Light of Godhead, from which the passage quoted comes, was probably 

composed in or near the third quarter of the thirteenth century (ibid. 108). 

Mechtild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. and intro. F. 

Tobin (New York etc., 1998), 62; cf. B. Newman, From Virile Woman to Woman- 

Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia, 1995), 150.


These objections fade on closer inspection even if they do not entirely 

disappear. The passion of Krishna and Radha may be extramarital 

or even adulterous in some versions, but one line strongly 

represented in Hindu theology is that they were in reality married. 

The other passionate cowgirls can be understood as di·erent forms 

of Radha herself. Anyway, one must not be too literal-minded 

with this sort of religious language. The Western image of God 

as the bridegroom of enormous numbers of soul-brides could be 

understood as polygamy, but this would be clumsy. Medieval Western 

marriage sermons sometimes built their symbolism around an 

Old Testament story: Esther’s triumphant displacement of Vashti 

as wife of the Persian king. In context this is clearly not an endorsement 

of divorce. With any symbol the analogy breaks down 

somewhere, and the trick is to know when to stop pressing the 

comparison (a principle very relevant to gendered imagery). 

The union of the the male god Siva with his wife Parvati can also 

symbolize the union of human and divine. As a standard reference 

work puts it, ‘Their marriage is a model of male dominance with 

Parvati docilely serving her husband, though this is also a model 

of the way a mortal should serve the god.’ It is true that Parvati 

is also a goddess, but a goddess close to humanity. Thus humans, 

women at least, can assimilate their religious experience to Parvati’s 

loving devotion to her husband. ‘Parvati, the daughter of the 

mountain Himalaya, is an ambiguous semi-divinity . . . Although 

poetic metaphors accorded her divine status, she is the quintessence 

of the lowly mortal woman worshipping the lofty male god.’ 

It is true that this description cannot be simply applied to Christian 

marriage symbolism. There may indeed be a tendency in Christian 

mysticism towards gender specialization—human woman as 

Hawley, ‘A Vernacular Portrait’, 53; D. M. Wul·, ‘Radha: Consort and Conqueror 

of Krishna’, in J. S. Hawley and D. M. Wul· (eds.), Devi: Goddesses of India 

(Berkeley etc., 1996), 109–34 at 133 n. 30. 

S. Goswami, ‘Radha: The Play; and Perfection of Rasa’, in Hawley and Wul·, 

The Divine Consort, 72–88 at 81: ‘the many gopis are but manifestations of the body 

of Radha’. (This represents the point of view of a modern devotee.). 

D. L. d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Mass Communication in a Culture 

without Print (Oxford, 2001), index, s.v. ‘Assuerus’. 

Article on ‘P»arvat»§’, in J. Bowker (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of World Religion 

(Oxford, 1997), 737. 

W. D. O’Flaherty, ‘The Shifting Balance of Power in the Marriage of Siva and 

Parvati’, in Hawley and Wul·, The Divine Consort, 129–43 at 135. (The comment 

relates to a specific set of sources.).


bride, notably—but either sex can take the female role in the symbolic 

register, as is evident from Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on 

the Song of Songs, where the monks are the bride. Nevertheless, 

the following simple and powerful idea is shared by Christianity 

and Hinduism: that union between humans and the divine is like a 

marriage. 

Hinduism also shares with Catholic Christianity a strong doctrine 

of the indissolubility of marriage. The correlation with the similar 

approach to marriage symbolism is significant and should be borne 

in mind by readers following the argument of this book. There is 

no sociological entailment here, no necessity, but the ideal type of a 

relation between the social rule of unbreakable marriage and highly 

developed marriage symbolism makes sense. 

In Christian spirituality it is the ‘soul–God =bride–bridegroom’ 

imagery which comes closest to Hinduism. Another variant of marriage 

symbolism, the image of the Church as bride of Christ, is further 

away from Hindu analogues. This is because of its collective or 

corporate community character, the idea of ‘the Church’ and even 

the human race as in some sense a unity, capable of being collectively 

infected by original sin and collectively redeemed by Christ. 

So far as one can generalize, Hinduism does indeed emphasize the 

character of the whole universe as a collective whole, but much less 

so the human race, or the collective identity of a society within it. In 

Hinduism there is the self (atman), there are status groups (castes) 

through which the self passes on the journey of reincarnations towards 

final release, and there is the All, but the idea of a society as 

an organic body with a collective role in the drama of History is 

alien. The medieval Church saw itself as just such a society, whose 

relation to God could be called a marriage. 

To this symbolism the closest parallel is in ancient Israel, where 

the Jewish people are themselves, collectively, the bride of God. 

It has been pointed out that according to Deuteronomy 24: 1–4 ‘a 

divorced woman who has remarried can never be reconciled with 

her former husband. Because God is anxious to bring back Israel 

as his beloved spouse, he must never have divorced her.’ 

Keller argues that ‘the roles of bride and bridegroom become fixed with regard 

to gender’, suggesting that there was a ‘gradual narrowing of the role of the bride to 

(primarily religious) women on the one hand’ and a ‘successive masculinization of 

the divine bridegroom on the other hand’ (My Secret is Mine, 8). 

See, however, below, n. 36. 

C. Stuhlmueller, ch. 22 on ‘Deutero-Isaiah’, in The Jerome Biblical Commen-


The Song of Songs may or may not be about the love of God 

and his people, but in any case this religious interpretation of these 

songs is the ‘oldest interpretation, in both Christian and Jewish 

tradition’. Hebrew ideas about God’s marriage to or love of his 

chosen people are not only a parallel to but also a crucial source for 

Christian marriage symbolism. The reading of the Song of Songs 

adopted by the third-century Christian theologian Origen owed 

much to Jewish tradition, and Origen is a decisive influence on the 

whole subsequent tradition of Christian marriage symbolism (on 

the ‘Church as bride of Christ’ as well as on the ‘Soul as bride of 

Christ’ themes). 

Thus the Bernardine tradition of bridal mysticism has parallels in 

Hinduism, and the image of Christ’s marriage to the Church draws 

on Old Testament Judaism. What may be harder to find in other 

religious traditions is the sober rationality with which medieval 

scholastic writers and canon lawyers integrated marriage symbolism 

into their systematic and coherent religious frameworks. The 

Supplement to the Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas succinctly 

integrates the di·erent levels into a coherent structure. Marriage 

is formed by signs of consent, usually verbal, not necessarily in a 

religious ceremony. These external signs represent a further level: 

the binding of man and woman. If the couple are Christians, this 

signifies and also brings about a spiritual union. This is the ‘sacrament’ 

in the more technical theological sense, worked out by the 

time of Aquinas, of a sign of grace that brought about what it represented. 

Beyond that, there is another layer still. The spiritual 

union of man and woman represents, but does not bring about, the 

union of Christ and the Church. This dense symbolism from the 

tary, ed. R. E. Brown, J. A. Fitzmyer, and R. E. Murphy, i (London, 1968), 366–86 

at 377, on Isa. 50, with reference to Isa. 54: 6–8 and 61: 4–5. 

R. E. Murphy, ch. 30, ‘Canticle of Canticles’, ibid. 506–10 at 507. 

‘For Christian readings of the Song of Songs, especially as popularized by 

Origen, this assumption [that the “Old Testament” is reflected in the “New Testament”] 

automatically suggested the scope of prior meanings; that is, the poems read 

by Jews as the love between God and Israel naturally find their “true” sense as the 

love between Christ and the Church’ (E. A. Matter, The Voice of my Beloved: The 

Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia, c.1990), 51). 

Supplementum, 42. 1, ‘Ad quartum’ and ‘Ad quintum’, 42. 2, ‘Respondeo’, 

and 42–3, ‘Respondeo’ and ‘Ad secundum’: see SanctiThomaeAquinatis...opera 

omnia, iussu . . . Leonis XIII P.M. edita, xii (Rome, 1906), 81–2. For the Supplement, 

put together after the death of Aquinas on the basis of his commentary on the 

Sentences of Peter the Lombard, see J. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d’Aquino: His Life,


world of rational speculative scholastic theology is a far cry from 

the emotional outpourings of the Bernardine tradition. 

The parallelism between symbolic and literal can take one by 

surprise. The Summa theologica Supplement raises this objection: 

Sacraments have ecacy from the passion of Christ. But a person 

does not become conformed to the passion through marriage, which 

is accompanied by delight. Theansweristhatmarriageisconformed 

to the passion not through pain but through the love which 

Christ showed the Church by su·ering to unite her to himself as 

his bride. 

State of research 

Aquinas is one writer among many powerful minds who created a 

tradition of rationally analysing marriage symbolism. This tradition 

has been well studied, above all in a little-known but (for our 

Thought and Works (Oxford, 1974), 362. In his view the compilation ‘was, no doubt, 

the work of Thomas’s earliest editors working under the direction of Reginald of 

Piperno’. These passages are taken from Aquinas’s commentary on the Sentences 

of Peter Lombard at dist. 26, qu. 2, arts. 1–3 (see the concordance of Supplement 

and commentary in SanctiThomaeAquinatis...operaomnia, vol. xii, p. xxv, and 

S. Tommaso d’Aquino: Commento alle Sentenze di Pietro Lombardo e testo integrale 

di Pietro Lombardo. Libro quarto. Distinzioni 24–42. L’Ordine, il Matrimonio, trans. 

and ed. by ‘Redazione delle Edizioni Studio Domenicano’ (Bologna, 2001), 196– 

206. For Aquinas on marriage as a symbol of the union of Christ and the Church 

see R. J. Lawrence, The Sacramental Interpretation of Ephesians 5: 32 from Peter 

Lombard to the Council of Trent (The Catholic University of America Studies in 

Sacred Theology, Second Series, 145; Washington, 1963), 67–72. The whole of this 

work is relevant for the theological background it provides to the social history 

which is the main focus of this book. For another scholastic theologian’s marriage 

symbolism see Pierre de Tarantaise, commenting on Peter Lombard, Sentences, 

4, dist. 26, qu. 3: ‘Coniunctio exterius apparens per signa aliqua est sacramentum 

tantum: coniunctio animorum interior sacramentum et res: e·ectus gratiae quae ibi 

confertur, res non sacramentum: res inquantum primo significata, res vero significata 

secundario coniunctio Christi et Ecclesiae’ (Innocentii Quinti Pontificis Maximi ... 

In IV. librum Sententiarum commentaria, iv (Toulouse, 1651), 287). 

Cf. Summa theologica, 3. 62. 5 for the theology presupposed. 

Supplementum, 42. 1, obj. 3. 

Ibid., ‘ad tertium’ (objection and response are taken from Aquinas’s commentary 

on the Sentences of Peter Lombard: see Commento alle Sentenze di Pietro 

Lombardo . . ., trans. and ed. ‘Redazione delle Edizioni Studio Domenicano’, dist. 26, 

qu. 2, a. 1, pp. 196, 198). Cf. Pierre de Tarantaise: ‘Ad 4 de Passione. Resp. Christus 

est passus a}ictionem carnis ex charitate spirituali quam habebat ad Ecclesiam. 

Quoad primum, matrimonium non significabat passum, sed quoad secundum’ (Innocentii 

Quinti . . . commentaria, iv. 287). For the similar thinking in Ricardus de 

Mediavilla see T. Rinc‹on, El matrimonio, misterio y signo: siglos IX al XIII (Pamplona, 

1971), 319–20.


topic) fundamental book, Rinc‹on’s El matrimonio, mistero y signo. 

A main function of the present volume is to demonstrate the relevance 

of Rinc‹on’s findings to legal practice and social history. 

Rinc‹on prefers the word ‘Significac‹§on’ to symbolism. He wants 

to emphasize that the connection between human marriage and 

Christ’s union with the Church goes far beyond subjective ‘spiritual 

sense’-type parallelism. Though ‘symbolism’ will be used 

loosely to cover both kinds of meaning here, the distinction is worth 

bearing in mind: it reminds us that in theological texts marriage is 

linked to the union of Christ and the Church by a tight web of close 

logical reasoning. The same is true of canon-law commentaries, 

which Rinc‹on studies alongside the strictly theological texts. 

It is rash but important to generalize about world history: if the 

generalization is misleading, someone will point it out, but otherwise 

no one will know either way. I would suggest, then, that there 

is nothing in the world history of religions much like the developments 

Rinc‹on describes. If Rinc‹on has made an exemplary analysis 

of the theological and canon legal texts, marriage symbolism in literary 

and mystical texts has been the object of studies distinguished 

by literary sensitivity and a preoccupation with the paradoxes of a 

gendered symbolism which both men and women could in principle 

use for their relation to God. The bridal mysticism of Bernard of 

See n. 32 ad fin. I have not found this book in the British Library, Bodleian Library, 

or Cambridge University Library. There are copies in the Birmingham University 

Library, the Biblioth›eque Nationale de France, in several German libraries, 

and of course in Spain. More recently, see T. Rinc‹on-P‹erez [the same author, I 

take it], El matrimonio cristiano: sacramento de la Creaci‹on y de la Redenci‹on. Claves 

de un debate teol‹ogico-can‹onico (Estudios Can‹onicos, 1; Pamplona, 1997), chs. 1–3. 

For marriage symbolism in connection with sacramentality see also Lawrence, The 

Sacramental Interpretation of Ephesians 5: 32, which should in turn be bracketed 

with S. P. Heaney, The Development of the Sacramentality of Marriage from Anselm 

of Laon to Thomas Aquinas (The Catholic University of America Studies in Sacred 

Theology, Second Series, 134; Washington, 1963). 

‘Creemos fundamental distinguir entre simbolismo o paralelismo simb‹olico y 

significaci‹on come tal. Lo primero, en t‹erminos gramaticales, equivale a una simple 

yuxtaposici‹on del sentido m‹§stico y el sentido literal. Mientras que en la en la 

significaci‹on come tal existe un subordinaci‹on o dependencia profunda del signo en 

relaci‹on con la cosa significada’ (Rinc‹on, El matrimonio, misterio y signo, 270 n. 48). 

Thus N. Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage: Literary Approaches, 1100–1300 

(Cambridge etc., 1997), develops a persuasive argument that despite the exaltation 

of virginity over marriage in some of the texts he studies they still make marriage 

symbolize a ‘true drama of feeling’ and stand as ‘a paradigm of emotional commitment’; 

‘the sponsa Christi-motif is much more than a rhetorical metaphor for 

spiritual union: it is used to evoke a psychological process’ (159). 

e.g. Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: ‘If monks wished to play


Clairvaux has also been thoroughly examined. Perhaps a majority 

of the writers on all these topics have a background in literature 

or religious studies (defined to include theology and canon law). 

That is no defect: it has doubtless sharpened their perception of 

religious subtleties and nuances. The present study has a somewhat 

di·erent and complementary aspect because it comes from a historian 

formed in an age when the social history of marriage was the 

hottest of historiographical topics. 

Before the 1970s not much of the history of marriage was written 

from history departments. Excellent work was done by church 

lawyers: catholics like Esmein and Dauvillier, but also Protestants 

like Sohm and Friedberg, engaged in a controversy about 

the introduction of civil marriage into Prussia, whose resonances 

seem faint today. (The contribution of German Protestants to medi- 

the starring role in this love story, they had to adopt a feminine persona—as many 

did—to pursue a heterosexual love a·air with their God. It might be assumed that 

when women began to compose their own mystical texts, they could more easily 

havefollowedthepathalreadylaidoutbymen.But...somewomenforgeda... 

less stereotypical way that allowed them a wider emotional range’, adopting the 

discourse of fin amour which ‘could encourage women writers to experiment with 

gender roles just as monks did within the Song of Songs tradition’ (138). (C. W. 

Bynum is almost certainly an inspiration behind this kind of analysis: see e.g. her 

‘“And Woman his Humanity”: Female Imagery in the Religious Writings of the 

Later Middle Ages’, in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the 

Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991), 151–79 at 176–9.) Or again 

Keller, My Secret is Mine: ‘Bernard of Clairvaux’s e·orts to re-establish the bridal 

metaphor in the monastic life of both sexes mark precisely the beginning of the 

definitive exclusion of monks from the concept’ (35); ‘Precisely the history of the 

motif of the bride of God itself, both its gender-specific fixing of the role of the bride 

of God and its attempts to force open such narrowings make clear that the human 

world of the sexes and its historically-determined mechanisms push their way into 

spiritual eroticism by the back door’ (263). Keller’s bibliography is a good guide 

to recent literature on marriage/bridal symbolism. For an exemplary analysis of 

gender in marriage symbolism see A. Volfing, John the Evangelist and Medieval 

German Writing: Imitating the Inimitable (Oxford, 2001), 138–60. 

J. Leclercq, Le Mariage vu par les moines au XIIe si›ecle (Paris, 1983), ch. 7, is an 

especially important study. See too his Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France: 

Psycho-Historical Essays (Oxford, 1979). 

A. Esmein, Le Mariage en droit canonique ed. R. G‹enestal and J. Dauvillier, 2nd 

edn. (2 vols.; Paris, 1929–35). 

J. Dauvillier, Le Mariage dans le droit classique de l’‹eglise depuis le D‹ecret de 

Gratien (1140) jusqu’›a lamortdeCl‹ement V (1314) (Paris, 1933). 

R. Sohm, Das Recht der Eheschlie¢ung aus dem deutschen und kanonischen Recht 

geschichtlich entwickelt: Eine Antwort auf die Frage nach dem Verh•altniss der kirchlichen 

Trauung zur Civilehe (Weimar, 1875). 

E. Friedberg, Verlobung und Trauung, zugleich als Kritik von Sohm: Das Recht 

der Eheschlie¢ung (Leipzig, 1876).


eval canon-law history would be an interesting topic.) The great 

Gabriel Le Bras defies classification: he was somewhere between 

law, theology and sociology: a great historian by nature but not 

by formal training. Joyce, a theologian, wrote a fine synthesis, 

and the German school of Catholic medieval historical theology, 

notably M•uller, Brandl, and Ziegler, also made contributions 

which have lost little of their value today. Still, they were not writing 

primarily for a community of historians and, perhaps more important, 

they wrote at a time when social history had not attained the 

dominance it enjoyed in the last decades of the twentieth century. 

Non-historians have continued to contribute even in those decades. 

Goody, who raised with great intelligence even if he did 

not solve the historical problem of the ‘forbidden degrees’, came 

from anthropology; Gaudemet, Weigand, Helmholz, and Donahue 

were again from law; Jean Leclercq, though clearly a 

historian in his attitudes and approach and with his finger on the 

See especially his article on ‘Mariage. III. La doctrine du mariage chez les 

th‹eologiens et canonistes depuis l’an mille’, in Dictionnaire de th‹eologie catholique 

(15 vols. excluding indexes; Paris, 1899–1950), ix (1926), 2123–223. 

G. H. Joyce, Christian Marriage: An Historical and Doctrinal Study (London 

etc., 1933). 

M. M•uller, Die Lehre des hl. Augustinus von der Paradiesesehe und ihre Auswirkung 

in der Sexualethik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts bis Thomas von Aquin: 

Eine moralgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Studien zur Geschichte der katholischen 

Moraltheologie, 1; Regensburg, 1954). 

L. Brandl, Die Sexualethik des heiligen Albertus Magnus (Regensburg, 1955). 

J. G. Ziegler, Die Ehelehre der P•onitentialsummen von 1200–1350: Eine Untersuchung 

zur Geschichte der Moral- und Pastoraltheologie (Regensburg, 1956). 

J. Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 

1983). This has received a fair amount of criticism though there has been a general 

appreciation too of the way the book has opened up the subject. For my own critiques 

see ‘Peter Damian, Consanguinity and Church Property’, in L. Smith and B. Ward 

(eds.), Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Margaret Gibson 

(London, 1992), 71–80 at 76–7, and ‘Lay Kinship Solidarity and Papal Law’, in P. 

Sta·ord, J. L. Nelson, and J. Martindale (eds.), Law, Laity and Solidarities: Essays 

in Honour of Susan Reynolds (Manchester, 2001), 188–99. 

J. Gaudemet, Le Mariage en Occident: les m¥urs et le droit (Paris, 1987), to 

name only one of his contributions. 

R. Weigand, Liebe und Ehe im Mittelalter (Bibliotheca Eruditorum, 7; Goldbach, 

1993). 

R. H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974). 

C. Donahue, Jr., ‘The Monastic Judge: Social Practice, Formal Rule, and the 

Medieval Canon Law of Incest’, in P. Landau, with M. Petzolt (eds.), De iure 

canonico medii aevi: Festschrift f•ur Rudolf Weigand (Studia Gratiana, 27; Rome, 

1996), 49–69; (with Norma Adams), Select Cases from the Ecclesiastical Courts of the 

Province of Canterbury, c. 1200–1301 (Selden Society, 95; London, 1981). 

See above, n. 37.


pulse of his time’s historiography, was writing from a monastery 

rather than a history department. Hubertus Lutterbach comes from 

theology. Students of vernacular literature like Schumacher and 

Burch have done thought-provoking work. Cartlidge’s study, 

mentioned above under the rubric of symbolic marriage, talks 

about perceptions of real human marriage as well. Perhaps the 

most important recent historian of medieval marriage and sexuality, 

R•udiger Schnell holds his chair in a department of Germanistik, 

though he has mastered the bibliography in all medieval 

fields on these topics to an astonishing degree. Only the historian 

Brundage, on whom below, can come near him as a guide to this 

practically endless sea of secondary scholarship. 

Brundage is one of a substantial number of historians employed 

in history departments who have added to this tower of scholarship 

recently, holding their own with colleagues from other sectors of 

academe. They are not necessarily more impartial—indeed, in this 

field historians tend to make their ideological aliations as evident 

as historians of monasticism used to before the First World War. 

Moreover, some have continued to use the same types of evidence as 

scholars from other disciplines: Payer’s The Bridling of Desire is 

in the tradition of historical theology and Brundage’s opus magnum 

is based above all on penitentials and canon-law commentaries so 

far as primary sources are concerned, although, as just noted, he 

is remarkably successful in getting a grip on the enormous mass 

H. Lutterbach, Sexualit•at im Mittelalter: Eine Kulturstudie anhand von Bu¢b•uchern 

des 6. bis 12. Jahrhunderts (Cologne etc., 1999). Although the style is detached, 

there are signs that he is himself fighting a battle within the world of Catholic 

theology. 

M. Schumacher, Die Auffassung der Ehe in den Dichtungen Wolframs von Eschenbach 

(Germanische Bibliothek, 2. Abt., Untersuchungen und Texte, 3. Reihe, 

Untersuchungen und Einzeldarstellungen; Heidelberg, 1967). 

S. L. Burch, ‘A Study of Some Aspects of Marriage as Presented in Selected 

Octosyllabic French Romances of the 12th and 13th Centuries’ (unpublished Ph.D. 

thesis, University College London, 1982). 

See above all R. Schnell, Sexualit•at und Emotionalit•at in der vormodernen Ehe 

(Cologne etc., 2002). 

Theopus magnum is J. A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval 

Europe (Chicago etc., 1987). Brundage’s publications on medieval marriage and sex 

are too numerous to list here, but special mention must be made of his ‘The Merry 

Widow’s Serious Sister: Remarriage in Classical Canon Law’, in R. R. Edward and 

V. Ziegler (eds.), Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society (Woodbridge, 

1995), 33–48, which is directly relevant to Chapter 3. 

P. J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages 

(Toronto etc., 1993).


of secondary scholarship about medieval marriage in three or four 

academic languages. Conversely, the analyses of actual court records 

by Weigand and Helmholz take us firmly beyond the world of ‘book 

texts’, if one may so put it. By and large, however, the professional 

historians have helped to root the subject more firmly in social 

history—converging with some of the lawyers in this respect. 

Christopher Brooke was very early in the field, including sections 

on marriage in a general survey, a historian somewhat ahead 

of his time. In a series of subsequent publications, he brought to 

bear on the history of marriage a knowledge of central medieval 

social history that owed much to his involvement with the Oxford 

Medieval Texts editorial project. The present study takes up a 

question that he put more clearly than any of the other historians 

who made up the wave of writing on medieval marriage: namely, 

what was di·erent about the Christian marriage of the Middle 

Ages? The Christianization of marriage in the twelfth century has 

been a central thread. Georges Duby used his remarkable architectonic 

literary gifts to develop an elegant and still broadly valid 

schema: an aristocratic model, favouring legitimate marriage but allowing 

easy divorce, and tolerating the marriage of close relatives, 

opposed to a clerical model emphasizing indissoluble monogamous 

marriage—exogamy. The endogamy/exogamy part of the thesis 

requires further commentary out of place in this argument, but 

the notion that the two models grew closer together in the early 

thirteenth century is broadly right. The lay nobility came to accept 

indissolubility, and the Church reduced the circle of forbidden 

degrees of relationship, allowing closer relatives to marry. All this 

needs to be put in the context of a rationality perhaps not fully 

understood by Duby. It should also be noted that he was able to 

draw on some crucial discoveries made earlier by John Baldwin 

about the thinking behind the changes in marriage law e·ected 

by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. In general Duby’s work 

tends to leave the impression that the medieval Church took a nega- 

C. N. L. Brooke, Europe in the Central Middle Ages 962–1154 (London, 1964; 

3rd edn. Harlow, 2000): in first edition 245–7 and index s.v. ‘Marriage’. 

His results were drawn together in The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford, 

1989), still probably the best way into the subject. 

Duby, Medieval Marriage; id.,Le Chevalier, la femme et le prêtre: le mariage 

dans la France f‹eodale (Paris, 1981). 

J. W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the 

Chanter and his Circle (2 vols.; Princeton, 1970), i. 332–7, ii. 222–7 (classic pages).


tive view of marriage, a view corrected in friendly fashion by Jean 

Leclercq (and as we shall see quite contrary to copious evidence 

of which he was unaware). Dyan Elliott’s study of ‘Spiritual Marriage’ 

(understood not in the usual sense of symbolic marriage but 

as marriage without sex) used saints’ lives alongside theological and 

canon-law texts, and tried to reconstruct actual practices. David 

Herlihy traced the change from an early medieval society where 

the rich and powerful had more than their fair share of women to a 

society where the husband-and-wife couple was the norm at all levels 

of society: the slimness of his Medieval Households is in inverse 

proportion to its achievement. Michael Borgolte has set the medieval 

Church’s e·orts to enforce monogamy and indissolubility in a 

comparative framework by showing how its sphere of influence was 

ringed with an outer sphere of polygyny, among the Muslims and 

Jews outside the borders of Latin Europe but also among Christians 

who came in contact with them or who maintained a polygynous 

subculture. 

The general trend of most recent work has been to emphasize the 

growing though always limited influence of the Church’s models 

on the social history of marriage (indeed, Borgolte emphasizes it 

too). This is particularly but not exclusively true of the work by 

scholars in history departments. This study will draw heavily on 

their results, especially the findings of scholars who have studied 

ecclesiastical court evidence. 

The argument 

The specific aim of the present study is to draw together the social 

history of marriage and the history of marriage symbolism. I 

am not quite the first historian to have seen the connection, for 

D. Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, 

1993). Her use of ‘spiritual marriage’ to mean marriage without sex is perhaps 

confusing since the phrase often means marriage as metaphor, but there is a pedigree 

behind her terminology: see P. de Labriolle, ‘Le “mariage spirituel” dans l’antiquit‹e 

chr‹etienne’, Revue historique, 137 (1921), 204–25. 

D. Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, Mass., etc., 1985). 

M. Borgolte, ‘Kulturelle Einheit und religi•ose Di·erenz: Zur Verbreitung 

der Polygynie im mittelalterlichen Europa’, Zeitschrift f•ur historische Forschung, 

31 (2004), 1–36; for aristocratic polygyny in regions or cultures within Christian 

Europe see ibid. 7 n. 23 from p. 6 (referring to the work of Jan R•udiger). 

Ibid. 11, 13. 

As an example see the able survey by D. O. Hughes, ‘Il matrimonio nell’Italia 

medievale’, in M. De Giorgio and C. Klapisch-Zuber (eds.), Storia del matrimonio 

(Rome etc., 1996), 5–61, notably 18–24, 44–9.


I think that Marcel Pacaut caught the essence of it in a few perceptive 

lines. Most of the actual links of causation need to be traced. 

This enterprise is related to the skilful elucidations by canon-law 

historians of marriage symbolism’s influence on the idea of the 

episcopal oce, to Dye’s important study of Marian marriage 

In a brief article that anticipates more than any other study the general approach 

of this book, Pacaut develops with respect to the twelfth century an argument that 

works even better for the mid-thirteenth century and after. To do justice to his 

priority a full quotation is required: 

le renvoi du couple Christ- ‹Eglise . . . tend aussi ›a exposer que le Christ et l’ ‹Eglise 

—et de mêmeleChristetl’âme — sont uns comme le sont l’‹epoux et l’‹epouse 

dans leur union charnelle, ainsi que le sugg›ere Pierre Lombard, ce qui se rapporte 

›a une image claire et simple selon laquelle l’union des corps est d’autant plus 

parfaite qu’elle repose sur l’amour et ce qui revient ›a rapprocher un mod›ele (pour 

l’âme) et une r‹ealit‹e dicile ›a saisir (pour l’ ‹Eglise) d’un autre mod›ele facilement 

concevable, presque “visualis‹e” et non utopique, car il existait certainement. C’est 

l›a aussi le sens profond de la m‹etaphore reprise dans les sermons sur le Cantique 

des Cantiques, qui ne peuvent exclure l’appel ›alar‹ealit‹e charnelle, et dont on peut 

tirer parfois, ›a l’inverse, qu’il serait souhaitable que les ‹epoux soient unis comme 

le Christ l’est avec son ‹Eglise. 

Ces propos ressortissent en fait ›a une m‹editation mystique et sont en même 

temps le reflet de la pastorale di·us‹ee par le clerg‹e. Celle-ci insiste sur la valeur 

de l’amour conjugal et sur sa n‹ecessit‹e pour accomplir le mariage par le moyen de 

l’union des corps. Elle souligne que le consentement, qui fait que l’union charnelle 

n’est pas honteuse, oriente les vies vers l’amour. Elle atteste donc aussi de ce qu’un 

e·ort s’accomplit alors afin que la r‹eussite amoureuse, physique et sentimentale, 

soit facilit‹ee par l’engagement consensuel reconnu, ›al’‹epoque o›u le droit cherche, 

sur une autre voie, ›a normaliser cet engagement, sans lequel la pr‹edication et 

la r‹eflexion spirituelle ne reposeraient, dans leur ‹elaboration, sur aucun support 

solide. (‘Sur quelques donn‹ees du droit matrimonial dans la seconde moiti‹e du 

xiiE si›ecle’, in Histoire et soci‹et‹e: m‹elanges o·erts ›a Georges Duby. Textes r‹eunis 

par les m‹edi‹evistes de l’Universit‹e deProvence(2 vols.; Aix-en-Provence, 1992), i. 

31–41 at 40) 

Keller, My Secret is Mine, especially chapter 2, also explores the interplay between 

symbolism and social practice. Her findings are very di·erent (without being 

necessarily incompatible), because she concentrates on social practices which 

are ‘Firmly rooted in the tradition of Germanic Law’ (p. 69)—Muntehe etc.— 

rather than the social structure created in the high and late Middle Ages by canon 

law. I. Persson, Ehe und Zeichen: Studien zu Eheschlie¢ung und Ehepraxis anhand 

der fr•uhmittelhochdeutschen religi•osen Lehrdichtungen ‘Vom Rechte’, ‘Hochzeit’ und 

‘Schopf von dem lône’ (G•oppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 617; G•oppingen, 1995), 

takes a close look at the relation between the details of marriage in poetic allegory and 

legal notions of marriage: see notably pp. 127–8. I am in sympathy with the approach 

but the contrast she draws between the Germanic and the canon-law attitudes to 

consummation may be overstated: see below, ch. 4 n. 16. 

S. Kuttner, ‘Pope Lucius III and the Bigamous Archbishop of Palermo’ (1961), 

repr. in id., The History of Ideas and Doctrines of Canon Law in the Middle Ages 

(London, 1980), no. vii; R.L.Benson,The Bishop Elect: A Study in Medieval 

Ecclesiastical Oce (Princeton, 1968), 122–9, 136–49; J. Gaudemet, ‘Le symbolisme 

du mariage entre l’‹evêque et son ‹eglise et ses consequences juridiques’ (1985), repr.


symbolism, and to Gabriella Zarri’s remarkable account of marriage 

symbolism in rituals and iconography. It is nevertheless a 

quite distinct line of enquiry. 

There will be a lot of thick description of the symbolic forms 

of thought underlying marriage law and practice, but the book 

has preoccupations which are rather played down in anthropology 

›a laCli·ord Geertz (which sees the study of society as more like 

interpreting a poem than causal analysis): force (not necessarily in a 

negative sense) and timing. In a nutshell, I shall try to establish how, 

when, and why marriage symbolism became a force in the lay world. 

Stated baldly, the line of interpretation goes like this. Marriage is 

a powerful symbol of the union of the human and the divine. Most 

relationships are superficial compared with marriage. Marriage is 

one of the strongest experiences in many people’s lives. Comparison 

with marriage is a way of conveying the strength of the bond 

between God and humanity. Marriage has many dimensions which 

can be explored to bring out by analogy aspects of union with God. 

A symbol or metaphor is capable of generating new ideas about 

the relationship it describes, whether that relationship is real or 

imaginary. It can also a·ect social policy and structures. Marriage 

is a ‘generative’ metaphor, vivid, full of unexpected possibilities, 

potentially a powerful influence on thought and action. (Not all 

metaphors are like this. Many have limited use and quickly become 

desiccated, like the ‘man is a wolf’ formula beloved of philosophers 

who discuss metaphor.) Other powerful generative metaphors are 

the meal as a symbol of community, the body as a symbol of the 

state, or the ‘conduit’ metaphor for communication. 

in id., Droit de l’ ‹Eglise et vie sociale au Moyen Âge (Northampton, 1989), no. ix, 

110–23. 

J. M. Dye, ‘The Virgin as Sponsa c.1100–c.1400’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 

University College London, 2001). 

G. Zarri, Recinti: donne, clausura e matrimonio nella prima et›a moderna([Bologna], 

2000), ch. 4. It deals (to quote a summary earlier in the same book) especially 

with the ‘pratica medievale di matrimoni simbolici, che aveva lo scopo, tra l’altro, di 

confermare la sacralit›a del matrimonio cristiano, in assenza di una ritualit›a religiosa 

pubblica nel matrimonio della coppia celebrato prevalentemente tra le mura domestiche’ 

(26). I share Zarri’s preoccupation with the connections between symbolism 

and social practices. 

D. A. Sch•on, ‘’Generative Metaphor: A Perspective on Problem-Setting in 

Social Policy’, in A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge, 1979), 254– 

83. 

M. J. Reddy, ‘The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in our Language 

about Language’, in Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, 284–324.


It will be argued that marriage symbolism had a quite limited 

causal impact for much of the Middle Ages: up until the long century 

around the year 1200. Therefore the explanations advanced 

in this book will often take the form of elucidating ‘neutralizing 

causes’, forces that neutralize a causal process which might otherwise 

be expected. I shall attempt to explain what prevented marriage 

symbolism for so long from becoming a force in the lay world. 

From the thirteenth century on it was indeed a force and changed 

social patterns.

1 

Mass Communication 

(a) Preliminaries 

The bulk of this book deals with the e·ect of marriage symbolism 

outside the texts that transmitted it. Much of the discussion is 

about the changes it brought about through law in social practice, 

but a natural starting point is its power over the minds of the 

laity through the cumulative force of mass communication. The 

argument of the present chapter makes the assumption that the 

cumulative repetition of much the same message by a powerful 

mass medium does have an e·ect on the thoughts of the people 

at the receiving end. It is an assumption. Some feel that the mass 

media do not really change people’s thinking at all. They may be 

right with regard to short-term propaganda. Brief intense political 

campaigns or revivalist preaching may well have a transitory impact 

and no lasting e·ect on attitudes. Can the same be true of ideas 

repeated over years and decades? Ideas propagated over a long 

period of time by modern newspapers (for instance) surely leave 

some mark on the minds of readers, as a dripping tap leaves a stain 

in a sink. As with modern newspapers, there is little hard empirical 

evidence at the reception end. Could one establish with absolute 

certainty the e·ect of newspapers on a single reader? Paradoxically, 

one can be more confident about aggregate e·ects. Ideas repeated 

to great masses of people over many decades will have impinged in 

some way on the minds of a significant portion of the audience: this 

much is taken for granted. The whole argument of this chapter is 

vulnerable to extreme scepticism on this point, but such scepticism 

flies in the face of common sense. The question then becomes one 

of timing and scale: when did marriage symbolism become such a 

regular part of preaching that laypeople who went to sermons could 

hardly escape it? It will be answered as follows: 

D. L. d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Mass Communication in a Culture 

without Print (Oxford, 2001), 14.

20 Chapter 1 

å Marriage symbolism was not preached to a mass public in the 

early Middle Ages. The influential collections containing marriage 

symbolism were not intended for popular preaching, the 

many surviving sermons intended for popular preaching contain 

relatively little marriage symbolism, and the impact of 

marriage symbolism would have been limited by extra-textual 

factors (late development of the parish system, incapacity of 

many priests to use Latin models e·ectively). 

å Preaching was a system of mass communication in the age of 

the friars. The large number of surviving manuscripts of model 

sermons represents a tiny proportion of the number that once 

existed, and each model sermon could be preached again and 

again. 

å Marriage symbolism is highly developed in late medieval 

preaching and rested securely on a literal-sense idea of marriage 

as good and holy. The symbolism of marriage and the 

praise of ordinary human marriage were complementary and 

are found together in the sermons that transmitted marriage 

symbolism to the masses. 

The middle section on preaching as mass communication and the 

long discussion of the loss rate of preaching manuscripts and of 

how so many could have been produced in the first place is the key 

to the argument that in the age of the Franciscans and Dominicans 

marriage symbolism was propagated so insistently and repeatedly 

to so many people that it must have been a social force. Some of 

the people could have ignored it all of the time and all of the people 

surely ignored it much of the time, but all of the people could not 

have ignored it all of the time. 

(b) The Early Middle Ages 

Bernard of Clairvaux and Haymo of Auxerre 

Marriage symbolism in preaching is associated with the sermons 

on the Song of Songs by Bernard of Clairvaux, but in fact it can 

be found long before, though in a more sober idiom. A ninthcentury 

homily by Haymo of Auxerre has, at least embryonically, 

the main features of the genre of sermons on the second Sunday 

On Haymo/Haimo see B. Gansweidt, ‘Haimo. 1. Haimo v. Auxerre’, in Lexikon 

des Mittelalters, iv (Munich etc., 1989), 1863; on the homily see D. L. d’Avray, ‘Sym-

Mass Communication 21 

after Epiphany (mostly sermons on the text Nuptiae factae sunt, 

John 2: 1) that would be the principal vehicle for marriage preaching 

in future centuries. Marriage is good. Christ’s presence at a 

wedding refutes heretics who condemn marriage. (He mentions 

Tatian and Marcion: later preachers would have the Cathars in 

mind.) Genesis proves that God created man male and female, 

and said that for the love of her husband a woman should leave 

father and mother and be one flesh with her husband. In Matthew 

Christ told the apostles that a husband must not leave his wife. 

Teachings of St Paul take their turn: husband and wife must pay 

the marriage ‘debt’ (make love at the other’s request). Husbands 

should love their wives as Christ loved his Church. In fact Haymo 

makes a good florilegium of biblical texts which are positive about 

marriage—ordinary human marriage. Then he goes on to the marriage 

of Christ and the Church, again presented through scriptural 

authorities. This combination of literal and spiritual (i.e. symbolic) 

marriage within the same framework is characteristic of the later 

‘Marriage feast of Cana’ genre of sermons on the second Sunday 

after Epiphany. (From here on this genre will also be called the 

Nuptiae factae sunt genre, the Latin for the first words of the reading 

‘There was a marriage . . .’.) The question remains, did this 

kind of marriage symbolism get through to the laity via popular 

preaching in the early Middle Ages? It is a hard question to answer. 

That will be apparent from the oscillations in the presentation of 

the data below. On balance, however, and in the current state of the 

evidence, it looks as though marriage symbolism in sermons could 

not have had a major impact on the laity before the thirteenth century. 

The debate about early medieval popular preaching 

It is much disputed whether popular preaching happened at all 

in this period (defined roughly as from the late sixth to the late 

twelfth century). A relatively recent article argues for a minimalist 

position: hardly any preaching. That rather extreme position 

seems hard to maintain in the light of work by Thomas Amos, 

who seems to have shown that there was a good deal of popu- 

bolism and Medieval Religious Thought’, in P. Linehan and J. L. Nelson (eds.), The 

Medieval World (London etc., 2003), 267–78 at 268–9. 

R. E. McLaughlin, ‘The Word Eclipsed: Preaching in the Early Middle Ages’, 

Traditio, 46 (1991), 77–122.

22 Chapter 1 

lar preaching. (He concentrates on the Carolingian period, but 

casts an eye back to earlier preaching.) His doctoral thesis on early 

medieval preaching unfortunately remains unpublished, but some 

of the findings have appeared in print as articles. He has identified 

‘over nine hundred sermons written or adapted by Carolingian 

authors as sources of popular preaching in the period 

750–950’. One collection has been properly edited in a modern 

edition: I shall refer to this by the name of its editor, Mercier. 

Three more are in Migne’s Patrologia Latina and easy to consult. 

Other popular Carolingian homiliaries have been studied in 

articles by three specialists whose work has changed our understanding 

of homiliaries: Barr‹e, Bouhot, and ‹Etaix. Yet another 

article argues that the homilies on the Gospels of Gregory the 

Great were widely used for popular preaching in the early Middle 

Ages. 

Marriage symbolism in early medieval popular preaching: a 

significant absence 

This is not sucient to show that marriage symbolism reached the 

people via the pulpit. We still need to ask how regularly marriage 

symbolism appeared in these sermons, and how many ordinary 

priests actually used the sermons Amos has studied. Even assuming 

that a non-trivial number of priests had reasonable Latin and 

a homiliary of the right level for their needs, a problem to which 

we must return, how much about marriage and marriage symbolism 

would it contain? My provisional verdict is that there was 

relatively little preaching about marriage symbolism in the Carolingian 

period. This is based mainly on a search for sermons on 

the Gospel reading of the marriage feast of Cana, which would 

‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 

Michigan State University, 1983). I have used this important thesis extensively: 

it led me to most of those sermons/homiliaries discussed below which Amos 

does not discuss in print. 

T. L. Amos, ‘Preaching and the Sermon in the Carolingian World’, in T. L. 

Amos, E. A. Green, and B. M. Kienzle (eds.), De ore Domini: Preacher and Word in 

the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, 1989), 41–60 at 47. 

XIV hom‹elies du IXe si›ecle de l’Italie du Nord, ed. P. Mercier (Sources chr‹etiennes, 

161; Paris, 1970). 

Amos, ‘Preaching and the Sermon in the Carolingian World’, 57 n. 31, for 

bibliography. 

P. A. DeLeeuw, ‘Gregory the Great’s “Homilies on the Gospels” in the Early 

Middle Ages’, Studi medievali, 3rd ser., 26 (1985), 855–69.


be a powerful vehicle for the popularization of marriage symbolism 

from the thirteenth century on. In the last three medieval 

centuries sermons on this reading or ‘pericope’ would combine 

a real appreciation of marriage as a human institution with welldeveloped 

symbolism. Arguably, it was this complementarity of 

literal and symbolic levels that gave the symbolism its force. It is 

conceivable that early medieval marriage symbolism was expressed 

through some other preaching genre—say sermons on a di·erent 

pericope—but it is unlikely. I have probably missed a few marriage 

feast of Cana sermons, but perhaps not a significant number of 

those that survive. There are few early medieval sermons on the 

marriage feast of Cana pericope, but when one looks at them one 

by one it becomes clear that most contain little marriage symbolism, 

or were probably not intended primarily for popular preaching. 

Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) wrote two sermons on this pericope. 

Moreover, he was an influential popular preacher both in his own 

time and afterwards, through copies of his homilies. One of the 

series of Carolingian popular sermons analysed by Amos in fact 

includes one of the two sermons in question. However, on closer 

inspection the relevance of the two sermons fades away—there is 

too little marriage symbolism of any significance in them. In each 

case it amounts to only a few lines. Incidentally, the sermons are 

written in a Latin which would probably have proved challeng- 

I have followed up most of the relevant footnotes to texts in Amos’s very thoroughly 

documented ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’, and also 

made searches in the CD-ROM of Migne’s PL. 

Sancti Caesarii Arelatensis sermones, pt. 2, ed. G. Morin (Corpus Christianorum 

Series Latina, 104; Turnhout, 1953), sermon 167, pp. 682–87, and sermon 168, 

pp. 688–91. 

Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’, emphasizes Caesarius’ 

importance: he preached himself and encouraged parish priests to preach from 

collections of sermons (31–2); after his death his sermons circulated in Merovingian 

Gaul (56); his influence continued in the Carolingian period (213, 215 (‘a sermon 

modelled closely after the works of Caesarius’), 393). 

Ibid. 393: Caesarius, sermon 167 =no. 15 on Amos’s list. 

Caesarius, sermon 167: ‘Dies ergo erat nuptialis et festa, quia advenienti sponso 

redempta iungebatur ecclesia: illi, inquam, sponso, quem omnia ab initio mundi 

saecula spoponderunt; qui descendit ad terras, ut dilectam suam ad celsitudinis suae 

thalamos invitaret, dans ei in praesenti arram sanguinis sui, ’; sermo 168: ‘Itaque tamquam sponsus procedens de thalamo 

suo descendit ad terras, ecclesiae ex gentibus congregandae suscepta incarnatione 

iungendus. Cui quidem ecclesiae, quae utique sumus nos, et arras et dotem dedit: 

arras dedit, quando nobis est ex lege promissus; dotem dedit, quando pro nobis est

24 Chapter 1 

ing to the average member of the lower clergy in Merovingian or 

Carolingian Francia. 

Moving forward from the dying Roman Empire to Anglo-Saxon 

England in the age of Bede (d. 735), we find a sermon on the 

marriage feast of Cana reading in the latter’s homiliary, but no 

evidence that the homily was meant for a lay audience. It is worth 

hearing Andries Van der Walt, the scholar who has studied it most 

intensively: ‘There is little doubt among modern scholars that 

Bede’s homilies were primarily intended to be delivered to his 

fellow monks. . . . There is ample evidence in the homilies that 

Bede was indeed talking to monks’ (ibid. 52). Among a good 

deal of other evidence, Van Der Walt quotes the following words 

from Bede’s Homily 1. 13: ‘we who have left behind carnal affections 

and earthly possessions, who, out of love for the angelic 

way of life, have declined to marry and produce children after 

the flesh’—and comments that this ‘seems to be a fairly accurate 

description of Bede’s usual audience’ (ibid. 56). A note of caution 

is added: ‘there is no evidence in the homilies to support 

the belief that he preached either outside the monastery or to a 

purely secular audience. A few homilies, however, do suggest that a 

larger audience than usual were present when they were delivered’ 

(ibid. 56–7). Van Der Walt discusses a few passages which may 

suggest that ‘lay people from the vicinity came to the monastery 

church either to attend the last week of Easter celebrations or to 

receive baptism’ (ibid. 57). Thus ‘it . . . cannot be ruled out altogether 

that on occasions such as Easter and Pentecost Bede had 

a number of lay people among his audience. But in all these instances 

the tone of the homilies remains distinctly monastic’ (ibid. 

58). The Sunday with the marriage-feast reading was in any case 

inmolatus. Et alio modo potest accipi: ut arras praesentem gratiam, dotem intellegamus 

vitam aeternam’ (pp. 682–3, 688 Morin). 

Bedae venerabilis Homeliarum libri II,inBedae venerabilis opera, pars III: opera 

homiletica, pars IV: opera rhythmica, ed. D. Hurst (Corpus Christianorum Series 

Latina, 122; Turnout, 1955), 95–104: homilia 14 post Epiphaniam. Hurst believes 

that the homilies in this collection were written towards the end of Bede’s life 

(ibid. vii). 

A. G. P. Van Der Walt, ‘The Homiliary of the Venerable Bede and Early Medieval 

Preaching’ (unpublished thesis, University of London, 1981). The early death 

of this meticulous scholar (my first doctoral student) precluded publication of more 

than a tiny fraction of his thesis. 

The evidence is set out on pp. 52–8.


probably not important enough to warrant an exceptional audience. 

Conceivably, the homilies were later adapted to a non-monastic 

audience. In the mid-eighth century (747–51) the English missionary 

Boniface asked Egbert, Archbishop of York to send him Bede’s 

book of homilies for the year ‘because it would be a very handy 

and useful manual for us in our preaching’. Presumably Boniface 

did not know what the homilies were like when he wrote, so 

this does not prove that he actually found them usable for popular 

preaching. (Or again, perhaps Boniface had preaching to the 

clergy in mind.) One cannot rule out the possibility that the marriage 

symbolism in the Cana homily reached some laypeople in 

the course of the homiliary’s reception history, but to assume a 

major impact on lay society would not be remotely justified by the 

evidence. 

The next natural stopping place in this brief survey is the 

Carolingian period. Here material becomes plentiful. The ensuing 

discussion will need to work laboriously through it, in order 

to demonstrate the broadly negative conclusion, viz. that not much 

marriage symbolism got through to the laity in the early Middle 

Ages. Perhaps this finding should be put more cautiously: that sermon 

evidence for transmission of marriage symbolism to the people 

through preaching is slight. It is fair to the reader to say that only 

scholars specially interested in early medieval preaching need read 

through the collection-by-collection analysis which follows. 

The homiliaries of the ‘School of Auxerre’ might seem to o·er 

evidence of the di·usion of marriage symbolism to a mass audience, 

but in fact it is unlikely that they did so. The homily by 

Haymo discussed above deserves close attention here. There is also 

a homily on the Gospel reading of the marriage feast of Cana by 

Heiric of Auxerre. The question is: were these homilies used for 

popular preaching? The great specialist on the homilies of the Auxerre 

school believed that they were for private devotion, at least 

The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, Being the Lives of SS. Willibrord, 

Boniface, Sturm, Leoba and Lebuin, together with the Hodoeporicon of St. Willibald 

and a Selection from the Correspondence of St. Boniface, ed. and trans. C. H. Talbot 

(London etc., 1954), 138. 

Heirici Autissiodorensis homiliae per circulum anni, ed. R. Quadri (Corpus Christianorum 

Continuatio Mediaevalis, 116; Turnhout, 1992), homily 1. 20, pp. 160–8. 

The homilies of Remigius of Auxerre printed in Migne, PL 131. 865–932, do not 

include a sermon on the marriage feast of Cana pericope.

26 Chapter 1 

at first. Heiric’s scholarly editor echoed his sentiments. Jean 

Leclercq too believed that the homiliaries of the School of Auxerre 

‘were used, except in exceptional cases, neither for the [monastic] 

oce, nor for the mass, but for devotion’—i.e. private devotion, 

not popular preaching. It would be rash to exclude the possibility 

of the redeployment of these works for popular preaching. Still, 

if that was not the original intention, and if Europe was not exactly 

full of parish priests whose Latin was good enough to adapt 

homiliaries with ease from Latin into the vernacular and for the 

needs of a lay audience, one must wonder how large a lay public 

the marriage feast of Cana sermons in these compilations ever 

reached. 

Similar considerations apply to the homiliary of Paul the Deacon. 

This was commissioned by Charlemagne, who approved it and 

ordered its publication. However, he probably did not see it as a 

tool for popular preaching. His idea in commissioning the work 

was to make available ‘a series of readings from the works of the 

Fathers for use at the night oce of the church’ (Smetana, loc. cit.): 

an essentially clerical liturgical ritual. 

So collections which look like obvious starting points for a history 

of the impact of marriage symbolism on the lay world turn out 

not to have been intended for the laity at all, at least by those who 

brought them into being. It is worth quoting here the comment 

of Thomas Amos, especially since he is in general a ‘maximalist’ 

about preaching in the Carolingian world as well as the scholar who 

has examined the whole problem most thoroughly: ‘The collection 

of Paul the Deacon and the works of the Auxerre masters were not 

‘Ils sont d’abord destin‹es ›a l’usage priv‹e’ (H. Barr‹e, Les Hom‹eliaires carolingiens 

de l’‹ecole d’Auxerre: authenticit‹e, inventaire, tableaux comparatifs, initia (Studi 

e testi, 225; Vatican City, 1962), 140. 

‘Dopo la prima generazione di omeliari cosidetti “patristici” come quelli de 

Alano di Farfa o di Paolo Diacono, si arriva, passando da Smaragdo di St. Mihiel, 

Rabano Mauro e le composizioni bavaresi a una nuova generazione di raccolte 

omiletiche non pi ›u direttamente destinate alla predicazione, ma piuttosto e in primo 

luogo alla lettura privata. . . . ›E in questo nuovo genere dove i due celebri scolastici 

di S. Germano di Auxerre, Aimone ed Eirico, faranno valere tutta la loro tecnica 

esegetica’ (Heirici . . . homiliae,ed.Quadri,x–xi). 

J. Leclercq, ‘Pr‹eface’ to R. Gr‹egoire, Les Hom‹eliaires du Moyen Âge: inventaire 

et analyse des manuscrits (Rerum Ecclesiasticarum Documenta, series maior, Fontes, 

6; Rome, 1966), vi. 

C. L. Smetana, ‘Paul the Deacon’s Patristic Anthology’, in P. E. Szarmach and 

B. F. Hupp‹e(eds.),The Old English Homily and its Backgrounds (Albany, NY, 1978), 

75–97 at 76.


intended for popular audiences. The first of those was liturgical in 

nature, designed for the use of cathedral clergy during the oces, 

while the last was monastic in nature, intended for private or group 

study and meditation.’ 

The homiliary of Smaragdus of St Mihiel (d. after 825) does contain 

a homily on our marriage feast pericope; according to Amos 

it was written for ‘private meditation’. He adds that it ‘came from 

and was intended for a monastic milieu’ (ibid. 199). This opinion 

carries much weight. 

A set of ‘Cat‹ech›eses celtiques’ discovered by Andr‹e Wilmart in 

MS Vatican Library Reg. Lat. 49 does contain a homiletic commentary 

on the marriage feast of Cana. At first sight this looks 

promising. On closer examination the quantity of marriage symbolism 

turns out to be fairly exiguous. 

I have also drawn a blank with the following sets of homilies 

or sermons, in that they they seem not to deal with the marriage 

feast of Cana, the natural locus for marriage symbolism in a sermon 

collection: 

Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’, 12 n. 6. 

Migne, PL 102. 84–90. 

Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’, 198–9. 

Analecta reginensia: extraits des manuscrits latins de la Reine Christine conserv‹es 

au Vatican, ed. A. Wilmart (Studi e testi, 59; Vatican City, 1933), ‘III Cat‹ech›eses 

celtiques’, 29–112. Wilmart’s extract vii from this manuscript is a commentary on 

2 John: 1–11, the marriage feast of Cana narrative. 

The passages are so short that they may be quoted (I run Wilmart’s paragraphs 

together): ‘DIE TERTIO: dies tertius legem tertiam sig(nificat), in qua 

Christus et aeclesia copulati sunt, quando ad illam uenit post tribulationem fidei 

trinitatis. NUPTIAE FACTAE SUNT: idest copulatio Christi est et aecclesiae, de 

qua sal(uator) dixit: OSCULETUR ME AB OSCULO ORIS SUI. IN CA(NAM) 

GAL(ILAEAE), id est in aeclesia in mundo constituta. Chanan enim domus epularum 

interpretatur, quod significat aeclesiam, in qua aepulae Christi per orationem 

Sanctorum praeparantur, ut ipse dicit: DOMUS MEA DOMUS ORATIONIS 

VOCABITUR . . .’ (74). There follows the interpretation of the Hebrew names 

‘Chanan’ and ‘Galilea’. Here the connection with marriage symbolism is rather exiguous 

and insubstantial. Then: ‘ET ERAT IBI MATER IHESU. Rogatus autem 

et Ihesus uenire ad nuptias cum discipulis suis ad nuptias uenit, idest ad copula(tionem) 

sibi aeclesiae catholicae quae erat sponsa eius, quia demancipatum diaboli 

eruens dedit ei dotem. Nam tribuit ei pignus, idest spiritum sanctum, nec 

gratis eam eruit, sed pretio sancti sanguinis sui redimit’ (75). There is a little 

more further on: ‘Sponsus autem in postremo a·erens uinum optimum significat 

Christum praedicantem euangelium post legem et profe(tas), qui est sponsus 

aecclesiae catholicae, cuius filii sunt omnes fideles. Item architriclinus figura est 

eorum omnium qui prius nesciunt uerbi dei uinum et postea bibunt, ut Paulus fuit’ 

(78). That is about all the marriage symbolism there is in the passage printed by 

Wilmart.

28 Chapter 1 

å a homily sermo de conscientia printed by Roger Reynolds; 

å the homilies in XIV hom‹elies, ed.Mercier; 

å the pseudo-Bede collection of homilies (to judge from the 

manuscript I used); 

å the thirty-three sermons surviving in MS Cracow, Capitular 

Library 43 (to judge by the thorough sermon-by-sermon analysis 

of them by Pierre David); 

å the homilies attributed to Eligius; 

å the homilies attibuted to Boniface; 

å the homilies written by Rhabanus Maurus for Bishop Haistulf 

of Metz; 

å the ‘Bouhot–Folliet’ Carolingian sermon collection; 

å the ‘Saint P›ere de Chartres’ homiliary; 

å The ‘Newberry Library Homiliary’; 

R. E. Reynolds, ‘The Pseudo-Augustinian “Sermo de Conscientia” and the 

Related Canonical “Dicta sancti Gregorii papae”’, Revue b‹en‹edictine, 81 (1971), 

310–17 at 316–17. 

XIV hom‹elies du IXE si›ecle d’un auteur inconnu de l’Italie du nord ,ed.P.Mercier 

(Paris, 1970). 

On the pseudo-Bede collection see Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian 

Sermon’, 212, 231–2 n. 63. To check this collection I used MS Oxford, 

Bodleian Library Laud. Misc. 427. 

P. David, ‘Un recueil de conf‹erences monastiques irlandaises du viiiE si›ecle: 

notes sur le manuscrit de la biblioth›eque du chapitre de Cracovie’, Revue b‹en‹edictine, 

49 (1937), 62–89; cf. Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’, 

210–11. 

Migne, PL 87. 593–654. On this collection see Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature 

of the Carolingian Sermon’, 208–9, 230 n. 48. 

Migne, PL 89. 843–72; see Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian 

Sermon’, 207–8, 229 nn. 40–4. 


Sermon’, 203, 227–8 nn. 26–7. 

See J.-P. Bouhot, ‘Un sermonnaire carolingien’, Revue d’histoire des textes, 4 

(1974), 181–223; G. Folliet, ‘Deux nouveaux t‹emoins du Sermonnaire carolingien 

r‹ecemment reconstitu‹e’, Revue des ‹etudes augustiniennes, 23 (1977), 155–98 at 181– 

98; Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’, 211, 231 n. 59; 

Migne, PL, suppl. 2. 1234–5. 

There is no sermon on the ‘Nuptiae’ pericope for Epiphany, to judge from 

Barr‹e’sanalysisinLes Hom‹eliaires, 17–24 and table of incipits; on this homiliary 

see also Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’, 213, 232 

n. 64. 

To judge by the list of incipits in M. P. Cunningham, ‘Contents of the Newberry 

Library Homiliarium’, Sacris erudiri, 7 (1955), 267–301 at 298–300; on this 

homiliary see also Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’, 213, 

232 n. 66.


å the sermon for Epiphany found by ‹Etaix in a homiliary written 

in Luxeuil script; 

å the sermons on the Christian life from MSS Verdun 64 and 

Munich, Clm. 12612edited by Morin in 1905 (though there is 

interesting material on marriage in the literal sense in these); 

å a homily on tithes and fasting (in other respects rather significant); 

å a lengthy sermon by Agobard of Lyons (apart from a short 

passage); 

å Atto of Vercelli’s sermons edited in Migne; 

å the florilegium in MS Montpellier H308, put together by 

Florus of Lyons; 

å the sermon on St Judocus by Abbot Lupus of Ferri›eres; 

R. ‹Etaix, ‘Sermon pour l’ ‹Epiphanie tir‹e d’un homiliaire en ‹Ecriture de Luxeuil’, 

Revue b‹en‹edictine, 81 (1971), 7–13. 

D. G. Morin, ‘Textes in‹edits relatifs au symbole et ›a laviechr‹etienne’, Revue 

b‹en‹edictine, 22 (1905), 505–24 at 515–19 and 519–23. 

Notably, from the Verdun manuscript sermon: ‘Nullus homo praesumat cumcupinam 

habere: quia quamdiu cumcupinam habet homo, deum contra se iratum 

habet, quia deus uxorem dixit habere, non cumcupinam. Nullus homo se praesumat 

cum comatre sua aut parente propinqua aut filiastra aut nouerca aut cognata aut deo 

sacrata ad uxorem sociatam: quia propter ista mala opera uenit ira dei super uos . . . 

Ille homo qui uxorem suam dimiserat propter fornicationis causam et aliam sociauerat, 

dimittat illam uxorem quam postea priserat, et agat paenitentiam propter 

peccata sua: quia si hoc non fecerit, non potest penitentiam fructuosam agere. Uxores 

uestras in Christi amore diligite: quia qui uxorem habuit, et dimiserat illam 

propter se ipsam, si despecta fuerit, damnatus erit in die iudicii: quia talem uxorem 

te uoluit deus dare, talem tibi dedit. Et uos, feminae, diligite maritos uestros, et 

amate illos in Christi amore’ (ibid. 516–17). Note the idea that marriages are made 

in heaven. 


Sermon’, 217, 234 n. 86. 


Sermon’, 204, 228 n. 31; the few lines of marriage symbolism in this long 

sermon are as follows: ‘Ostendit etiam caput exaltatum ad quantam sublimitatem 

elevat corpus suum, et unitatem capitis et corporis, sponsi videlicet et sponsae. 

Unde dicitur: Induit me vestimentis salutis, et indumento justitiae circumdedit me 

quasi sponsum decoratum corona, et quasi sponsam ornatam monilibus suis. Seenim 

dixit sponsum, se sponsam. Haec tanta unitas est illud inaestimabile et ine·abile 

bonum, quod nec oculus vidit, nec auris audivit, nec in cor hominis ascendit, quod 

praeparavit Deus diligentibus se; cum Agnus ille est sponsus gregis sui, pastor 

ovium suarum; et qui est agnus in passione, leo in resurrectione . . .’ (Migne, PL 

104. 273). Migne, PL 134. 833–60. 

The florilegium is analysed in C. Charlier, ‘Une ¥uvre inconnue de Florus 

de Lyon: la collection “de fide” de Montpellier’, Traditio, 8 (1952). 81–109 at 

81–5; cf. Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’, 204, 228 

n. 32. 

See Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’, 205, 228 n. 34,

30 Chapter 1 

å the homilies of Gregory the Great (much used for preaching 

in the early Middle Ages). 

One may probably add MS Laon, Biblioth›eque Municipale 265. 

I have not seen this directly but there is a fairly full analysis in 

a study of Laon Cathedral School by John Contreni, which does 

not suggest that it contains marriage symbolism, apart perhaps 

from a few lines which are not enough to a·ect the argument being 

developed here. Of the ‘Mondsee Homiliary’ (of Abbot Lantperhtus 

of St Michael of Mondsee) only the summer portion has 

survived (the marriage feast of Cana reading comes in the winter). 

One cannot exclude the possibility that these collections contain 

some marriage symbolism in other places. I have mostly worked 

from beginnings of sermons (incipits) in compiling the list in the 

preceding paragraph, and it is always conceivable that pockets of 

marriage symbolism lurk in the body of the sermons or homilies, 

without the incipit giving a clue, as is the case with the fifteen lines 

or so of spousal symbolism in the last of the ‘five sermons of Abbo’ 

of St-Germain printed in Migne, or with paragraphs 4 and 5 of 

MS Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 3883, transcribed 

below as Document 1. 1. WemayalsonotethataWolfenb•uttel 

collection analysed by Reginald Gr‹egoire contains a sermon by Augustine, 

again not on the Cana reading, where marriage symbolism 

is an important part of the structure. Even so, it is hard to ima- 

citing W. Levison, ‘Eine Predigt des Lupus von Ferrieres’, in id., Aus rheinischer 

und fr•ankischer Fr•uhzeit (D •usseldorf, 1947), 561–4 (not seen, but I have read the 

sermon in MS BL Royal 8. B. XIV, fos. 131V–133V). 

DeLeeuw, ‘Gregory the Great’s “Homilies on the Gospels” in the Early Middle 

Ages’. Marriage symbolism is only rather slightly represented, to judge by the old 

but full index: see Migne, PL 76. 1414. 

Analysis of the manuscript in J. J. Contreni, The Cathedral School of Laon from 

850 to 930: Its Manuscripts and Masters (Munich, 1978), 130–3. In his list of the 

contents of this composite manuscript he includes (131) ‘texts on matrimony and 

baptism, an excerpt from Isidore of Seville’s De ecclesiasticis ociis’. Contreni does 

not give a reference, but this work by Isidore does have a section on marriage at 

2. 20, and this includes short passages of marriage symbolism, for which see Migne, 

PL 83. 810, 812–13. 

Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’, 203–4. 

For the five sermons, see Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian 

Sermon’, 206, 229 nn. 36–7, and Migne, PL 132. 761–78. The passage in question 

is at 775. 9–24. 

Augustine, sermon 238, Migne, PL 38. 1125–6: see R. Gr‹egoire, ‘La collection


gine that this would substantially a·ect the shape of our imaginary 

graph charting the prominence of marriage as metaphor. 

Marriage symbolism in early ‘marriage feast of Cana’ homilies: some 

exceptional examples 

A few surviving homiliaries do have sermons on the marriage feast 

of Cana pericope containing some marriage symbolism. Two of 

them are transcribed below, as Documents 1. 2 and 1. 3. There 

are some good passages of marriage symbolism, which are short 

enough to be quoted. We may begin with the following from the 

‘Bavarian Homiliary’ (Document 1. 1)—not, however, from the 

pericope of the marriage feast of Cana, which would be the usual 

venue for marriage doctrine and symbolism in sermons of the last 

three medieval centuries. It is especially interesting for the way 

it combines commentary on marriage in the literal sense with the 

symbolic meaning of marriage: 

Therefore, although a virgin is ranked at one hundred, and a married 

woman at thirty, nevertheless a chaste [married] woman is better than a 

proud virgin. For that chaste woman, serving her husband, has a rank of 

thirty: for the proud virgin no rank at all will be left. In her is fulfilled the 

words of the Psalmist (Ps. 17: 28): ‘You will save the humble people, and 

you will bring down the eyes of the proud.’ And since St Paul calls the 

whole catholic Church a virgin, seeing in her not only the virgins in body, 

but [also] wanting the minds of all to be free from corruption: when he 

says this: ‘I have prepared you for one husband, to present you as a chaste 

virgin’, the souls not only of holy nuns, but also of all men and women, 

if they have had the will to keep, with chastity of body, virginity in those 

aforesaid five senses, should not doubt that they are brides of Christ. For 

Christ is to be understood as the bridegroom not of bodies but of souls. 

And therefore, dearest brethren: both men and women, both boys and 

girls, if they keep their virginity until they are married, and do not corrupt 

their souls through these five senses, that is, sight, hearing, taste, smell, or 

touch, while they use them well, on the day of judgement, when the gates 

are opened, will be worthy to enter into the eternal marriage chamber of the 

bridegroom. But those who both corrupt their bodies before marriage by 

some adulterous union, and afterwards do not cease to wound their souls 

homil‹etique du Ms. Wolfenb•uttel 4096’, Studi medievali, 3rd ser., 14 (1973), 259–86 

at 276 no. 41, and Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’, 214 

at nn. 71–2. 

Cf.Mark4:20. 

prepared] espoused in Vulgate, but it may not be a scribal error

32 Chapter 1 

by living evilly throughout their lives, by hearing evilly, by speaking evilly, 

if a fruitful and worthy penance does not provide a cure, will shout out 

without justification after the gates have been closed: ‘Lord, Lord, open 

for us’ (Mt. 25: 11; cf. Luke 13: 25).—‘Amen I tell you, I know you not 

whence you are’ (Mt. 25: 12; Luke 13: 25). (Document 1. 1. 4) 

There may be other such passages in early medieval homiliaries, 

since (as already noted) I have concentrated my search on Cana 

pericope homiliaries (influenced by the late medieval pattern), but 

I would be surprised if they are very plentiful. The Cana pericope 

of the same ‘Bavarian Homiliary’ does include a couple of relevant 

passages. Near the beginning of the sermon we find: 

It says: ‘There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee and the mother of Jesus 

was there. Jesus and his disciples were invited to the marriage.’ It is great 

humility in our Lord that he deigned to come to a human marriage. But 

yet, in that same place he produced a great mystery. 

Therefore, there came to a marriage celebrated in the carnal way on 

earth our Lord and Saviour, who descended from heaven to earth to join 

the Church to himself by a spiritual love. His marriage bed, indeed, was 

the womb of the uncorrupted Virgin, in which God was joined to human 

nature, and from which, when he was born, he came out to join the Church 

of the faithful to himself. But he had always from the beginning of the 

world been invited to this marriage by holy and just men, who begged him 

with all their might to carry out the redemption of the human race that he 

had promised. (Document 1. 2. 1–2) 

The remainder of the sermon concentrates on other parts of the 

Gospel reading: the transformation of the water into wine, the 

conversation between Jesus and his mother and its meaning, and 

the six water jars which provide a vehicle for surveying the six ages 

of world history. 

Some more quotable and relevant passages can be found in the 

homily on the Cana reading in the ‘Beaune Homiliary’. It starts 

with marriage symbolism: 

Dearest brethren, we have heard when the holy Gospel was read that 

on the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee. What is that 

marriage, if not our winning? What are those celebrations but the joys of 

our salvation? They are done on the third day, because in the third period 

of the world the delight of this celebration occurred. For there was one 

period of nature, and the other of the grace of heaven, in which Christ, 

Probably in the sense of ‘Christ’s winning of us’, rather than ‘our gain’.


invited to the marriage, revealed himself by the power of his works as God 

hidden in man, and from the unstable history of the heathen united to 

himself a permanent wife. But among the music provided by the prophets 

to celebrate the wedding, the wine of grace was lacking. This the mother 

raised reproachfully with her son. (Document 1. 3. 1) 

Marriage symbolism reappears a little later as the theme of the six 

ages of the world is introduced—an interesting combination of two 

motifs with no necessary connection: 

Those six water jars, however, signify the six ages, and these ages continue 

to stay like empty vessels, unless filled by Christ. In each and every one of 

them there were not lacking prophecies of the bride and bridegroom, and 

these, made clear in Christ, aimed at the salvation of all the nations. 

In the first water jar, who is symbolized by Adam and Eve, if not Christ 

and the Church? And who is shown in the second, in which Noah commanded 

the mystical ark, if not the same Christ on the wood of the cross, 

joining to himself as bride the Church from all the nations? (Document 

1. 3. 3–4) 

After a rapid survey of the ages of the world, there is another 

passage of marriage symbolism, this time launched by the remark 

in the Gospel reading that the water jars held ‘two or three measures 

apiece’: 

To Christ, indeed, and his intervention on behalf of the nations, pertained 

the prophecies of the six water jars, each of which held twofold or threefold 

measures, and are signified in the foreskin and circumcision, or in the three 

divisions of the world, since Christ the bridegroom came to choose for 

himself a single bride out of every people and every kind of men, and for 

her he mixed the wine of grace, a wine which is pronounced good by the 

wine steward, that is, the chorus of holy doctors, and preferred to all the 

pleasures of the previous age . . . (Document 1. 3. 5) 

These are nice passages, but they are not enough to change the general 

impression of a meagre crop, especially compared to the last 

three medieval centuries, where there are extremely large numbers 

of sermons on the marriage feast of Cana pericope, a high proportion 

of them with much to say both about human marriage proper 

and about what it symbolizes. 

England: a special case 

The biggest exception to our generalization about the early Middle 

Ages is England, where homilies were produced in the vernacular.

34 Chapter 1 

This may have been because the Latin of the English clergy was 

even worse on average than elsewhere—a plausible position though 

hard to prove. Whatever the reason, vernacular homilies would 

surely have been much more accessible to the lower clergy. They 

are easily accessible to the historian too, since the content of the 

corpus has been thoroughly indexed. 

Perhaps the earliest relevant passage is from the Blickling Homilies. 

(These are one of two collections of vernacular Anglo-Saxon 

homilies whose date, setting in life, and audience all seem uncertain.) 

In a sermon for the Annunciation we find the following: 

‘the Heavenly King shall prepare thy womb as a bridal chamber for 

his son, and also great joy in the bride-chamber . . .’ And again, 

‘Let us rejoice then in the union of God and men, and in the union 

of the bridegroom and the bride, that is Christ and holy church.’ 

This is marriage symbolism, but there is apparently not much more 

of it in vernacular collections other than ªlfric’s. ªlfric uses marriage 

symbolism in several places, one of them his homily on the 

marriage feast of Cana Gospel reading. 

Pastoral delivery systems in the early Middle Ages 

The vernacular tradition in England raises a question about the 

Continent and indeed about the impact of Latin texts in England 

itself. Were most laypeople near enough to a church to have even 

the possibility of hearing regular sermons? Would the mass of the 

clergy have been capable, suciently Latin-literate, to use Latin 

R. DiNapoli, An Index of Theme and Image to the Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon 

Church, Comprising the Homilies of ªlfric, Wulfstan, and the Blickling and Vercelli 

Codices (Hockwold cum Wilton, 1995): for marriage, see pp. 62–3. 

C. D. Wright, ‘Vercelli Homilies XI–XIII and the Anglo-Saxon Benedictine 

Reform: Tailored Sources and Implied Audiences’, in C. Muessig (ed.), Preacher, 

Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages (Leiden etc., 2002), 203–27 at 205–6. See 

also especially M. Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England 

(Cambridge, 1990): ‘we have no unambiguous proof that the anonymous works 

do belong to the pre-reform period, rather than to a date closer to the dates of 

compilation of the manuscripts in which they are found’ (264); she cautions against 

assigning the anonymous homilies to the pre-reform period (264–6). 

The Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century, from the Marquis of Lothian’s 

Unique MS. A.D. 971, ed. and trans. R. Morris (London, 1880), 8. 

Ibid. 10. 

See DiNapoli, Index of Theme and Image, 63, under ‘the Church is Christ’s 

bride’. 

For a commentary on this homily with analysis of its sources see M. Godden, 

ªlfric’s Catholic Homilies: Introduction, Commentary and Glossary, ed. M. Godden 

(Early English Text Society, SS 18; Oxford, 2000), 370–80.


sermons intended for popular preaching? Now pastoral provision 

in the early Middle Ages is a low-certainty area. The map of the 

spread of the parish system has not yet been definitively drawn, and 

there was almost certainly significant regional variation. Scholars 

can provide respectable reasons for almost diametrically opposite 

positions: one can believe in massive pastoral provision and one can 

doubt if there was much, outside the radius of a small number of 

centres. There has been a tendency recently to take a ‘maximalist’ 

view. On this view, substantial ‘mother churches’ in one way or 

another provided pastoral services to large areas, and did so quite 

eciently. The communities of clergy in these mother churches 

may have been quite well educated. 

The tendency to show that there could have been a lot of pastoral 

provision before the parish has done good by stopping scholars 

from taking the contrary for granted, but the question remains: how 

ecient was the delivery system for turning written Latin sermons 

into vernacular popular preaching? Here one should remember a 

famous passage of Bede about the need for everyone to know the 

Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed. He tells Archbishop Egbert 

to 

[m]ake the ignorant people—that is, those who are acquainted with no 

language but their own—say them in their own language and repeat them 

assiduously. This ought to be done, not only in the case of laymen, that is, 

those still leading a secular life, but also of those clerics or monks who are 

ignorant of the Latin language. . . . On this account I have myself often 

given to many ignorant priests both of these, the Creed and the Lord’s 

Prayer, translated into the English language. 

Many priests whose Latin was so bad that they could not translate 

the Lord’s Prayer? The implications are considerable. Only the very 

simplest model sermons or homilies would have been helpful to the 

average priest, and for some of these ill-educated priests the Latin 

of even the simplest model sermon would have been challenging. 

So how much got through to the laity? 

Cf.W.Davies,Small Worlds: The Village Community in Early Medieval Brittany 

(London, 1988), 25 and n. 44. 

See notably, for the British Isles, J. Blair and R. Sharpe (eds.), Pastoral Care 

before the Parish (Leicester etc., 1992). 

John Blair reminded me of this passage. 

Letter of Bede to Archbishop Egbert, translated in English Historical Documents 

c. 500–1042, ed. D. Whitelock (London, 1955), no. 170, pp. 735–45 at 737–8.

36 Chapter 1 

It is worth listing the possibilities in ascending order of improbability. 

That some Latin sermons written for popular preaching 

were actually preached from monasteries or pre-parish pastoral 

centres is almost certain. That such texts were available in most 

pre-parish centres is much less certain. That there was a critical 

mass of Latin educated priests in most pre-parish centres is about 

equally unlikely, though not impossible. That most pre-parish pastoral 

centres had both a critical mass of Latin educated priests and 

model popular sermons in Latin for them to use is less likely still. 

That they prepared sermons from these Latin texts every Sunday 

and took them out to the surrounding villages is even less likely, and 

we may note that the Sunday on which the marriage feast of Cana 

reading occurred was not a major feast. Add to this accumulation 

of improbabilities the earlier finding, that little of the surviving 

corpus of popular early medieval sermons is about marriage symbolism, 

and the probability of such symbolism being preached to 

large numbers of laypeople in the early medieval centuries looks 

remote. 

‘Maximalists’ about pastoral care and preaching in the early 

Middle Ages should not regard this as an attack on their position. 

The point at issue is the impact of one particular theme, marriage 

symbolism. It may very well be that many quasi-monastic centres 

reached out to large areas of the countryside surrounding them, 

and evangelized energetically. 

The England of ªlfric apart, however, it is far from clear that 

there was much marriage preaching accessible to laypeople until the 

end of the twefth century. That century is a great age of preaching, 

but it was predominantly directed towards clerics, notably monks 

and canons. No doubt a careful search for popular sermons such 

as Amos conducted for the Carolingian era would yield a significant 

number of Latin texts designed to serve as models for popular 

preaching. Whether many of them would contain a lot of marriage 

symbolism is much more doubtful. The natural place to look for 

such symbolism is preaching on the text ‘There was a marriage in 

Cana of Galilee’: Nuptiae factae sunt in Chana Galileae. Migne’s 

Patrologia Latina contains relatively few sermons on this text, no- 

In a personal communication John Blair has raised the possibility of lively 

‘charismatic’ vernacular preaching, not too much tied to Latin sources, in pre-Viking 

England. 

M. de Reu, La Parole du Seigneur: moines et chanoines m‹edi‹evaux prêchant 

l’Ascension et le Royaume des Cieux (Brussels etc., 1996), 228–9.


tably few from the twelfth century. The homily on the marriage 

feast of Cana Gospel reading by Bruno of Segni (d. 1123) does 

not contain a great deal of marriage symbolism, but concentrates 

mainly on the symbolism of the water jars that figure in the Cana 

reading. 

To recapitulate: in the early medieval centuries and up until 

c.1200, there was no mass communication of marriage symbolism, 

or at least, no significant evidence of anything like that has come to 

light so far. With the thirteenth century everything changes, even 

before mendicant preachers made their mark. 

(c) Mass Communication in the Age of the Friars 

Model sermons and oral preaching 

Any given model sermon could be preached ‘live’ again and again 

to di·erent audiences, so that the model sermons written on parchment 

are the tip of an ‘oral’ iceberg: this is one half of the proposition 

that preaching was a form of mass communication, the less controversial 

half. The more controversial half is that surviving sermon 

manuscripts are the tip of an iceberg of lost codices and quires. 

This chapter is in a sense a remote sequel to a 1985 study which 

tried among other things to show how model sermons worked. 

Synthesizing and reinforcing a scholarly consensus, it argued that 

The audience and ‘setting in life’ of Bruno’s homilies have been cautiously 

characterized by his historian: ‘Les morceaux qui ne se trouvent pas dans les commentaires 

sont de la main de Bruno, semble-t-il. Cet ensemble o·re donc un certain 

int‹erêt: il prouve qu’un commentaire ex‹eg‹etique ‹etait jug‹e apte›a une utilisation 

pastorale, bien qu’il soit tr›es probable que cet hom‹eliaire de Bruno n’‹etait pas destin‹e 

›a une c‹el‹ebration liturgique, mais plutôt ›a une lecture publique ou priv‹ee’ (R. 

Gr‹egoire, Bruno de Segni, ex‹eg›ete m‹edi‹evale et th‹eologien monastique (Centro Italiano 

di Studi sull’alto medioevo, 3; Spoleto, 1965), 87; and de Reu, La Parole, 228). 

‘S. Brunonis Episcopi Signiensis Homilia xviii, Dominica II post Epiphaniam’, 

in Migne, PL 165. 767 and 461–6. 

D. L. d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Di·used from Paris before 

1300 (Oxford, 1985), chs. 2 and 3, and passim. 

A particularly important influence on the field in general was L.-J. Bataillon, 

‘Approaches to the Study of Medieval Sermons’, Leeds Studies in English, ns 11 

(1980), 19–35, repr. in id., La Pr‹edication au XIIIe si›ecle en France et Italie: ‹etudes et 

documents (Aldershot, 1993), no. i (most of the other articles in the same collection 

of reprints are relevant in one way or another). See now N. B‹eriou, ‘Les sermons 

latins apr›es 1200’, in B. M. Kienzle (ed.), The Sermon (Typologie des sources du 

Moyen Âge Occidental, 81–3; Turnhout, 2000), 363–447, esp. 405–9. The same 

author’s magisterial L’Av›enement des ma^§tres de la Parole: la pr‹edication ›a Paris au 

XIIIe si›ecle (2 vols.; Collection des ‹Etudes Augustiniennes, S‹erie Moyen Âge et

38 Chapter 1 

model sermons were readily available to Franciscans, Dominicans, 

and similar preachers in manuscript books and quires. These books 

were often very small and portable and can be called pocket books 

or vade-mecum books. The number of such portable books to 

have survived is noteworthy, expecially in view of the huge loss 

rate of manuscripts, above all the sort friars were likely to carry 

around with them (on this see the following section). These model 

sermons could be preached again and again by the same or different 

preachers. The Latin of the model could be turned into any 

vernacular, so a book of model sermons could be used in any part 

of Europe. 

Most of this holds good in principle for popular model sermons of 

the earlier Middle Ages. Yet it is a di·erent world. The respectable 

list of early medieval popular sermons put together by Thomas 

Amos and others pales into total insignificance when one looks at the 

nine volumes (excluding indexes) of J. B. Schneyer’s Repertorium. 

Each volume lists only the beginnings and ends of sermons and 

the call numbers of manuscripts, but requires hundreds of pages— 

sometimes around a thousand—to convey that basic information: 

and this just for sermons between 1150 and 1350. We have seen 

that few popular sermons on the marriage feast of Cana Gospel 

reading survive from the early Middle Ages, whereas the index 

of the Repertorium lists some 280 for these two centuries alone. 

Furthermore, there were almost certainly many more preachers 

with the education to get good use out of model sermons. Richard 

Southern calculated that there were around 28,000 Franciscans 

and 12,000 Dominicans in the early fourteenth century, and a great 

many of these would have been preachers. 

Since model sermons were meant to be reused, and there was 

no prejudice against derivative preaching except to an ‹elite congregation, 

one may infer that many oral events corresponded to each 

written sermon. Preachers would not have to follow the model ex- 

Temps Modernes, 31; Paris, 1998) concentrates on sermons actually preached and 

transmitted by reportatio. 

D. L. d’Avray (with A. C. de la Mare), ‘Portable Vademecum Books Containing 

Franciscan and Dominican Texts’, in A. C. de la Mare and B. C. Barker-Benfield 

(eds.), Manuscripts at Oxford: An Exhibition in Memory of Richard William Hunt . . . 

on Themes Selected and Described by Some of his Friends (Exhibition catalogue, 

Bodleian Library; Oxford, 1980), 60–4. 

R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 

1970), 285.


actly, and almost certainly mixed and matched their contents with 

material from other preaching aids like exemplum collections and 

collections of saints’ lives. Yet even if one cannot assume a precise 

correlation between any one model sermon and any one live 

preaching event, there was probably a fair correspondence between 

the aggregate content of widely di·used model sermon collections 

and the aggregate content of live preaching. It is the same with 

newspapers today. It would be hard to know the e·ect of any one 

tabloid topos on any one reader, but one can be fairly sure that the 

aggregate of newspaper articles on, say, immigration has an e·ect 

on the aggregate of attitudes in large sectors of the population, so 

that newspapers may be regarded as a social force. So too with 

model sermons in the Middle Ages. 

The ultimate audience would usually be lay. Not invariably. Some 

friars or other priests might simply read a book of sermons for pleasure 

or edification. When the sermons were by a famous man like 

Bonaventure, that might even be the normal usage. But with the 

general run of workaday sermon collections one can hardly see usage 

stopping with reading. On that hypothesis the instructions for 

preachers in sermons are hard to explain. When we do have prefaces, 

they make it clear that the sermon collections could indeed 

be designed to serve as models and tools for preaching: and this 

really settles the issue. Furthermore, however, many model sermons 

were not much more than divisions and scriptural authorities. 

These were definitely not just for reading. But if they were tools 

for preachers, there is no reason to doubt that the fuller sermons 

were too. Again, there are other genres of preaching aid: exempla, 

distinction collections, etc. Why should actual sermons not serve 

as a preaching aid? They provide structures to hold materials from 

other preaching aids together. 

Another proviso: model sermons might be used from time to time 

to preach not to lay but to clerical audiences in circumstances where 

As Robert Lerner wisely pointed out to me in a personal communication. 

D’Avray, Preaching of the Friars, 106–8. 

Ibid. 108–10; see now N. B‹eriou, ‘Les prologues de recueils de sermons latins 

du xiiE au xvE si›ecle’, in J. Hamesse (ed.), Les Prologues m‹edi‹evaux: actes du colloque 

international organis‹e par l’Academia Belgica et l’ ‹Ecole Franc«aisedeRomeavecle 

concours de la F.I.D.E.M. (Rome, 26–28 mars 1998) (Textes et ‹etudes du Moyen 

Âge, 15; Turnhout, 2000) 395–426 at 414–16. 

B‹eriou, ‘Les prologues’, sect. II.i; R. H. Rouse and M. A. Rouse, Preachers, 

Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland 

(Studies and Texts, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 47; Toronto, 1979).

40 Chapter 1 

the listeners were unlikely to care about intellectual property. 

However, it would be natural for a preacher to think twice about 

using for (say) fellow Franciscans a sermon which members of his 

audience might have in a book of their own. Grosso modo, one 

may assume that the content of model sermons tells us about the 

content of preaching to the laity. We cannot tell which sentences 

of any given model sermon were used on any given occasion, but 

we can be fairly sure that themes and structures of thought which 

recur again and again in model sermons reached large numbers 

of laypeople at some time or another. Similarly, we cannot know 

what any one lay listener made of a sermon, but we can make very 

educated guesses about aggregate impact, or at least about whether 

a given idea was likely to be familiar to large numbers of people. 

Lost sermon manuscripts 

The present volume is the sequel to a 2001 study seeking among 

other things to demonstrate that marriage preaching belonged to a 

system of mass communication. The sermons edited there would 

have circulated in large numbers of manuscripts now lost (quite 

apart from the fact that any written version could be preached 

again and again to di·erent audiences). The number of lost manuscripts 

would seem to have been unconsciously but grossly underestimated. 

There are two connected theses: first, that the loss rate 

of manuscripts of this genre at least was a lot higher than most 

medievalists tend to suspect; and second, that not only professional 

scribes, but also Franciscans and Dominicans, copied sermon 

manuscripts to professional standards—so that they were available 

to confr›eres and were not just personal books. Thus we have a 

fact: that the number of written model sermons was greater than 

the large number surviving to an extent that has not been appreciated; 

and an explanation of how it was possible to put so many 

manuscripts into circulation before the invention of printing. 

The evidence is cumulative: recent discoveries about a massive 

destruction of ‘useless’ manuscripts to provide pieces of parchment 

for binders, whose business was expanding through the ceiling; 

the almost total disappearance of books from Franciscan and 

Academics in particular could in some circumstances think a great deal about 

intellectual property: B. Smalley, EnglishFriarsandAntiquityintheEarlyFourteenth 

Century (Oxford, 1960), 308. 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons.


Dominican libraries that must once have been very large; the utilitarian 

attitude to books; the book rules of the friars, quite di·erent 

from the conventions governing the libraries of Benedictine and 

Cistercian houses—rules that made attrition inevitable; the use of 

quaterni, unbound quires; and, finally, technical textual arguments 

that also point to large-scale losses. These arguments each have 

considerable force on their own, but they also converge towards the 

same conclusion—massive losses of sermon manuscripts. The convergence 

strengthens each individual argument, as is normal with 

evidence of the historical type. 

It should be noted that the argument has implications that go 

beyond the history of preaching. Model sermons were not the only 

books produced and then lost in enormous numbers. The arguments 

developed below relativize the whole notion of the print 

revolution (while showing that the pressure it put on binders led 

to destruction of manuscripts and a misleading impression today 

about the di·erence between the number of manuscripts and of 

printed books). However, these implications for other genres are 

Here I return to the case argued in Medieval Marriage Sermons, 15–30, in order 

to answer the arguments set out in Robert Lerner’s courteous but critical review 

in Speculum, 79 (2004), 163–5. First a clarification. I did not mean to say that only 

practising preachers would have made ‘nonconformist’ changes and that formal 

hands point to the existence of an industry. My point about nonconformist changes 

(see below) was that they show that there was a skilled and confident amateur 

labour force copying manuscripts—for the use of others as well as themselves— 

in addition to the production by commercial scribes. My aim at this point was 

not to demonstrate a massive loss rate (my arguments for that are quite di·erent) 

but to explain how it had been possible for so many manuscripts to be produced. 

So Lerner’s evidence that independent scribal variation can be found in all sorts 

of texts (not just sermons) is no objection to my argument, and indeed I made 

a similar point myself in Medieval Marriage Sermons, 23 n. 62. My argument 

about formal hands, too briefly made, was that confident variation was not confined 

to personal notebooks which would never be copied and which only one person 

could use: see Medieval Marriage Sermons, 25, ‘not the end of the line’. Since 

Lerner’s reading of my book will have reached more readers than the book itself, 

I must stress that his version of it contains misunderstandings, for which my overcompression 

is probably responsible. I further develop the arguments about mass 

communication in ‘Printing, Mass Communication and Religious Reformation: The 

Middle Ages and After’, in J. Crick and A. Walsham (eds.), TheUsesofScriptand 

Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge, 2004), 50–70. Note that there I analyse the arguments 

of Uwe Neddermeyer’s very important Von der Handschrift zum gedruckten Buch: 

Schriftlichkeit und Leseinteresse im Mittelalter und in der fr•uhen Neuzeit. Quantitative 

und qualitative Aspekte (2 vols.; Buchwissenschaftliche Beitr•age aus dem Deutschen 

Bucharchiv M•unchen, 61; Wiesbaden, 1998). I do not repeat this analysis here but 

it is important for the present argument: Neddermeyer has arguments for a lower 

loss rate which are ingenious but do not take into account the di·erence between 

the ways in which the friars and the older orders used books.

42 Chapter 1 

not the principal concern: and of course most other genres would 

not be further di·used by the oral ‘multiplier’ e·ect that has just 

been discussed. 

Binding and the great book massacre 

One of the stranger phenomena of book history is the great destruction 

of books around 1500. Destruction of books in the Reformation 

need not surprise us, but this elimination of a large part of the book 

stock had nothing to do with religious di·erences. The phenomenon 

was uncovered by Gerhardt Powitz in an essay that no historian 

of the transition from script to print can a·ord to ignore. Its implications 

for the present argument are considerable, and in fact they 

ought to a·ect the whole way we look at the impact of printing: 

hence the liberal quotations from a paper that could easily escape 

the attention of non-specialist readers. 

Old manuscript books were broken up to provide parchment to 

help bind more favoured books, according to Powitz, for parchment 

was in demand for binding, used for pastedowns, flyleaves, and in 

the structure of the spine. Thus, for instance: 

The Dominican house at Frankfurt possessed the Summa dictaminis of 

Guido Faba in a manuscript of the thirteenth century. Even towards the 

end of the fifteenth century the the librarian of the convent . . . gave 

the volume the call number N4and the ex-libris ‘fratrum predicatorum 

in Franckfordia’ [Dominicans in Frankfurt]. Not long after (around 

1500) the manuscript was cut up; remains of it can still be found in 

the bindings of incunables which belonged to the convent, among them 

the sheet with the call number and the ex-libris. (Powitz, ‘Libri inutiles’, 

300) 

Or again: 

new books in a modern form were appearing in an abundance hitherto 

unimaginable; in view of this, it was inevitable that a replacement of the 

textual foundations within genres, a change of repertoire, should take place. 

The sermon collections of Pierre de Reims and Jacques de Lausanne, neither 

of which got into print in the fifteenth century, were in the possession 

of the Frankfurt Dominican house in manuscripts of the thirteenth and 

fourteenth centuries. Around 1500 these preaching texts were recycled— 

G. Powitz, ‘Libri inutiles in mittelalterlichen Bibliotheken: Bemerkungen •uber 

Alienatio, Palimpsestierung und Makulierung’, Scriptorium, 50 (1996), 288–304. 

The key word is ‘Makulierung’, which I translate as ‘recycling’. I am very grateful 

to Marc-Aeilko Aris for drawing my attention to this article.


perhaps because of a preference for building up a collection of some of the 

printed preaching collections by other authors that were just coming on 

the market? (Powitz, ‘Libri inutiles’, 301–2, emphasis added) 

Unfashionable books were sacrificed in a frenetic period of bookbinding. 

Powitz writes of a 

great wave of recycling, which in the fifteenth century, and to be precise in 

the decades around 1500, burst over ecclesiastical libraries. It is a process 

of unprecedented intensity and one with highly influential consequences 

for the history of libraries: a very large proportion of the medieval manuscripts 

that had been successfully passed down to that point was destroyed 

within a few decades, at a stroke, just like that. (Powitz, ‘Libri inutiles’, 

299) 

Powitz calls this the ‘great work of destruction [gro¢e Zerst•orungswerk]’, 

the ‘book massacre [B•uchersterben]’ of the period 

around 1500 (ibid.). 

Why? The principal answer is that the invention of printing 

produced a flood of books that needed to be bound. However, 

this is not the sole explanation. For some reason, the period around 

1500 also saw the rebinding of many old manuscripts. So other 

old manuscripts were cannibalized to provide parchment for pastedowns 

etc. 

Demand for recycled manuscripts went through the ceiling, both 

in the in-house binderies of religious houses and also in the com- 

Together with ibid. n. 40: ‘Frankfurt a.M. StUB Fragm.lat. VIII 53 (Petrus 

Remensis); III 72 (Jacobus de Lausanna); vgl. auch Fragm.lat. X 27’. 

‘Die Kernfrage, die sich stellt, lautet: Wie konnte es in der Zeit um 1500 zu 

einer Makulierungswelle diesen Ausma¢es kommen?’ (ibid. 300). 

‘Als eine bestimmende Triebkraft ist ohne Zweifel die Einf•uhrung des Buchdrucks 

in Rechnung zu stellen, der gro¢e Medienwandel, dessen tiefgreifender, 

epochaler Charakter den Zeitgenossen seit etwa 1470/80 zunehmend bewu¢t geworden 

sein mu¢. . . . Nicht selten wird der Erwerb von Drucken mit dem Ausscheiden 

von Handschriften gleichen Inhalts Hand in Hand gegangen sein. Ein 

Beispiel: F •ur den Lateinunterricht der Klosterschule erwarben die Frankfurter 

Dominikaner zwischen 1485 und 1500 mindestens 20 gedruckte Exemplare des 

Doctrinale, der Versgrammatik des Alexander de Villa Dei. Vollst•andige Handschriften 

dieses Textes aus dem Frankfurter Kloster sind bezeichnenderweise nicht 

nachweisbar, wohl aber 10 Codices discissi . . . Dies k•onnten die Reste von Handschriften 

sein, die man bis zum Erwerb der Drucke benutzt hatte’ (ibid. 301). 

‘Zu der gleichen Zeit, als die in Mengen auf den Markt dr•angenden •altesten 

Drucke und die zun•achst weiterhin entstehenden Handschriften ihren ersten Einband 

erhielten, machten Kl•oster und Stifte sich daran, Tausende von •alteren B •uchern 

(also Handschriften) umzubinden’ (ibid. 302).

44 Chapter 1 

mercial city binderies. ‘The “looting” . . . was universal, wherever 

parchment was available’ (ibid. 303). 

Powitz’s revolutionary findings were anticipated in a very restricted 

domain by Neil Ker in his study of Oxford pastedowns, 

a study with such an antiquarian air that its implications for the 

history of the book were not properly realized. This too is a study 

of the recycling of manuscripts, revealing large-scale destruction of 

manuscripts, and making it clear that the pastedowns that survive 

must be a modest proportion of the number binders actually used: 

We can seldom collect together as much as the twentieth part of a complete 

book; often no more than a hundredth part, or even less. There is no 

reason to doubt that the binders used the whole of these books and many 

others now entirely lost. They will have used many thousands of leaves as 

wrappers of ephemeral notebooks, account books, and light-weight printed 

books and many thousands as pastedowns in bindings which no longer 

exist. (Ker, Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts, xii) 

Ker also points out (p. xi) that not one of the 265 philosophical 

books in the Merton College distribution for borrowing by the 

fellows of 1519 is extant, at least in the college library—the implication 

being that recycling for the benefit of binders has much to 

do with this. 

These borrowable philosophical books were only one sector of 

Merton’s magnificent library, and other sectors have survived very 

well. The same cannot be said for the libraries of the Franciscans 

and Dominicans in England. Their history shows that the 

modern distribution of manuscripts is an utterly unreliable guide 

to the medieval state of a·airs. It is possible to speak with some 

confidence thanks to the researches of Ker, Watson, Humphreys, 

Mynors, and of Richard and Mary Rouse. It is in fact astonishing 

‘Der auf diesen Voraussetzungen basierende Aufschwung des Buchbindewesens 

hat den Bedarf an Handschriftenmakulatur in die H•ohe schnellen lassen, und 

dies nicht nur im Bereich der kl•osterlichen und kirchlichen Hausbuchbindereien, 

sondern ebenso in den Buchbinderwerkst•atten des st•adtischen Gewerbes’ (ibid.). 

N. R. Ker, Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts Used as Pastedowns in Oxford 

Bindings, with a Survey of Oxford Binding c. 1515–1620 (Oxford Bibliographical 

Society Publications, ns 5; Oxford, 1954). 

N. R. Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books, 2nd 

edn. (London, 1964), and A. Watson, Supplement to the Second Edition (London, 

1987); K. W. Humphreys, The Friars’ Libraries (Corpus of British Medieval Library 

Catalogues; London, 1990); R. H. Rouse, M. A. Rouse, and R. A. B. Mynors, 

Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum veterum (Corpus of Medieval Library 

Catalogues; London, 1991).


how few manuscripts have survived from medieval Franciscan and 

Dominican libraries in England. 

Losses from mendicant libraries 

The case of the London Franciscan and Dominican convents conveys 

a warning to anyone who thinks that the modern pattern of 

survival is any kind of guide to the medieval situation. In a large 

Franciscan or Dominican convent one would expect a lot of manuscripts. 

The Dominican convent in London was large. In 1300, 92 

friars lived there according to a recent study. Of the few books 

surviving from their library, not one would be classed as a model 

sermon collection or preaching aid. 

It is the same with the Franciscans. In 1300 there would seem 

to have been 76 of them in London. Of the handful of surviving 

manuscripts from the library, one, the ‘Postillae’ of Bertrand de la 

Tour, could count as a model sermon collection. Another includes 

a few folios from a thirteenth-century sermon manuscript. Athird 

manuscript is a ‘vocabulary of the Bible’ and might count as a 

preaching aid if one stretched a point. 

Similarly with the Oxford Dominican house: according to the 

historian of the early Dominicans in England, the number of friars 

at Oxford ‘fluctuates . . . between 60 and 96’. Just three books 

have survived: Oxford, Merton College 132; Cambridge, Trinity 

College 347; and Oxford, Bodleian Lat. bib. d. 9. None of these 

seems to be a sermon manuscript. 

Rouse, Rouse, and Mynors, Registrum Anglie, cxlvii n. 66; Humphreys, The 

Friars’ Libraries, xx. 

J. R •ohrkasten, ‘Mendikantische Armut in der Praxis: Das Beispiel London’, 

in G. Melville and A. Kehnel (eds.), In proposito paupertatis: Studien zum Armutsverst•andnis 

bei den mittelalterlichen Bettelorden (Vita regularis: Ordnungen und 

Deutungen religi•osen Lebens im Mittelalter, 13; M•unster, 2001), 135–67 at 146. 

Ker, Medieval Libraries, 124. 

Ker, Medieval Libraries, 123; Watson, Supplement, 47. 

R•ohrkasten, ‘Mendikantische Armut in der Praxis’, 146. 

Ker, Medieval Libraries, 123. 

MS London, BL Royal 4. D. iv. 

MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodl. 429 =Summary Catalogue no. 2599. 

MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 239 =Summary Catalogue no. 21813. 

W. A. Hinnebusch, The Early English Friars Preachers (Institutum Historicum 

FF. Praedicatorum, Dissertationes Historicae, 14; Rome, 1951). 

Ker, Medieval Libraries, 142; Watson, Supplement, 52. 

The Bodleian manuscript, which formerly belonged to Neil Ker (see Ker and 

Watson, locc. citt.), is a Bible, almost certainly thirteenth century (personal exami-

46 Chapter 1 

So the known survival rate of sermon collections is nil for one big 

mendicant convent and a handful for another. Yet the number of 

sermon collections in each library in the Middle Ages must surely 

have been in three figures. In the Franciscan Library of Padua 

there were no fewer than 230 collections of sermons at the end of 

the medieval period, to judge by the 1499 catalogue. Even if our 

three English friars’ libraries were each half the size of Padua’s, 

that still implies a loss rate on a notable scale, to put it mildly. 

In the case of the Franciscans and Dominicans a further factor 

has to be taken into account, one which suggests that their loss rate 

taken as a whole must have been far greater than that of the older 

orders, however great that may have been. With the older orders, 

a book belonged to the library. Monks were assigned books, but 

normally they would read them within the monastery. The norm 

was for a fully professed monk to spend his whole life in the same 

monastery. Thus it would be easy for the librarian to keep track 

of library books. He might decide to destroy some books for their 

parchment, but he was not so likely simply to lose track of large 

numbers of books. 

The same would be true of the books of Franciscans and Dominicans—but 

only when they were attached to libraries. As we have 

seen, the loss rate could be huge nevertheless: but this would be 

mainly because of the decision to recycle ‘useless books’ for their 

parchment, or because of the break-up of the convent and its library 

during the Reformation or a ‘secularization’. Friars’ books belonging 

to a convent library presumably faced much the same risks as 

Benedictine or Cistercian books. However, whole categories of friars’ 

books were not attached to any library, and were consequently 

much more vulnerable. 

nation); Trinity 347 is ‘W. Woodford contra Wiclevum’: M. R. James, The Western 

Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge (4 vols.; Cambridge, 1900– 

4), i. 473–5. Merton 132 has a commentary on the Sentences and ‘institutiones in 

sacram paginam’ of Simon of Tournai: H. O. Coxe, Catalogus codicum mss. qui in 

collegiis aulisque Oxoniensibus hodie adservantur (2 pts.; Oxford, 1852), pt. 1. 57–8. 

K. W. Humphreys, The Library of the Franciscans of the Convent of St. Antony, 

Padua, at the Beginning of the Fifteenth Century (Studies in the History of Libraries 

and Librarianship, 3, Safaho-Monografien, 4; Amsterdam, 1966), 15. In this case 

many have survived: see Humphreys’ concordance of catalogue entries and surviving 

manuscripts.


Books without libraries 

As Neil Ker put it, ‘The books individual friars had the use of 

might be the property of the order, or of the province, or of the 

custody, and were carried from house to house.’ Ker was able to 

draw on Humphreys’ careful study of the book provisions of the 

friars. This makes it clear that books were not ‘anchored’ to 

any one library. A book unattached to a library is in danger in 

the long run, especially if it is small and unadorned. It is like a 

ship without a convoy in submarine-infested waters. Books could 

belong to provinces or in the Franciscan case also to custodies 

(subdivisions of Franciscan provinces) rather than to individual 

convents (Humphreys, 27–8, 52 n. 51). The Dominican provincial 

priors were supposed to ‘keep a written list recording which books 

belong[ed] to the [provincial] community and to which brothers 

they [were] assigned’ (ibid. 27 n. 59). This sort of regulation seldom 

works properly. 

Clearly it was hard to keep track of both provincial books and 

conventual books out on loan. Humphreys quotes an order to the 

friars of the French Dominican province that 

brothers who have books granted to them for their use, whether by the 

provincial priors or by any of the convents, are bound to inform in writing 

the same priors of convents or their deputies (vicariis), and the provincial 

prior so far as the books of the province are concerned, within a month 

from receipt of this memorandum, about the aforesaid books, or otherwise 

they are ipso facto deprived of the use of these books. (Humphreys, 28–9 

n. 68) 

In other words, there was no record of who had what. Even modern 

libraries with immaculate records have trouble with readers who 

forget what they have out. Despite the rather pathetic-sounding 

e·orts to introduce some discipline into the borrowing system, 

it was a recipe for the loss of books, though from the point of 

view of the Dominicans’ pastoral ecacy it was a perfectly sensible 

arrangement. Franciscans too take out books. It is worth quoting 

Humphreys’ summary of regulations about what to do when a 

Franciscan friar died. They are a prudent librarian’s nightmare: 

The books of a friar dying when away from his native convent were to 

be collected by the custodian or by the warden and sent back to the of- 

K. W. Humphreys, The Book Provisions of the Mediaeval Friars 1215–1400 

(Amsterdam, 1964).

48 Chapter 1 

ficers in charge of the custodies where the books had been first issued. The 

convent, custody or province which assigned the books was to have such 

books returned; other volumes, i.e. gifts, or the personal books of a friar 

were to go to the convent at which the friar had first been received. If it was 

impossible to discover who had originally assigned the books, they were to 

be sent to the province from which the friar first came. Any friar who had 

lent a book to another should ensure that it was returned to the custodian 

or warden at the death of the borrower. (Humphreys, 52) 

It is hard to imagine that this system worked like clockwork. 

Though books belonged to Franciscan custodies, Humphreys 

points out (57) that there is no evidence that every custody had a 

library. If books lacked a physical home, it must have been dicult 

to keep track of them. Again, we know that books could be loaned 

to a Franciscan for life (ibid. 62). Friars could move around Europe 

a good deal in the course of their life, and books must have got lost 

in one way or another. 

The implications should not be understated. No doubt some of 

these books were eventually incorporated into mendicant libraries, 

but often they would leave the order: books of deceased friars could 

be sold (Humphreys, 28, 53). Some were probably purchased by 

the older orders, which built up large collections of sermons in 

their libraries. This may explain why so many mendicant sermon 

collections survive in monastic libraries. There they would have a 

stable existence, unless recycled at the end of the Middle Ages for 

parchment. Books that went into private hands surely had much 

less chance of survival. It is a law that books outside libraries tend 

eventually to disappear. Of course, they were physically sturdy, so 

their nomadic existence could have continued for some time. Yet 

the very sturdiness of their parchment would in the end make them 

desirable to commercial bookbinders. One suspects that they were 

even more vulnerable to recycling than books in monastic libraries, 

because unwanted books are more of a nuisance to an individual 

and his heirs than to a large institution with continuity and a lot of 

space. 

Quaterni 

Even more vulnerable than books would have been the quaterni or 

unbound quires used by the friars. We know that friars used them. 

Roger Bacon says that the secular clergy with pastoral responsibili-


ties tended to have a weak formation in theology or preaching, so 

that when obliged to take on the task of preaching they ‘borrow and 

beg the quaterni of the young friars’. A 1267 regulation of the 

Roman province of the Dominican order banned friars from selling 

books or quaterni that they had written, unless they obtained the 

provincial prior’s permission first. Not only friars used quaterni: 

the Paris secular Jean d’Essômes left to the Sorbonne a manuscript 

of sermons and miscellanea which looks as if it was put together 

from originally independent quaterni. (This is a reminder that 

highly educated members of the secular clergy count as ‘honorary 

friars’ for the purpose of this study.) A discussion by Gervase of 

Mont Saint- ‹Eloi of originality in preaching says that great masters 

have been shamed by someone saying that ‘I will show you in my 

quaterno the whole sermon you have given’. ‘Great masters’ were 

supposed to compose their own sermons for some sorts of setting 

at least, whereas the imaginary critic would presumably have had 

the same sermon in his notebook to use as a model when preaching 

to a di·erent sort of audience. In any case, it is further evidence 

that a quaternus was a normal way of carrying around sermons. 

If a quaternus was not bound together with others into a book, its 

chances of survival would have been slight compared with, say, an 

illuminated Bible in a big Benedictine library. In fact, a quaternus 

written in 1300 probably had a lower chance of making it to 1500 

than the illuminated Bible of making it from 1100 to 1500. Different 

genres of book paid di·erent rates of interest to time, in the 

sense that the rate of attrition in one kind of book must have been 

much higher than with others. The attrition rate of friars’ quaterni, 

as of friars’ books unattached to a library, two categories which no 

doubt heavily overlapped, must have been particularly high: and 

sermon texts will have figured largely in both categories. 

The word he used is ‘praelati’, which seems to have included priests who had 

authority over a parish as well as ‘prelates’ in the modern sense: and I am assuming 

from the context that he is likely to have the former in mind. 

Roger Bacon, Opus tertium,inFr. Rogeri Bacon opera quaedam hactenus inedita, 

ed. J. S. Brewer, i (Rolls Series; London, 1859), 309; d’Avray, Medieval Marriage 

Sermons, 19. 

Humphreys, Book Provisions, 26; d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons, 26. 

MS Paris, BN lat. 16499: see d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons, 235–7, for 

further references, especially to the findings of M. Mabille. 

Smalley, English Friars, 308.

50 Chapter 1 

The pecia argument 

The last argument for a high loss rate is very technical: it involves 

a two-step inference from some surprising facts about transmission 

of sermon manuscripts by the pecia system (the system used 

to facilitate the copying of manuscripts in university milieux of the 

thirteenth and the first part of the fourteenth centuries). The details 

of the argument have been set out elsewhere and need not be 

repeated. The following recapitulation only explains the general 

structure of the argument. 

The first step is a demonstration that the loss rate of pecia manuscripts 

could be high by examining the transmission of a Franciscan 

sermon collection called Legifer. Withthepecia system, a university 

‘stationer’ had in his shop manuscripts of works believed to be 

in demand, in the form of loose quires. These shop manuscripts 

are called ‘pecia exemplars’. Their quires were hired out to people 

who wanted to copy the work. The copies are called ‘pecia copies’. 

Because the quires were loose, more than one scribe could be copying 

at the same time: one could be copying the first quire, another 

the second, another the third, and so on, although it was not likely 

to work out as simply as that since the scribes were operating independently, 

probably commissioned by di·erent people. A more 

probable scenario would be that the scribe finished a quire and returned 

it to take out the next, only to find that someone else had 

it out. In that case he could take out the next one in the sequence, 

and leave an appropriate space to be filled later when the borrowed 

quire was back in the shop. Scribes often noted in the margins of 

their own manuscripts break points between quires in the pecia exemplar: 

they might write ‘pe.’ and a number. (Note that in a pecia 

copy the pecia marks will not normally coincide with the beginning 

of a quire.) Even when they did not, there are often tell-tale 

signs, such as a change of ink at the point where we know a new 

exemplar quire began, or compressed writing because they had left 

insucient space for the contents of a quire copied out of sequence. 

The system was first properly understood and explained by Jean 

Destrez, who devoted his life to it and travelled around European 

libraries looking for manuscripts with pecia indications, whether 

exemplars or copies. Few individuals have ever looked at so many 

medieval manuscripts in so many di·erent libraries, and it is un- 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons, 17–19; id., ‘Printing, Mass Communication 

and Religious Reformation’, 52–6.


likely that anyone since has developed such a sharp eye for a pecia 

indication. He published a big book long before his manuscript 

work was complete, and so many of his later findings never got into 

print, but fortunately he left his voluminous notes in good order, 

and they may be consulted today in the Dominican study centre of 

Le Saulchoir in Paris. 

Since Destrez, scholars have worked out some more details of 

how the system worked. They have been able to show how some 

pecia exemplars had to be duplicated, presumably because of demand, 

and how others had to be remade in part, presumably because 

some parts had become soiled or damaged by over-use. The 

Franciscan sermon collection called Legifer is one such collection. 

We have an exemplar and a copy, but the marginal numbers in the 

copy do not coincide with the quire numbers of the exemplar all the 

way through. The natural inference is that the original exemplar 

was so heavily used that parts had to be remade. 

If so, many copies were made from it. However, Destrez found 

only one pecia copy. Now, he must have missed some manuscripts 

with pecia indications. As indicated above, manuscripts copied from 

pecia exemplars did not necessarily have the tell-tale numbers in 

the margin, and the other pecia indications are easier to miss. Still, 

Destrez had the best eye in the world for such indications and 

devoted his working life to looking for them. Thus it is thoughtprovoking 

that he did not find more pecia copies of this work. The 

natural explanation is that many others have disappeared: again, an 

indication of a high loss rate. 

There is a second step to the argument. Pecia transmission accounts 

for only a small proportion of surviving sermon manuscripts. 

So one may say this: if surviving pecia manuscripts represent 

only the tip of the small iceberg of those that once existed, 

surviving sermon manuscripts tout court represent only a tiny proportion 

of the number of sermon manuscripts tout court that once 

existed. This complex argument would not be overwhelming on 

its own. There are too many links in the chain of inference for 

J. Destrez, La Pecia dans les manuscrits universitaires du XIIIe et du XIVe si›ecle 

(Paris, 1935). 

I set out a converging argument about the pecia transmission of the sermons of 

Pierre de Reims in Medieval Marriage Sermons, 17–18. It is not the only hypothesis 

that fits the data, but it is the hypothesis with the most comfortable fit. As an 

argument for a large loss rate it would not stand on its own, but it reinforces and 

draws strength from the other arguments.

52 Chapter 1 

certainty. Still, it fits very well with the other evidence and adds 

significant support to an already strong case. 

Here the subject is sermon manuscripts and model sermons, 

but it should be said again that the implications extend to other 

genres of manuscripts of this period, some of which survive in 

far more copies than the sermon collections studied here. The 

implication is that their original di·usion was proportionally larger. 

So the concept of late medieval mass communication should not be 

confined to the friars or to model sermon collections and preaching 

aids—though it should be remembered that only these were further 

systematically multiplied by repeated oral events. 

Convergence 

Each of the foregoing arguments—the great book massacre, the vanished 

mendicant libraries, books without libraries, quaterni without 

books, pecia inferences—has considerable force, but they also 

support one another more or less independently. The onus of proof 

should be on those who deny a colossal loss rate of mendicant manuscripts 

like model sermons, and other manuscripts facing similar 

perils. Quantification would be quite artificial, but, despite the talk 

of tips of icebergs, one in ten would surely be too optimistic by far. 

It is perfectly possible that only one in fifty got through to our day: 

perhaps even fewer. Even with fifteenth-century printed books, 

the survival rate averages only about 1.2 per cent for small-format 

books, and these books have had fewer centuries to survive and 

would have been less attractive to bookbinders seeking strong scrap 

materials. The low figure is eloquent. It is all the more remarkable 

that we still have so many thirteenth- and fourteenth-century sermon 

collections in books of this format: just the size that friars 

could have carried easily with them when they moved to a di·erent 

This was stressed in Robert Lerner’s review of Medieval Marriage Sermons in 

Speculum. He intended it as a reductio ad absurdum: the absurd conclusion being that 

medieval books which survive to this day in hundreds of manuscripts could have 

originally been transmitted by thousands of manuscripts. But in fact there is nothing 

absurd about this conclusion, though it runs against some assumptions which are as 

prevalent as they are ungrounded in evidence. 

‘. . . bei Oktavb•anden allerdings nur bis zu 3% (Durchschnittswert 1,2%) 

[erhalten]’ (Neddermeyer, Von der Handschrift zum gedruckten Buch, 75); ‘Schmale 

B•andesindfastausnahmslosnurnochvereinzeltvohanden....Oktavb•ande [sind] 

heute in jedem Fall sehr selten’ (ibid. 76).


house or province. Common though they still are, there may have 

been a hundred times more of them, or still more than that, at the 

start of the fourteenth century. 

Production of manuscripts by friars 

If so many manuscripts have been lost, they must have been first 

produced. How could they have been produced in such numbers 

without the help of printing? In essence, the answer is that a double 

labour force was at work. On the one hand, there were professional 

scribes. There has been an idea in the air in the oral culture 

of modern manuscript scholars that such commercial scribes took 

over the work of monastic scriptoria entirely. However it may be 

with monastic scriptoria, which lie outside the scope of the present 

study, it is a mistake to think that the new orders of friars relied 

only on the products of commercial scribes. They certainly got 

many of their books this way. (Other books originally copied by 

paid scribes for someone else would have been passed on as gifts 

to mendicant convents.) There is no doubt that very many manuscripts 

used by friars were produced by this first labour force of 

paid scribes. However, the second labour force consisted of the friars 

themselves, who copied their own manuscripts. It also included 

any other literate priests who copied sermon collections for their 

own use and—this is important—the use of others. 

There is a good deal of direct evidence for the copying activity 

of friars: chronicle evidence and their own regulations. Then 

there is a quite di·erent kind of evidence which converges towards 

the same conclusion: the nature of variants in many sermon manuscripts. 

In some manuscripts there are many free and independent 

variants: not mistakes but voluntary changes that make sense. They 

represent an independent attitude on the part of the scribe, and this 

has considerable implications. 

Such variants may be found in the critical apparatus of Medieval 

Marriage Sermons,moreorlesspassim. They are also more clearly 

D’Avray , ‘Portable Vademecum Books Containing Franciscan and Dominican 

Texts’. 

M. Mulchahey, ‘More Notes on the Education of the Fratres communes in the 

Dominican Order: Elias de Ferreriis of Salagnac’s Libellus de doctrina fratrum’, in 

J. Brown and W. P. Stoneman (eds.), A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of 

Leonard E. Boyle, O.P. (Notre Dame, Ind., 1997), 328–69 at 338. 

Collected in d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons, 25–8.

54 Chapter 1 

illustrated in another study, and some more evidence of the same 

kind is provided in Documents 1. 4–8. The changes are not necessarily 

drastic. Small unnecessary modifications betray an attitude 

to the text di·erent from that of hired scribes. 

These independent variants are not a peculiarity of Franciscan 

and Dominican sermon manuscripts. In vernacular texts they are 

exceedingly common, and they may also be found in other genres 

of Latin text. There is a whole spectrum from the scribe-author 

who rewrites the whole thing to a copyist who feels free to change 

the wording occasionally, but deliberately (so I am not counting 

simple inversions of words, which can occur even when a scribe is 

trying to copy exactly, word for word). 

On the other hand, many texts do not have any semi-authorial or 

independent-minded interventions. A majority of the manuscripts 

collated for Medieval Marriage Sermons trytogiveastandardtext. 

I would be amazed to find such improvisation in a copy made 

from pecia exemplars at university stationers; it is not normal in 

canon-law manuscripts. 

The following principles are in tune with common sense and 

may confidently be proposed as hypotheses which no one is likely 

to succeed in falsifying. 

(1) Manuscripts of works by authors of known authority, when 

copied by commercial scribes working for hire, would seldom 

if ever have independent, deliberate, nonconformist variants. 

Like any copies, they will have errors, but we should not find 

improvisation. The reason: if you pay someone to copy a work, 

you do not expect him to alter the text as he goes along. So, for 

instance, a pecia copy of a sermon collection in the university 

stationer’s shop will necessarily be conformist. 

(2) Consequently, when the text of a manuscript varies freely from 

the standard one, not in error but deliberately, it was probably 

not copied by a commercial scribe. (Or if it was, it descends 

from a manuscript which was not the work of a commercial 

scribe.) The reason: if you are not working for money and feel 

D’Avray, ‘Printing, Mass Communication and Religious Reformation’, 69–70. 

See d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons, 23 n. 62. 

My instinct was confirmed by conversation with Kent Emery (who knows the 

pecia transmission of Henry of Ghent). 

My own impression confirmed by conversation with Dr Martin Bertram. 

This should be interpreted as an invitation to try.


at home with the material, you are not obliged to follow the 

exemplar slavishly. So a sermon collection copied by a friar 

who was an experienced preacher could have nonconformist 

variants. 

(3) A manuscript with a script of professional quality and where 

the text is conformist could either be the work of a commercial 

scribe or of someone working on his own account. The reason: 

a commercial scribe had to be conformist, but a person working 

on his own account and without pay could be conformist too: 

nonconformity was not an obligation. So a sermon collection 

with a conformist text might or might not have been copied by 

afriar. 

These principles are an appeal to common sense. The way to falsify 

them would be to find a substantial number of manuscripts of Latin 

works where the scribe was demonstrably working for hire but 

where the text nevertheless contains nonconformist variants. Until 

or unless the principles are falsified, the hypothesis holding the field 

is that both commercial scribes and friars copied mendicant model 

sermon collections. 

To clear up any misunderstanding: free scribal variations are 

not in themselves evidence of mass communication. Works with a 

minute di·usion could be copied this way. The free variants are 

evidence of a second labour force alongside professional scribes, 

pointing to an explanation of how such a high rate of production 

was possible. This fact also shows how the production of so many 

manuscripts could be economically viable despite the relatively 

high cost of medieval books. If friars rather than paid scribes 

did the copying, the greater part of the cost of a book would be 

saved. Louis-Jacques Bataillon has provided evidence suggesting 

that in the later thirteenth century parchment represented about 

20 per cent of the cost of a book. This would have made the economics 

of large-scale book production viable for friars. It must be 

remembered that the cost of parchment varied a lot. MS BN Lat. 

I am indebted to Robert Lerner for raising the question of the cost of book 

production. 

L.-J. Bataillon, ‘Les conditions de travail des ma^§tres de l’universit‹e deParis 

au xiiiE si›ecle’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et th‹eologiques, 67 (1983), 417–32 at 

423 n. 25. 

M. Gullick, ‘From Parchmenter to Scribe: Some Observations on the Manufacture 

and Preparation of Medieval Parchment Based upon a Review of the Literary

56 Chapter 1 

16497 (written on cheap parchment) cost 12 sol. of Paris all told, 

so the parchment would have cost between 2 and 3 sol., between a 

quarter and a third of a florin, quite a modest sum. Alms given 

by Louis IX in 1256 give a relative idea of the cost of the parchment 

for this book. Thus pittances of bread and wine for fourteen days 

came to £38. 17s. 8d. in Paris currency, pittances from the kitchen 

for eighteen days came to £33. 2s. 6d., and alms for 200 poor on 

14 August came to £20, a little short of the cost of the parchment 

for BN Lat. 16497 for each poor person. On the assumption that 

the parchment was the main monetary cost because the labour cost 

only the future user’s time, the book—of this sort and in these 

circumstances—becomes a relatively inexpensive article. 

Another study notes a fifteenth-century English manuscript 

composed of parchment quires (sixteen pages per quire) which cost 

a penny-halfpenny each. To put this in perspective by comparison 

with a peasant inventory from 1457: two buckets are valued at 

a shilling, which makes each worth four quires; a sheet cost 4d., 

more than two quires; two worn canvasses cost 4d., each more than 

a quire; a chair cost 3d., two quires. Friars received substantial 

donations, and money on this scale would have been readily available. 

In the light of these figures, some of the ideas current among 

scholars about the minimum cost of a basic parchment book are 

exaggerated by orders of magnitude. 

As just noted, manuscripts with maverick modifications of the 

text can be written as well as if they were produced by professional 

scribes. Whoever improvised upon the text did so in a physical form 

that others could use and copy. These maverick texts with nonconformist 

variants are not confined to personal preaching notebooks 

which could only be of use to the man who wrote them. 

Here it is useful to invent a term: cul-de-sac books. A cul-de-sac 

Evidence’, in P. R•uck, Pergament: Geschichte, Struktur, Restaurierung, Herstellung 

(Historische Hilfswissenschaften, 2; Sigmaringen, 1991), 145–57 at 147, 151. 

Bataillon, ‘Les conditions de travail’, 423 n. 24 (citing M. Mabille, ‘Les 

manuscrits de Jean d’Essomes conserv‹es ›a la Biblioth›eque Nationale de Paris’, 

Biblioth›eque de l’ ‹Ecole des Chartes, 130 (1972), 231–4). 

Cf. P. Spu·ord, with the assistance of W. Wilkinson and S. Tolley, Handbook of 

Medieval Exchange (Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks, 13; London, 

1986), 168. 

E. M. Hallam, Capetian France 987–1328 (London etc., 1980), 233, table 5.1. 

Cf. Gullick, ‘From Parchmenter to Scribe’, 151. 

C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England 

c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989), 170.


codex is a manuscript which is at the end of the line of tradition, 

because it is too untidy, informal, and personalized for anyone to 

use it as an exemplar. For the same reasons, it is unlikely to be 

passed on to new owners capable of using it in the same way as the 

man who wrote it. 

The manuscripts under discussion here were not cul-de-sac 

books. These model sermons could be the exemplars of further 

copies, and they could be used by other preachers, not only by the 

man who copied them. The point is really an answer to a potential 

objection: viz., that manuscripts with nonconformist variants were 

just private books, usable only by the man who made them and 

sterile in terms of the transmission of the text. The relevance to the 

mass communication thesis is thus real but indirect. 

To conclude. There may have been up to c.40,000 Franciscans 

and Dominicans in the early fourteenth century. It was common 

for friars to copy sermon collections. Not all Franciscans and 

Dominicans did, we can be sure. On the other hand, there were 

also Carmelites, Augustinian Hermits, educated members of the 

secular clergy who could match the pastoral activity of the friars, 

and probably also some members of the older orders. This 

formidable labour force worked alongside the commercial scribes 

who also copied sermon manuscripts. There has been a tendency 

to assume that the commercial scribes did all the work: hence the 

demonstration above that they did not carry the burden of copying 

alone. An enormous number of books to help preachers resulted. 

Even the number that has survived is huge, but it may be a tiny 

percentage, perhaps even as low as 1 per cent, of the number that 

once existed. The survival rate was probably quite uneven, biased 

against quaterni and friars’ books not linked to libraries: though 

I am again putting right a misapprehension (for which I blame my lack of 

clarity) in the Speculum review by Lerner, who understood me to mean that maverick 

variants in a manuscript of professional appearance are evidence of a copying 

industry, which is not in fact my view. 

The estimate of R. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle 

Ages (Harmondsworth, 1970), 285. 

‘[A] certain number of monks, at least in the thirteenth century, went to Oxford 

to learn preaching, partly with the aim of dispensing with the services of friars in the 

cathedral priories, where friction had developed between the mendicants and the 

possessioners. Preaching in both Latin and English was contemplated’ (D. Knowles, 

The Religious Orders in Engand, ii. TheEndoftheMiddleAges(Cambridge, 1961), 

24). I do not see why such monastic preachers should not have copied sermon 

manuscripts.

58 Chapter 1 

library books too were vulnerable to the great book massacre of 

c.1500. Each of these innumerable model sermons on parchment 

could have been used repeatedly for vernacular ‘live’ preaching 

(the ‘multiplier e·ect’). While we cannot even guess at the impact 

of an individual sermon on an individual, the cumulative impact 

of sermon topoi on the the sermon-going public cannot have been 

slight. These considerations entitle us to regard mendicant preaching 

as a social force in the same kind of sense as a modern mass 

medium. It remains to examine the content of the message where 

marriage and marriage symbolism are concerned. 

(d) The Message about Marriage 

Marriage symbolism 

Anyone who skims through the sermons edited and translated in 

Medieval Marriage Sermons, or through the complementary corpus 

of sermons in the ‘Documents’ section corresponding to this 

chapter, will realize that marriage symbolism is prominent and 

perhaps usually predominant. (The following analyses will be 

based on these two dossiers, but one could carry out a similar exercise 

with late medieval sermons.) As a symbol, marriage is as 

a rule overwhelmingly positive in preaching, but it can stand for 

an intense commitment of any kind, including commitment to sin 

or the Devil. The sinful soul is ‘the daughter and bride of the 

Devil’. The three stages that lead up to the finalization of a 

marriage—initiation (engagement), ratification (present consent), 

and consummation—stages which we shall meet again and again 

and which are normally full of positive significance, can stand for 

the three stages that finalize a sin. Thought or pleasure is initiation, 

consent is ratification, deed is consummation. 

A detail of language should be noted. Pierre de Saint-Beno^§t 

The sermons did not have to take the approach they did, for they normally 

start from the Gospel reading about the marriage feast of Cana, and instead of 

exalting marriage on the literal and symbolic levels, the path they actually took, 

they might have concentrated on an influential apocryphal story according to which 

the bridegroom of Cana was St John the Evangelist, who opted for celibacy between 

wedding and consummation: see A. Volfing, John the Evangelist and Medieval 

German Writing: Imitating the Inimitable (Oxford, 2001), 29–31. 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Pierre de Saint-Beno^§t, para. 4/2/; 

G‹erard de Mailly paras. 3–7; Konrad Holtnicker: Document 1. 10. 8. 

Konrad Holtnicker: Document 1. 10. 8. 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Pierre de Saint-Beno^§t, para. 4.


calls this evil marriage ‘carnal marriage’. However, ‘carnal’ does not 

necessarily have negative associations. There are sermons where it 

is used in a positive sense. 

A common motif or topos is the marriage of Christ and human 

nature. This is the incarnation, the union of divine and human 

‘in the womb of the Virgin’, when the Lord ‘took up our nature 

and completely united it to himself for ever’. This is compared 

by one preacher to the marriage between a woman of ill repute 

in the Old Testament and Osee (i.e. Hosea), who gave his name 

to the book of the Bible in which the story occurs. The woman 

is called Gomer. Pierre de Reims explains that the Hebrew name 

means ‘taken up’. The idea is that human nature is ‘taken up’ and 

united to the saviour, Osee. The two natures become ‘truly two in 

one flesh’. 

The marriage feast of Cana took place ‘on the third day’, according 

to the words of the Gospel. Guibert de Tournai picks up on 

this detail and uses it in his symbolism. The first day is the age 

of nature: that is, before God gave the Law of the Old Testament 

to the Jews. The second day is the ‘age of scripture’, the age of 

the Old Testament. The third day is the age of grace, when divine 

and human nature were united in one person. Guibert is interesting 

on the consummation of this marriage. He understands 

it in two ways. First, there is the Passion of Jesus Christ. At the 

climax of the passion, Jesus said: ‘It is consummated’. The other 

‘consummation’ is the resurrection. Here one needs to be aware of 

thirteenth-century marriage law and theology to understand the 

implications of Guibert’s comment. He says that after the resurrection, 

there will be no more division of Christ’s body and soul 

or Divinity and Humanity. Guibert shows his knowledge that it 

is only after consummation that Christian marriage becomes absolutely 

indissoluble. As we shall see in a later chapter, before that 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons, 121, 134. 

See ibid.: Pierre de Reims, para. 2 (also p. 121, on the Angers version, and 

pp. 122, 122–3, on the Milan version); Guibert de Tournai, paras. 4, 6, 8 (and 

pp. 285 and 316, on the Assisi version); Jean Halgrin: Document 1. 9. 5;Servasanto 

da Faenza: Document 1. 11. 21–2. 

Servasanto da Faenza: Document 1. 11. 21. 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Pierre de Reims, para. 2. 

Ibid.: Guibert de Tournai, para. 4. Ibid., para. 6. 

As often with Guibert, he has not quite thought it through: of course the 

Divinity and Humanity, as opposed to body and soul, would have been inseparable 

right from the incarnation according to standard theology.

60 Chapter 1 

it could be dissolved at least by the entry of one partner into a 

religious order. 

Clearly connected with the ‘marriage to human nature’ topos is 

the image of Christ’s marriage to the Church: the two meanings are 

imperfectly distinct. One version of Pierre de Reims puts it thus: 

the marriage feast of Cana was ‘a sign or sacrament of the joining 

together of Christ and the Church: just as Christ did not lay down 

human nature once he had taken it up, so too marriage is not divided 

or sent away’. However, the ‘marriage to the Church’ motif may 

be analysed apart without doing violence to the data. 

The ‘initiation–ratification–consummation’ topos comes into 

play again. The three stages of betrothal, consent in the present 

tense, and sexual intercourse were, as already noted, a familiar 

schema in theology and canon law, and through law a·ected practice. 

Familiarity with social practice will have enhanced the symbolism, 

as with Guibert de Tournai’s reflection on ‘consummation’, 

examined above. Pierre de Saint-Beno^§t comes close to echoing one 

of Guibert’s thoughts. He says that ‘the matrimonial bond of this 

marriage, that is, the marriage of Christ and the Church, was initiated 

in the promise of the Son of God which was made to the holy 

fathers, ratified in the incarnation, and consummated in Christ’s 

passion.’ 

This takes him on to the Eucharist, the meal of Christ’s body and 

blood. It is the feast that goes with the marriage. The Eucharist is 

the wedding banquet again in another preacher’s development of a 

story from the Bible used frequently in marriage symbolism. This 

is the story of Ahasuerus and Esther, applied to the marriage of 

Christ and the Church. The proud consort of the king of the 

Medes and Persians is replaced as queen by a beautiful Jewish girl. 

In the biblical account revenge on the enemies of the Jews follows. 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons, 121. 

In the corpus used for this analysis I note the following cases: d’Avray, Medieval 

Marriage Sermons: Hugues de Saint-Cher, para. 11, also p. 134; Pierre de 

Saint-Beno^§t, paras. 7–9, and also, for the Trinity College Dublin manuscript, 

p. 226; ‘Documents’: Konrad Holtnicker, 1. 10. 9; Servasanto da Faenza, 1. 11. 23. 

He means to the great men of Old Testament times. 

Pierre de Saint-Beno^§t, para. 8. 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Pierre de Saint-Beno^§t, para. 9. 

Ahasuerus, Assuerus in the Latin Vulgate, corresponds to the historical Xerxes 

I. 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Pierre de Saint-Beno^§t, para. 7; Konrad 

Holtnicker: Document 1. 10. 9.


The preachers are not interested in that, but in the symbolism of 

the marriage. Vashti the first queen represents the synagogue, and 

Esther the Jewish girl stands for the Christian Church. 

Could this Vashti–Esther symbolism have undermined marital 

indissolubility? It seems unlikely. For one thing, the story is set 

in Old Testament times, when the rules were di·erent, as preachers 

knew and could explain. Much more importantly, the whole 

emphasis is on the symbolism of salvation history and the point 

about the Old Testament dispensation and its replacement by the 

Christian Church, with the Old Testament narrative serving as an 

allegory. When the preacher moves into scriptural narrative as the 

basis for imagery, the change of discourse would probably have 

been evident to most attentive listeners, especially since supplementary 

clarification would have been possible in the ‘live’ sermon 

preached from the model if any necessity had been apparent. The 

message—replacement of Synagogue by Church—would have explained 

to the listener why the story was being used. When it came 

to types of discourse and changes of register in oral sermons, there 

is no reason to think late medieval listeners were obtuse, and there 

is an exotic tone to the story which marked it as belonging to the 

Old Testament ‘other’. The line between this allegory and the analyses 

of Christian marriage, whether as a symbol or at the literal 

level, would not have been hard for most listeners to intuit. 

The Esther story comes up again under our next heading: the 

marriage of the individual soul to Christ or God. In Guibert de 

Tournai this is linked with the ‘initiation–ratification–consummation’ 

topos: 

The third marriage is the spiritual one of Christ and the faithful soul. 

This is the marriage of Assuerus with Esther. Esther 2: 17–18: ‘the king 

made Esther reign in the place of Vashti, and he ordered that a banquet be 

prepared for the union and marriage with Esther’. 

And this is what is said in today’s Gospel: that the water was changed 

into wine, for the banquet of that marriage: the water, that is, of contrition, 

into the wine of consolation. For it is said in Mark 2: 19: ‘Can the children 

of the marriage fast, as long as the bridegroom is with them?’ 

This marriage is initiated in good thought, ratified in consent, and consummated 

in good action. 

Guibert is quite eloquent in his section on the marriage of the 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Guibert de Tournai, paras. 12–14.

62 Chapter 1 

soul. Some of the credit goes to the quotations he chooses, but 

no source is cited for the following passage: ‘In good consent he 

comes: not as a lord imposing labour, not as a judge striking fear, 

not as a master correcting error, not as a doctor drastically curing 

a disease, but as a bridegroom arousing love.’ This passage too 

may be a quotation, of course—Guibert was derivative. In this 

‘model sermon’ genre it was unimportant: ecacy mattered more 

than originality. 

Even from the surviving Latin models one can guess that some 

developments of the ‘marriage to the soul’ image could have stimulated 

mental images in listeners. Pierre de Reims develops a 

comparison between a soul who is betrothed to but then betrays 

Christ and a poor girl betrothed to the son of a king but who 

is unfaithful to him and loses everything. As he works through 

the analogy, he evokes the social condition of a peasant girl. For 

example: ‘if she were free and responsible for herself, after all this 

she might still be able to get a living for herself from somewhere or 

other; but it is not so, because she has fallen into a great bondage.’ 

This would be a much stronger image for listeners familiar with 

the stigma of servile status in thirteenth-century France than it is 

for a modern reader, unless the historian can reconstruct some of 

the lost connotations. 

The imagery can be very simple. Jean Halgrin talks about the 

soul who, forgetful of her engagement ring, does not keep the 

faith of marriage, when women as a rule keep their engagement 

ring thoughout their life. An image like this would not need 

to be developed: the listeners would provide their own supplementary 

images. A much fuller image which could have triggered 

associations precisely because it was analysed in greater depth 

was that of the ideal husband, represented by G‹erard de Mailly 

in the corpus analysed here and in fact quite a widespread 

e.g. ibid., para. 17/7/ (the motif of the beautiful captive also used by Pierre de 

Reims, paras. 19–20); and para. 18, a passage from St John Chrysostom which is 

rather fine. 

Ibid., para. 14. 

Cf. D. L. d’Avray and M. Tausche, ‘Marriage Sermons in ad status Collections 

of the Central Middle Ages’, in N. B‹eriou and D. L. d’Avray, with P. Cole, J. 

Riley-Smith, and M. Tausche, Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons: Essays 

on Marriage, Death, History and Sanctity (Spoleto etc., 1994), 77–134 at 94. 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Pierre de Reims, para. 13/1/. 

As I tried to do in Medieval Marriage Sermons, 61–2. 

Jean Halgrin, Document 1. 9. 8.


topos. G‹erard says that Christ has all the qualities of an ideal 

bridegroom: he is eloquent, wealthy, wise, attractive in appearance, 

powerful, noble—and immortal. This last quality is clearly 

not for the human bridegroom, however idealized, but in general 

the list converges—perhaps more closely than coincidence can account 

for—with the image of the attractive knight found in the 

romances of Chr‹etien de Troyes. That is not to say that Chr‹etien 

influenced the preacher. More probably, they both reflect generally 

current social assumptions. However, this means that G‹erard’s list 

would have struck cords in the imaginative and fantasy life of many 

listeners. 

The image of the soul’s marriage to God is turned by the Florentine 

Aldobrandino da Toscanella into a reflection on the nobility of 

man: it could be designated ‘other-worldly humanism’. Explaining 

why the marriage of God and the soul really belongs to the next life, 

he gives a fascinating glimpse of his structured universe. Creatures 

are ranked in order of nobility, as are their settings in the elements. 

Thus plants go with earth; above them, fish with the nobler element 

of water; above them, the birds of the air, a still higher element. So 

‘those things which are fittingly grouped together in nature are fittingly 

grouped together in a place, as all plants are on earth’ (and 

so on). But man has a likeness to God, so the marriage takes place 

in heaven. ‘For . . . a noble pilgrim does not willingly contract a 

marriageinthelandofhispilgrimage...butreturnstotheplace 

of his birth.’ 

This leads on to the general unsatisfactoriness of life in this world, 

where ‘we are made sad, we grow heated, we get thirsty, we grieve, 

wegetsick...Forinthisworldthereisnoonewhocouldhaveall 

good things without some evil. For some are good-looking, and yet 

poor; some are noble, but reduced to beggary; some are rich and 

noble, but su·er from ill health; some are rich and noble and healthy, 

but childless; but some, though they have children, nevertheless 

It is analysed in N. B‹eriou and D. L. d’Avray, ‘The Image of the Ideal Husband 

in Thirteenth Century France’ (1990), in B‹eriou and d’Avray, Modern Questions 

about Medieval Sermons, 31–61. 

For the explanation of the analogy see d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: 

G‹erard de Mailly, paras. 21–9. 

See B‹eriou and d’Avray, ‘The Image of the Ideal Husband in Thirteenth 

Century France’, 42–6, for a fuller analysis of the parallels. 

See Aldobrandino da Toscanella, Document 1. 12. 5.

64 Chapter 1 

have children who are foolish or evil; and if they are good, they are 

short-lived.’ 

Aldobrandino de Toscanella has in e·ect located the marriage 

of the soul to God in heaven. Once again, the di·erent kinds of 

symbolic marriage prove to be imperfectly distinct. With Pierre de 

Saint-Beno^§t the eternal marriage in heaven is a continuation of 

the marriage of Christ and the Church. In the present, the feast is 

the Eucharist, compared to a midday meal. In the future, that is in 

eternity in heaven, there is the evening feast. 

The marriage feast of the lamb in the Book of Revelations, or 

Apocalypse, is a favourite motif for this ultimate marriage. The 

problem of representing heaven is overcome by using such scripturally 

inspired imagery. Another example: ‘[The Lord] satiates 

them with the flood of his pleasure, and he inebriates them with the 

wine of his plenty’ (derived from Ps. 35: 9). 

One could give much more detail about marriage symbolism in 

preaching, but the argument does not require it. It should be sufficiently 

clear that it is important in model sermon collections of the 

thirteenth century (and the same could be demonstrated for model 

sermons circulating in the last two medieval centuries). That needs 

to be taken together with the previous demonstration that model 

sermons were a form of mass communication, so that they can be 

called a social force. 

Symbolism’s literal foundation 

The next stage of the argument is that the symbolic use of marriage 

in these sermons rested securely on a literal-sense idea of marriage 

as good and holy: an idea propagated by the same sermons that 

transmitted marriage symbolism to the masses. The marriage symbolism 

was not dissociated from marriage in its mundane literal 

sense. A positive evaluation of ‘real’ marriage and the enthusiasm 

for marriage symbolism were complementary. 

The fact that many marriage sermons bring instruction on marriage 

in the literal sense within the same frame as marriage symbolism 

has implications. One could have envisaged a genre of marriage 

Ibid. 1. 12. 7. This passage sounds as though it could have been lifted from an 

earlier writer, but if so I have failed to find the source. 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Pierre de Saint-Beno^§t, para. 9. 

Ibid., para. 24; G‹erard de Mailly, para. 37; Konrad Holtnicker: Document 1. 

10. 10; Servasanto da Faenza: Document 1. 11. 25. 

Servasanto da Faenza: Document 1. 11. 24.


symbolism which actually deprecated the ordinary human marriage 

of men and women. We actually find this view represented among 

the Cathars: ‘spiritual’ symbolic marriage between the soul and 

God, good; human marriage with sex, bad—not marriage at all but 

whoring. 

Instead, many sermons for the second Sunday after Epiphany 

make vigorous propaganda for human marriage as well as developing 

the theme of symbolic marriage. This provided a solid literal 

base for the symbolic ideas. 

Preaching and the sacralization of marriage 

This line of thought needs to be extended beyond textual analysis. 

The propaganda for human marriage in this genre of preaching 

will have helped to sacralize the social institution. Preaching would 

have conferred a religious aura on marriage. 

This would have been particularly important in parts of Europe 

where a religious marriage ceremony was not required by the 

Church. In parts of Italy couples could get married in a civil ceremony 

not only with full validity, but also with the full approval 

of the Church. There seems to have been no general rule about a 

religious ceremony in canon law—a fact often missed in the past 

by good scholars. After 1215 it is true that banns had to be read 

in order to stay within the rules, but the reading of banns would 

not have the same sort of psychological and religious impact as a 

religious ceremony. 

As a consequence, marriage could easily have seemed a very 

secular thing to the laity—had it not been for preaching. As it was, 

from the mid-thirteenth century at least it would have been hard 

for a layman or woman living in a town and attending mendicant 

sermons to avoid hearing every year or so sermons explaining the 

religious value of marriage, literally understood. 

Attitudes to sex before and after the Cathars 

In some sermons from our corpus symbolic marriage is the dominant 

theme and not much space is allotted to the goodness of marriage 

in the literal sense, but even when the point is made succinctly, 

M. G. Pegg, The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245–1246 

(Princeton etc., 2001), 176 n. 27: report of the view of a Cathar believer. 

Here I am leaving out of account the whole question of clandestine marriages 

where the couple did not bother to have the banns read in advance. These will be 

discussed below, in Chapter 2.

66 Chapter 1 

the endorsement of the legal sexual union of men and women by 

these celibate preachers is unambiguous. To some degree this can 

be explained as a reaction to the Cathars, who had spread like wildfire 

in the twelfth century and who tended to think that sex was bad 

inside or outside marriage and that procreative sex was the worst 

kind. In the Cathar Book of Two Principles, one of the few Cathar 

writings to survive systematic persecution, there is an interesting 

polemic (in its own terms dazzlingly skilful) by one Cathar sect 

against another in which the evilness of marriage is used as common 

ground from which a logical refutation can be mounted. 

The logic of the system, so far as one can generalize about it, was 

that the whole material world was the product of an evil principle. 

Souls were seen as good, bodies as bad. Sex perpetuated the chain 

of bodies. 

The goodness of marriage in the literal sense had been preached 

before the Cathars appeared on the scene. The following passage 

from Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis deserves attention—it 

was not discussed before as it is not about marriage symbolism— 

for it undermines the assumption that the early medieval Church 

was generally negative about marriage. It comes from a section 

explaining, to quote its heading, that ‘Those who are bound by 

marriage, and those who are free from the ties of marriage, are not 

to be given the same advice’. It uses the Old Testament narrative 

of Lot’s flight from Sodom as a sort of parable. He stopped o· on 

the way to the mountains at a place called Segor: 

Lot . . . finding Segor, by no means immediately ascended the mountains. 

Indeed, to flee from burning Sodom is to reject the illicit fires of the flesh. 

For the height of the mountains is the purity of those who are continent. 

Or truly, those people also are in e·ect [quasi] on the mountain who cleave 

to carnal union, but who are yet not weakened by any pleasure of the flesh 

over and above the intercourse that is due for begetting children. Indeed, 

to stand on the mountain is to seek only the fruit of procreation in the 

flesh. But since there are many who do indeed abandon the crimes of the 

flesh, and who, being in the state of matrimony, do not however keep to 

For further references on the Cathar attitude to marriage see d’Avray, Medieval 

Marriage Sermons, 11, citing Arno Borst on the Cathar condemnation and on what 

was apparently a more favourable attitude in a later phase, and Le Roy Ladurie for 

the idea of marriage as instrumentally useful but equivalent to fornication in value 

terms. 

For a convenient translation of the passage in question see W. L. Wakefield 

and A. P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York etc., 1969), no. 59, 

p. 570. Migne, PL 77. 101.


the norms of that use of marriage which alone is proper, therefore did Lot 

indeed leave Sodom, but yet he did not reach the heights quickly, because 

now the way of life that earns damnation is left behind, but still the height 

of conjugal continence is not kept to in a rarefied way. For Segor is truly 

a city at a point midway, which can save the fugitive who is weak, namely 

because, when a married couple have intercourse through incontinence, 

they both flee the lapses of crimes [scelerum], and yet are saved through 

apardon[venia]. They find as it were a little city in which they may be 

protected from the flames, because this conjugal life, while not marvellous 

in its virtues, is nevertheless safe from punishment. (Migne, PL 70. 102–3) 

In short, marital sex motivated by the desire for children virtually 

puts married couples on the same level with monks and nuns; 

marital sex ‘through incontinence’ is only half-way to the heights, 

yet a means of salvation. It is quite possible that these ideas did 

get into some popular preaching in the early Middle Ages. So this 

passage may be more important for the history of marriage preaching 

than the defence of marriage at the beginning of Haymo of 

Auxerre’s sermon on the Cana pericope. (Haymo’s homiliary 

was not primarily for popular preaching, as we have seen.) So 

thirteenth-century preachers were drawing on tradition as well as 

reacting against Cathars. Nevertheless, the success of the Cathar 

movement probably helps to explain why some of them were so 

insistent about the goodness of marriage. 

Thirteenth-century preachers allude to St Paul’s prophecy that 

heretics would come and condemn marriage. St Paul was probably 

attacking contemporary Gnostics. Early medieval homiliaries, 

notably that of Haymo of Auxerre, picked up the passage but 

probably did not have any contemporary heretics in mind. Our 

thirteenth-century preachers, however, could hardly have failed to 

think that the Cathars, who briefly mounted such a serious challenge 

to Catholicism in southern France and Italy, were a fulfilment 

of the prophecy. 

For our purposes the balance of tradition and reaction in the 

For the passage giving arguments for marriage see Haymo of Auxerre, homily 

18, Dominica II post Epiphaniam, inMigne,PL 118. 126–37 at 126–7. 

See above, pp. 25–6. 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Hugues de Saint-Cher, the sermon 

analysed but not edited, p. 132; G‹erard de Mailly, para. 1; Guibert de Tournai, 

para. 1; Servasanto da Faenza: Document 1. 11. 11. 

Haymo of Auxerre, homily 18, Dominica II post Epiphaniam, inMigne,PL 

118. 126.

68 Chapter 1 

genesis of thirteenth-century preachers’ attitudes to marriage matters 

less than the impact of their preaching. The great di·erence 

between the last three medieval centuries and the preceding period 

was that positive ideas about marriage were pumped out by a 

preaching system which was capable of bringing them to very large 

numbers of laypeople. 

The following topoi become very familiar to anyone who reads a 

range of later medieval marriage sermons. Here they are illustrated 

only from the sermons transcribed in the Documents section below 

and those edited in Medieval Marriage Sermons,butthemotifsare 

also common outside this double corpus. 

God created marriage 

‘For it was instituted not by any contemptible person, not by a 

man, not by an angel, but by God.’ Sermons outside our corpus 

compare marriage favourably in this respect with the great religious 

orders. 

Marriage was made in Paradise 

As Konrad Holtnicker put it, marriage was instituted ‘not in a 

contemptible place, not in a corner, as clandestine marriages are 

made nowadays, but in Paradise’. Holtnicker goes on to complain 

about people who ‘contract marriage after many lapses and acts of 

fornication’ (ibid.). Nevertheless, he sees marriage itself as noble: 

in sharp contrast to extramarital sex. Other sermons make the point 

about Paradise more simply. 

Marriage was instituted in a sinless world 

This motif is obviously closely connected with the ‘Paradise’ topos. 

In sermons it tends to be just another compliment to marriage, but 

there was a reservoir of theological reflection in the background, 

on the nature of marriage in Paradise: whether it involved pleasure 

Konrad Holtnicker, Document 1. 10. 4; cf.d’Avray,Medieval Marriage Sermons: 

Hugues de Saint-Cher, para. 1. 

N. B‹eriou and D. L. d’Avray, ‘Henry of Provins, O.P.’s Comparison of the 

Dominican and Franciscan Orders with the “Order” of Matrimony’, in B‹eriou and 

d’Avray, Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons, 71–5. 

Konrad Holtnicker: Document 1. 10. 4. 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Hugues de Saint-Cher, para. 1; Guibert 

de Tournai, para. 1; Jean Halgrin: Document 1. 9. 1.


etc. Probably preachers did not discuss in any depth the theology 

of marriage in Paradise. Still, the topos implied that marriage went 

with human nature in its pristine perfect state, and was not just a 

remedy for concupiscence and lust. 

The double cause 

Preachers distinguish between the function of marriage before the 

sin of Adam and Eve and after it. In the state of innocence, it was 

for the sake of children (though they had not got as far as having 

any before the first sin was committed), but after the original sin 

marriage became a remedy for fornication also. Behind this lies 

the idea that the original sin disrupted the balance of human nature 

and the control by mind and will over passion and desire. Marriage 

acquired the supplementary function of regulating unruly passions. 

Put like this, the preacher’s view sounds unromantic. That would 

be somewhat misleading. Their married love is not the love of 

medieval romances, it is true: it is not an unstoppable emotional 

force. Still, married love is a very central theme. Guibert de 

Tournai seems to have had a sense for it, writing that ‘“Man will 

leave [his father and mother]” by the privilege of love, for that love 

by which husband and wife love one another is more vehement than 

all carnal loves.’ 

Christ was present at a marriage feast 

The preachers argue that Christ’s presence implies approval. 

Servasanto develops the argument thoroughly: 


in der Sexualethik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts bis Thomas von Aquin: Eine moralgeschichtliche 

Untersuchung (Studien zur Geschichte der katholischen Moraltheologie, 

1; Regensburg, 1954), 277–9. ‘Yes’ was the outcome of the debate. 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Hugues de Saint-Cher, para. 1; cf. 

d’Avray and Tausche, ‘Marriage Sermons in ad status Collections of the Central 

Middle Ages’, 104–6. 

See d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons, index, s.v. ‘marriage, love and’; also 

id., ‘The Gospel of the Marriage Feast of Cana and Marriage Preaching in France’, 

in B‹eriou and d’Avray, Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons, 135–53 at 143–4. 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Guibert de Tournai, para. 9; cf. d’Avray 

and Tausche, ‘Marriage Sermons in ad status Collections of the Central Middle 

Ages’, 128–31. 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Hugues de Saint-Cher, para. 1; Pierre 

de Saint-Beno^§t, para. 1; Guibert de Tournai, para 1; Jean Halgrin: Document 1. 

9. 1; Konrad Holtnicker: Document 1. 10. 5; Servasanto da Faenza: Document 

1. 11. 13.

70 Chapter 1 

Again, if marriage had been evil, the Lord would have taught that it is 

evil, nor would he have honoured it with his presence, nor eaten there, nor 

adorned it with so solemn a miracle, nor permitted his most holy mother 

to be present. Therefore in honouring a marriage with all these things, he 

showed that it was good. 

Again, the canon says, and this is self-evident, that the error which is not 

resisted is approved, nor is a man who abandons the e·ort to resist a public 

wrong immune from suspicion of being secretly involved. Therefore, if 

marriage were evil, since the Lord was present at it, and did not resist that 

evil when it would have been possible for him to do so, and did confute it 

when he was the teacher of truth, in failing to obstruct evil, he approves it. 

But this is utterly impossible. Therefore so is the first point, namely, that 

marriage is evil. (Servasanto da Faenza: Document 1. 11. 12–13) 

The miracle at Cana 

Christ’s endorsement of marriage is also demonstrated by the miracle 

worked at the wedding feast. 

Against the background of all these topoi, one or two preachers 

stand out for their more original or sophisticated apologias for 

marriage. Aldobrandino da Toscanella is unusual for his time in 

asserting that it confers grace. Until some point in the thirteenth 

century there was no consensus that marriage actually did confer 

grace: many thought that it was the one sacrament that did not. 

By the second half of the thirteenth century the conviction that 

Christian marriage conferred grace had more or less won the day. 

However, it should not surprise us that preaching lagged behind 

theological development. Aldobrandinoda Toscanella, though, had 

apparently been keeping up with academic theology. He puts it 

like this: 

Again . . . in marriage grace is conferred. In so far as it is contracted in 

the faith of Christ, it has the power to confer the grace which helps with 

doing those works which are required in marriage. And we see an example 

of this in the field of natural philosophy, for whenever the power of doing 

something is given to anything, helps are also provided by means of which 

D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Hugues de Saint-Cher, para. 1; Pierre 

de Saint-Beno^§t, para. 1; Guibert de Tournai, para. 1; Jean Halgrin: Document 1. 

9. 1; Konrad Holtnicker: Document 1. 10. 6; Servasanto da Faenza: Document 1. 

11. 12. 

D’Avray, ‘The Gospel of the Marriage Feast of Cana and Marriage Preaching 

in France’, 149, citing D. Burr, The Persecution of Peter Olivi (Transactions of the 

American Philosophical Society, ns 66, pt. 5; Philadelphia, 1976), 45–6.


those things may be attained. Therefore, since God has disposed it that 

man has the power in matrimony of using his wife for the procreation of 

children, he is also given the grace without which he cannot do it in a 

fitting way: just as God, or Nature, which gives the power of walking to an 

animal, gives it the instruments, namely legs, with which it may be able to 

walk. (Aldobrandino da Toscanella: Document 1. 13. 5) 

Nature and Aristotle 

Aldobrandino da Toscanella is keen on nature as well as grace, 

standing out from most preachers in the corpus for his special interest 

in it, except that Servasanto, the other Florentine preacher 

included, is very like him in this respect. In one of his sermons Aldobrandino 

celebrates nature in a passage where the precise train of 

thought, though not immediately evident in detail, is optimistic and 

evocative: for example, ‘natural things are delightful, . . . Everything 

is a matter of delight in the time that belongs to it, like sweet 

wine in winter, dry wine in summer’. The same paragraph eventually 

leads into the Aristotelian idea that everything in nature 

strives towards the imperishable and the divine. Some things are 

imperishable in themselves so do not need to reproduce. Others 

have to achieve a sort of permanence by producing something like 

themselves. Thus ‘it may be preserved in something which is like 

itself because of the divine being, and thus it conserves nature’. 

Servasanto da Faenza finds his way to the same idea, which 

he presents slightly di·erently, perhaps because refutation of the 

Cathars is at the forefront of his mind. His language and way of 

thinking are syllogistic and no less Aristotelian than Aldobrandino’s, 

a warning not to attempt a sharp distinction between Franciscan 

and Dominican Florentine preaching. He argues that if 

something has a good end (note the teleological thinking), then it 

too is good. But the end (i.e. the ‘telos’) of generation is to bring 

into the world children for the worship of God and to preserve in 

Aldobrandino da Toscanella: Document 1. 13. 3. 

Deriving probably from De anima bk. 2, 415a–b. 

See Aristotle’s De Anima in the Version of William of Moerbeke and the Commentary 

of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. and trans. K. Foster, S. Humphries, and I. 

Thomas (London, 1951), 210 and 214–15, for the translation and/or commentary 

which Aldobrandino may have used. 

D. L. d’Avray, ‘Philosophy in Preaching: The Case of a Franciscan Based in 

Thirteenth-Century Florence (Servasanto da Faenza)’, in R. G. Newhauser and 

J. A. Alford (eds.), Literature and Religion in the Later Middle Ages: Philological 

Studies in Honor of Siegfried Wenzel (Binghampton, NY, 1995), 263–73.

72 Chapter 1 

them the being that comes from God. This is a good end. So procreation 

must be good. Then comes the Aristotle citation, as with 

Aldobrandino. 

Servasanto uses a series of other arguments from nature, notably: 

nothing made by nature is superfluous, so the sexual organs 

must be there to be used (properly, of course). Nature provided for 

reproduction, just as for nutrition; but if nutrition is good, so is 

reproduction. It is a greater thing to conserve the species than the 

individual; but nutrition preserves only the individual, reproduction 

the species; so the sexual act of generation is more necessary 

to the universe and not sinful. 

All this has a relevance to the argument about the influence of 

marriage symbolism. The positive rationale for marriage in preaching 

converged with the symbolic message but will also have helped 

to foster social attitudes in the public which could give a secure base 

for the reception of the symbolism. The less that attitudes to marriage 

were coloured by religious approval, the weaker the base for 

religious marriage symbolism. Marriage would be a weaker symbol 

of union with God for people who thought that marriage in the 

normal human sense had nothing at all to do with their religion. 

Conclusion 

There is every reason to think that marriage symbolism became 

a powerful force in the lay world through preaching, from the 

thirteenth century on. The symbol of metaphor was intrinsically 

powerful, at least for many of those who had the basic religious 

beliefs and some positive experience of marriage. 

Why did this not happen before the thirteenth century? The 

simple answer seems to be that an adequate delivery system for 

bringing marriage doctrine and marriage symbolism to the laity 

had not been in place. There was some popular preaching, but the 

Carolingian reforms had anticipated the preaching revolution of 

the thirteenth century on a relatively minute scale. The total volume 

of preaching material was very small in comparison with that 

of the last three medieval centuries. In any case a high proportion 

of ordinary priests were not well equipped educationally to make 

e·ective use of Latin homiliaries or sermons even if they had them. 

Furthermore, marriage symbolism seems to have played a relatively 

insignificant role in what preaching there was. Though the verdict 

Servasanto da Faenza: Document 1. 11. 5.


has to be provisional until more research on early medieval preaching 

has been published, everything points to a watershed shortly 

after 1200, when university-trained clergy and above all the friars 

started preaching and producing model sermon collections. The 

sermons tended to include a marriage sermon in which propaganda 

for human marriage was combined with marriage symbolism. 

Something similar might have come about much earlier if the 

Carolingian experiment had not fallen apart in the ninth century, 

owing to invasion, succession crises, and lack of a firm economic 

infrastructure for government. Weak economic infrastructure may 

also be the ultimate reason for the generally low level of clerical 

education, which would have limited the amount of preaching 

from model marriage sermons even if they had been available. The 

infrastructural frailties of the period before 1200 are the main reason 

why marriage symbolism had relatively little impact in the lay 

world before that date. 

Even if it had done, the symbolism would have been undermined 

by marriage practices. Before the pontificate of Innocent III, the 

Church’s ocial religious emphasis on the indissolubility of marriage 

had been undermined by the easy annulments. The male lay 

‹elite now accepted the principle and the authority of the Church’s 

courts where the validity of marriage was concerned. Still they 

managed to change wives quite easily when they wanted to by discovering 

real or imaginary impediments which enabled them to get 

the marriage annulled. Before the Church courts gained a monopoly 

of such cases it had probably been even easier to end a marriage 

with a nominal annulment. All that changed in the thirteenth century, 

and as it happened marriage symbolism seems to have been 

a powerful force behind the change, which drastically a·ected the 

whole social institution of marriage. 

I have argued that marriage symbolism became a social force 

when preaching became a medium of mass communication in the 

thirteenth century, but so far this has meant a force on people’s 

minds, rather than on their behaviour. In the remainder of the 

book I shall look at the ways in which marriage symbolism worked 

through law to a·ect social practice. The chronology is roughly the 

same, the period around 1200 being decisive.

2 

Indissolubility 

(a) From the Roman Empire to the Carolingian Empire 

Causes and e·ects 

A potential cause may be neutralized for centuries by other social 

forces. If they are weakened, the cause is activated. One argument 

developed below is that Augustinian marriage symbolism’s tendency 

to promote indissolubility was unlikely to take e·ect while 

so many of the clergy could identify with the sexually active lay 

male. 

Then again, ideas may lie dormant for a long time, until influential 

persons infuse them with intensity and power. This began to 

happen when intellectuals at the proto-university of Paris revitalized 

Augustinian marriage symbolism. More decisive still was Innocent 

III’s determination to turn symbolism into social fact.The 

degree to which he succeeded will be discussed, and I shall argue 

that Church tribunals did not make a mockery out of indissolubility 

after his time, as they had arguably done often in the twelfth 

century. So far as law can control life, Innocent and the symbolism 

behind his thinking left a deep mark on the social practice 

of marriage. Establishing that proposition will involve analysis of 

some comments by a great canonist (Hostiensis) that seem to show 

the opposite; analysis also of the meaning of the large class of ‘precontract’ 

cases in the church courts. The latter show that indissolubility 

overrode other considerations, including rules about marriage 

in church where they obtained. Indissolubility could furthermore 

be enforced by excommunication at the deserted spouse’s request. 

Thus indissolubility had become a constraint on social behaviour. 

It limited or channelled sexual and emotional freedom to an extent 

unparalleled in most societies. The character of the constraint 

should not be misunderstood. In two important respects it did 

coexist with freedom. Legal separation was an option: sometimes

Indissolubility 75 

there were even papal legal remedies to safeguard a wife’s property 

in such circumstances. Again, indissolubility was the counterpart 

of a strong emphasis by the Church on real freedom at the point 

of commitment to marriage: another rather unusual feature of later 

medieval canon law in a broad comparative perspective. 

Augustine of Hippo against the social world of late antiquity 

A marriage system di·erent from any other in the history of great 

civilizations was in large part produced by the reciprocal causal 

interplay of symbolism and social practice: but the process took 

800 years, from Augustine of Hippo at the beginning of the fifth 

century to Innocent III at the start of the thirteenth. The specific 

thing was marriage of one man to one woman for life. I have 

failed to find the combination of monogamy and indissolubility in 

any other major civilization. It is hard to overstate the importance 

of this. Hinduism has indissolubility with polygamy, pagan Rome 

monogamy with divorce, classical China the same but with status 

accorded to concubinage, Judaism and Islam allow both polygamy 

and divorce in principle. 

Here we are talking about norms. Many people will always get 

around a social norm. On the other hand, to say that norms leave 

social behaviour una·ected would be an extreme view. Another 

qualification: in many or most societies monogamy for life may 

have been general practice without being a norm. Economics and 

sentiment both encourage it, countering the tendencies of men to 

use power to get sex and make alliances. The fact remains that there 

is something unusual about what happened in the West. 

In explaining this development some familiar names will come 

up: especially Augustine of Hippo, Gregory VII, and Innocent III. 

However, it is first and foremost the history of an idea, a symbolic 

idea that came to give meaning to social practice. The idea itself is 

older than the medieval West and found in other civilizations, as we 

noted at the start of the book: the idea that the union of man and 

woman stands for the union of God and humans. We saw that it was 

an image for God’s relation with his chosen people the Jews before 

it became a symbol of Christ’s union with the Church. Augustine 

For a useful survey (from a Catholic point of view) of texts giving the mind of 

ecclesiastical writers from antiquity to the twelfth century see F. Delpini, Indissolubilit›a 

matrimoniale e divorzio dal I al XII secolo (Archivio ambrosiano, 37; Milan, 

1979).

76 Chapter 2 

of Hippo was the man who turned the image into a social time 

bomb. 

In his treatise On the Good of Marriage (probably written in 401) 

Augustine linked indissolubility with symbolism: 

the bond of fellowship between spouses is so strong that though the purpose 

of their attachment is for begetting children, the marriage is not dissolved 

even in order to beget them. A man could put away a barren wife and marry 

one by whom to have children, but that is not permitted . . . Admittedly if 

an adulterous wife or husband were abandoned and one or other of them 

married another, more persons would be born; yet if, as the divine law 

seems to lay down, this is not permitted, who would not become alive to 

the significance of so strong a marriage bond? 

My belief is that the bond would certainly not have been so strong 

had not some sacred symbol of something more profound than this feeble 

mortality of ours become attached to it, and when people abandoned it 

and were keen to dissolve it, it remained unshaken to punish them; for the 

marriage alliance is not rescinded by the divorce [i.e. separation] which 

comes between them, and so they remain wedded to each other even when 

separated; and they commit adultery with those to whom they are attached 

even after their divorce, whether the wife associates with a man, or the 

husband with a woman. However, it is only ‘in the city of our God, upon 

his holy mountain’ that this situation with a wife applies. 

The significance of Augustine’s thinking was recognized in a 

concise, acute, and little-known paper by R. Kuiters. He noted 

that Augustine did not explain indissolubility in terms of ‘nature’: 

Augustine’s logic led him to find in the relation of husband and wife to 

the union of Christ and the Church the solid base on which he establishes 

the indissolubility which is specific to Christian marriage. . . . To play its 

role as a similitude, marriage must be adapted and brought nearer to the 

original....Divorcebecomes...inconceivableandwithoute·ect,for 

even though they are separated by their wills, the husband and wife remain 

united in the City of God by a religious (sacramental) bond. (Kuiters, 10, 

my trans.) 

Augustine, De bono coniugali, 7,inAugustine: De bono coniugali; De sancta 

virginitate, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford, 2001), 17. 

R. Kuiters, ‘Saint Augustin et l’indissolubilit‹e du mariage’, Augustiniana, 9 

(1959), 5–11. Also good on Augustine is S. P. Heaney, The Development of the 

Sacramentality of Marriage from Anselm of Laon to Thomas Aquinas, (The Catholic 

University of America Studies in Sacred Theology, Second Series, 134; Washington, 

1963), xiv. 

Augustine strengthened his idea in a work written a couple of decades later (419– 

20), ‘On marriage and concupiscence’: ‘Les ‹epoux sont invit‹es, voire moralement


A strikingly similar interpretation of Augustine was reached in a 

more recent study: 

Augustinebelieves...thatGodmademarriageindissolublesothatit 

mightsymbolizetheunionbetweenChristandtheChurch....thelittle 

sacrament (i.e., marriage bond) is a sacrament of the great sacrament (i.e., 

the mystery of the inseparable union between Christ and the Church). 

Indissolubility is the salient feature of the comparison and the point of 

assimilation.’ 

The individual elements of Augustine’s synthesis were not so 

new. Indissolubility of marriage was a well-established idea in the 

Christian writers of the first five centuries. Similarly,theideaof 

symbolic marriage was important in the Christian ancient world 

before Augustine, as well as in biblical texts that would of course 

have been familiar. However, Augustine welded the two components 

into a combination that would eventually become socially 

powerful. 

In his own day and for centuries after it, however, Augustine’s 

ideas about indissolubility and symbolism had little to do with the 

law and social practice around him: neither reflecting nor much affecting 

them, so far as we can see. The Christian law of the expiring 

Western Empire and its resilient Byzantine counterpart allowed divorce. 

Studying the history of texts, studying ‘historical theology’, 

oblig‹es d’être la r‹eplique de l’union du Christ ›a son ‹Eglise. . . . Le fondement (la 

res) de ce sacrement, c’est que l’homme et la femme sont ins‹eparablement unis par 

le mariage pour toute leur vie. La continuit‹e de ce sacrement est sauvegard‹ee dans 

le Christ et l’ ‹Eglise’ (Kuiters, p. 10). 

It was almost certainly independent, so the convergence confirms the truth of 

the interpretation. 

P. L. Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage 

during the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods (Leiden etc., 1994), 301. 

‘Parmi les auteurs des cinq premiers si›ecles consid‹er‹es comme orthodoxes un 

seul donne donc clairement au mari tromp‹e la permission de contracter ›a nouveau 

mariage, l’inconnu d‹esign‹e sous le nom d’Ambrosiaster. Des signes d’une attitude 

moins rigide ›al’‹egard des remari‹es peuvent être d‹ecel‹es dans le canon 10 du concile 

d’Arles et dans le canon 9 de Basile, mais rien ne permet de dire qu’ils acceptent 

ces secondes noces: seules le font les ‹evêques blâm‹es par Orig›ene’ (H. Crouzel, ‘Les 

P›eres de l’ ‹Eglise ont-ils permis le remariage apr›es s‹eparation?’, in id., Mariage et 

divorce, c‹elibat et caract›ere sacerdotaux dans l’‹eglise ancienne: ‹etudes diverses ( ‹Etudes 

d’histoire du culte et des institutions chr‹etiennes, 11; Turin, 1982), 3–43 at 43). 

Crouzel goes on to say that he is not personally an unquestioning advocate of 

absolute marital indissolubility, but the interpretation of patristic texts should not 

be a·ected by the modern scholar’s personal views. 

Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, 49–65. Reynolds argues that the

78 Chapter 2 

can leave a false impression of continuity. Augustine’s views run 

right through the subsequent history of thought, but only in the 

thirteenth century did social and legal practice move into line with 

the symbolic theology of marriage he worked out. Social practice 

converged slowly with the Augustinian ideal, the gap between them 

huge until the early thirteenth century. 

Early medieval m‹enages 

Beneath the stormy surface of political events in the age of Augustine 

and the successor states to Rome—the age held together in 

the mind by the writings of Peter Brown—a slow transformation 

of marriage structure occurred. A world of ‘commensurable household 

units’ evolved, a contrast with both classical and ‘barbarian’ 

society: 

In classical society, mass slavery alone assured that some households might 

include scores or even hundreds of persons, while many slaves and poor 

freemen were denied any sort of independent domestic life. . . . The polygynous 

practices of the northern barbarians, the concentration of women in 

the households of the rich, also accentuated the di·erences in domestic organization 

up and down the social scale. (Herlihy, Medieval Households, 59) 

The change from slavery to serfdom and the influence of Christianity 

evened up the di·erences between households, so that most 

men could live with a woman and only a few men had a lot of 

women (Herlihy, 59–62). ‘The appearance of commensurable domestic 

units in the early Middle Ages, the formation of a symmetrical 

array of households encompassing the entire community, mark 

an epoch in the history of the European family’ (ibid. 62). 

This development should not be confused with a victory for indissolubility. 

‘The Church’ was not yet making any concerted or 

determined e·orts against the practice of divorce. Even the legis- 

aim of the Christian emperors ‘was to make divorce more dicult, and to ensure 

that persons did not divorce without good cause’ (62) and that ‘they aimed to bring 

the law of divorce into line with Christian teaching, but that what they knew as 

the Christian doctrine of marriage was less dogmatic and less theological than the 

doctrine of men like Tertullian, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine’ (64). 

See D. Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, Mass., etc., 1985), ch. 3 (‘commensurable 

units’, p. 57; ‘commensurate household units’, p. 61). 

For the whole Frankish period see I. Fahrner, Geschichte der Ehescheidung im 

kanonischen Recht, i.Geschichte des Unaufl•oslichkeitsprinzips und der vollkommenen 

Scheidung der Ehe (Freiburg i.Br., 1903) 47–105; G. Fransen, ‘La rupture du 

mariage’, in Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, Il matrimonio nella so-


lation of church councils was not unanimous against divorce and 

remarriage: the Council of Angers in 453 permitted men to remarry 

and the Council of Vannes (465) accepted it apparently for 

either husband or wife if adultery was demonstrated. In the following 

century the opposition of the Church to divorce was limp 

and in 506 the Council of Agde admitted the principle. The early 

penitentials—a curious genre whose influence and setting in life 

are not easy to determine—are rigorous but ‘in the seventh century 

Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury, allowed divorce on 

grounds of adultery, desire to enter religion, desertion for five years, 

the reduction of either partner to slavery, or the wife’s abduction 

into captivity’. 

If churchmen were not of one voice in condemning divorce, we 

should not expect greater rigour from lay authorities and do not 

find it. According to P. L. Reynolds, the law codes of the Germanic 

successor states ‘contain remarkably little on the subject of 

the dissolution of marriage’, but this ‘may be due to the ease with 

which persons (especially men) could dissolve their marriages’. 

For women, divorce after a properly formalized marriage may have 

become harder than in Roman times (ibid. 99–100). ‘If an unfortunate 

Burgundian woman attempted to divorce her husband 

she was to be smothered in mire.’ Possibly it was easier in early 

ciet›a altomedievale (2 vols.; Settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi sull’alto 

medieoevo, 24; Spoleto, 1977), ii. 603–30, esp. 623–6; J.-A. McNamara and S. F. 

Wemple, ‘Marriage and Divorce in the Frankish Kingdom’, in S. M. Stuard (ed.), 

Women in Medieval Society (Philadelphia, 1976), 96–124; J. Gaudemet, ‘Deuxi›eme 

partie: les incertitudes du haut Moyen Âge’, in id., Le Mariage en Occident: les 

m¥urs et le droit (Paris, 1987), 93–132; R. Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir dans le monde 

franc (VIIe–Xe si›ecle): essai d’anthropologie sociale (Paris, 1995), 277–85; and A. Esmyol, 

Geliebte oder Ehefrau: Konkubinen im fr•uhen Mittelalter (Beihefte zum Archiv 

f•ur Kulturgeschichte, 52; Cologne etc., 2002). The main thesis of the last-named 

work is to expose as a myth the idea of a type of marriage (‘Friedelehe’) between 

‘Muntehe’ on the one hand (where a free woman passed from her family’s control 

to her husband’s with a corresponding property transaction) and concubinage on 

the other: which would normally be between a free man and an unfree woman, so 

that a free woman’s status was drastically diminished if she entered into such a 

union. 

McNamara and Wemple, ‘Marriage and Divorce in the Frankish Kingdom’, 

97–8. Ibid. 100. 

P. Sta·ord, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers: The King’s Wife in the Early 

Middle Ages (London, 1983; repr. London etc., 1998), 80. 

Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, 99. 


100.

80 Chapter 2 

Anglo-Saxon England. To return to the Continent: McNamara 

and Wemple found that ‘all the codes recognized that a man could 

repudiate his wife for very slender reasons by requiring some monetary 

consolation for the uno·ending wife thus left with her children’. 

It went beyond divorce. ‘Traditions of polygamy died hard 

among the Merovingians’, noted Wallace-Hadrill, commenting on 

the murder of King Chilperic’s queen, at the instigation of a mistress 

it was said—‘the mistresses of Chilperic saw no reason to 

grant to the Visigothic princess the position of unique influence 

she demanded’. 

Not only kings ignored the rules: Pippin of Herstal, the father of 

Charles Martel, is a striking case. In one of the few sources for 

the period we read that ‘Pippin took a second wife, the noble and 

lovely Alpaida. She gave him a son, and they called him in his own 

language Charles. And the child grew, and a proper child he undoubtedly 

was.’ The chronicler omits to mention at that point that 

his wife Plectrudis was still alive. At Pippin’s death ‘his widow, the 

before-mentioned lady Plectrudis, took everything under her control’. 

One must not be too cut-and-dried in characterizing early 

medieval relationships. Between the ideal-types of full monogamy 

‘...marriageswerenotregardedasindissolubleanditwasnotalwaysthe 

wife who was discarded. In ªthelbert’s code the woman who wanted to end her 

marriage faced no legal obstacles. After clause 77, defining the man’s right to return 

the “fraudulent” woman, come clauses that spell out the property claims of the wife 

who wishes to leave her husband; she may do so—and no grounds are specified— 

taking with her half the goods and all the children; if the children stay with the 

husband then the wife herself receives a child’s share’ (H. Leyser, Medieval Women: 

A Social History of Women in England 450–1500 (London, 1995), 45). 


100. Cf. Sta·ord, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 74: ‘If doubt must hang over 

polygamy, serial monogamy is crystal clear. . . . many kings repudiated one wife to 

marry the next.’ 

J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Long-Haired Kings (Toronto etc., 1982), 134. On 

early medieval polygamy and concubinage see too M. Borgolte, ‘Kulturelle Einheit 

und religi•ose Di·erenz: Zur Verbreitung der Polygynie im mittelalterlichen 

Europa’, Zeitschrift f•ur historische Forschung, 31 (2004), 1–36 at 10 and n. 41, with 

further references. 

See The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar, with its Continuations, ed. 

J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (London etc., 1960), 86 (for the second wife) and 87–9 (for 

the survival of the first). Paul Fouracre directed me to this case. 

Ibid. 86. Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir dans le monde franc, 271, comments in 

connection with this case that ‘Le syst›eme germanique r‹epondait aux motivations 

sociales de la polygamie’. 

The Fourth Book of Fredegar, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, 87.


and full bigamy or polygamy there are intermediate stages, not 

necessarily clearly distinguished from one another: concubinage 

where the woman was not just a mistress but had an ocial or 

semi-ocial position, or was a wife but not in the fullest sense, or 

where the line between wife and concubine was blurred. 

The evidence of formularies gives a glimpse of what were presumably 

regular social patterns and suggests that divorce was normal in 

the barbarian West, and not only at the top of the social scale. The 

following item in the formulary of Marculf is extremely significant: 

Since not charity according to God but discord reigns between N. and his 

wife N., and because of this they are in no way able to live together, it 

was the will of each of them, that they should separate from the union of 

marriage, and this they have done. They have consequently had written 

and confirmed these two letters with the same content to be given to each 

other, so that each of them should be free to do what they wish: whether to 

enter the service of God in a monastery, or to enter into a marital union: 

and neither should have to answer to their neighbour [proximi] forit.But 

if either of the two parties should want to change this or make some claim 

against the other one of the couple, they must pay a pound of gold to the 

other, and, as they have agreed, they shall be kept away from their own 

marriage and shall remain with the party they have chosen. 

‘Neighbour’ here may be a clumsy way of referring to the other 

party in the dissolved marriage, or to third parties, but it makes 

no substantive di·erence. The meaning of the final clause is also 

clumsily formulated. It seems to say that if one party tries to reverse 

the agreement they must pay a penalty, and cannot interfere with 

their former partner’s new relationship. 

Thus it is hard to detect any influence of Augustine’s ideas about 

marriage on the pre-Carolingian world. Conceivably this is because 

of the state of the sources, but more probably the influence was 

absent. No doubt Augustinian marriage symbolism found a place 

of some kind in the consciousness of some learned men. Still, a 

chasm separated it from social practice. 

Cf. Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir dans le monde franc, 271–4, and J. Ch‹elini, L’Aube 

du Moyen A^ge: naissance de la chr‹etient‹e occidentale. La vie religieuse des la•§cs dans 

l’Europe carolingienne (750–900) (Paris, 1991), 139, 140–1. 

Marculfi formularum libri duo, ed. A. Uddholm (Collectio Scriptorum Veterum 

Uppsaliensis; Uppsala, 1962), bk. 2, ch. 3, p. 273. 

J. Gaudemet, Le Mariage en Occident: les m¥urs et le droit (Paris, 1987), 120 

and nn. 46 and 47 for further references.

82 Chapter 2 

(b) c.800–c.1200 

Carolingian contradictions 

The place of the Carolingian era in the history of marriage is like 

its place in medieval history generally: there are moments when 

one could be in the thirteenth century, but the new social forms 

and patterns do not quite come to anything. As with the revival of 

trade, the power of the state, and the creative application of hard 

questions to theological problems, so too with lifelong monogamy 

or indissolubility: there are confident new beginnings, then it tails 

o·, and even when the forces of change look strong there are contradictory 

tendencies. 

With marriage the picture is confused. Councils legislate against 

indissolubility, councils permit divorce, popes send mixed signals, 

the practice of great men sometimes seems Merovingian and sometimes 

it could come straight out of the thirteenth century, when 

people took church law very seriously. 

Charlemagne’s sexual history is not so di·erent from the Merovingian 

pattern. His life was full of marriages and semi-ocial 

liaisons with concubines, and at least one of the marriages involved 

repudiation of an existing full wife: he had Himiltrud either as 

a concubine or as a wife, then the daughter of Desiderius King 

of the Lombards while Himiltrud was still living, then Hildegard 

while the Lombard princess was still alive. Things were very 

di·erent with his son and successor Louis the Pious. When his 

wife was condemned for adultery in 830, Louis had to promise to 

enter a monastery, which ‘seems to demonstrate that by this time 

the indissolubility even of adulterous marriages became generally 

accepted’. That might suggest a clear trend towards indissoluble 

marriage at the highest level at least, but not so. A few decades 

later Lothar II, king of the Middle Kingdom (of the successor 

states of the Frankish empire), tried hard to change wives, though 

as we shall see he was thwarted by a powerful pope. That might 

Sta·ord, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 60; McNamara and Wemple, ‘Marriage 

and Divorce in the Frankish Kingdom’, 104–5; Gaudemet, Le Mariage en 

Occident, 122. 


106. 

For the case see e.g. ibid. 108–11; Gaudemet, Le Mariage en Occident, 126–7; 

and, for political context, see J. L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London etc., 1992), 

214–17.


of course fit the same trend, but there is no clear-cut direction: 

not long afterwards we find Charles the Bald making his son Louis 

the Stammerer divorce his wife Ansgard and marry a Burgundian 

noblewoman named Adelaide. As we shall see, royal marriages 

continued to be very breakable after the Carolingian era. 

The secular and church legislation also sent mixed signals. It 

may or may not seem paradoxical that Charlemagne legislated in 

favour of indissolubility. Under his successor, in 829, a council 

at Paris said that for a cuckolded husband to remarry was another 

adultery. On the other hand, the council of Compi›egne in 757 

permitted divorce in the modern sense of allowing remarriage. 

It is the same story with the penitentials. The Jesuit scholar Joyce 

even thought that a penitential tradition deriving from Theodore, 

the Greek archbishop of Canterbury, was responsible for a growing 

tolerance for divorce. Joyce was an impressive historian but 

almost certainly wrong on this point: he surely underestimated the 

prevalence of divorce with remarriage before Theodore. But still, 

a very soft line on indissolubility is characteristic of penitentials 

from around 700. On the other hand, some late penitentials were 

more supportive of indissolubility. 

Mixed signals came even from Rome. On the one hand, two 

mid-eighth-century popes were strongly for indissolubility. A letter 

of Pope Zachary to Pippin took a hard line. His successor 

Nelson, Charles the Bald, 232; Sta·ord, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 75. 

Bishops gathered by Charlemagne at Friuli ruled that adultery did not end a 

marriage, and ‘This legislation was later incorporated into the Capitulary to the 

Missi in 802 extending it to the whole empire’ (McNamara and Wemple, ‘Marriage 

and Divorce in the Frankish Kingdom’, 104). The Admonitio Generalis of 789 

contained an indissolubility canon deriving from the Dionysio-Hadriana canonlaw 

collection which had been sent by the pope in 774: Fahrner, Geschichte des 

Unaufl•oslichkeitsprinzips und der vollkommenen Scheidung der Ehe, 82. 


105. 

Ibid. 103; J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (Oxford, 1983), 171; 

Sta·ord, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 80. See also Fahrner, Geschichte des 

Unaufl•oslichkeitsprinzips und der vollkommenen Scheidung der Ehe, 75–7. 

G. H. Joyce, Christian Marriage: An Historical and Doctrinal Study (London 

etc., 1933), 337–41. 

Gaudemet, Le Mariage en Occident, 132; P. Daudet, ‹Etudes sur l’histoire de 

la juridiction matrimoniale: les origines carolingiennes de la comp‹etence exclusive de 

l’ ‹Eglise — France et Germanie (Paris, 1933), 62–4. 

Gaudemet, Le mariage en Occident, 132; Daudet, ‹Etudes sur l’histoire de la 

juridiction matrimoniale, 64. 

Gaudemet, Le Mariage en Occident, 120 (note the error of ixE for viiiE); McNa-

84 Chapter 2 

Stephen II allowed separation only if one spouse was possessed or 

su·ering from leprosy: even so, the marriage was not dissolved. 

On the other hand, it is possible that the Roman synod held by 

Pope Eugenius II in 826 permitted divorce on grounds of adultery 

(definitely forbidding it, however, on any other grounds). This 

was a provincial synod, not a general council. It has not given rise 

to the polemics aroused by Gregory II’s letter to Boniface about a 

man whose wife was sick so that he could not (had never been able 

to?) have intercourse with her: nor should it. Perhaps one could 

say that the doctrine of indissolubility was in about the same kind 

of state as the doctrine of the Trinity had been before Nicaea or 

the doctrine of Christ’s divinity and humanity before Chalcedon: 

positions were possible that would later be excluded. 

In parenthesis, another decree of this synod deserves mention. 

Decree 37 forbids any man to have two wives or concubines. 

Nothing surprising about that—except that it was necessary to say 

mara and Wemple, ‘Marriage and Divorce in the Frankish Kingdom’, 102; Ch‹elini, 

L’Aube du Moyen A^ge, 229; W. Kelly, Pope Gregory II on Divorce and Remarriage 

(Analecta Gregoriana, 203, Series Facultatis Iuris Canonici, Sectio B, 37; Rome, 

1976), 71–2. 

Gaudemet, Le Mariage en Occident, 129. 

Concilium Romanum, 826, no. 36: ‘De his, qui adhibitam sibi uxorem relinquerunt 

et aliam sociaverunt. Nulli liceat, excepta causa fornicationis, adhibitam 

uxorem relinquere et deinde aliam copulare; alioquin transgressorem priori convenit 

sociari coniugio’ (Concilia aevi Karolini, ed. A. Wermingho· (2 vols.; Monumenta 

Germaniae Historica, Legum Sectio III, Concilia, 2. 1–2; Hanover, 1906–8), ii. 

582). Fahrner commented on this that ‘Dieser an sich zweideutige Kanon kann bei 

der Stellung der r•omischen Kirche nur dahin gedeutet werden, da¢ im Falle des 

Ehebruchs eine unvollkommene Scheidung gestattet ist’ (Fahrner, Geschichte des 

Unaufl•oslichkeitsprinzips und der vollkommenen Scheidung der Ehe, 83n.3)—but 

permission to divorce (without qualification) on grounds of adultery is the most obvious 

sense of the Latin. On the synod in its context see T. F. X. Noble, ‘The Place 

in Papal History of the Roman Synod of 826’, Church History, 45 (1976), 434–54. 

The essence of Noble’s argument is that the synod aimed to take the initiative in 

leading the reform of Christendom away from the Carolingians. 

It consisted of the pope and ‘sixty-two bishops drawn from the Roman church 

province and from parts of what had been Lombard Italy’ (Noble, ‘The Place 

in Papal History of the Roman Synod of 826’, 442); ‘In the context of the synodal 

activity of the Carolingian period the Roman synod of 826 was, basically, a provincial 

synod’ (ibid. 446). 

Kelly, Pope Gregory II on Divorce and Remarriage, esp. 315, where Kelly concludes 

that ‘although the possibility that Gregory permitted divorce and remarriage 

cannot be completely ruled out, the likelihood that he did so must be considered to 

be remote’. 

Noble, ‘The Place in Papal History of the Roman Synod of 826’, 454, with 

further references.


so at all. One cannot invariably infer a practice from legislation 

against it, but as a rule of thumb the inference has much to be said 

for it. The decree does seem to imply that a tolerance of polygamy 

(or at least bigamy) was widespread enough in early eighth-century 

society to provoke ecclesiastical condemnation. An educated guess 

would be that at this time many men kept a semi-ocial concubine 

alongside their ocial wife. 

A generation after the Roman synod indissolubility found a tenacious 

and powerful defender in Pope Nicholas I. He thwarted King 

Lothar II’s attempted divorce from Theutberga with an intransigence 

hard to imagine in the Merovingian era. It was already a sign 

of changed times that Lothar got his clergy to make a canon-law 

case. Pope Nicholas I paid it no heed. He acted like a thirteenth 

century pope, except that an Innocent III would have laboriously 

considered the precise canon-law arguments at issue. Otherwise, 

it could have been Innocent III frustrating Philip Augustus more 

than three centuries later. 

Lothar II’s queen, Theutberga, had found another defender in 

Hincmar of Reims, the marriage guru of ninth-century Francia— 

Cf. R. Kottje, ‘Kirchliches Recht und p•apstlicher Autorit•atsanspruch: Zu den 

Auseinandersetzungen •uber die Ehe Lothars II.’, in H. Mordek (ed.), Aus Kirche 

und Reich: Studien zu Theologie, Politik und Recht im Mittelalter. Festschrift f•ur 

Friedrich Kempf zu seinem f•unfundsiebzigsten Geburtstag und f•unfzigj•ahrigen Doktorjubil•aum 

(Sigmaringen, 1983), 97–103 at 103: ‘Es mag sein, da¢ er Lothar und 

seine Anh•anger besser durchschaut, ihre Motive klarer erkannt hat, als es uns die 

erhaltenen Zeugnisse der Auseinandersetzungen erm•oglichen. Selbst dann ist als bemerkenswert 

festzuhalten, da¢ er nicht nur auf die — wenigstens formal — rechtlich 

begr•undeten Darlegungen der Partei Lothars nicht eingegangen, sondern auch seine 

Urteile nicht mit •uberliefertem kirchlichem Recht begr•undet hat’. Kottje inclines 

to the view that it was all about power for Nicholas, but the latter may have felt deep 

scepticism about the case without wanting or perhaps feeling equipped to wade 

into the quagmire of canon-law arguments. For a di·erent perspective see Nelson, 

Charles the Bald, 199: ‘Subsequently, Theutberga revealed her state of mind [in 

accepting a life of penance in a convent for alleged sins]: “I will say whatever they 

want—not because it’s true but because I fear for my life”’. Letha B•ohringer argued 

that ‘Lothar seine Gemahlin 857 aufgrund von Ressentiments verstie¢, deren 

Hintergrund wahrscheinlich ein tiefer Konflikt zwischen ihm und iherer Familie 

bildete. . . . Die mit dem Scheidungsgesuch Lothars befa¢ten Bisch•ofe . . .unterst•utzten 

ihren K•onig . . . aus Loyalit•at’ (Hincmar of Reims, De divortio Lotharii 

regis et Theutbergae reginae, ed. L. B•ohringer (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 

Concilia, 4, suppl. 1; Hanover, 1992), 17. Thus Kottje’s reading—that assertion of 

papal power was the main reason why the divorce was prevented—should not be 

regarded as the last word on this case. For a recent discussion of the Lothar II– 

Nicholas I confrontation see Esmyol, Geliebte oder Ehefrau, 159–70. 

Not an unqualified defender: B•ohringer points out that Hincmar ‘gestattet . . . 

dem K•onig grunds•atzlich Scheidung und Wiederheirat (auch mit Waldrada!), wenn

86 Chapter 2 

‘conseilleur matrimoniale’, as Gaudemet called him. The crisis 

led him to write a lengthy and important treatise on marriage. 

Hincmar played an even more central role in another high-profile 

marriage case, that of Stephen of Auvergne. 

That case anticipates the high Middle Ages in more than one 

respect. It suggests that the Church’s rules had penetrated the 

consciousness of the higher nobility; it anticipates the emphasis 

on the mystical significance of consummation which became an 

essential element of marriage law and theology from the late twelfth 

century on; finally, it shows the power of symbolic reflection to 

shape the course of events. 

Stephen of Auvergne had got himself into a position where he 

seemed doomed to choose between incest and the dissolution of a 

marriage to which he had consented. The woman’s father brought 

him before a church council (Tusey). Hincmar extricated Stephen 

from the mess, arguing that it was morally impossible to consummate 

the marriage, which was thus necessarily null. The case and 

the way it was resolved show that the Church was on the way to becoming 

the rule-maker in marriage matters. We shall look again in 

a later chapter at the place of consummation in the argument. For 

the moment, however, we must note that ‘Beyond the social aspect 

of marriage he sees a Christian mystery that reflects the Incarnation 

and Christ’s marriage with his Church; and he sees it much 

as Augustine had seen it. Marriage, in a word, was a signum of the 

great and true mystery of Christ’s incorporation in the church . . . 

a unique and irreversible gift’. Hincmar was continuing the wellestablished 

tradition of taking marriage symbolism seriously, but 

Theutberga des Inzestes •uberf•uhrt wird’ (Hincmar, De divortio, 19). But he ‘•au¢ert 

allerdings schwere Bedenken gegen das bisherige Verfahren und starke Zweifel an 

der Stichhaltigkeit der Vorw •urfe. Solange der Sachverhalt nicht gekl•art sei, betont 

er, d•urfe die Ehe nicht gel•ost werden’ (ibid.). 

Gaudemet, Le Mariage en Occident, 125. On Hincmar and Lothar’s divorce, see 

e.g. ibid. 126–7; McNamara and Wemple, ‘Marriage and Divorce in the Frankish 

Kingdom’, 108–11. 

Hincmar of Reims, De divortio. 

For a full analysis see Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, 348, 351, 

354–61; for a di·erent perspective, Nelson, Charles the Bald, 196–7. 

Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church, 410. 

Cf. Gaudemet, Le Mariage en Occident, 120 (speaking about Hincmar but not 

about the particular case of Stephen of Auvergne): ‘l’insistance mise sur le sacramentum, 

le symbole de l’union du Christ et de l’ ‹Eglise renforcent encore la doctrine 

de l’indissolubilit‹e. D‹ej‹a Isidore de S‹eville avait qualifi‹e lemariaged’“inseparabile


making it work to solve a real-life, high-profile case. It is typical 

of Carolingian history: ninth-century events foreshadowing structures 

of the thirteenth century and beyond, a moment anticipating 

a later longue dur‹ee. 

The ‘False Decretals’ and the attitude of the Church establishment, 

c.850–1200 

The indissolubility principle may have been strengthened in the 

long term by ideas about the episcopal oce in the legal compilations 

called the ‘False Decretals’. In these we find a stress on 

the marriage of the bishop to the church he ruled. The False 

or Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals seem to have been put together in 

the mid-ninth century to strengthen the hand of ordinary bishops 

in dealing with metropolitan bishops who claimed authority 

over them. It was a world in which bishops might be driven from 

their sees (perhaps because of their own shortcomings) and the 

symbolism of indissolubility delegitimized such expulsions: just 

as Christ is indissolubly married to the whole Church, so is the 

individual bishop indissolubly married to his see. The symbolism 

of the bishop’s marriage to his church was widely di·used by 

canon-law collections that drew on the False Decretals, including 

the most influential collection of all, Gratian’s Decretum. Bishops 

were, needless to say, influential in the thought and life of Church 

and society. The False Decretals and the subsequent collections 

they influenced must have made bishops think more about marriage 

symbolism and indissolubility, in connection with their own 

oce but also generally. It was not enough to transform society, but 

sacramentum”, en se r‹ef‹erant ›a l’union indissociable du Christ et de son ‹Eglise. On 

retrouve la même id‹ee et la même justification chez beaucoup d’auteurs de l’‹epoque 

carolingienne’ (with further references). 

J. Gaudemet, ‘Le symbolisme du mariage entre l’‹evêque et son ‹eglise et ses 

consequences juridiques’ (1985), repr. in id., Droit de l’ ‹Eglise et vie sociale au Moyen 

A^ge (Northampton, 1989), no. ix, 110–23 at 113–14. 

The standard study is H. Fuhrmann, Einflu¢ und Verbreitung der pseudoisidorischen 

F•alschungen: Von ihrem Auftauchen bis in die neuere Zeit (3 vols.; Schriften 

der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 24. 1–3; Stuttgart, 1972–4). 

Gaudemet, ‘Le symbolisme du mariage’, 114: ‘Trop d’‹evêques, en ce milieu du 

ixE si›ecle, sont indignes et leur peuple, scandalis‹e etoutr‹e, les chasse. C’est contre 

ce d‹esordre et ces voies de fait que s’insurgent les Fausses-D‹ecr‹etales. Le principe 

est celui de l’attache ind‹efectible au si›ege. Les textes sur l’union des ‹epoux viennent 

le fortifier’ (the analogy breaks down in that the pope’s power to remove a bishop is 

admitted). 

Ibid. 114–15. Noteesp.Pars2,C.7,q.1,c.11.

88 Chapter 2 

it helped smooth the ground for the transformation that took place 

in the central Middle Ages. 

Celibacy and the attitude of the Church establishment, c.1050–1200 

The e·ect of celibacy on the seriousness with which the Church establishment 

took indissolubility deserves greater prominence in the 

history of marriage. Here we have to do with one of those forces that 

neutralize, counteract, or remove another force that had until then 

held a development in check. With this kind of causation definitive 

proof is impossible. Equally, it is foolish to shut one’s eyes to the 

probability that it changed the situation. The development that was 

held in check up to this point was the translation of Augustinian 

marriage symbolism into the social practice of indissolubility. The 

obstacle was the form of life of influential clergymen, or at any rate 

many of them. Their way of life was too close to that of the average 

sexually active upper-class layman for them to take a really hard 

line with the latter. 

This development came so late because the intense movement 

in favour of clerical celibacy did not get under way until the papal 

reform of the mid-eleventh century; I would suggest that this 

movement powerfully reinforced the psychological commitment of 

bishops, senior churchmen, and the celibate masters of the urban 

schools that can be described as pre-universities to the enforcement 

of indissolubility on the laity. 

The following general explanatory schema is not demonstrable 

but it is adequate to explain the timing of the tightening of the 

marriage law in the West. In societies where men hold most of the 

power, it is to be expected that the law will tolerate relatively free 

divorce, or polygamy, or ocial concubinage, or some combination 

of the above. In patriarchal societies, a critical mass of men may 

like the idea of having more than one woman. (The reverse pattern 

would be predictable in a truly matriarchal society, but such societies 

are not common: matriarchal inheritance rules do not make 

a matriarchal society.) Rulers especially are likely to want to exercise 

their power in the sexual domain too, and to be disinclined 

towards either laborious clandestinity or loss of respectability. If 

divorce is easy to obtain, the pressure for polygamy will be less. 

Most modern societies fit that pattern. If polygamy or legal concubinage 

is allowed, the pressure for divorce will be less. Hindu India 

definitely fits that pattern.


High-caste marriage in Hindu India is an interesting case for 

comparison. Hinduism has a marriage model in many ways reminiscent 

of the one that developed in the medieval period—so far 

as one can generalize about the variety of di·erent tendencies and 

movements called ‘Hinduism’ for short. Marriage was sacramental 

and theoretically indissoluble; in most circumstances the first 

wife had a quite special status. Nevertheless, polygamy was normal 

for rulers and others who could a·ord it, and even divorce might 

be legitimated. A simple explanation is that the Brahman religious 

specialists who were the custodians of the religion were themselves 

sexually active males who could relate to and shared the sexual 

drives of the powerful men they advised. 

As for religions such as Judaism and Islam, it is almost (actually 

not quite) a circular argument to say that rules laid down by 

charismatic religious leaders who were not themselves restricted to 

one woman are unlikely to impose monogamy and indissolubility. 

For believers, this is because God revealed the rules to them. For 

unbelievers, their own form of life may have a·ected their thought 

on the subject. 

In a society where power over marriage is held by celibates, however, 

a psychological barrier is removed. Men without any women 

at all may not have sympathy for other men who say they cannot 

manage with only one. The normal assumption that men will have 

a visceral sympathy with other men needs to be put into reverse. A 

genuinely celibate clerical hierarchy can helpfully be seen as a third 

gender where questions of divorce and polygyny are concerned—a 

thought that has received inadequate attention. 

Cf. the following passage from the Koran: ‘O prophet, we have allowed thee thy 

wives unto whom thou hast given their dower, and also the slaves which thy right 

hand possesseth, of the booty which GOD hath granted thee; and the daughters 

of thy uncle, and the daughters of thy aunts, both on thy father’s side and on thy 

mother’s side, who have fled with thee from Mecca, andanyother believing woman, 

if she give herself unto the prophet; in case the prophet desireth to take her to wife. 

This is a peculiar privilege granted unto thee, above the rest of the true believers. 

We know what we have ordained them concerning their wives, and the slaves whom 

their right hands possess: lest it should be deemed acrimeintheeto make use of the 

privilege granted thee; for GOD is gracious and merciful. Thou mayest postpone the 

turn of such of thy wives as thou shalt please, in being called to thy bed; andthou 

mayest take unto thee her whom thou shalt please, and her whom thou shalt desire 

of those whom thou shalt have before rejected: and it shall be no crime in thee’ (The 

Koran: Commonly Called the Alkoran of Mohammed, ed. and trans. G. Sale (London 

etc., 1887), 318–19). 

However, it was suggested to me by S. Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval

90 Chapter 2 

Until the mid-eleventh century many of the clergy in Western 

Europe lived respectably if not perhaps quite legitimately under 

a matrimonial or quasi-matrimonial regime not unlike that of the 

laity. One symptomatic example: at the beginning of the eleventh 

century we find an archbishop of Lyons and another bishop granting 

in return for rent a property to a certain Rozelin—a canon 

and thus a clergyman with a substantial position—and to his partner 

Amandola. The modern English usage of ‘partner’ precisely 

renders the Latin word fidelis. There is no hint of disreputability. 

By and large this was not untypical of the better-o· clergy’s 

lifestyle in the early Middle Ages, so far as one can judge from 

patchy evidence. There is a change of atmosphere with the Gregorian 

reform in the mid to late eleventh century, a fierce attempt to 

make clerical celibacy a reality. Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand) 

was associated in people’s minds with this campaign, though it 

began well before he became pope. A little Ely chronicle says simply 

that ‘Hildebrand the archdeacon, elected as pope, himself banned 

clerics, apart from the ones to whom the canons permitted it, 

from living with women’. Even after Gregory VII put the full 

force of his intense personality as well as the papal oce behind 

the campaign for clerical celibacy, it took quite a while to change 

practice. Arguably,unrespectable concubinage at parish-priest level 

remained common until the eighteenth or nineteenth century: but 

it had no legitimation, and in some regions it was believed that 

French Literature (Cambridge, 1995), which develops (pp. 94, 103) the analogous 

argument that clerical writers of romances, like Chr‹etien de Troyes, cannot be 

aligned with either the female or the male protagonists, because the latter are knights, 

whose social status and values are quite di·erent from their own; and I think the 

idea of the clergy as a third gender is generally ‘in the air’ among scholars at present. 

Die Urkunden der burgundischen Rudolfinger, ed. T. Schie·er with H. E. Mayer 

(Monumenta Germaniae Historica Regum Burgundiae e Stirpe Rudolfina, Diplomata 

et Acta; Munich, 1977), no. 152, p. 334. 

For a survey of the history of celibacy see G. Denzler, Das Papsttum und der 

Amtsz•olibat, i.Die Zeit bis zur Reformation (P•apste und Papsttum, 5.1; Stuttgart, 

1973). 

See e.g. C. N. L. Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford, 1989), 64. 

This presumably refers to clerics in minor orders. Cf. C. Mirbt, Quellen zur 

Geschichte des Papsttums und des r•omischen Katholizismus, 5th edn. (T •ubingen, 1934), 

no. 291, pp. 151–2 (and no. 271, p. 143, item 3, for the celibacy decree of Pope Nicolaus 

II at the Lateran synod of 1059); Denzler, Das Papsttum und der Amtsz•olibat, 

i. 65. 

‘Hyldebrandus archidiaconus papa electus ipse [ms. corrected and unclear] interdixit 

clericis cum mulieribus habitare nisi quas canones exceperunt’ (MS BL 

Cotton Domitian XV, fo. 6VA, new foliation).


anyone who received the kiss of peace from the ‘priestess’ had no 

part in the Mass. Even at the relatively elevated level of canonries, 

however, marriage or de facto marriage was respectable deep into the 

twelfth century. Christopher Brooke has described the period 1090 

to 1130 as ‘the heyday of the married canons’ at St Paul’s Cathedral. 

In Hereford it took longer for celibacy to take hold: until the 

end of the twelfth century. Still, by the time Innocent III became 

pope the men who ran the Church mostly lived without women 

and sex. That was bound to make a di·erence to their attitude, to 

make them less indulgent towards the serial polygamy of patriarchal 

males. This is not the sort of explanation one can footnote. 

Without it, however, one is left with an unsolved problem. It may 

also appeal to those who think that social practice and ‘forms of life’ 

a·ect the intensity with which attitudes are held. 

The establishment of celibacy coincided with the crystallization 

and professionalization of ecclesiastical courts, and it is the combination 

which was to be so deadly to polygyny. It was argued above 

that kings and nobles might have resisted church jurisdiction over 

marriage if they had not had the ‘forbidden degrees’ escape route 

to fall back on. When Innocent III put a stop to that, the church 

courts’ control of suits about whether a marriage was firmly in place 

was taken for granted. 

Divorce and law c.900–c.1200: the survival of patriarchal patterns 

The change in attitude on the part of the Church establishment 

did not, however, succeed in changing the noble and royal habit of 

changing wives until the thirteenth century, and this time lag can 

be adequately explained. The following schema is another oversimplification, 

in that there were surely individuals who do not 

fit the crude generalizations: but it is close enough to the myriad 

facts on the ground, irrecoverable in all their details, to explain why 

the principle of monogamy and social practice stayed far apart until 

D. L. d’Avray and M. Tausche, ‘Marriage Sermons in ad status Collections 

of the Central Middle Ages’, in N. B‹eriou and D. L. d’Avray (with P. Cole, J. 

Riley-Smith, and M. Tausche), Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons: Essays 

on Marriage, Death, History and Sanctity (Spoleto etc., 1994), 77–134 at 126 n. 204. 

Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage, 84. 

J. Barrow, ‘Hereford Bishops and Married Clergy c.1130–1240’, Historical Research 

[formerly Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research], 60 (1987), 1–8. The 

cases she studies ‘suggest that marriage of the higher clergy continued in parts of 

England to as late as 1200, a date about fifty years later than that suggested as the 

latest date for marriage among the higher clergy by Professor Brooke’ (ibid. 4).

92 Chapter 2 

Innocent III. Here I leave aside areas on the borders of Latin Christian 

Europe and some long-Christianized areas within it in which 

polygamy of an old-fashioned sort seems to have been tenacious. 

In the three centuries from c.900 to c.1200 great men continued to 

change wives without much diculty, but the way in which they 

did so altered. In the late ninth and tenth centuries the Church had 

no monopoly of marriage cases. It looks as though marriages could 

be dissolved without consulting any church tribunal: the scanty 

data do not show us lay judges in action in marriage cases, but 

there is enough evidence to suggest that often powerful men just 

did what they wanted. The marriage to Adela•§de of Louis V of 

France (not yet sole king—his father Lothar III was still in charge) 

is a good example. Without jurisdiction, the Church had no control. 

Laypeople were not disrespectful of all church rules. On the 

contrary, they made astonishing e·orts to comply with the rules 

against marrying kin. This may be because churchmen had been 

attacking the marriage of kin quite vehemently for centuries, and 

Borgolte, ‘Kulturelle Einheit und religi•ose Di·erenz’, 10–23: a good corrective 

to the present chapter’s concentration on the ‘core’ regions of Latin Europe. 

‘Les rares cas d’esp›ece que fournissent les tr›es pauvres sources du xE si›ecle ne 

font plus appara^§tre le juge la•§c. Mais, ›a côt‹e de quelques e·orts du juge eccl‹esiastique, 

on trouve encore la preuve d’un tel arbitraire de la part des maris que parler 

d’une comp‹etence exclusive au profit des ‹evêques semble finalement une gageure’ 

(P. Daudet, L’ ‹Etablissement de la comp‹etence de l’‹eglise en mati›ere de divorce @ de 

consanguinit‹e (France — X›e me–XII›e me si›ecles) ( ‹Etudes sur l’histoire de la juridiction 

matrimoniale; Paris, 1941), 18); ‘A la fin du xE si›ecle l’on peut recueillir dans les 

chroniques plusieurs preuves que les la•§ques, tout au moins les grands, rompent ›a 

leur convenance les liens conjugaux, de fac«onplusoumoinsarbitraire,auprixdeplus 

ou moins de scandale, sans que l’autorit‹e eccl‹esiastique soit consult‹ee, sans qu’elle 

paraisse protester’ (ibid. 21–2). Cf. Sta·ord, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 74– 

5: ‘Edward the Elder probably dismissed ªl}aed to marry Eadgifu; Henry the 

Fowler rid himself of Hatheburg to take Mathilda; Edgar disposed of Wulfthryth 

to marry ªlfthryth, if not ªthelflaed to marry Wulfthryth; and Robert the Pious 

summarily dismissed both Rozala and Bertha. Hugh of Arles, when he fled from 

MaroziainRome,scarcelywentthroughtheformalities.Atinyminority...madea 

thorough job of it by murdering their wives. The majority found legitimate excuses 

for disposing of unwanted women.’ 

Daudet, L’ ‹Etablissement de la comp‹etence de l’‹eglise, 22. 

‘After the “seven forbidden” degrees had been established as the norm in the 

early Middle Ages, in the later ninth and tenth centuries the greatest noble families, 

including Eleanor’s and Louis’s ancestors, had tried to avoid such marriages in 

the first place’ (C. B. Bouchard, ‘Eleanor’s Divorce from Louis VII: The Uses 

of Consanguinuity’, in B. Wheeler and J. C. Parsons (eds.), Eleanor of Aquitaine: 

Lord and Lady (New York and Basingstoke, 2002), 223–35 at 225). Bouchard gives 

reference to her previous work on this issue and answers objections to it, to my mind 

convincingly—her findings are a remarkable achievement. 

‘...tratdiefr•uhmittelalterliche Kirche seit dem 6. Jahrhundert f•ur die Durch-


the message may have begun to sink in after a long time lag (quite 

a good model for medieval lay religion in general). However, so 

far as one can judge from patchy evidence, magnates treated the 

principles of indissolubility and perhaps even monogamy with less 

respect, and prelates could not do much about it: nor do they seem 

to have tried very hard in the tenth century. 

If we move fast forward to the twelfth century, we find a quite 

di·erent state of a·airs with a very similar outcome so far as ease 

of divorce was concerned. On the one hand, there was a new world 

of marriage jurisdiction. Throughout the century questions about 

the validity of marriage were deemed to belong to the Church. As 

the century progressed, church jurisdiction became rationalized 

in several ways. Decrees of popes and councils were synthesized 

in Gratian’s Decretum, which took on the role of a legal code. 

The result was analysed by keen legal minds. A functioning system 

of ecclesiastical courts began to crystallize, run by an emergent 

bureaucracy at the local level and at Rome. Towards the end of the 

twelfth century series of doubtful points about marriage law were 

tested by cases setting precedents. 

Yet this did not a·ect patterns of lay practice as much as one 

might expect. Kings and great nobles had stopped trying to obey 

setzung des Verbotes geschlechtlicher Beziehungen zwischen blutsverwandten und 

verschw•agerten Personen ein. Hatte man diese Delikte zwar auch schon vereinzelt 

in Konzilsbeschl•ussen seit dem 4. Jahrhundert geahndet, so trat die Kirche seit dem 

6. Jahrhundert doch mit zuvor unbekanntem Nachdruck f•ur die kirchenrechtliche 

Durchsetzung der Inzest-Verbote ein’ (H. Lutterbach, Sexualit•at im Mittelalter: 

Eine Kulturstudie anhand von Bu¢b•uchern des 6. bis 12. Jahrhunderts (Cologne etc., 

1999), 172 and sect. 2.3.3.2 passim, with further references, especially to the work 

of Paul Mikat and Mayke de Jong). 

Daudet, L’ ‹Etablissement, pt. 1, ch. 1, sect. II. ii, passim. 

On marriage in the twelfth century in general, see Brooke, The Medieval Idea 

of Marriage (this splendidly readable and balanced synthesis is especially strong 

on the twelfth century); G. Duby, Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth- 

Century France, trans. E. Foster (Baltimore etc., 1978); id., Le Chevalier, la femme 

et le prêtre: le mariage dans la France f‹eodale (Paris, 1981); and a brilliant essay, 

far more important than its brevity would suggest, by John Gillingham, ‘Love, 

Marriage and Politics in the Twelfth Century’ (1989), repr. in id., Richard C¥ur 

de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century (London etc., 1994), 

243–55. 

See now A. Winroth, The Making of Gratian’s Decretum (Cambridge, 2000). 

On these cases see the important study by V. Pfa·, ‘Das kirchliche Eherecht 

am Ende des zw•olften Jahrhunderts’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung f•ur Rechtsgeschichte, 

94 [Zeitschrift f•ur Rechtsgeschichte, 107], kanonistische Abteilung, 63 

(1977), 73–117.

94 Chapter 2 

the Church’s rules on the forbidden degrees of kinship. There 

may be various explanations, but one could be precisely that they 

had worked out a way of making the Church’s own law work against 

itself. They played the ‘forbidden degree’ rules o· against the indissolubility 

rules. If a king or nobleman married a woman related 

within the extensive forbidden degrees of consanguinity or anity, 

and did not seek a dispensation, he had an annulment in his pocket. 

John Baldwin found a remarkable passage in the writings of Peter 

the Chanter: a knight saying explicitly that he was going to marry 

a particular woman with a large dowry who was possibly related to 

him in the third degree of anity, and that if she didn’t please him 

he would be able to get the marriage dissolved. It would be valid 

in church law: a church court would have to recognize it. This may 

explain why the laity so readily accepted church jurisdiction over 

marriage cases. 

Between the tenth century and the twelfth we find what the foregoing 

would lead us to expect: the rise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, 

roughly coinciding with a decline in observance of ‘forbidden de- 

Cf. Bouchard, ‘Eleanor’s Divorce from Louis VII’, 225, speaking of the dissolution 

of Louis VII’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine: ‘this divorce, a case of a 

prominent couple breaking up on the grounds of consanguinity with the divorce the 

husband’s idea, not the bishops’, was not typical of the entire Middle Ages, only of 

the twelfth century’. 

‘Sicut audivit magister militem quemdem [recte quemdam?] de uxore ducenda 

dicentem: Bene est michi quia magna est dos. In tercio genere anitatis forsitan 

est illa mihi, et ideo non ita mihi proxima, quod ab ea separer. Sed si voluero et 

non placebit michi, per anitatem illam discidium procurare potero. Ecce quanta 

derisio in ecclesia propter huiusmodi tradiciones’ (quoted by J. W. Baldwin, Masters, 

Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and his Circle (2 vols.; 

Princeton, 1970), ii. 225 n. 179, and analysis at i. 335). 

‘Mesurons le chemin parcouru, en trente ans: en 1031, au concile de Bourges, le 

juge d’ ‹Eglise n’est pas mentionn‹e lorsqu’est admis le divorce pour cause d’adult›ere; 

en 1060, au contraire, le concile de Tours investit l’‹evêque d’un pouvoir d’appr‹eciation 

pratiquement sans limite, dans tous les cas de divorce et de s‹eparation’ (Daudet, 

L’ ‹Etablissement de la comp‹etence de l’‹eglise, 43); ‘A l’‹epoque d’Yves de Chartres, non 

seulement l’‹evêque est pleinement comp‹etent, pour faire cesser une s‹eparation non 

canoniquement motiv‹ee et, ›a l’inverse, pour s‹eparer un mariage ou même pour le 

d‹eclarer nul, mais encore la fermet‹e des lignes g‹en‹erales de la proc‹edure suivie 

devant lui d‹enote d‹ej›a une pratique bien assise. Cette comp‹etence pleine est aussi 

une comp‹etence exclusive. Apr›es plus d’un si›ecledegraved‹ecadence doctrinale et 

judiciaire, l’‹episcopat franc«aisar‹eclam‹e, en 1031, cette comp‹etence; trente ans apr›es 

il l’a pos‹ee comme une r›egle. Et si, durant la fin du xiE si›ecle, certain fid›eles ont pu 

tenter de se soustraire ›alaloicanonique,grâce ›a la force de leur situation personnelle, 

ils se sont finalement inclin‹es: les r‹epudiations arbitraires sont impossible d‹esormais, 

en droit sinon en fait’ (ibid. 68).


gree’ laws. The more church justice blocked the path to divorce, 

the more the magnates tended to choose marriages which they knew 

could be annulled at need—whether or not by coincidence, perhaps 

with a half-awareness midway between innocence and calculation. 

The Church did not control the point of entry into a marriage. At 

the risk of a little disingenuity, the great laymen had it both ways: 

they could change wives and get religious legitimation. 

It is worth pausing to reflect on these frequent annulments, which 

made the system look two-faced: unbreakable monogamy in principle, 

but a popular loophole to facilitate changing wives. How can 

this be squared with a very eminent specialist’s statement that ‘If 

you take the rough with the smooth—if you take a wider view of the 

nature of inheritance than just the production of a ceaseless flow of 

male heirs—the doctrine of legitimate monogamy [i.e. the medieval 

Church’s model, including the ban on divorce] may produce very 

satisfactory results.’ Brooke is calling in question the assumption 

that easy divorce was in the interest, even the pragmatic interest, 

of medieval kings and nobles. Now it is true in a sense that indissoluble 

monogamy was arguably just as good for the class as a 

whole even in pragmatic terms: Brooke’s insight is valid. However, 

the issue falls into a large class of cases where the willingness of 

some individuals to risk a sacrifice produces an aggregate and average 

advantage. His argument is structurally similar to ‘everyone 

is better o· if individuals don’t cheat in paying taxes’, ‘waiting is 

more ecient in an orderly queue’, ‘interrogated prisoners will get 

lighter sentences if they manage not to inform on each other’ (the 

famous ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’). The problem that bedevils the ‘rational 

choice theorists’ who devote themselves to such issues is that 

this undoubted aggregate advantage will not necessarily be enough 

to make an individual accept a sacrifice. It can actually be in the 

individual interest of the toughest man in the queue to push his 

way to the front. You may know that another family’s good fortune 

in acquiring your lands balances your unhappy awareness that 

‘In the eleventh century . . . [the greatest noble families] began to marry cousins, 

not first cousins or even generally second cousins, but often third cousins—the same 

degree of relationship as that between Louis and Eleanor’ (Bouchard, ‘Eleanor’s 

Divorce from Louis VII’, 225). Bouchard notes that ‘several such unions ...were 

dissolved against the wishes of the principals’ (ibid.). 

C. N. L. Brooke, Europe in the Central Middle Ages, 962–1154, 3rd edn. (Harlow, 

2000), 151. The first edition of this book was published in 1964, and already included 

a substantial discussion of the history of marriage. Brooke was in advance of the wave 

of scholarship from the 1970s on.

96 Chapter 2 

the territory will be lost to your family after your death, because 

you have no heir. That may not stop you thinking of marrying a 

new, younger, and more fertile wife, especially if your sexual drive 

encourages you. Other reasons may stop you: love for your wife, 

belief in ‘till death do us part’, but not pragmatic considerations. 

The Capetian policy of marrying early and often was not untypical. 

It takes strong ‘internalized norms’ to produce the collectively rational 

system that Brooke describes, for pragmatism alone will not 

do it, and in the twelfth century not enough of the magnates had 

made the ‘one-man-one-woman’ model their own for the system to 

work that way. 

In the sublimated regions of romantic fiction we find symptoms 

of the feeling that marriage was not necessarily for life. In the 

twelfth century there was still an idea that one was released from 

even a long-standing and consummated marriage if one’s spouse 

entered a religious order. (This is the more comprehensible if we 

remember that not so very long before, in the early eighth century, 

this possibility had been timidly admitted even by the bishop and 

canon-law specialist Fulbert of Chartres.) The feeling seems to 

have been quite powerful even in the second half of the twelfth 

century. We find it in the Lai by Marie de France called Eliduc. 

Here we have a version of the eternal triangle in which the wife 

becomes a nun to free her husband to marry the other woman. 

The similar plot line in the romance Ille et Galeron by Gautier 

d’Arras is worth a close look. Ille has left his wife Galeron after 

receiving a disfiguring wound, because he thought she would not 

be able to stand the sight of him. He underestimates her devotion. 

She travels far and wide looking for him, and finally finds him as 

he is about to marry another woman. She makes a sad speech and 

o·ers to enter a nunnery so that he can go ahead and marry the 

other woman: 

[4124] Since then I have climbed down many a great hill, and up many a 

mountain, su·ered many a hardship and o·ered up many a coin for your 

sake, and all of this strikes me as very little. When I saw that I could not 

find you and that all my men were dead, I came away to the pope here in 

Daudet, L’ ‹Etablissement de la comp‹etence de l’‹eglise, 26–30. Daudet notes that 

‘l’‹evêque n’exclut, en principe, ni l’entr‹ee d’Aude, en religion, ni le mariage nouveau 

de Galeran’ (ibid. 28). 

R. L. Krueger, ‘Questions of Gender in Old French Romance’, in ead. (ed.), 

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 8 at p. 139.


Rome; I bared my conscience to him, and he imposed a penance on me. 

I have been in this town ever since: it will be four years this summer. So 

help me God, whose servant I am, there was never anyone who gave me 

any news of you until today; but now I have news which I know is good 

andwelcometoyouandallyourfriends....[4145] My lord, I can see 

very well that I am keeping you too long: you are due to marry the king’s 

daughter. For God’s sake, may I be in your thoughts and in your wife’s, so 

that for the sake of God and his countenance the pope may do this much 

for me, and find a place for me in an abbey. May God sanctify and bless 

you! I intend to pray God night and day to grant you a place in Paradise 

when our souls leave our bodies, when evil doers will be left outside. 

She takes it for granted that her entry into a nunnery will leave 

him free to remarry. Entry into the religious life would end the 

marriage, which had definitely been consummated. Gautier had 

earlier told his readers that ‘Ille, who had longed for her so much, 

shared one bed with Galeron, and they experienced such joy and 

such delight that it defies description’ (ibid. 53). As it happens, Ille 

does not take up her o·er. He still loves Galeron and the marriage 

to the other woman is called o·. 

Furthermore, the whole atmosphere is religiously charged, and 

there is no hint of unorthodoxy. On the contrary, Galeron assumes 

the pope will be involved. This is not a courtly love counter-culture. 

The passage reflects genuine unclarity among pious laypeople about 

the indissolubility doctrine held by the higher clergy. 

That becomes doubly evident later in the poem, when Galeron 

takes a vow in childbirth to enter a nunnery (ibid. 178–9) and Ille 

can consider marrying the other woman, whom he also loves. Ille 

was confused about his emotions. The poet compares his heart to 

atower: 

Who was inside? The first love, which held it by force of custom; except 

that his love for the maiden, which was outside, frequently accused her, 

saying that she had no right to be there inside, and intended to demonstrate 

logically and prove that love for a nun has no title to the heart of a castellan, 

a duke, a count or a king, and that it is on the contrary wholly unreasonable 

that it should be allowed, that it should be permitted to be there. It was Ille 

who su·ered, Ille who felt the e·ects of this. The first love was dicult to 

overcome, and did not know what on earth to reply, but what she did say 

Gautier d’Arras, Ille et Galeron, ed. and trans. P. Eley (King’s College London 

Medieval Studies, 13; London, 1996), 139. 

In a later chapter it will be explained that an unconsummated marriage could 

be dissolved by entry into a monastery.

98 Chapter 2 

was that she was the rightful occupant; this is what her title deed said; and 

the second replied that it was null and void from the moment she became 

a nun: what use does a nun have for a castle? [5653] But a king’s daughter 

does, who has the power to give and to take away, and let the nun read her 

psalter in the abbey and in the church! (Ille et Galeron, trans. Eley, 191) 

Ille eventually marries the second lady, after rescuing her from 

an unwanted suitor and his army. The religious legitimacy of the 

marriage is stressed: 

All the Romans eagerly endeavoured to see to it that Ille the noble warrior 

should have the crown; they were all well aware that his wife was a nun. 

Duke Ille wanted it very much, and the prospect did not displease Ganor 

[the other woman] in the least; the pope used his best endeavours; so there 

was no alternative but for it to be done. The pope celebrated their marriage; 

Rome was glad and rejoiced at it. (Ille et Galeron, trans. Eley, 221) 

Abelard and H‹elo•§se 

Abelard or the Abelard persona in Letter 4 of the famous correspondence 

with H‹elo•§se had thought di·erently, and this was the 

view that would ultimately prevail. When they were both committed 

by vows to the religious life, he had still been able to write: 

Come too, my inseparable companion, and join me in thanksgiving, you 

who were made my partner both in guilt and in grace. For the Lord is not 

unmindful also of your own salvation, indeed, he has you much in mind, 

for by a kind of holy presage of his name he marked you out to be especially 

his when he named you H‹elo•§se, after his own name, Elohim. In his mercy, 

I say, he intended to provide for two people in one, the two whom the devil 

sought to destroy in one; since a short while before this happening he had 

bound us together by the indissoluble bond of the marriage sacrament. 

Most scholars at present think that the correspondence is genuine 

or at least that it is an only semi-fictionalized literary composition 

by Abelard and H‹elo•§se themselves. Abelard died in 1142/3, so the 

The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. B. Radice (Harmondsworth etc., 

1974), 149 (in the revised edition by M. Clanchy (2003) the passage will be found 

under ‘Letter 5’, p. 83). 

M. T. Clanchy, Abelard: A Medieval Life (Oxford, 1997), 15, 154–5. 

D. Luscombe, ‘From Paris to the Paraclete: The Correspondence of Abelard 

and Heloise’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 74 (1988), 247–83, esp. 270, and 

also 278, where he raises the attractive and plausible possibility of a ‘compact between 

Heloise and Abelard jointly to share, compose and exchange their thoughts, 

experiences and principles in fictive correspondence’.


view he expresses definitely antedates the attitudes in Eliduc and 

Ille et Galeron. It is not surprising that the author of a Latin text 

(let alone the immensely learned Abelard) should be more in touch 

with the long theoretical tradition that marriage was indissoluble 

than vernacular romances. 

The attitude of Abelard and H‹elo•§se to indissolubility may be 

symptomatic of a gradual but general shift of attitudes towards 

divorce in the twelfth century, preparing the way for the transformation 

of law and consequently society e·ected by Innocent III, 

to be discussed below. It is actually rather surprising how few marriages 

are dissolved in vernacular romances: Marie de France and 

Gautier d’Arras apart, instances of true divorce in the modern sense 

are extremely dicult to find. Exceptions tend to prove the rule. 

Thus in Chr‹etien de Troyes’s romance Clig›es the marriage of the 

heroine to the emperor in Constantinople is never consummated, 

a fact that she regards as crucial. Poems like Chr‹etien’s Erec and 

Eneide or Yvain, or Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal, suggest 

that the idea of durable married love had great appeal in literature 

even if great men found it constricting in practice. 

In the twelfth century the lay ‹elite show signs of accepting the 

theory that the clergy were trying to turn into law, but maintained 

traditional habits of serial polygamy by using a loophole in the 

Church’s own rules. Paradoxically, this may have played a part in 

the eventual triumph of indissolubility. It enabled the nobility to 

get used to ecclesiastical domination of marriage without changing 

the pattern of their legitimized sex lives too much. By the time 

they were compelled to do so, they had been paying lip-service 

to indissolubility and working within canon-law rules for so long 

that they could not easily justify resistance after the convenient 

loophole had been closed. There were few ideological obstacles to 

be overcome in lay minds when a new wave of clerical intensity 

washed over Western marriage. It drew much of its impetus from 

the proto-university schools. 

(c) The Age of Innocent III 

Symbolism, the schools, and Innocent III 

A wind of change was getting up among academics in the twelfth 

century. Peter Lombard brought out clearly the connection between 

marriage symbolism and indissolubility. He took up Augustine’s

100 Chapter 2 

ideas and rechargedthem with influence. After the Lombard’s place 

in the tradition had become secure, and then for more than a century, 

every serious theologian would be steered towards reflection 

on the subject. Their conclusions have been closely analysed in a 

neglected book by Tomas Rinc‹on. 

The most important thing about Rinc‹on’s findings for our purposes 

is that they provide the background which makes sense of 

some epoch-making decisions by Pope Innocent III, who made 

this symbolic reasoning about marriage his own. Against the background 

of twelfth-century thought reconstructed by Rinc‹on, this 

was explicable, almost predictable. Thus Peter of Poitiers uses language 

which we shall meet again in Innocent’s decretal Debitum 

(X. 1. 21. 5). Peter says that ‘The sacrament is here the consent 

of minds and carnal joining, and there are not two sacraments, but 

one sacrament: of the union of Christ to the Church which comes 

about through charity, and of the bodily union which comes about 

through conformity of nature—of which the sign is carnal joining, 

just as consent of minds is the sign of spiritual union.’ Peter was a 

prominent Paris theologian in the late twelfth century. He would 

have been teaching when the young Lothario Segni, the future Innocent 

III, was a student there. However, the whole tradition of 

thought about marriage symbolism in twelfth-century Paris is a 

relevant context to Innocent’s decisions. 

T. Rinc‹on, El matrimonio, misterio y signo: siglos IX–XIII (Pamplona, 1971). 

Rinc‹on deals with canonists as well as theologians. 

Peter of Poitiers, Sententiarum libri quinque, 5. 14 (Migne, PL 211. 1257), 

cited by Rinc‹on, El matrimonio, 208 and n. 308. Note that the Migne edition has 

‘consensus animorum’ then ‘consensus animarum’; Rinc‹on silently emends. 

On Peter of Poitiers, and for further references, see F. Robb, ‘Intellectual Traditon 

and Misunderstanding: The Development of Academic Theology on the Trinity 

in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University 

College London, 1993), 108–9. The work from which this is taken was influential: 

see ibid. 108. 

On the future Innocent III’s time as a student in Paris see W. Imkamp, Das 

Kirchenbild Innocenz’ III. (1198–1216) (P•apste und Papsttum, 22; Stuttgart, 1983), 

24: ‘d•urfte sein Pariser Studienaufenthalt in die ersten beiden Drittel der 80er Jahre 

des 12. Jahrhunderts fallen’; and Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants, i. 44: 

‘Peter of Poitiers . . . acceded to the theological chair left vacant by Peter Comestor 

in 1169, was made chancellor of Notre-Dame in 1193’. 

On this see Rinc‹on, El matrimonio, pt. 2, ch. 2, and the conclusions on p. 212, 

which are worth quoting since the book is hard to obtain: ‘1.A El matrimonio es 

un v‹§nculo indisoluble por ser sacramento de la uni‹on indisoluble de Cristo con la 

Iglesia. 2.A El divorcio es pecado porque rompe esta significaci‹on. 3.A La uni‹on de 

Cristo con la Iglesia se realiz‹odedobleforma:porelamoryporlacarne.Loprimero 

se significa por el consentimiento, lo segundo por la c‹opula. El matrimonio-signo,


We see symbolic reasoning at work when Innocent refused to 

annul the marriage of Peter I of Aragon to Maria de Montpellier. 

Explaining his decision, he explicitly links the sacrament of human 

marriage with the sacrament of the union of Christ with the Church, 

of God with the faithful soul, and of the second person of the 

Trinity with human nature. The decision is hard to explain in 

terms of Realpolitik, as a recent careful analysis by Martin Aurell 

has demonstrated. Consequently, the reason Innocent gives looks 

like the real explanation. We know that Innocent liked marriage 

as a spiritual metaphor—it is the basis of one of his allegorical 

treatises and of an important sermon on the anniversary of his 

coronation—but symbolism which shapes action is something different. 

The central theme of the present study is of course that 

marriage symbolism became a force in the real social and political 

world, with Innocent III’s pontificate marking a turning point. 

The symbolic reasoning that surfaces briefly in Innocent’s expla- 

en efecto, debe plegarse jur‹§dica y vitalmente a las exigencias dimanantes de la cosa 

significada. 4.AEsplena y estrictamente sacramento el matrimonio integrado por 

los dos elementos. Es sacramento en sentido amplio cuando media s‹olo un v‹§nculo 

consensual.’ Rinc‹on’s pt. 2, ch. 3, on ‘La significaci‹on en las fuentes can‹onicas 

del siglo XII’, is also important as backround to Innocent III. For Innocent III’s 

thought on marriage generally see M. Maccarrone, ‘Sacramentalit›a e indissolubilit›a 

del matrimonio nella dottrina di Innocenzo III’, Lateranum, 44 (1978), 449–514. 

‘. . . et maxime ubi agitur de matrimonii sacramento, quod ante peccatum in 

paradiso a Domino institutum, praeter propagationis humani generis fructum, illud 

ine·abile sacramentum, conjunctionis Christi videlicet ad sanctam Ecclesiam Dei 

ad fidelem animam, et ipsius verbi ad humanam naturam, noscitur figurare’, cited 

by Inkamp, Das Kirchenbild Innocenz’ III., 224 n. 130. 

‘Innocent III n’avait pas un pr‹ejug‹e particuli›erement favorable pour Maria . . . 

Tous semblaient contre la dame: ses ennemis ‹etaient sûrs d’obtenir sa destitution. 

Elle d‹ecida alors de changer le cours des ‹ev‹enements, en d‹efendant personnellement 

ses droits ›a Rome’ (M. Aurelle, Les Noces du comt‹e: mariage et pouvoir en Catalogne 

(753–1213) (Paris, 1995), 456–7 (Aurell summarizes the grounds for the decision 

ibid. 457). He notes that Peter I was an ally of Innocent in his Languedoc policy (ibid. 

458), and comments that ‘Le verdict ne r‹epondait pas ›a la pressante conjoncture 

politique, mais bien plutôt ›a l’application stricte de la l‹egislation canonique: le 

mariage de Pere IER avec Marie de Montferrat aurait parfaitement convenu ›a la 

croisade en Terre sainte, pr‹econis‹ee de longue date par le Saint Si›ege, tout comme 

l’union avec Marie de France serait la bienvenue ›al’‹epoque o›u Innocent III prônait 

une solution pacifique ›a la crise albigeoise. Le tribunal, indi·‹erent aux subtilit‹es de 

la diplomatie, ne s’arrêta pas ›a ce genre de consid‹erations. Profond‹ement enracin‹e 

dans la conscience des juges romains, le mod›ele matrimonial chr‹etien avait pris le 

dessus sur les contingentes strat‹egies temporelles’ (ibid. 458). 

R. Kay, ‘Innocent III as Canonist and Theologian: The Case of Spiritual 

Matrimony’, in J. C. Moore (ed.), Pope Innocent III and his World (Aldershot etc., 

1999), 35–49.

102 Chapter 2 

nation of this decision is set out in detail in his decretal Debitum, 

which will be discussed in more detail in the chapter on bigamy: it 

is a key text. As will become clear there, this intellectually gifted 

ecclesiastical politician had a coherent and consistent symbolic rationale 

in mind. Granted his ability to turn ideas into action, we 

should not be surprised to find him behind the most thoroughgoing 

attempt—probably in human history up to that point—to impose 

a ‘one man to one woman for life’ model of marriage on a large 

literate society. 

Innocent’s intransigence towards royal matrimonial wishes 

showed the way things were going. Even more remarkable than his 

decision to confirm Marie de Montpellier’s marriage was his refusal 

after much diplomatic delay to grant an annulment to Philip II Augustus 

of France. Innocent needed Philip as an ally. In the early 

thirteenth century Philip made himself the most powerful ruler in 

Europe. The empire was divided by a succession crisis and had 

no serious centralized revenues by comparison with France. The 

Angevin empire under King John su·ered a humiliating defeat and 

a massive loss of land to Philip. Behind his success was wealth. 

Innocent was trying to get a pro-papal candidate made Holy Roman 

Emperor; in 1207 he imposed his candidate as archbishop of 

Canterbury after a disputed election, and found himself locked in 

a serious conflict with the king of England. By inflexibility towards 

Philip he was taking a risk. In hindsight, we know he could afford 

to, but he could not have been so sure in advance: the other 

crises were too serious. The rejected girl was a Danish princess. 

Staying on good terms with Denmark was desirable, but good relations 

with France were more important by far: in the early 1200s 

France had achieved a position comparable to that of the United 

States from the 1990s: not the only power that mattered, but far 

As Rinc‹on recognized: ‘En la exposici‹on detallada que acabamos de hacer, ha 

quedado, a nuestro juicio, incuestablemente patente la relevancia jur‹§dica de la significaci‹on 

sacramental del matrimonio, debido, en gran manera, al peso magisterial 

yjur‹§dico de la decretal Debitum de Inocencio III’ (El matrimonio, 403). 

In addition to works cited below, see J. Gaudemet. ‘Le dossier canonique sur 

mariage de Philippe Auguste et d’Ingeburge de Danemark (1193–1213)’, Revue 

historique de droit franc«ais et ‹etranger, 62 (1984), 15–29, repr. in id., Droit de l’ ‹Eglise 

et vie sociale au Moyen A^ge, no.xiv. 

For instance, to judge by the accounts of 1202/3, ‘An overwhelming surplus 

was...availableforthecostsofthe“hotel”andthemilitary campaign against John’ 

(J.W.Baldwin,The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal 

Power in the Middle Ages (Berkely etc., 1986), 174).


stronger than any other. After conquering Normandy and other 

domains of King John of England, in 1204 Philip stood alone in 

terms of power. Innocent showed a conciliatory spirit by legitimating 

Philip’s children by his mistress. The tone and intensity of his 

pressure on Philip varied with the configurations of church power 

politics. But nothing would make Innocent actually dissolve the 

There is more to be said about the Danish side of the crisis, and Frederik 

Pedersen has this in hand. Though he emphasizes Denmark’s influence more, our 

positions are not far apart. In a personal communication he agrees ‘that the case 

could never have ended in a victory for Philip. Innocent was far too committed to 

the consensual theory of marriage and too clever a politician to fall for the rather 

lame excuses Philip presented as reasons for his wish for the dissolution of his 

marriage to Ingeborg’. 

Of this, Georges Duby wrote that ‘the most important consideration for Rome 

was the increase in power that might accrue to it from the ascension to the French 

throne of a bastard legitimized by the pope’ (Medieval Marriage, 78). This is an 

instance of Duby’s tendency to over-explain. The desire to please Philip at that 

critical time is a sucient explanation. Anyway, it was not as if legitimation could 

be withdrawn, so it would not have given a future pope much of a hold over a 

future king who might not inherit anyway (and did not: in the event, Philip’s son by 

a previous marriage to a wife who had died succeeded him as Louis VIII). Again, 

what of the power that would have accrued to Rome from the marriage of the king to 

a mistress turned into a queen by the pope’s decision? Such arguments are shadowboxing 

either way: with a scholar of Duby’s fame and a widely read work like this 

the danger is that some people might assume that there is positive evidence. 

This led a nineteenth-century historian of the case to think that Innocent III’s 

overriding priorities were political: ‘zu einem sofortigen energischen Vorgehen, 

wie er es gegen einen minder m•achtigen F•ursten in dieser Zeit •ubte, mochte sich 

Innocenz gegen den K•onig von Frankreich bei der unklaren Lage der Dinge im 

Reich, die ihm gute Beziehungen zu Philipp wertvoll machen mu¢ten, doch nicht 

entschlie¢en k•onnen’ (R. Davidsohn, Philipp II. August von Frankreich und Ingeborg 

(Stuttgart, 1888), 71); ‘mu¢te sich eine Angelegenheit geistlichen Zwanges, in der 

es nur gegolten h•atte, die moralische Hoheit des apostolischen Amtes zur Geltung 

zu bringen, mit den Interessen weltlicher Politik des Papsttums kreuzen, mu¢te 

sie durch diese bestimmt und vielfach gehemmt werden. Wo die Pflicht des Oberhirten 

schnelles Einschreiten gefordert h•atte, erheischte das Interesse politischer 

Machtstellung kluges Abwarten’ (ibid. 74–5). Davidsohn did not grasp that, for 

Innocent, indissolubility was a value not up for negotiation, whereas such matters 

of timing, tone, and sanctions were the objects of instrumental calculation. Innocent 

had a ‘Verantwortlichkeitsethik’ anchored in some fixed values rather than a ‘Gesinnungsethik’ 

which would have compelled him to treat each decision as an absolute 

moral imperative. For a better insight into Innocent’s mind see R. H. Tenbrock, 

Eherecht und Ehepolitik bei Innocenz III. (doctoral dissertation for the University of 

M•unster; Dortmund-H•orde, [1933?]), 99: ‘es kennzeichnet die Gr•o¢e dieses Papstes 

und Staatsmannes, da¢ er im Grunde niemals bewu¢t von dem Wege des Rechts 

abwich. Er verlangsamte wohl den Schritt auf diesem steilen und rauhen Wege, um 

Ausschau zu halten nach Nebenpfaden, die ihn zwar nicht vom Ziele wegf•uhrten, 

aber ihm gestatteten, manchen Vorteil f•ur die Kirche zu erlangen. Das bedeutete 

freilich oft ein Zur•uckweichen vor den Schwierigkeiten und eine Angst, gewisse 

•au¢ere Erfolge, Erfolge des Politikers, des Mannes, der der Welt “zugewandt” ist,

104 Chapter 2 

marriage. Innocent really is a confusing figure for historians who 

divide great men into idealists and power-brokers. 

Thus Innocent III took the exalted idea of indissolubility out of 

the ivory tower and into the world of power politics. At the end of 

his pontificate he tried to make it a more general norm in practice. 

At the Fourth Lateran Council the loopholes which had permitted 

not only monarchs but also many lesser noblemen to get out of marriages 

were closed. The circle of forbidden degrees was drawn much 

smaller. The ban had extended up to the seventh degree of consanguinity: 

anyone with a great-great-great-great-great-grandparent 

in common, any sixth cousin, that is. The same rule applied to affinity: 

one could not marry the widow, widower, or former sexual 

partner of a sixth cousin. Both anity and consanguinity were now 

reduced from seven degrees to four: one could not marry a third 

cousin or anyone who had slept with one or been married to a deceased 

third cousin, but beyond that there was no problem; obscure 

extra modes of anity were abolished altogether. 

aufgeben zu m •ussen. Aber gerade dadurch war es ihm beschieden, “seine Papstidee 

in die reale Wirklichkeit zu •ubersetzen und die Macht des Papsttums aufs 

h•ochste zu steigern”.’ An excellent brief treatment in context is in Baldwin, Masters, 

Princes, and Merchants, i. 235 and ii. 225–6. M.-B. Brugui›ere, ‘Le mariage de 

Philippe-Auguste et d’Isambour de Danemark: aspects canoniques et politiques’, 

in Universit‹e des Sciences Sociales de Toulouse, M‹elanges o·erts ›a Jean Dauvillier 

(Toulouse, 1979), 135–56 (I am grateful to Alexandra Sanmark for drawing my 

attention to this), and ead., ‘Canon Law and Royal Weddings, Theory and Practice: 

The French Example, 987–1215’, in S. Chodorow (ed.), Proceedings of the Eighth 

International Congress of Medieval Canon Law (Monumenta Iuris Canonici, Series 

C, Subsidia, 9; Vatican City, 1992), 473–96, makes some surprising assertions and 

assumptions. She thinks that Innocent’s legitimation of Philip’s children by Agnes 

of M‹eran ‘n’est gu›ere susceptible que d’une explication: depuis son accession au 

trône de saint Pierre, il avait d‹ecouvert le bien fond‹e delarequête de Philippe Auguste...etilnepouvaitplusmettreenp‹erilsans 

raison valable la succession au trône 

de France’ (‘Le mariage de Philippe-Auguste et d’Isambour de Danemark’, 145–6). 

This will not do. Legitimacy was not a matter of principle like indissolubility. The 

fundamental implausibility is that forbidden degrees that would have annulled the 

marriage without diculty were ascertainable but not used by Philip Augustus, who, 

she suggests astonishingly, was not really trying after his initial e·ort. A secondary 

implausibility is that fear of o·ending Denmark was a major reason for frustrating 

Philip Augustus: a topsy-turvy sense of power realities in the early thirteenth century. 

(As noted above, however, Frederik Pedersen has in press a paper emphasizing 

the importance of Denmark.) I hope to return to these questions in detail. 

Gaudemet, Le Mariage en Occident, 205–6; Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and 

Merchants, i. 336–7. Baldwin gives fascinating evidence that Innocent was influenced 

by Peter the Chanter: see ibid. 332–7 (Gaudemet, Le Mariage en Occident, 205, 

comments, ‘On peut en discuter’). Baldwin, i. 336, is probably mistaken in thinking 

that hearsay testimony was banned by Lateran IV: see below.


The change in the consanguinity laws dovetailed with another 

measure designed to prevent annulments by precluding invalid 

marriages. This was Canon 51, on clandestine marriages. It laid 

down that banns must be read in advance of a marriage, to give time 

for any impediments to come to light. This gave neighbours who 

heard the banns time to bring up a problem if there was one, and 

gave the priests time to investigate whether there was any impediment. 

Note that this decree did not require marriage in church or by 

a priest, as some good historians have assumed. It was not about 

sacralizing the ritual of entry into marriage, which varied from one 

part of Europe to another: in parts of Italy a purely secular marriage 

contract was quite acceptable in the eyes of the Church. Marriage 

was a sacrament whether or not a priest was present. The decree 

was part of a determined e·ort to block the twelfth-century nobles’ 

favourite escape route from marriage. The smaller the circle of 

possible impediments, the easier it would be to discover them; furthermore, 

there would be time to discover them and a public request 

for anyone who knew of one to make it known before the marriage. 

The Fourth Lateran Council did not go so far as to declare marriage 

invalid if the banns had not been read. Perhaps there was 

uncertainty about the limits of the Church’s power to add a condition 

of validity to a sacrament; or more probably there was fear that 

marriage practices were too varied and ingrained and that such a 

rule would create many invalid marriages; or perhaps the problems 

were not thought through. At any rate plenty of people did get 

married clandestinely, without having the banns read, as we shall 

see. Nevertheless, it is clear that Innocent and the Council were in 

earnest in their e·ort to make annulment much harder. 

Tighter rules about proof 

In addition to redrawing the limits of consanguinity and generalizing 

the system of banns, Innocent III, or rather the Fourth Lateran 

Council, made it harder to prove in court, tightening up the evidence 

requirements. Hearsay evidence had been allowed before 

Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, ed. J. Alberigo et al., 3rd edn. (Bologna, 

1973), 258. 

See D. L. d’Avray, ‘Marriage Ceremonies and the Church in Italy after 1215’, 

in T. Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (eds.), Marriage in Italy 1300–1650 (Cambridge, 

1998), 107–15 at 107–9, for historians’ views. 

The best starting point on this topic is R. H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in 

Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974), 81–2.

106 Chapter 2 

because it had been so hard to reconstruct genealogies linking sixth 

cousins going back to great-great-great-great-great-grandparents: 

now it was still allowed, but rigorous requirements had to be observed. 

For a certain tolerance of less than rigorous evidence had been 

acceptable when dealing with the distant past, rather as scholars 

nowadays allow a little more leeway to early than to late medieval 

historians when it comes to rigorous demonstration. Reduction of 

the forbidden degrees to four brought the family facts in question 

nearer to the present. A couple related in the fourth degree 

would have a great-great-grandparent in common, and they might 

even be still alive. In noble families couples could a·ord to marry 

shortly after puberty. An elementary calculation brings the implications 

home. Pregnancy and childbirth at 16 were possible and 

respectable. Suppose this happened in two lines coming down from 

a common ancestor. A woman could be a great-great-grandmother 

at 64. Seven years later her great-great-great-grandchildren might 

be the subject of marriage negotiations. (Betrothal was acceptable 

after the age of reason had been reached.)Atthatpointthefamilies 

involved could consider whether there were any canonical impediments. 

The common ancestor linking the couple in the fourth 

degree of consanguinity could be alive. 

It is unlikely that common ancestors of fourth-degree relatives 

often actually lived to see an annulment process between their 

great-great-grandchildren. Suppose that the young couple became 

engaged without anyone bothering about the impediment, and married 

without the banns being read (or without anyone being so tactless 

as to protest). The great-great-grandmother would be elderly 

by the time they got married. Possibly she would be dead by then. 

If the husband sought an annulment a few years later (perhaps because 

he wanted to make a new political marriage alliance), more 

time still would have elapsed and our great-great-grand-maternal 

common ancestor would very probably be dead. Even so, many 

people alive would have known her and they could have sworn to 

the genealogy at first hand, with no need for hearsay evidence. 

Not all ‘forbidden degree’ cases would have presented so few 

‘Aquinas’, Supplement to Summa theologica, 43. 2, in Sancti Thomae Aquinatis 

. . . opera omnia, iussu . . . Leonis XIII P.M. edita, xii (Rome, 1906), 83–4 

(‘Supplementum’ section, which is separately paginated): an interesting essay in 

developmental child psychology.


problems of proof. If children were born in both lines coming 

down from the common ancestor at thirty-year intervals between 

the generations rather than sixteen-year intervals, the genealogy 

would stretch back into a more distant past. For this reason, no 

doubt, the decree did allow hearsay evidence, but only under the 

stringent conditions to which we must now turn. 

These conditions are set out with forceful directness by Hostiensis, 

Henry of Susa (Latin Segusium) or Henricus de Bartholomaeis, 

doyen of thirteenth-century canonists (in a career full of success 

he also rose high in the service of King Henry III of England and 

ended up a cardinal), in an important passage which is edited below 

(Document 2. 2. 1). Hostiensis comments directly on the decree of 

Lateran IV: it had been incorporated into the Decretals of Gregory 

IX, which put it before the eyes of every canon lawyer. It was 

natural for Hostiensis to discuss it at length in his great Lectura 

on the Decretals, and his own remarks would have reached a wide 

and respectful professional audience. Witnesses giving indirect 

evidence must be of good repute, must have learnt of the forbidden 

degree relationship before the beginning of the legal case, and must 

have learnt it from ‘elders’ (antiquioribus). There must be more 

than one witness of good repute, reporting the testimony of more 

than one source of good repute. The witnesses in the annulment 

case must not be motivated by hatred, love, fear, or advantage. They 

must be able to identify properly the individuals in the genealogy to 

which they bear witness, and they must know how to count the degrees 

of consanguinity or anity. They must swear that they heard 

the facts to which they bear witness from their elders, and believe 

them personally, and they must have seen some of the people in the 

kin group they reconstruct acting as relatives. 

No paraphrase is as forceful as Hostiensis’s own words, which 

give judges a numbered checklist and deserve to be quoted: 

The first thing is that one should consider whether the witness carries 

weight or not. Second, whether he or she learnt the things to which testimony 

is given before the beginning of the lawsuit. Third, whether the 

witness heard this from his or her elders. Fourth, whether the witness heard 

it from at least two people. Fifth, whether the two were suspicious types or 

of bad reputation, or whether they were trustworthy and unexceptionable. 

K. Pennington, ‘An Earlier Recension of Hostiensis’s Lectura on the Decretals’ 

(1987), repr. in id., Popes, Canonists and Texts, 1150–1550 (Aldershot etc., 1993), 

no. xvii (retaining the original pagination: 77–90), at 79.

108 Chapter 2 

Sixth, whether only one person heard this from several people, even if they 

were of good reputation, or whether several witnesses of evil repute heard 

it from men even of good repute. Seventh, granted that there are several 

of good repute, who heard it from several of good repute, whether they are 

motivated by hatred, a·ection, fear, or advantage. Eighth, whether they 

have described the persons by their own names or at least by adequate 

periphrases. Ninth, whether they distinguish the individual degrees on 

both sides, counting them out clearly. Tenth, whether they conclude by 

swearing that their depositions are based on what they have heard from 

their elders. Eleventh, whether they believe that it is so. Twelfth, whether 

they have seen some of the persons of the degrees which they have counted 

out acting as relatives. 

These are the twelve things, in the order specified above, which are to be 

absolutely kept before the mind; it is by questioning the witnesses about the 

greater part of these things that the enquiry should be conducted. If one of 

them should be lacking, the testimony is held to be insucient, as is made 

clear at the beginning of this passage. And when there is an annulment 

case turning on consanguinity or anity, the judge should memorize these 

twelve questions, and he should question every witness about them or the 

majority of them, in such a way as not to leave out even one of them, indeed 

he should conduct his examination with the utmost rigour even if the case 

is contested. For the argument, see below: ‘Concerning a man who has 

intercourse with a blood relative of his wife’, Super eo; ...(Document 

2. 1. 2–3) 

(d) Indissolubility in Practice 

How far were the rules about proof observed? 

Hostiensis feels very strongly about the need for rigour in annulment 

cases. He suddenly breaks out of his normal dry and technical 

manner of writing to say with outrage that these rules for evidence 

in annulment cases had been widely disregarded by the judges of 

his own time: 

So far, however, the judges of our time have kept this badly, caring little 

or nothing for such things. Therefore they despise the canonical form 

and pass many sentences of annulment contrary to God and justice, not 

without dangers to their souls and the souls of many others, dangers which 

My interpretation here is that the judge must obviously conduct a careful 

interrogation when the case is not contested, because of the danger of collusion, but 

that he must still do so even if the case is adversarial and one party is casting doubt 

on the claims of the other.


we solemnly entreat them not to neglect in the future, but to hold before 

their minds. (Document 2. 1. 4) 

The tone is reminiscent of protests against the ease of annulments 

in the United States in the late twentieth century—and indeed, 

we shall have to consider the possibility that the experience which 

sparked o· Hostiensis’s protest was localized, since the situation he 

describes does not fit very easily with what we know from church 

court records, where we have them. He was a man experienced in the 

world’s a·airs, but there is no tolerant cynicism here: his warning 

about the danger to the souls of the judges and many others seems 

to come from the heart. 

Hostiensis uses the word actenus (so far), as if he expected the 

situation to change, and perhaps it did. He was himself an enormously 

influential man and probably did not underestimate the 

e·ect of his vehement protest on readers and pupils—for in the 

nature of the case it is likely that he expressed himself with still 

greater freedom, which is saying a lot, in his academic teaching. 

Discussions during academic teaching may lie behind the objections 

Hostiensis raises. An imaginary interlocutor challenges him 

by saying that the law normally tries to make as much proof as 

possible available: so why not in annulment cases? Hostiensis has 

two answers. The first is much the same as the point made earlier, 

namely that proof had become much easier since the number of 

forbidden degrees had been reduced to four, so that strict standards 

should now be expected. His second argument is an allusion 

to the ‘examples’ of how hearsay evidence could be abused. The 

decretal which gave rise to the whole discussion had referred to the 

many examples that showed the danger of hearsay evidence and 

the consequent need for rigour. An earlier passage in Hostiensis’s 

commentary takes this remark as a cue for the remarkable 

story of Raymund Barellus, of the diocese of Nice (printed below 

as Document 2. 1. 1). 

Barellus worked the following scam to get marriages dissolved. 

He was old, and claimed to be able to reconstruct practically any 

Cf. R. H. Vasoli, What God Has Joined Together: The Annulment Crisis in 

American Catholicism (New York and Oxford, 1998). 

‘quia tamen pluribus exemplis et certis experimentis didicimus, ex hoc multa 

pericula contra legitima provenisse coniugia, statuimus, ne super hoc recipiantur 

de cetero testes de auditu, quum iam quartum gradum prohibitio non excedat, nisi 

forte [then the list of rigorous conditions begins]’ (X. 2. 20. 47).

110 Chapter 2 

genealogy (in the locality, obviously). However, as a single witness 

he would be unable to provide sucient testimony: it was standard 

practice to require two. He would take a group of ten or a dozen 

people, tell them the genealogy, divide them into groups, and get 

people from di·erent groups to relay the genealogy to other people 

who could then act as witnesses in the annulment suits, claiming 

that they heard the genealogy from their elders. 

I have failed to identify this ingenious subverter of the law. It is 

possible that his interesting activities were carried on before 1215 

and that Hostiensis only knows of him by reputation, but it seems 

much more likely that the canonist had direct knowledge of these 

machinations, and was genuinely shocked by their cynicism. He had 

been prior of the cathedral church of Antibes in the same general 

region. If applied with conscientious rigour, the detailed rules he 

gives for evidence would probably have stymied Barellus. 

The next imaginary interlocutor suggests that this rigour might 

throw the baby out with the bathwater. If all the rules are observed 

to the letter, can a case ever be made for an annulment on grounds 

of consanguinity? Hostiensis responds strongly. The benefit of the 

doubt should always be given in favour of marriage. Better that a 

union within the forbidden degrees continue than that a valid one 

be dissolved. His position is quite similar mutatis mutandis to a 

traditional attitude to crime: better that a guilty man go free than 

that an innocent man be convicted. 

Hostiensis explains his rationale. Indissolubility is a matter of 

divine law, the forbidden degrees are made by human ecclesiastical 

law. He makes it clear that he has in mind primarily the third 

or fourth degrees of consanguinity and anity, which he is sure 

are not subject to an absolute divine prohibition; he indicates that 

the second degree might be in the same category, but he is being 

careful. He thinks that where the degrees are so close that divine 

law is an issue, the relationship will be so evident that witnesses 

would hardly be needed. 

On the face of it, this passage gives clear evidence that ‘soft’ 

annulments were still the norm after 1215. That would be to go 

beyond the evidence. We too should exercise, as historians, the 

kind of rigour that Hostiensis liked in judges. It does not follow 

at all that the situation was the same as before 1215. To begin 

with, not all conscientious canonists would necessarily have gone 

all the way with him. He is not just saying that substantively valid


marriages should not be undone with the help of formalities: he 

is saying that substantively invalid marriages should be allowed 

to stand if any part of the formal proof process is deficient. He 

views marriages in the way that a tenacious defence lawyer today 

views the innocence of clients: the prosecution should have to get 

every technicality right. He attacks a predecessor who put forward 

the following argument. If one witness proves that Martin is the 

son of John, and a di·erent witness proves that Bertha is John’s 

daughter, that is a sucient demonstration that Martin and Bertha 

are siblings. Hostiensis will have none of it. The reasoning is against 

the wording of the decretal, and in any case there might be more 

than one John. We may well feel that the last point is weak, because 

it is only a thought experiment in which the identity of John might 

be presumed secure and unambiguous in the testimony of both 

witnesses. On the other hand, Hostiensis seems to be right about the 

literal meaning of the decretal. All the same, his opponent, on whom 

he pours scorn, was not trying to find an escape clause to allow 

unjustified annulments: he was just drawing a logical conclusion 

which makes sense in itself. 

More to the point, most of the surviving church court evidence 

is later than the time when Hostiensis was writing. As we shall 

see, it tells a di·erent story, in which annulments on grounds of 

consanguinity are rare. Perhaps Hostiensis was generalizing from 

limited experience from one part of France at a time for which we 

have little court record evidence. It may be that there were great 

regional di·erences (just as c.2000 an extremely high proportion 

of Catholic annulments were from the United States). It is even 

possible that his own influence, or rather the great influence of his 

commentary, had an e·ect upon attitudes. 

If so, we may note in passing that this is another instance of 

marriage symbolism a·ecting social practice. The next two chapters 

will show how deeply Hostiensis’s thinking about ‘bigamy’ 

and consummation was bound up with marriage symbolism. In 

particular, a long passage about consummation shows that indissolubility 

was closely connected in his mind with the representation 

of Christ’s union to the Church—a position familiar by now, but 

expressed with unusual power. 

Whether or not Hostiensis was responsible for tougher treatment 

of consanguinity or anity cases for annulment can only be 

For the foregoing, see below, Document 2. 2.

112 Chapter 2 

guessed. The educated guess is surely that he must have had some 

influence because of his great status, but could not have worked a 

transformation on his own. However that may be, there is a good 

deal of evidence that the ‘forbidden degrees’ loophole was no longer 

a popular escape route from marriage in the fourteenth century, in 

the areas where ecclesiastical court record evidence has survived 

and has been studied. 

Records of real cases from local church courts 

Most of the evidence survives (or is known to survive) in England, 

and the English evidence for marriage litigation has been the subject 

of several fine studies. It is worth quoting some of the conclusions: 

Helmholz: ‘It is all but irresistible to conclude that divorces were 

often procured under the system of kinship disqualification. The 

Church court records, however, do not support that conclusion. 

The hard fact is that there were few divorces on these grounds.’ 

Helmholz provides various explanations: people tried to avoid marrying 

kin, they looked for wives outside their community, forbidden 

degrees were hard to prove under the tough conditions of evidence 

(ibid. 79–85). 

Sheehan (writing about a late fourteenth-century Ely consistory 

court register): ‘the court’s principal activity was the vindication 

and defence of the marriage bond; pleas of annulment occurred 

infrequently’; ‘It becomes evident that marriages were not especially 

threatened by impediments of consanguinity and anity’ 

(ibid. 75); ‘the court was primarily a body for the proof and defence 

of marriage rather than an instrument of easy annulment’ (ibid. 76). 

Ingram: 

Today the bulk of matrimonial litigation . . . relates to divorce. In late 

medieval and early modern England the situation was very di·erent. It is 

true that, although legal divorce in the modern sense was unknown, it was 

possible on rigorously specified grounds to bring actions for the annulment 

of marriage or for separation from bed and board. However, all the available 

evidence indicates that, throughout the period from the fourteenth to 

Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England, 79. 

M. M. Sheehan, ‘The Formation and Stability of Marriage in Fourteenth- 

Century England: Evidence of an Ely Register’ (1971), repr. in id., Marriage, Family, 

and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies, ed. J. K. Farge (Cardi·, 1996), 38–76 

at 74.


the seventeenth centuries, such suits were comparatively infrequent: cases 

concerning the formation of marriage, not marital breakdown, normally 

constituted the bulk of matrimonial litigation in the English ecclesiastical 

courts. 

Pedersen (studying the fourteenth-century consistory court of 

York): ‘Perhaps most surprising, however . . . is the fact that according 

to the cause papers no marriages were annulled because of 

consanguinity.’ 

Three other scholars may be cited to show that the English situation 

was not exceptional—that annulments on grounds of consanguinity 

were rare on the Continent too: 

Weigand: 

‘Consanguinity’ and ‘Anity’. When one considers the extent of these impediments 

in the Middle Ages, even after the reduction in 1215 to the 

fourth degree according to the canonical and thus also the Germanic computation, 

one might presume that these impediments played a very great 

role. Indeed, occasionally one finds it written in the scholarly literature 

that these and other impediments would have been able to provide the 

interested parties with a rationale for dissolving the marriages which they 

could subsequently use pretty well whenever they wanted. In reality, however, 

they played only a subordinate role; furthermore, the annulment of 

a marriage occurred only on the basis of genuine proofs, and certainly not 

on the basis of mere assertion by the parties involved. 

M. Ingram, ‘Spousals Litigation in the English Ecclesiastical Courts c.1350– 

c.1640’, in R. B. Outhwaite (ed.), Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History 

of Marriage (London, 1981), 35–57 at 35–6. 

F. Pedersen, Marriage Disputes in Medieval England (London etc., 2000), 137. 

R. Weigand, ‘Zur mittelalterlichen kirchlichen Ehegerichtsbarkeit: Rechtsvergleichende 

Untersuchung’ (1981), repr. in id., Liebe und Ehe im Mittelalter (Bibliotheca 

Eruditorum, 7; Goldbach, 1993), new pagination at foot pp. 307*–341*, 

at 325*–326* (my translation). Weigand goes on to summarize the findings for individual 

church courts where records have survived. He notes among other things 

an interesting finding in a study of northern French dioceses. On the one hand, 

consanguinity cases were quite common. On the other, they seem not to have aimed 

at a dissolution of the marriage. Instead, the data show couples being instructed 

to obtain dispensations that would put their marriage right. There is reason to 

think that the papal Penitentiary dealt with such dispensations quite eciently: 

for this aspect of its work see L. Schmugge, P. Hersperger, and B. Wiggenhauser, 

Die Supplikenregister der p•apstlichen P•onitentiarie aus der Zeit Pius’ II. (1458–1464) 

(T •ubingen, 1996), 72–3, 80–8, and K. Salonen, The Penitentiary as a Well of Grace in 

the Late Middle Ages: The Example of the Province of Uppsala 1448–1527 (Annales 

Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, 313; Helsinki, 2001), 109–19.

114 Chapter 2 

Lombardi (writing about Florence at the end of the period and in 

the subsequent one): 

If we consider the cases as a whole, it becomes evident that people did not 

for the most part have recourse to the tribunal for the purpose of breaking 

a matrimonial bond. More numerous were the cases which had to do with 

the formation of the bond. 

Donahue: 

My own research has focussed on England and France. Anne Lefebvre 

has surveyed the surviving records from late medieval France. Professor 

Weigand and Klaus Lindner have worked on Germany. An international 

group on ecclesiastical court records has produced reports on the surviving 

records of Austria, Belgium, France, Hungary, The Netherlands, 

and Switzerland, and has made some preliminary soundings in Germany, 

Spain and Italy. While the patterns of these records and of their survival 

vary markedly from country to country, and considerably more work in situ 

needs to be done, the conclusions about incest cases that Helmholz and 

Sheehan arrived at on the basis [of] a relatively small sample of English 

cases have held up remarkably well: Incest cases do not comprise a large 

portion of the marriage business of the medieval church courts. There are 

somesuchcases....Thenumber...however,palesincomparisonwith 

the number of instance cases in which one party is seeking to enforce a 

marriage legitimately—as he or she alleges—entered into or to obtain a 

separation on the ground of adultery or cruelty, or in comparison with 

the number of ex ocio prosecutions of fornication or adultery. . . . First, 

the search has now been extended widely enough and has covered enough 

di·erent types and levels of courts that we are probably safe in arguing 

that the records are not there. Second, with a bit more hesitancy, we can 

probably argue that the records never were there, i.e., that the sample is 

wide enough and the circumstances of its survival peculiar enough that we 

D. Lombardi, Matrimoni di antico regime (Annali dell’Istituto storico italogermanico 

in Trento, Monografie, 34; Bologna, 2001), 171 (my translation). Cf. ibid. 

175: ‘il numero delle cause di nullit›a resta comunque limitato, finch‹e, a partire dal 

ventennio 1670–1689, sparisce del tutto. Ne possiamo forse dedurre che il principio 

di indissolubilit›a si fosse profondamente radicato nelle coscienze dei fedeli, oltre che 

tra i guidici, sensibili alle esigenze di salvaguardia del vincolo.’ 

Donahue means cases involving the forbidden degrees of kinship (consanguinity 

and anity). I am not sure that the word incest in the sense that anthropologists 

use it, or indeed in the everyday sense, captures the way it was regarded in this period: 

except where very close kinship was concerned, the rules were seen increasingly as 

designed to produce on the aggregate a sociologically desirable harmony between 

extended families, rather than moral absolutes barring the way to pollution. See 

D. L. d’Avray, ‘Lay Kinship Solidarity and Papal Law’, in P. Sta·ord, J. L. Nelson, 

and J. Martindale (eds.), Law, Laity and Solidarities: Essays in Honour of Susan 

Reynolds (Manchester, 2001), 188–99.


are probably looking at a relatively unbiased sample of what once was. . . . 

Third, not only were relatively few cases of incest recorded, but there were 

relativelyfewsuchcases....wecanprobablyrejectonceandforallthe 

suggestion that all medieval marriages were de facto dissoluble because of 

the incest rules. 

These converging investigations discredit the view once current 

that the forbidden degrees provided a let-out clause for most marriages 

in the Middle Ages. Of course it is possible that despite Donahue’s 

confidence more records may come to light and that these 

might alter the picture. It is hard to know what may or may not 

survive in Italy because it was normal for ordinary notaries to keep 

ecclesiastical court records and to mingle them with perfectly secular 

documents. So more Italian ecclesiastical court cases about 

marriage will probably be found from time to time and it is possible 

that they may lead future scholars to rethink Donahue’s verdict— 

but it does not seem likely. One set of Italian church court records 

that seems to have escaped the scholars just quoted reminds us 

that consanguinity cases need not be about the couple’s desire to 

get out of a marriage, for in an Asti case of 1265 it is just the 

opposite. A married couple, Pietro Rugio and Agnesina Rugna, 

were reported as being related in the forbidden degrees. There followed 

an investigation. Seven witnesses bore out the accusation, 

so the marriage was pronounced null. Then Pietro and Agnesina 

appeared and said under oath that they did not know themselves 

C. Donahue, Jr., ‘The Monastic Judge: Social Practice, Formal Rule, and 

the Medieval Canon Law of Incest’, in P. Landau, with M. Petzolt (eds.), De iure 

canonico medii aevi: Festschrift f•ur Rudolf Weigand (Studia Gratiana, 27; Rome, 

1996), 49–69 at 55–6. 

A case in point was drawn to my attention by Chris Wickham: marriage cases 

mixed with records of debt etc. in the records of Guglielmo Cassinese towards the 

end of the twelfth century: see Guglielmo Cassinese (1190–1192), ed. M. W. Hall, 

H. C. Krueger, and R. L. Reynolds (2 vols.; Notai liguri del sec. XII, 2; Documenti 

e studi per la storia del commercio e del diritto commerziale italiano, 12–13; Turin, 

1938). This has some interesting cases (e.g. vol. ii, no. 1293, pp. 70–1; no. 1467, pp. 

138–40; no. 1641, pp. 212–13), though they do not a·ect the argument of this book 

either way. 

Documenti capitolari del secolo XIII (1265–66, 1285–88, 1291, 1296–98), ‘a 

cura di Pietro Dacquino’, ed. A. M. Cotto Meluccio (Asti, 1987). (Trevor Dean 

directed me to this rich and fascinating set of documents.) The collection reinforces 

the conclusions of Donahue, Weigand, et al. A search through the entries listed in 

the index under ‘Cause matrimoniali’ did not reveal a single case of annulment on 

grounds of consanguinity or anity. As with English material, to which these cases 

bear a striking resemblance, the disputes seem to turn on the formation of marriage: 

consent, pre-contract, etc. Ibid., nos. 74 and 75, pp. 36–7.

116 Chapter 2 

to be blood relatives. They were released from excommunication. 

The investigation seems to have continued, and we do not know 

the outcome. 

Consanguinity cases do not in themselves show that indissolubility 

was taken lightly. It they result from the initiative of local 

church authorities, rather than the husband, they attest only to zeal 

for the consanguinity rules. The large number of indissolubility 

cases from the Southern Burgundian Netherlands can be and have 

been explained in this way. Though they do not conform to the 

general pattern described by Donahue, they do not resemble the 

twelfth-century pattern of easy annulments either: all the indications 

are that the couples wanted to stay married and that the local 

church’s agenda was to enforce the ‘forbidden degrees’ legislation 

of 1215. 

The ‘easy annulments’ theory works well for the long century before 

Lateran IV in 1215, but after that date it is a historians’ myth 

which modern scholarship has dispelled. This needs to be said with 

some emphasis, for even so fine a historian as Robert Bartlett, in a 

recent standard work which goes up to 1225, suggests that ‘aristocrats 

were adept at using the rules of consanguinity to get something 

like divorce on demand’, without noting the transformation of the 

situation near the end of this period. 

The meaning of ‘pre-contract’ cases 

Here an objection could be raised. In England at least, among 

the commonest sorts of case in later medieval church courts were 

‘pre-contract’ cases, where a marriage was challenged by someone 

claiming a prior marriage to one of the partners. Behind such cases 

might lie an earlier clandestine marriage. If a man and a woman 

contracted a marriage by simple consent, without having banns 

read first, it was a sin but valid. If the court believed in the earlier 

marriage, the later one was dissolved. Did not pre-contract cases 

make a mockery of indissolubility? If so, that undermines the thesis 

that symbolism eventually brought about a transformation of 

marriage practice. 

M. Vleeschouwers-Van Melkebeek, ‘Incestuous Marriages: Formal Rules and 

Social Practice in the Southern Burgundian Netherlands’, in I. Davis, M. M •uller, 

and S. Rees Jones (eds.), Love, Marriage, and Family Ties in the Later Middle Ages 

(International Medieval Research, 11; Turnhout, 2003), 77–95. 

R. Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075–1225 (Oxford, 

2000), 558. The examples he gives are all pre-1215.


On the contrary: pre-contract cases were premissed on the conviction 

that a marriage was indissoluble. The first marriage contract 

may have been informal, may have taken place in sinful circumstances, 

but even so, it overrode any subsequent marriage, however 

religious the ceremony. Marriage was so absolutely indissoluble 

that even a marriage contracted in an alehouse stood against a 

subsequent marriage solemnized by a papal legate in Canterbury 

Cathedral. According to the predominant view, widely publicized 

in pastoral manuals, the sacramentality of marriage did not require 

a religious ritual, merely the exchange of consent. Two influential 

English pastoral manuals from di·erent halves of the fourteenth 

century deserve special attention. William of Pagula defines marriage 

thus: 

Marriage is contracted by consent alone through words in the present 

tense, as when a man says: ‘I take you to be my wife’, or the woman says: 

‘I take you to be my man or husband’. Whether or not an oath is inserted, 

it is not permitted to contract another marriage. 

A little later he says: 

Two things are necessary for a marriage to take place, namely, substance 

and form. For the substance, the consent is there. For the form, the words 

reckoned to express consent in the present tense, as when he says: ‘I take 

you to be mine’, and the woman says: ‘I take you to be mine’, or other 

words expressing consent in the present tense. 

Another extremely popular English priests’ manual produced 

later in the fourteenth century, the Pupilla oculi of Johannes de 

Burgo, is even clearer: 

With respect to the minister of this sacrament, it should be noted that 

no other minister is required apart from the couple contracting the marriage. 

. . . It is clear also that the ministry of a priest is not required for 

the conferral of this sacrament, and that the sacerdotal blessing which the 

priest is accustomed to pronounce over the husband and wife, or the other 

‘Contrahitur matrimonium solo consensu per verba de presenti, ut ubi dicit: 

“Accipio te in meam uxorem”, vel mulier dicit: “Accipio te in meum virum vel 

maritum”. Sive iuramentum sit interpositum vel non, non licet alteri ad alia vota 

transire’ (MS BL Royal 8. B. XV, fo. 141R). 

‘Duo sunt necessaria ad esse matrimonii, scilicet substantia et forma. Pro 

substantia, est ibi consensus. Pro forma, verba deputata ad exprimendum consensum 

de presenti, ut ubi dicit: “Accipio te in meam”, et mulier dicit: “Accipio te in meum”, 

vel alia verba consensum de presenti exprimentia’ (ibid., fo. 142V).

118 Chapter 2 

prayers pronounced by him, are not the form of the sacrament, nor of its 

essence, but something sacramental pertaining to the adornment of the 

sacrament. 

A theologian here or there may have associated the Church’s 

blessing with marriage’s character as a sacrament, but it is mistaken 

to think that this was the general view, as has been suggested 

for England in a recent study. Paradoxically, every pre-contract 

‘De ministro huius sacramenti est notandum quod non *requiritur alius ministerdistinctusabipsiscontrahentibus....Patetetiamquodadcollationemhuius 

sacramenti non *requiritur ministerium sacerdotis, et quod illa benedictio sacerdotalis 

quam solet presbiter super coniuges proferre, sive alie orationes ab ipso prolate, 

non sunt forma sacramenti, nec de eius essentia, sed quid sacramentale ad ornatum 

pertinens sacramenti’ (MS BL Royal 11. B. X, fo. 124RA). 

See the important and able article by Christine Peters, ‘Gender, Sacrament 

and Ritual: The Making and Meaning of Marriage in Late Medieval and Early 

Modern England’, Past and Present, 169 (2000), 63–96 at 67–9, where she argues 

that ‘For Aquinas, the form of sacrament of marriage was exchange of consent in 

words of the present tense, the couple were the ministers of the sacrament, and 

other rituals merely contributed to its honour and dignity. For others, including 

Duns Scotus and Bonaventure, form comprised both exchange of consent using 

specified words and the blessing by the church. Practice in late medieval England 

suggests that it was this second view which was generally understood by clergy and 

laity alike’ (67). The evidence of key English priests’ manuals does not bear that 

out: see previous note. The argument Peters goes on to give is interesting but not 

decisive: it is conceivable that some writers located the sacrament in the blessing, 

but she does not produce enough evidence to outweigh the passages from priests’ 

manuals cited above and to demonstrate a predominance in England of the view that 

the blessing rather than consent was the crucial sacramental element. That liturgical 

texts describe the nuptial blessing as ‘benedictio sacramentalis’ is inconclusive. As 

is shown in Chapter 3, sect. (b), this came to mean one short phrase, and one 

blessing among many, in the Sarum manual, the most important liturgy of later 

medieval England. About the canonist Bernard of Pavia Peters may be right (68 

n. 12), but a learned analysis by J. A. Brundage seems to undermine her reading: see 

‘The Merry Widow’s Serious Sister: Remarriage in Classical Canon Law’, in R. R. 

Edwards and V. Ziegler (eds.), Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society 

(Woodbridge, 1995), 33–48 at 40. Peters suggests (67 and n. 10) that important 

theologians thought that it was the priestly blessing that conferred the sacrament, 

but in fact this is far from clear: see the fundamental article by Gabriel Le Bras, 

‘Mariage. III. La doctrine du mariage chez les th‹eologiens et canonistes depuis 

l’an mille’, in Dictionnaire de th‹eologie catholique (15 vols.; Paris, 1899–1950), ix 

(1926), 2123–223 at 2206–7. Peters cites a couple of striking pieces of evidence from 

England: views of Lollard heretics who (she argues) had to ‘abjure the belief that 

mutual exchange of consent without the prescribed form of words and/or church 

solemnization was sucient for the sacrament of marriage’ (68–9 and n. 13). Now 

one of the cases she cites (N. Tanner, Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich 1428– 

31 (Camden Fourth Series, 20; London, 1977), 111) is not relevant to her general 

argument about sacramentality. John Reve had to withdraw the opinion that there 

could be the sacrament of matrimony ‘withoute contract of wordes or solempnisacion 

yn churche’. This only proves that the Church insisted on solemnization or at least


case was an act of homage to the clergy’s idea that marriage was 

unbreakable. These cases spoke a di·erent language from the forbidden 

degrees cases of the twelfth century. 

The big di·erence between such cases and annulments on 

grounds of forbidden degrees in the twelfth century is this: in the 

twelfth century laymen used the canon law against itself. The structure 

of the law sent conflicting signals, not in theory but in practice. 

The forbidden degrees loophole made it look as though the Church 

did not really mean what it said about indissolubility. To many it 

must have seemed like an ideal to which one had to pay lip-service, 

while working around it to achieve a realistic flexibility adapted 

to human weakness. Though the wide extension of the forbidden 

degrees had not actually come about to facilitate serial monogamy, 

that was the appearance. They had in fact arisen out of the reforming 

zeal of men like Peter Damian, who would have been shocked 

at the way they were used. Later reformers like Peter the Chanter, 

the academic, and Innocent III, the man in power, were evidently 

shocked too and did something about it. 

Wherever there is a law that seriously aims to change behaviour, 

people will find ways to frustrate its intentions. The measures put 

in place under Innocent III to make marriages lifelong are no 

exception—the scam invented by Raymundus Barellus has already 

been noted. So: if you wanted to leave your spouse you could try 

to persuade a church court that you had been married to someone 

else first. (This would work especially well if you did actually want 

to marry that person.) We have remarked that this happened; it 

may have been common. There is an exemplum about a man who 

married a woman and then did not want to take her as his wife. She 

took him to a church court with witnesses, proving her case. He 

countered by claiming that he had been married before to another 

woman. A date was set for him to prove it. On the day before the 

verbal consent: which implies the assumption by the Church that verbal consent 

without a blessing was enough for the sacrament of marriage (special cases like 

mutes are not in the picture here.) The other case that Peters cites (71) does not 

seem to be an abjuration in the strict sense. John Pyrye is giving information about 

opinions he had learnt from the condemned heretic William White, one of which 

was ‘quod solus mutuus consensus inter virum et mulierem sucit ad sacramentum 

matrimonii sui’. Clearly this is regarded by the authorities as a bad idea. Could this 

simply be because the obligation to marry in church was heavily emphasized by the 

late medieval English Church, as a matter of positive law? 

See above, p. 116.

120 Chapter 2 

trial, he and the woman went through a form of marriage in front of 

the two witnesses he had persuaded to support him. At the hearing, 

the first witness swore that he had witnessed the contract, allegedly 

seven years earlier. The question was put to him: how did he have 

the circumstances so fresh in his mind? He answered (lying through 

his teeth) that it was no wonder, because on that same day one of his 

children had drowned. The other witness perjured himself just as 

plausibly. When asked how he had kept the circumstances so fresh 

in his mind for seven years, he said ‘Lord, it is no wonder, because 

on the same day when I had to climb over a wall, I fell and broke 

one of my shins in the fall.’ Old-fashioned perjury frustrates any 

law. That is a di·erent matter from the law frustrating the law. 

Perjurious and collusive pre-contract cases might have made contemporaries 

cynical about human nature. They would not induce 

cynicism about the Church’s real intentions. 

Evidence of papal registers 

Again, sometimes pure corruption could frustrate the law. In 1234 

Pope Gregory IX wrote to the archbishop of Vienne about the 

bishop of Orange. People were saying alarming things about him. 

He was a serial seducer, and assisted in this by a female helper 

whom he had installed and was supporting in church accommodation, 

committing simony in his disposal of benefices, denying 

justice, preventing appeals, and also taking money to annul good 

marriages and tolerate invalid ones. The bishop at the centre of 

‘In eodem episcopatu [Norwich], in decanatu de Len, contigit quod quidam 

contraxit cum quadam muliere, et post illum contractum ipse eam in coniugem 

accipere noluit. Ipsa igitur coram ordinario loci [fo. 82VA] et testibus productis [predictis 

ms.] ipsum petiit in maritum ac vendicavit. Igitur cum contra ipsum per 

testes esset probatum, excepit, dicens quod antea cum quadam alia contraxerat; et 

ad hoc probandum per testes diem certum assignavit. Die igitur illo probationis 

faciende statuto, cum muliere cum qua contraxisse se dixerat et duobus qui hoc testificare 

deberent die prefixo venit. Set priusquam ante ordinarium accederet, coram 

illis duobus mulierem per verba de presenti accepit in uxorem, eodem scilicet die 

quo debuit probationem suam facere. Iuratus igitur unus ex predictis, iuravit se 

vidisse dictum contractum, lapso iam septennio. Cui cum examinator eius diceret: 

“Qualiter ita recenter habes in memoria tales circumstantias?”: et ille: “Domine, ne 

mireris, quia illo die quidam de filiis meis submersus est in aqua et periit.” Post 

hec iuratus alius aperte testatur eadem. Cui cum examinator diceret: “Mirum michi 

videtur quod tales circumstantias per septennium tam recenter retinuisti”, respondit: 

“Domine, non est mirum, quia eodem die cum debui transire murum cecidi, et 

ex casu illo confracta est una de tibiis meis.”’ (MS BL Add. 33956, fo. 82rb–va; cf. 

MS BL Harley 2385, fo. 69VB). 

The printed calendar of the commission is as follows: ‘Archiepiscopo Vien-


these alleged scandals was already excommunicated when the pope 

asked the archbishop to investigate. The annulments for bribes 

find their place among a series of accusations that mark this out as 

a dramatically untypical case. 

For in general the papal registers tell much the same story as the 

local church court records studied by the scholars quoted above. 

In the thirteenth century at least, annulments are hard to find in 

them. The overwhelming majority of cases are about dispensations 

to get married or stay married despite an impediment. 

Balance sheet 

To sum up: Indissolubility was a reality of social life at least from 

the pontificate of Innocent III. No doubt there were other places 

and perhaps whole regions where easy annulments were possible for 

one reason or another. New evidence may be found which dilutes 

the strong conclusions of Donahue and others. Nevertheless, those 

conclusions look set to stand. 

Enforcement 

The indissolubility principle was extended: popes and lower ecclesiastical 

authorities provided the means for a deserted spouse to 

reel in the errant partner. Papal formularies include letters setting 

in motion proceedings to bring back a husband or wife who had 

nensi, Apostolicae Sedis legato, mandat quatenus, ad Aurasicensem (=Arausicensem) 

civitatem accedens, de Aurasicensi episcopo inquirat, qui, . . . quamplures 

focarias habens, ut dicebatur; surripiens virginibus castitatis vinculum, pro quibus 

et aliis facilitate damnabili seducendis, quamdam miseram, in procurandis alienis 

lapsibus forte per proprios eruditam, [auxiliatricem] specialem sibi constituerat, 

eique unum de domiciliis Aurasicensis ecclesiae, cujus indigna pane vescebatur, 

deputaverat; ad ecclesias et ecclesiastica beneficia conferenda symoniacam advocans 

pravitatem; justitiam petentibus non impendens et emissis appellationibus super 

illatis ab ipso molestiis minime deferens; interventu pecuniae matrimonia legitima 

dirimens et prohibitis obstaculum non opponens; divina ocia, licet excommunicationum 

sententiis innodatus, celebrare praesumens,—in multos excessus ceciderat; 

quae invenerit Summo Pontifici suis litteris fideliter rescribat’ (Les Registres de 

Gr‹egoire IX, ed. L. Auvray, i (Paris, 1896), no. 1709, col. 942. 

I read through the marriage cases in the ‹Ecole Franc«aisedeRomecalendarsof 

papal registers up to and including Boniface VIII, using the analytical indices for 

the registers where they exist. I have not attempted a systematic trawl of fourteenthcentury 

registers. 

Royal annulments are a special case because of the pressure the parties could 

bring to bear. It is nevertheless my prima facie impression that even kings found 

it hard or impossible to get an annulment unless their case in law held water. The 

question requires further investigation and I hope to deal with it in a separate study.

122 Chapter 2 

moved out and tell the delinquent to treat deserted partners with 

‘marital a·ection’. A letter from the bishop of Lincoln in 1298 

shows the same attitude at work at episcopal level. Robert Huthe 

had married Mariot la Carter two decades before, lived with her 

nine years, and had six children with her. Then he left her for Agnes 

la Rus, defied excommunication by the archdeacon of Lincoln, and 

moved away to the area under the archdeacon of Ely. The latter is 

asked to pursue the matter. One assumes that the deserted wife 

Mariot la Carter had set the process in motion. 

An apparently real example of such an excommunication survives 

in a miscellaneous British Library manuscript: 

Formula for an Excommunication. In the year of the Lord 1309, on Friday, 

27 June, I, John, parish priest in Matray, since James/Jacob son of 

Hedbeigerius does not want to accept his wife Bridget, who had been 

adjudged to him by the sentence of the venerable father the Lord John 

bishop of Brixen (Brininen), and to treat her with marital a·ection, after 

being admonished by me three times on this matter in the presence of 

witnesses—and the witnesses should be named—exercising my authority 

I excommunicate him with this document. 

‘Contra virum recedentem ab uxore et adultere adherentem. Iud. Sua nobis 

G. de . . mulier conquestione monstravit quod R. de . . laicus diocesis, ea dimissa, 

propria temeritate cuidam adultere inpudenter adheret. Mandamus quatenus, si 

est ita, dictum R. ut, adultera ipsa dimissa, nominatam uxorem suam recipiat et 

maritali, ut tenetur, a·ectione pertractet, monitione premissa per censuram ecclesiasticam 

iustitia exigente compellas’ (MS BL Lansdowne 397, fo. 154R (newer 

foliation)). The double dots in papal documents mean that a proper name has 

been omitted. ‘Iud.’ could be extended as ‘Iudici’ or ‘Iudicibus’. If the latter, the 

last word would be extended as ‘compellatis’. Cf. P. Herde, Audientia litterarum 

contradictarum: Untersuchungen •uber die p•apstlichen Justizbriefe und die p•apstliche 

Delegationsgerichtsbarkeit vom 13. bis zum Beginn des 16. Jahrhunderts (2 vols.; 

Bibliothek des Deutschen historischen Instituts in Rom, 31–2; T •ubingen, 1970), 

ii. 302. 

The Rolls and Register of Bishop Oliver Sutton, 1280–1299, ed. R. M. T. Hill, 

vi. Memoranda, May 19, 1297–September 12, 1299 (Lincoln, 1969), 84–5. 

‘Forma excommunicationis. Anno Domini M.O CCCIX.O proxima feria sexta 

post nativitatem sancti Baptiste, ego Iohannes, plebanus in Matray, quia Iacobus 

filius Hedbeigerii Brigidam uxorem suam sibi adiudicatam per sententiam venerabilis 

patris domini Iohannis Brixinensis episcopi non vult accipere et eam maritali 

a·ectione tractare, ter per per me monitus super hoc coram testibus—et nominentur 

testes—auctoritate qua fungor eum (interlined) excommmunico in hiis scriptis’ (MS 

BL Add. 18347, fo. 40R). The context is a small set of models for the correct form 

of an excommunication, but this one, at least, is so circumstantial that it is probably 

based on a real case.


Legal separation 

The law of indissolubility did not force a couple to stay together 

in all circumstances, and this should be factored into any assessment 

of marriage in the age of papal monarchy. Church law was 

inflexible about remarriage but took a di·erent attitude to legal 

separation, about which it could be quite flexible at least in the 

later medieval centuries, when indissolubility was being enforced 

(a chronology for the social history of legal separation in the preceding 

centuries has not been established). To take a concrete 

example: legal separation was the outcome in a messy case that 

came before the vicar of the bishop of Asti. The matter came 

to a head in 1265. A woman called Agnesina was ordered to return 

to her husband Guglielmo, who gave money as security that 

he would not injure her. There was a guarantor in case he did 

not pay. Some days later the guarantor withdrew, anxious about 

the husband’s stupidity. Agnesina was released from excommunication 

for desertion. Her husband accused her of a long-term 

adulterous a·air. She and a man named Bachino had been sleeping 

together in his shop and elsewhere for years, the husband alleged. 

Agnesina was very happy with the idea of a legal separation. A 

few days after this there seems to have been another change of 

mind. Guglielmo withdrew the charge of adultery and wanted his 

wife back. She was prepared to comply but wanted ‘a good security 

with a substantial penalty’: presumably a way of ensuring 

that he paid punitive damages if he hurt her. However, that idea 

seems to have been dropped: within a few days the bishop’s vicar in 

matters spiritual pronounced the legal separation, after Agnesina 

had admitted adultery. It is spelt out that neither party could remarry. 

For some good recent studies of legal separation, mainly covering the later 

Middle Ages and the early modern period, see S. S. Menchi and D. Quaglioni (eds.), 

Coniugi nemici: i processi matrimoniali. La separazione in Italia dal XII al XVIII secolo 

(I processi matrimoniali degli archivi ecclesiastici italiani, 1; Annali dell’Istituto 

storico italo-germanico in Trento, Quaderni, 53; Bologna, 2000), especially—for the 

Middle Ages—D. Quaglioni, ‘“Divortium a diversitate mentium”: la separazione 

personale dei coniugi nelle dottrine di diritto comune (appunti per una discussione)’, 

95–118; C. Meek, ‘“Simone ha aderito alla fede di Maometto”: la “fornicazione 

spirituale” come causa di separazione (Lucca 1424)’, 121–39; and S. Chojnacki, ‘Il 

divorzio di Cateruzza: rappresentazione femminile ed esito processuale (Venezia 

1465)’, 371–416. 

Documenti capitolari del secolo XIII, ed. Cotto Meluccio, nos. 48–51, pp. 24–6. 

‘bonam securitatem sub magna pena’ (no. 50, p. 26).

124 Chapter 2 

If a woman (or a man, but it was more likely to be a woman) 

had diculty in getting a legal separation, she could even go to the 

pope: there was a routine mechanism, probably necessary only in 

cases where local ecclesiastics were not trusted—for instance, if the 

husband was a friend of the bishop. A formulary of the Audientia 

litterarum contradictarum, the oce through which routine litigation 

at the papal curia passed, gives an interesting example of a 

papal letter setting in motion the proceedings towards a legal separation. 

It is clearly based on a real case, for the husband is named 

as a knight called Antonio de Luna of Zaragoza. The complaint 

had been made by his wife Alienor. Antonio had been a persistent 

adulterer and had apparently also treated her cruelly, so she was in 

physical danger living with him. She asks for a legal separation, divortium 

quoad thorum et mutuam servitutem. Furthermore, and this 

is important, she wants her dowry to be returned, together with 

anything else assigned to Antony as part of the marriage settlement. 

Thus property was involved. It was not just a matter of the 

couple splitting up and living apart: a legal settlement could hardly 

be avoided if Alienor wanted everything back, and the other side of 

the case would in fairness have to be heard. The pope—or rather 

the administrators acting with his authority—appoints the bishops 

of Barcelona and Vich as judges delegate, suspending the canonlaw 

rules designed to make sure that judges and parties were not 

too far apart geographically. One suspects that the husband was 

powerful locally and that judges from some distance away were 

appointed to ensure that the trial was fair to the wife. 

Even with the possibility of legal separation, the medieval Church 

was asking more of married couples than most cultures and religions 

have done, since it did not permit remarriage so long as the 

first marriage was deemed to be genuine. This was clearly a demanding 

doctrine. The obverse was that the Church demanded a 

high level of freedom at the point of entry into marriage, so that 

any pressure that would frighten a reasonable person was enough 

to invalidate a marriage. 

Indissolubility and free consent 

Marriage was an unbreakable bond but it had to be accepted freely 

in the first place. In the Church’s ocial thinking marriage was a 

Herde, Audientia litterarum contradictarum, 308–9. 

See ibid. 309 nn. 2 and 3.


strong, free, individual choice. There is a certain logic to this link 

between indissolubility and freedom. Because the commitment was 

for life, responsibility must be undiminished by family or other 

pressure. A choice that could not be revoked must not be imposed. 

This frame of mind, which was embodied in law, could not be 

further from the caricature of medieval marriage as nothing but a 

matter of families and property. 

In the half century before Innocent III, the power to chose 

and freedom of consent seem to have come to the fore in Church 

thinking at the highest level. Family or other external pressures 

continued throughout the Middle Ages and afterwards into recent 

times. The marriage of the Vanderbilt heiress to the duke of Marlborough 

in 1895 is a case of de facto coercion that should make 

modernists think about how much their period really di·ers from 

the Middle Ages. A wealthy American woman was pressured by 

her parents into giving up the perfectly acceptable wealthy New 

York lawyer whom she loved, in order to marry an English peer 

whom she did not, for reasons which had nothing whatsoever to do 

with the legal power to choose. Social pressure is stronger than law. 

Such cases can still be found today, though the fashion for marrying 

American heiresses to British aristocrats is no longer an oppressive 

force. Nevertheless, it can hardly be denied that a law of free choice 

will make a real di·erence in many cases. 

The canon-law compilation and textbook by Gratian gave a 

powerful impetus to the power to choose. As the classic article 

which brought out this feature of his thought put it: 

Gratian recognized the place of individualistic, unsocial decision-making 

in the choice of spouses . . . Underlying this deference to the individual was 

the conviction that ‘consent makes marriage’—not any consent, not merely 

lustful consent to intercourse, not merely intellectual consent to a shared 

life, but consent informed with that special quality that Gratian, drawing 

on the Roman law, denominated ‘marital a·ection,’ an emotion-coloured 

assent to the other as husband or wife. Neither Church nor feudal lord 

For the concept of consent in an earlier period see I. Weber, ‘“Consensus 

facit nuptias!” •Uberlegungen zum ehelichen Konsens in normativen Texten des 

Fr•uhmittelalters’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung f•ur Rechtsgeschichte, 118, kanonistiche 

Abteilung, 87 (2001), 31–66. 

My source is the chapter on ‘The Financial Times meets Hello!: Anglo- 

American Marital Relations 1870–1945’, in a forthcoming history of Anglo-American 

relations by my colleague Professor Kathy Burk, to whom my thanks.

126 Chapter 2 

nor family could supply that element. Where it was wanting, there was no 

marriage. 

Gratian’s textbook was among the most influential books of the 

Middle Ages: not just a·ecting thinking but also action, for it was 

the handbook of the new professionalized church lawyers who ran 

the well-organized hierarchy of ecclesiastical courts that came into 

being around this time. Gratian’s ideas about the power to choose 

were therefore much more than ideals. They exercised power over 

society. 

The line of thought was taken further by a pope who left a mark 

on church law almost as deep as Gratian’s. This was Alexander III, 

pope from 1159 to 1181. Gratian’s synthesis of the law had left 

many questions unanswered. The hardest cases about marriage 

were often concluded by a papal decretal, which became case law 

from then on. Alexander III issued many such decretals, notably 

in marriage cases, and many were incorporated in the code of case 

law issued in 1234, so that they remained legally binding and were 

closely studied by practising church lawyers up to 1917 (when the 

medieval church law was replaced). 

The free consent doctrine of Alexander III is the subject of another 

classic article which converges towards the same general interpretation 

of later medieval marriage. The two investigations 

must have been pursued at around the same time, which would 

make the similarity of the findings about adjacent topics all the 

more striking. 

Alexander III ‘requires only the consent of the bride and groom 

and rejects a requirement of the consent of anyone other than the 

bride and groom’. In previous legal tradition or traditions, ‘the 

family, the master, and in feudal times, the lord, play an important 

role’. Alexander’s position may have vacillated a little during 

his pontificate, but the law he left to posterity put the couple, 

J. T. Noonan, ‘Power to Choose’, Viator, 4 (1973), 419–34 at 425. 

C. Donahue, Jr., ‘The Policy of Alexander the Third’s Consent Theory of 

Marriage’, in Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Medieval Canon 

Law, Toronto, 21–25 August 1972 (Monumenta Iuris Canonici, Series C, Subsidia, 

5; Vatican City, 1976), 251–79. 

Ibid. 256; J. A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe 

(Chicago etc., 1987), 335–6. 

Donahue, ‘The Policy of Alexander the Third’s Consent Theory of Marriage’, 

256. 

For the problems of working out a coherent chronogical development of his


the man and the woman, at the centre of the stage without any 

supporting cast to upstage them. Donahue even made the intriguing 

and attractive suggestion that Alexander’s marriage rules ‘represent 

an unconscious attempt to incorporate the acceptable elements of 

courtly love into the law of the Church’. Less tentatively, he 

argues that ‘The coincidence . . . of an ethic of love which, in marked 

contrast to the general practice of society, puts a high premium on 

the consent of the woman, with a set of legal rules which make 

valid marriage by the consent of the parties alone is almost too 

extraordinary to arise by chance’ (ibid.). 

The social forces pushing against free consent in practice must 

have been hard to withstand. Nevertheless, the influence of canon 

law on social practice should not be underestimated either. To quote 

Noonan again: 

If a father beat his daughter severely to enforce his choice, the marriage 

wasnull,asaYorkcaseshows....Attemptsbyparentstocoercemightalso 

be treated as sin and punished by refusal of the sacraments—a father, for 

example, might be denied absolution on his deathbed if his will disinherited 

a daughter refusing to marry as he directed. 

Local church court records are not common for the thirteenth century 

outside Italy, but they survive for thirteenth-century Pisa and 

a similar picture has emerged: 

In a series of cases judged at the beginning of the thirteenth century by 

the episcopal court of Pisa, some women who had been betrothed refused 

to obey their own parents and guardians and rejected the marriages 

arranged by them, maintaining, as did Gherardesca, the daughter of Gherardo 

Magliolachi, that the choice of a husband for her ‘was not and is not 

to her mind’, and that ‘she has not given her consent and does not intend 

to give it’. 

A couple of cases that went right up to the pope show aware- 

thought as expressed in his decretals, see Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage, 

169–72, and also 133 n. 37. 

Donahue, ‘The Policy of Alexander the Third’s Consent Theory of Marriage’, 

279. 

Noonan, ‘Power to Choose’, 433–4. 

D. O. Hughes, ‘Il matrimonio nell’Italia medievale’, in M. De Giorgio and 

C. Klapisch-Zuber (eds.), Storia del matrimonio (Rome etc., 1996), 5–61 at 20– 

1 (my translation), citing Das Imbreviaturbuch des Erzbischoflichen Gerichtsnotars 

Hubaldus aus Pisa (Mai bis August 1230), ed. G. Dolezalek (Forschungen zur neueren 

Privatrechtsgeschichte, 13; Cologne etc., 1969), 101–2.

128 Chapter 2 

ness of the rationale behind the rules. A woman named Gemma 

had a daughter whose name is simply given as ‘T’. The daughter 

was betrothed to a boy when they were both less than seven, and 

a penalty clause was included in the arrangement. Still, when she 

grew up she married someone else. The father of her childhood 

fianc‹e attempted to enforce the penalty clause. In 1231 the pope 

gave delegates the power to stop him, because marriages should be 

free. In a case of 1233 a French clergyman was able to bring in the 

pope to help a relative. Her father had died and her guardian had 

arranged for her to marry the son of a certain Theobald, when the 

son came of age. If this son died first, she would marry another son. 

Theobald and the son specified under plan A both died; there was 

another son but he was not yet old enough to marry. So Theobald’s 

widow seems to have imprisoned (‘presumes to detain’) the girl, 

who was now of marriageable age. The clergyman petitioned for 

her release and freedom to marry someone else. The pope commissioned 

the bishop of Le Mans to investigate and judge the case. 

If the facts turned out to be as stated, the girl was to be released, 

or else the woman holding her would face ecclesiastical censure. 

Again the pope states the rationale that ‘marriages should be free’, 

matrimonia libera esse debeant. 

The hard line on indissolubility needs to be set against the insistence 

on liberty. Marriage was for life, but it must be entered freely. 

We have seen—it is the theme of this chapter—that symbolism underlay 

the idea that marriage was for life. It seems also to connect 

with the thought that marriage must be free. To quote Noonan yet 

again: 

Unwilling marriages usually brought bad results. But why was freedom a 

positive good? Reflection on the canons led to an answer put in the terms of 

the great mystery of the Epistle to the Ephesians, succinctly stated in 1457 

by the last great commentator on Gratian, Juan de Torquemada: ‘Marriage 

signifies the conjunction of Christ and the Church which is made through 

the liberty of love. Therefore, it cannot be made by coerced consent.’ 

‘cum vero libera matrimonia esse debeant’: the phrase is from the calendar in 

Les Registres de Gr‹egoire IX, ed. Auvray, vol. i, no. 719, col. 449, but it looks as 

though the editor has taken it from the words of the papal letter. 

‘proneptis’: it can mean great-granddaughter, but in context ‘great-niece’ is 

more likely. 

Les Registres de Gr‹egoire IX, ed. Auvray, vol. i, no. 1188, cols. 671–2. 

Noonan, ‘Power to Choose’, 434.


A similar formula is found in the ‘Supplement’ to the Summa theologica 

(further research may well show it to be a topos). In a question 

on ‘Whether a coerced consent makes a marriage void’ we meet the 

remark that ‘marriage signifies the conjunction of Christ and the 

Church, which is brought about in the liberty of love. Therefore it 

cannot be brought about through a coerced consent’. 

Explanations 

To conclude: the law of indissolubility became e·ective from the 

early thirteenth century on. Apparently contrary evidence—the 

strictures of Hostiensis, the plethora of pre-contract cases—fades 

away on closer examination. The law had teeth, but we need to 

remember that legal separation was possible and also that freedom 

at the point of entry into marriage was stressed, balancing the rule 

of strict indissolubility. 

We have traced the path of this doctrine from theological into 

social history. Several compatible explanations have been given for 

the timing: the influence of the ‘False Decretals’, which emphasized 

the bishop’s unbreakable ‘marriage’ to his church; the spread of 

celibacy in the power ‹elite of the clergy; the flowering of canon law 

and church courts. All of these help to explain why indissolubility 

moved from theory into practice in the central Middle Ages. These 

forces account only for the timing, however, and a certain idea of 

marriage marked in advance the lines along which they ran. In 

history ideas can have a delayed-action impact. In recent centuries, 

for instance, ideas of human equality and rights have been applied 

to new categories of persons and situations gradually, long after the 

basic principle had become a social premiss. People pay lip-service 

to a principle for decades or centuries, but one day some group 

takes it seriously. 

Without the principle of indissolubility, one man to one woman 

for life, the idea stretching back to Augustine and before, clerical 

energies and legal organization would have been pointed in a different 

direction. This takes us back to the beginning: the rationale 

‘matrimonium significat coniunctionem Christi ad Ecclesiam, quae fit secundum 

libertatem amoris. Ergo non potest fieri per consensum coactum’ (Supplementum, 

q. 47, art. 3, in SanctiThomaeAquinatis...operaomnia,iussu...Leonis 

XIII P.M. edita, xii (Roma 1906), ‘Supplementum’ section (separately paginated), 

90. The remark comes in the ‘Sed contra’ section, which usually (as here) goes in 

the direction of the writer’s own view, as expressed in the ‘Respondeo dicendum’ 

section.

130 Chapter 2 

of the principle as articulated lucidly by Augustine.The rationale 

is a symbol, the equation of Christ’s union with the Church and 

the union of man and wife, symbolism which was released from the 

realm of texts and went on to transform law and society.

3 

Bigamy 

(a) Bigamy and Becoming a Priest 

The meaning of ‘bigamy’ 

Bigamy in this context does not mean having two wives at the same 

time. It refers to a man’s marriage to a widow or his remarriage 

after his wife’s death. For the laity it was legitimate in the Middle 

Ages. It was not banned by the Church, and in fact was extremely 

common, as any social and political historian knows. On the other 

hand there were rules about bigamy that may at first seem strange. 

They have not been much studied though a few good publications 

lay a solid foundation. The key rules for our purposes are: (a) a 

man who has been made a widower twice or whose deceased wife 

was a widow is banned from the priesthood; (b) a central blessing 

P. Fedele, ‘Vedovanza e seconde Nozze’, in Il matrimonio nella societ›a altomedievale 

(Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’alto Medioevo, 24; 2 

vols.; Spoleto, 1977), ii. 820–43 at 825. B. Jussen, Der Name der Witwe: Erkundungen 

zur Semantik der mittelalterlichen Bu¢kultur (Ver•o·entlichungen des Max-Planck- 

Instituts f•ur Geschichte, 158; G•ottingen, 2000), is less relevant to the current investigation 

than might appear, perhaps surprisingly, since our general ideas about 

history should be done are so similar. It tells an important monographic story about 

the creation of the schema of di·erential afterlife rewards for virgins, widows, and 

married people c.400 by writers like Jerome, the corresponding development in the 

early Middle Ages of a distinct status group of women who had resolved not to remarry, 

and the metaphor of the penitential Church as a widow. It is not really about 

widows who remarried, as was normal and respectable. For canon-law background 

see J. A. Brundage, ‘The Merry Widow’s Serious Sister: Remarriage in Classical 

Canon Law’, in R. R. Edwards and V. Ziegler (eds.), Matrons and Marginal Women 

in Medieval Society (Woodbridge, 1995), 33–48. 

See above all S. Kuttner, ‘Pope Lucius III and the Bigamous Archbishop of 

Palermo’ (1961), repr. in id., The History of Ideas and Doctrines of Canon Law 

in the Middle Ages (London, 1980), no. vii, pp. 409–53; H. Schadt, ‘Die Arbores 

bigamiae als heilsgeschichtliche Schemata: Zum Verh•altnis von Kanonistik und 

Kunstgeschichte’, in W. Busch (ed.), Kunst als Bedeutungstr•ager: Gedenkschrift f•ur 

G•unter Bandmann (Berlin, 1978), 129–47. Also useful are the article by J. Vergier- 

Boimond, ‘Bigamie (l’irr‹egularit‹e de)’, in R. Naz (ed.), Dictionnaire de droit canonique, 

ii (Paris, 1937), 853–88, and A. Esmein, Le Mariage en droit canonique, 2nd 

edn.,rev.R.G‹enestal and J. Dauvillier (2 vols.; Paris, 1929–35), ii. 119–25.

132 Chapter 3 

must be omitted from the marriage ceremony in the case of second 

marriages; and (c) a cleric in minor orders can be married but only 

once and only if his wife was a virgin. This section deals with the 

first of these three rules. 

Marriage symbolism, bigamy, and eligibility for the priesthood 

The rule against admitting double widowers and widowers of widows 

to the priesthood seems to derive ultimately from scriptural 

texts: from the New Testament, especially Titus 1: 5–7, which 

states that a presbyter should be the husband of one wife; and from 

the Old Testament, especially Leviticus 21: 13–14 and Ezechiel 44, 

which say that the high priest must not marry a widow (among other 

excluded categories). For our purposes it is not necessary to explain 

the origin of these prohibitions. Probably they can be accounted 

for along the lines pioneered by Mary Douglas. The passage from 

Titus would in itself provide an explanation for the survival of 

the rules, though not a complete one because it could have been 

reinterpreted. Thus, it seems to imply a married priesthood, yet 

was not understood to mean that. So the ‘one wife’ could have 

been explained away too: she could have been the Church or God 

or Christ. Widows and widowers in the literal sense could have 

been taken out of the picture. We do not need to explain why they 

were left in it in the early Christian centuries, as our concern is the 

Middle Ages. 

Why were the rules so important in the Middle Ages? Of Max 

Weber’s famous four determinants of social action, tradition, emotion, 

value-rational motivation, and ends–means calculation, the 

first, tradition, must surely have done much to keep the bigamy 

rules in operation. Their very antiquity must have discouraged the 

thought of simply abandoning them. That is taken for granted in 

this chapter. I attempt to show, however, that symbolic value rationality 

was another important reason and motive for respecting these 

traditions. A sign of the vitality of this symbolic value rationality 

is that it enabled development and modification of the rules. Their 

history is marked by vitality and change. Their symbolic rationale 

stimulates original reflections by famous writers. Tradition is thus 

M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept[s] of Pollution and Taboo, 

with a new preface by the author (London etc., 2002). 

M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundri¢ der verstehenden Soziologie, 

ed. J. Winckelmann, 5th rev. edn. (3 vols.; T •ubingen, 1976), i. 12.

Bigamy 133 

necessary but not sucient to explain the medieval history of the 

bigamy rules. 

For historians of the Middle Ages, Augustine of Hippo’s rationale 

in terms of Christ’s marriage to the Church is a sucient 

starting point for causal explanation in terms of symbolic values. 

In a passage that would run like a thread through the future law of 

bigamy, Augustine put it thus: 

In the future, the one city will be composed of many souls who have ‘one 

soul and one heart’ in God, and after this earthly pilgrimage it will be the 

perfection of our unity, in which all men’s thoughts will not be hidden from 

each other, and will in no way be opposed to each other. For this reason 

the sacrament of marriage has in our time been reduced to one husband 

and one wife, so that it is not possible for a man to be ordained minister of 

the Church if he has had more than one wife. This has been more clearly 

understood by those who have decreed that a man who as a catechumen 

or pagan had a second wife, should not be ordained. The concern here is 

with the sacrament, not with sinning. In baptism all sins are forgiven, but 

he who said ‘If you have taken a wife, you have not sinned, and if a virgin 

marries, she does not sin’, and ‘Let her do what she wishes; she does not 

sin, let her marry’ [1 Cor. 7: 28, 36], made it suciently clear that marriage 

is no sin. Now to ensure the sacred nature of the sacrament, a woman who 

has lost her virginity, even if she is a catechumen, cannot after baptism be 

consecrated among the virgins of God. So similarly it has not seemed out 

of place that a man who has had more than one wife, though not having 

committed any sin, has not observed the norm, so to say, of the sacrament, 

which was required not to gain the reward of a good life, but for the seal of 

ecclesiastical ordination. 

Augustine was writing at a time when priests could still have wives 

but were not supposed to have sex with them. As the theory that 

priests should be unmarried gained acceptance, the rule would have 

come to refer to the categories just mentioned, twice widowed men 

and widowers of widows. It applied to bishops, priests, and deacons; 

in the Rome of late antiquity it seems to have extended to clerics in 

minor orders too, but this was not general in the West; the rule was 

extended to subdeacons in the course of the early Middle Ages. 

Where the early medieval centuries are concerned, it is hard to 

Augustine, De bono coniugali, 21[xviii], in Augustine: De bono coniugali; De 

sancta virginitate, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford, 2001), 39–41. 

H. C. Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church, 3rd rev. edn. 

(2 vols.; London, 1907), ch. 5, esp. 74–6. 

Kuttner, ‘Pope Lucius III and the Bigamous Archbishop of Palermo’, 411–12.

134 Chapter 3 

say how far the rules about ‘bigamy’ were enforced in practice. 

Historians generally assume that the sexual abstinence of priests 

was honoured in the breach rather than the observance, so one 

might argue a fortiori that ‘bigamy’ rules were still less likely to be 

obeyed—but that might be a false inference and a false assumption 

about the relative gravity of the two deviations from the rules. 

As with so many topics in the history of Europe before c.1000, 

agnosticism is the only safe position. 

Peter Damian 

Rules about the clergy undoubtedly began to bite into social practice 

by the end of the eleventh century. Celibacy was taken in deadly 

earnest by the leaders of the eleventh-century reform. One of these 

leaders also wrote some fascinating lines on bigamy, which tend to 

suggest that the rules were taken seriously in his day. This was Peter 

Damian, like Hildebrand himself a reformer of passionate intensity. 

In a letter to a hermit about the mystical body of Christ, in which 

he explains how the words Dominus vobiscum, ‘TheLordbewith 

you’ in the plural, can meaningfully be used by someone who is on 

his own, he points out that there are things in the Church which 

seem otiose from the point of view of human reason, but which are 

from God if one takes account of the virtutisintimae...sacramentum, 

a phrase hard to translate but which might from the passage 

that follows be rendered: ‘the mysterious symbol of intimate power’ 

(ibid. 264). The passage goes like this: 

For who might not find it strange that it is laid down by provisions of canon 

law that no ‘bigamist’ may by any means be raised to the priesthood, but 

that one who has lapsed and committed fornication, even if he is a priest, 

may after he has completed his penance be restored to the oce that 

he held by right before? For indeed St Paul’s opinion of fornication is 

quite clear when we read that ‘neither fornicators nor servers of idols nor 

adulterers will possess the kingdom of God’. But on those who contract 

second marriages, it continues as follows: ‘A woman’, he says, ‘is bound 

by the law as long as her husband lives, but if her husband dies, she is at 

They understood it as a ban on marriage, not just on sex with a wife with whom 

one might have had children before becoming a priest. 

Peter Damian, Letter 28, to the Hermit Leo of Sitria, in Die Briefe des Petrus 

Damiani, ed. K. Reindel, i (Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Die Briefe der 

deutschen Kaiserzeit, 4; Munich, 1983), 248–78. 

‘digamum’, which (just like ‘bigamus’) would include a man who had remarried 

after his wife’s death and a man who had married a widow who had then died.

Bigamy 135 

liberty: let her marry whom she will, only in the Lord.’ Without a doubt, 

with the words of the one passage and the other he shows clearly both that 

‘bigamists’ do not break the rule of God’s law and that fornicators are cut 

o· at the peril of their soul from the kingdom of God on account of their 

lack of carnal restraint. 

How to explain, then, that men who do not sin fall away from all hope 

of becoming priests, while men who are eliminated by ill-doing from the 

kingdom of God do not lose the prospect of ecclesiastical rank if they have 

completed their penance worthily? For this reason only: that with those 

who are joined in second marriages the focus is not on sin but on the symbol 

[sacramentum] of the Church. For just as Christ—who is the ‘high priest 

of future goods’ [Hebr. 9: 11], and the true ‘priest according to the order 

of Melchisedech’ [Ps. 109: 4], the one, that is, who o·ered the lamb of his 

own body on the altar of the cross to God the Father for the salvation of the 

world—is the husband of one bride, that is of the whole holy Church, which 

is without doubt a virgin, since it keeps the integrity of the faith inviolably: 

so too each and every priest is commanded to be the husband of one wife, 

so that he may seem to present the image of that supreme spouse. With 

‘bigamists’, therefore, the issue is not the assessment of sin but rather the 

form of the sacrament, and when they are excluded, it is not that a crime 

is being punished, but that the mystical rule of the true priesthood is 

kept: otherwise, how would something be counted among crimes that the 

doctrine of St Paul permits to take place licitly? But the sacred canons 

too designate those who condemn second marriages as belonging to the 

Novatian heresy. Therefore, in order that we may show we always hold the 

mystery of ecclesiastical unity, there can be no objection if we use a verbal 

expression even if it is not so very necessary. (Ibid. 464–5) 

The train of reasoning would seem to be this. Second marriages 

rule out the priesthood not because there is anything wrong with 

second marriages per se, for on the contrary, they are entirely licit 

and it is heretical to deny that; even so, they are ruled out for priests 

in order to make a symbolic or mystical point about the union of 

Christ and the Church. God expresses himself in symbolic ways 

which do not quite make sense on the level of literal-minded human 

reasoning. Thus in the same way the plural expression Dominus 

vobiscum can be used in a context which would otherwise require 

the singular in order to make a point about the mystical unity of 

the Church. 

One manuscript cited in the apparatus criticus reads ‘sacramenti’.

136 Chapter 3 

Innocent III’s decretal Debitum 

Peter Damian seems to take it for granted that the rule banning 

‘bigamists’ from the priesthood is not a dead letter, and the conviction 

with which he expounds its symbolic meaning is unmistakable. 

The eleventh-century reformer thought along the same lines as St 

Augustine at the end of the Roman Empire. So did Innocent III 

in the early thirteenth century. In 1206 the symbolic rationale of 

the bigamy rules enabled him to solve a concrete case in a decision 

that would be incorporated into the canon-law compilation of 

1234, a compilation that remained in force until 1917. Thus many 

commentators would reflect on the pope’s reasoning. The decretal 

in question is known as Debitum (X. 1. 21. 5). It is important for 

the history of both bigamy and consummation, the subject of the 

next chapter. Innocent III’s pivotal role in the history of marriage 

symbolism and its social impact will not have escaped notice. 

A man marries a widow who had never had sex with her husband: 

she comes to him a virgin, and dies before him. Can he become a 

priest, or is he banned by the ‘bigamy’ rule? Innocent’s answer is 

a meditation on the significance of the symbolism and at the same 

time a practical legal verdict. He reasons as follows: 

Since there are two things in marriage, namely the consent of minds and 

the intercourse of bodies, one of which signifies the charity which obtains in 

spirit between God and the just soul . . . while the other signifies [designat] 

the conformity of flesh which obtains between Christ and the Church, to 

which second thing pertains that to which the Evangelist bears witness: 

‘The word was made flesh and dwelt among us’: therefore a marriage which 

is not consummated by the intercourse of bodies is not suited to signify 

the marriage which was contracted between Christ and the Church by the 

mystery of the incarnation, in relation to which St Paul, expounding the 

words said by the first-made man, ‘This now is bone of my bones and flesh 

of my flesh, and because of this a man will leave his father and his mother, 

and cleave to his wife, and they will be two in one flesh’, immediately adds: 

‘ButthisIsayisagreatsacramentum [sacrament? symbol? mystery?] in 

Christ and the Church’. Since, therefore, it is forbidden because of the 

defect of the sacramentum for a twice married man [bigamus] or husband of 

a widow to presume to be elevated to holy orders, because she [the wife] 

is not the only woman of only one man, nor is he one belonging to one: 

therefore, where the mingling of bodies is lacking with spouses of this sort, 

this sign [signaculum] of the sacrament is not lacking. Therefore a man 

who marries a woman who has been married to another man without ever 

sleeping with him should not on this account be prevented from being

Bigamy 137 

elevated to the priesthood, since the woman did not divide her flesh into 

more than one part, and he did not do so either. 

So symbolism solves a concrete case. Here the image works causally. 

Above all, a case like this is a symptom of how much in earnest 

intellectuals such as Innocent III were about marriage symbolism. 

This case will turn up again in the context of consummation. 

Hostiensis and the ‘Tree of Bigamy’ 

Apart from its immediate practical e·ects, this decretal of Innocent 

III is important for the history of ‘bigamy’ because it gave rise 

to an astonishingly elaborate visual and conceptual structure in the 

Golden Summa (Summa aurea) of Hostiensis, perhaps the greatest 

of the medieval canon lawyers. This is the ‘Tree of Bigamy’, which 

is accompanied by a lengthy textual commentary. Diagram and 

commentary have been thoroughly studied by Hermann Schadt, 

who perceived their interest for art history, so that they need not delay 

us here, but they are a remarkable monument to legal marriage 

symbolism. On the right hand side of the diagram (heraldically 

speaking, or the left-hand side as one looks at it) are all the good 

marriages. Most are symbolic but one is the marriage of Adam 

and Eve. Hostiensis has human marriage in mind. He says it is 

one of the seven sacraments of the Church and the greatest in 

its signification (and he gives other reasons for the greatness and 

goodness of marriage). So the literal base of the symbol is secured, 

but symbolic marriages dominate diagram and commentary, 

examples being the marriage of God and the Virgin Mary 

and that of Peter with the Church (ibid., fo. 42RA–B). In the section 

or cellula on the marriage of the Son of God with the Church 

the rationale of the bigamy rule is spelt out: no one can marry the 

Church unless he is similar to his spouse. We are treated to a 

Schadt, ‘Die Arbores bigamiae als heilsgeschichtliche Schemata’. 

‘In secunda cellula ita scribitur matrimonium Ade et Eve in paradiso contractum. 

Hoc est unum de vii sacramentis ecclesie, quod est maius et dignius aliis quo 

ad significationem. Cum enim omnia alia sacramenta precedat, merito aliqua [read 

alia?] sequentia per ipsum habent significari non e contra. Hoc enim quod non est, 

significarenonposset...Notaigiturquodhocsacramentuminmagnaveneratione 

haberi debet, tum ratione autoris, qui ipsum instituit, scilicet dei’ (and so on with 

other reasons) (Hostiensis/Henricus de Segusio, Summa aurea (Lyons, 1548 edn.), 

fo. 41VB; I have used BL C 66 K 7). Note that the Summa is a di·erent work from 

the Lectura, used extensively in the previous chapter. 

‘nullus potest desponsare ecclesiam, nisi sit similis sponso suo’ (ibid., fo. 42RA); 

cf. Schadt, ‘Die Arbores bigamiae als heilsgeschichtliche Schemata’, 134.

138 Chapter 3 

dialogue between a bishop and a layman who wants to take holy 

orders: 

bishop: Do you want to marry the Church, that is, do you want to take 

holy orders? 

layman: Ido. 

bishop: Are you a ‘bigamist’, that is, have you married two wives in 

succession? 

layman: Ihave. 

The bishop’s decision: ‘You have to be rejected—even if you had married 

one wife who was not a virgin. For God the spouse of the Church had only 

one human partner, who was a virgin, nor did he divide the word made 

flesh into pieces’. 

On the opposite side of the diagram are evil unions, described 

as bonds, vincula, rather than matrimonia. They include the bond 

between hell and the Devil, man and sin, heresies and the Devil, 

etc. In these bonds there is no unity, but everything is division and 

schism. They are associated with bigamy, which denotes division, 

whereas the order of priesthood signifies unity: so the two cannot 

come together in the same person. Hostiensis uses strong words, 

though he makes it clear that he is not talking about the ethics of 

‘bigamy’ but rather of its signification. Morals and symbolism are 

distinct registers. Successive ‘bigamy’ is morally unimpeachable 

and the problem is in the symbolic register. 

In intellectual and cultural histories of the Middle Ages marriage 

symbolism goes with mysticism and monastic theology rather 

than with canon law (though the marriage symbolism of the episco- 

‘dicere potest episcopus: “Vis desponsare ecclesiam?”, id est, “Vis ad ordines 

promoveri?”. Responsio laici: “Volo”. Interrogatio episcopi: “Es tu bigamus?”, id 

est, “Duxisti duas uxores successive?”. Responsio laici: “Duxi”. Determinatio episcopi: 

“Repellendus es—etiam si unicam et corruptam uxorem carnalem duxisses. 

Nam deus sponsus ecclesie non habuit, nisi unicam humanam, et virginem, nec 

divisit verbum incarnatum in plures”’ (Hostiensis/Henricus de Segusio, Summa 

aurea, fo.42RA). 

‘In omnibus his vinculis vel ipsorum aliquo nulla unitas est, nulla firmitas, 

nulla integritas: sed totum divisio, totum schisma, totum falsitas, totum corruptio, 

et hoc per bigamiam representatur sive per bigamum qui divisus fuit sive corruptus 

in matrimonio, sicut precedentes in vinculis infernalibus, sive diabolicis; sicut ergo 

deus et diabolus in eundem subiectum simul, et semel, et eodem modo cadere non 

possunt, quia nemo potest servire deo et mammone, sic bigamia, que divisionem 

denotat, et ordo sacer, qui unitatem designat, in eundum subiectum simul et semel 

congrue cadere non possunt’ (ibid., fo. 42VB). 

‘Ergo bigami in vinea [read linea?] ista cadunt et per ipsam presentantur: non 

quo ad vite meritum, sed quo ad ordinationis signaculum’ (ibid.).

Bigamy 139 

pal oce has been thoroughly studied by legal historians). This 

is evidently a misleading segregation where marriage symbolism 

is concerned. The symbolism is not an afterthought or a playful 

decoration. It is an essential element in their thinking . This was 

apparent in the history of indissolubility traced above, and it holds 

good also for attitudes to ‘bigamy’ and consummation. 

Bigamy and dispensation 

Document 3. 1, from the mid-thirteenth-century canonist Johannes 

de Deo’s treatise on dispensations, is another example of a symbolic 

analysis with practical social implications. Johannes sets out to explain 

why in his view a dispensation is possible in some ‘bigamy’ 

cases and not in others. The passage is dicult because compressed, 

but the sense of it seems to be as follows.With ‘true’ bigamy dispensation 

is impossible, because it would go against the words of 

St Paul—he means the remarks about ‘a husband of one wife’. (Incidentally, 

this view of Johannes would not prevail, but that is not 

the issue here.) So when is a candidate for holy orders truly bigamous? 

The broad answer will be familiar by now. It is when the 

sacramental symbolism is lacking from his previous married life, 

because he has been married twice or married to a woman who had 

been married at least once before. Johannes goes into a miniature 

analysis of the type of sacramental symbolism which is not as it 

should be with true bigamists. As for the undefective symbolism, it 

is primarily the representation of Christ’s union with the Church. 

However, there is secondary symbolism too (consignificatum est). 

He specifies the union of the divinity with Christ’s flesh, a union 

never broken. Then, as if by way of an afterthought, Johannes says 

that there are three unions: the union of the Divinity to the flesh, 

the union of the Divinity to the soul, and the union of soul to body. 

Only this last one was ever divided—at the death of Christ. He adds 

another union: that of the soul of the just person to God, a union 

based on faith and charity, one that can sometimes be broken by 

mortal sin. 

This little analysis completed, Johannes returns to the practical 

problem of when a dispensation by the pope is possible. His line 

is that the sacramental symbolism is not defective in cases where 

there are not two genuine marriages: that is, where one of the two is 

invalid. He lists such cases. One seems to be bigamy in the modern 

By Kuttner, Benson, and Gaudemet: see Introduction, n. 69.

140 Chapter 3 

sense, when a man marries a second time during his first wife’s 

lifetime, so that the second marriage is invalid. Another situation 

listed is that of a man in holy orders (probably he means a subdeacon 

or someone of higher rank) who marries a woman who is not a 

virgin. In this case the marriage is null. It would in fact have been 

null even if the woman were a virgin. After 1139 it was clear law 

that the marriage of a cleric in major orders (a subdeacon, deacon, 

or priest) was not only illicit but also invalid. So why does John 

raise the case in the context of ‘bigamy’ and what di·erence does it 

make whether the woman was a virgin? 

The fact that the woman is not a virgin may have been introduced 

by Johannes because a rigorist understanding of ‘bigamy’ 

sometimes included marriages to women who had previously slept 

with another man, whether or not they were widows. Reading between 

the lines, John’s point may be this: if a priest invalidly marries 

a virgin, he can after separating from the woman and undergoing 

a long penance obtain a dispensation from a bishop to resume his 

priestly oce. On the other hand, if the woman had not been a 

virgin, an episcopal dispensation would not be enough, because 

the sexual union had been akin to bigamy, bigamy by extension so 

to speak. 

A casuistry of bigamy and its implications 

If we take Innocent III’s decretal Debitum and Johannes de Deo’s 

analysis together, an important conclusion about the social relevance 

of marriage symbolism begins to emerge. The rationality of 

marriage symbolism was the basis of a casuistry of ‘bigamy’ cases, 

providing the principles that could enable discrimination between 

apparently similar cases and settle the law when its application 

to ambiguous instances was unobvious. Incidentally, we have here 

a criterion for distinguishing between unthinking ‘tradition’ and 

‘value rationality’ as determinants of social action. Value rationality 

is not just about general principles, far from it, but they are an 

important element, and can be invoked and applied by casuistry to 

settle ambiguous concrete cases. Tradition alone could not provide 

such a casuistry. Its social relevance was confined to men who had 

been married and widowed. 

The remainder of this chapter deals with people who did not seek 

to become priests. Section (b) deals with second weddings, and the 

final section with married clerics in minor orders. In neither case

Bigamy 141 

is marriage symbolism the sole relevant factor but without taking 

account of marriage symbolism one cannot make sense of the social 

history of either. 

(b) The Marriage Ceremony 

Suspicion of second marriages and its ritual implications 

Symbolism may not have been crucial to the history of second 

marriages until relatively late in our period. In the early period 

other rationales seem to have influenced attitudes more, and this 

background must be sketched in first. From an early period priestly 

intervention in second weddings was limited. Some such rule seems 

to be common to both Eastern and Western Christianity, in itself a 

symptom of antiquity. So far as the West is concerned, a decisive 

moment was the reception of early fourth-century legislation of the 

Council of Neocaesarea into the influential canon-law collection 

of Dionysius Exiguus, c.500, which would ensure its currency in 

the Latin Church. In the form in which we find it in Dionysius, it 

states: 

It is inappropriate that a priest should join in the meal at the marriage of a 

person who has been married previously, for since the twice married person 

needs to do penance, what priest could give consent to such a marriage for 

the sake of a banquet? 

The need to do penance after a second marriage had already been 

spelt out in another decree of the same council, also adopted by 

Dionysius. 

K. Ritzer, Formen, Riten und religi•oses Brauchtum der Eheschlie¢ung in den 

christlichen Kirchen des ersten Jahrtausends, 2nd edn., ed. U. Hermann and W. Heckenbach 

(Liturgiewissenschaftliche Quellen und Forschungen; M•unster Westfalen, 

1981), index, s.v. ‘Wiederverheiratung’. 

‘A Cappadocian Council of uncertain date (probably early 4th cent., before 325). 

It passed 15 canons concerned chiefly with disciplinary and marriage questions’ 

(F.L.CrossandE.A.Livingstone(eds.),The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian 

Church (Oxford, 1997), 1136). 

‘Presbyterum in nuptiis bigami prandere non convenit, quia cum poenitentia 

bigamus egeat, quis erit presbyter qui propter convivium talibus nuptiis possit 

praebere consensum’ (Dionysius Exiguus, Codex Canonum Ecclesiasticorum, ‘Regulae 

prolatae in synodo Neocaesariensi XIV, no. li, inMigne,PL 67. 156). 

‘De his qui in plurimas nuptias inciderunt, et tempus quidem praefinitum 

manifestum est, sed conversatio eorum, et fides, tempus abbreviat’ (Regulae ..., 

no. xlvii,inMigne,PL 67. 155). A more up-to-date and critical edition of Dionysius’ 

canon-law collections is much to be desired.

142 Chapter 3 

If the twice-married person needed to do penance, it seems implied 

that there was something morally a little dubious about remarrying. 

Indeed that idea existed. Esmein’s classic history of the 

canon law of marriage suggests two reasons. One was the rigorist 

view of sex that had some currency in the patristic period: if a person 

had to get married, once was enough; the other was an ideal 

of true monogamy, unspoilt by remarriage. This second reason is 

close to the thinking of Brahman Hinduism about remarriage, but 

Esmein reminds us that pagan Roman religion had a counterpart 

for special cases and that Tacitus attributed a similar attitude to the 

Germans (ibid.). 

The legitimacy of remarriage 

An alternative view and the one that prevailed is that no moral 

stigma attached to second marriages. Jerome put that view in no 

uncertain terms: not only a second but a fifth or a sixth marriage was 

licit. Remarriage after a partner’s death was absolutely normal 

throughout the Middle Ages. The papacy had no problem with 

that. In the central Middle Ages we find popes (Lucius III and 

Alexander IV) banning taxes imposed by abbots or a bishop on the 

remarriage of widows. Peter Lombard said succinctly that ‘not 

only first or second marriages are licit, but even third and fourth 

marriages should not be condemned’. He quoted the passage from 

Jerome. 

Twelfth-century authorities: Peter Lombard, Gratian, and two papal 

decrees 

Even so, Lombard did quote a passage from pseudo-Ambrose 

(‘Ambrosiaster’), which runs: ‘first marriages only are instituted 

by God, whereas second marriages are permitted. And first mar- 

Esmein, Le Mariage en droit canonique, ii. 120. 

Ibid. 119–21. Cf. Jussen, Der Name der Witwe, 170–1 (granting the substantive 

point while stressing negativity about second marriages). 

Epist. 48 (ad Pammachium), para. 18 (Migne, PL 22. 508), cited by Ignatius 

Brady, the anonymous editor, in Magistri Petri Lombardi Parisiensis Episcopi Sententiae 

in IV libris distinctae, 3rd edn., ed. Patres Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras 

Aquas (2 vols.; Spicilegium Bonaventurianum, 4–5; Grottaferrata, 1971–81), ii. 

Liber III et IV, 509 (listing the letter as number 43—presumably a slip). 

Esmein, Le Mariage en droit canonique, ii. 124–5 n. 5. In the same note Esmein 

points out that in 1391 the bishop of Chartres armed in Parlement that charivaris 

against the remarriage of widows were forbidden by synodal statutes. 

Sententiae, 4. 42. 7, ii. 508 Brady.

Bigamy 143 

riages are celebrated above with the blessing of God, whereas 

second marriages lack glory even in the present.’ The reference 

to ‘blessing’ may have influenced the later path of the limitation on 

priestly participation. 

The ruling from the Roman Empire survived into Gratian’s Decretum, 

verbally modified if the editions are to be trusted but substantially 

much the same. Gratian prefaces this with the comment 

that ‘There is a general ban on men and women contracting marriages 

frequently. Therefore priests ought not to take part in the 

marriage when it is a second wedding, as is read in the Council of 

Neocaesarea.’ 

Not everything in Gratian was treated as binding, but two later 

twelfth-century papal decretals reinforced the idea that second marriages 

should be treated di·erently, especially since both became 

incorporated in the 1234 canon-law collection that became the authoritative 

lawbook of Western Christendom. Pope Alexander III 

laid it down that a ‘chaplain’ who ‘celebrated the blessing with a 

second [wife]’ was ‘suspended from his oce and benefice until 

absolved by the apostolic see’. The reference to ‘the blessing’ 

marks this out from Gratian and the Council of Neocaesarea decree. 

‘sublimiter’: probably meaning ‘in heaven’, though it may mean something 

vaguer: ‘in the heights, sublimely’. 

‘primae nuptiae tantum a Domino sunt institutae, secundae vero sunt permissae. 

Et primae nuptiae sub benedictione Dei celebrantur sublimiter, secundae vero 

etiam in praesenti carent gloria’ (Ambrosiaster on 1 Cor. 7: 10, in Migne, PL 17. 

225; cited by Peter Lombard, Sententiae, 4. 42. 7, ii. 509 Brady). 

‘Fides et conuersatio penitenciam adbreuiet eorum, qui frequenter ducunt uxores. 

De his, qui frequenter uxores ducunt, et de his, qui sepius nubunt, tempus quidem 

his manifestum constitutum est, sed conuersatio et fides eorum tempus adbreuiat. 

Presbiterum uero secundarum nuptiarum conubio interesse non debere; 

maxime cum precipiatur secundis nuptiis penitenciam tribuere: quis erit presbiter, 

qui propter conuiuium illis consentiat nuptiis?’ (Decretum, Pars II, C. 31, q. 1, c. 8, 

in E. Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici (2 vols.; Leipzig, 1879–81; repr. Graz, 1955), 

i. 1110). 

‘conubio’, but ‘convivio’ in another edition: see ‘Editio Romana’ apparatus in 

Friedberg. 

Decretum, Pars II, C. 31, q. 1, c. 7, in Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici, i. 

1110. 

‘secunda’. 

‘Capellanum . . . quem benedictionem cum secunda . . . constiterit celebrasse, 

ab ocio beneficioque suspensum, cum literarum tuarum testimonio . . . ad sedem 

apostolicam nullatenus destinare postponas’ (Decretals of Gregory IX, X. 4. 21. 

1, in Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici, ii. 730). The passages marked as omitted are 

those left out in the 1234 canon-law collection and supplied by Friedberg from other 

sources.

144 Chapter 3 

Perhaps it was influenced by the pseudo-Ambrose passage noted 

above. 

Urban III’s decree also concentrates on ‘the blessing’. ‘A man or 

a woman, passing to a second marriage, ought not to be blessed by 

a priest, for, since they have been blessed on another occasion, their 

blessing should not be repeated.’ We shall shortly need to look 

more closely at what in terms of external ritual might be implied 

by ‘the blessing’. 

The meaning of the rules about the marriage blessing 

More immediately, what was the thinking behind these decrees? 

No definitive answer can be given at present. It would be a good research 

topic. Canon-law commentaries on Gratian, Decretum, Pars 

II, C. 31, q. 1, cc. 7–8, could be collected with the aid of Kuttner’s 

Repertorium, the main Decretalist commentaries on Decretals of 

Gregory IX, X. 4. 21. 1 and 3, could be reviewed; commentaries 

on Peter Lombard, Sentences, 4. 42. 7, could be found with the aid 

of Stegm•uller’s Repertorium. It would be a bonus for the argument 

of this book if symbolic reasoning turned out to be central, 

but I would not predict that. The most likely guess, no substitute 

for an investigation, is that the rationale behind the papal decrees 

was a mixture of tradition, respect for the attitude embodied in 

pseudo-Ambrose, and a sense that the blessing was a kind of ritual 

that should not be repeated. The last thought might be explicable 

in terms of the uncrystallized state of thought about marriage as a 

sacrament. Bernard of Parma in his standard gloss on the Decretals 

of Gregory IX suggested as a reason that a sacrament should 

not be repeated. Other canonists rejected the idea that the nuptial 

blessing (as opposed to marriage itself) was a sacrament. Thus 

Go·redus of Trani (writing in the years 1241–3) pointed out that 

‘Vir autem vel mulier, ad bigamiam transiens, non debet a presbytero benedici, 

quia, quum alia vice benedicti sint, eorum benedictio iterari non debet’ (Decretals 

of Gregory IX, X. 4. 21. 3, in Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici, ii. 731). 

S. Kuttner, Repertorium der Kanonistik (1140–1234): Prodromos Corporis glossarum, 

i (Studi e testi, 71; Vatican City, 1937). 

F. Stegm •uller, Repertorium commentariorum in Sententias Petri Lombardi (2 

vols.; W•urzburg, 1947). The canny researcher would save time by following in the 

footsteps of P. Biller, The Measure of Multitude: Population in Medieval Thought 

(Oxford, 2000), ch. 7.2, pp. 166–77. 

Esmein, Le Mariage en droit canonique, ii. 123. For Bernard of Parma see P. 

Erd•o, Storia della scienza del diritto canonico: una introduzione (Rome, 1999), 90. 

Esmein, Le Mariage en droit canonique, ii. 123 at n. 4.

Bigamy 145 

the nuptial blessing was not a sacrament, though marriage itself 

was, and that some sacraments could be repeated. One should 

also mention Hostiensis’s suggestion that if one of the partners 

in a marriage had been blessed at a previous marriage the unity 

of flesh in the consummation of the second marriage would be 

enough to communicate the blessing to the unblessed partner, so 

that the second marriage did not require a reprise. Was this idea 

also around in the twelfth century? The most likely overall hypothesis 

is that Alexander III and Urban III were not themselves 

absolutely clear in their minds and that it seemed safest to them to 

stick to a rule deemed traditional. 

A feeling that the blessing should not be repeated because it was 

‘sacramental’ or ‘quasi-sacramental’, and a certain stigma attached 

to second marriages, are the reasons for the rule given in the curious 

questions about marriage in MS BL Royal 11. A. XIV (see below, 

Document 3. 8. 20–1). It may be significant, though, that there is a 

long passage nearby (3. 8. 19) which is full of marriage symbolism, 

drawing out the significance of the placing of the principal blessing 

shortly before communion in the mass: 

...inthecommunionofthebodyandbloodofChristthelowestthings 

are joined to the highest, that is, the human mind is joined to the body of 

Christ, in fact to God himself. Since, therefore, marital union [copulatio] 

signifies this joining, and indeed also the very union by which the same 

deity is united to the humanity as one person in Christ, who is most truly 

contained in the aforesaid sacrament [of the Eucharist], it was most fittingly 

laid down that the blessing which has the principal place in marriage be 

solemnly conferred before communion or the the reception of the same 

blessed body, as the sign before the signified. 

Whether or not symbolism had been important in the thinking 

behind the rule originally, it was certainly important from the 

thirteenth century on. The analysis in Thomas Aquinas’s widely 

di·used commentary on the Sentences deserves close attention. 

Esmein, Le Mariage en droit canonique, ii. 123 and especially n. 5; for Go·redus 

see Erd•o, Storia della scienza del diritto canonico, 98. 

Esmein, Le Mariage en droit canonique, ii. 124 and n. 3. 

In the extracts below I translate and paraphrase from the Latin text given in 

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, qu. 3, art. 2, in 

S. Tommaso d’Aquino: Commento alle Sentenze di Pietro Lombardo e testo integrale di 

Pietro Lombardo. Libro quarto. Distinzioni 24–42. L’Ordine, il Matrimonio, trans. and 

ed. by the ‘Redazione delle Edizioni Studio Domenicano’ (Bologna, 2001), 888–90. 

For the commented text see Peter Lombard, Sentences, 4. 42. 7, ii. 508–9 Brady).

146 Chapter 3 

He is discussing the question of whether a second marriage is a 

sacrament, concluding that it is and that consequently—this is the 

interesting part—it is an obstacle to a priestly career. (He means 

even after the second wife’s death—otherwise the point would be 

obvious in his context.) First come the arguments against regarding 

a second marriage as a sacrament, the usual scholastic method of 

beginning with what can be said against one’s own point of view: 

1. It seems that a second marriage is not a sacrament. For if someone 

repeats a sacrament, he does an injury to it. But one should not do injury 

to any sacrament. Therefore, if a second marriage were a sacrament, it 

would certainly not be something to be repeated. 2. Besides, in every 

sacrament some blessing plays a part. But not in a second marriage, as the 

text [of Peter Lombard’s Sentences] says. Therefore no sacrament happens 

there. 3. Besides, signification is of the essence of a sacrament. But in a 

second marriage the signification of marriage is not preserved: because it 

is not a marriage of one to one, like Christ and the Church. Therefore 

it is not a sacrament. 4. Besides, one sacrament is not an impediment to 

the reception of another. But a second marriage is an impediment to the 

reception of priestly orders Therefore it is not a sacrament. 

Then Aquinas begins to set out the reasons on the other side, 

reasons why a second marriage is after all a sacrament: 

On the other hand, sexual intercourse in a second marriage is excused from 

sin, just as in a first marriage. But marital sexual intercourse is excused 

by the three goods of marriage, which are faith, children, and sacrament. 

Therefore a second marriage is a sacrament. 

Besides, from a non-sacramental second union of man and woman, no 

irregularity is contracted, as is evident with respect to fornication. But an 

irregularity is contracted in a second marriage. Therefore it is sacramental. 

Here Aquinas means that fornication by a widower does not make 

him a ‘bigamist’ and bar him from holy orders: in e·ect his point is 

that this happens with a second marriage only because it is a proper 

sacramental union. This casts an interesting light on the issue of 

clerical ‘bigamy’, discussed in the sections that precede and follow 

this one. It is because of the high sacramental status of marriage 

that two successive marriages rule out a priestly career even after 

the second wife’s death, and are incompatible with clerical status, 

according to this reasoning. The ‘irregularity’ does not reflect badly 

on marriage as a state: rather the contrary. 

Note: the subject of the first section of this chapter.

Bigamy 147 

Now the main arguments for the sacramentality of second marriages 

begin: 

I reply that one should say that wherever one finds the things which are of 

the essence of marriage, that is a true sacrament; so, since everything that 

is of the essence of the sacrament is found in a second marriage, because 

there is the matter required, which the legitimate status of the persons 

supplies, and the form required, that is the expression of internal consent 

through words: it is also clear that a second marriage is a sacrament just 

like a first one. 

Next Aquinas disposes of the objections. The argument about repeatability 

is disposed of very easily. The objection applies only 

to sacraments whose e·ect is perpetual, where repetition might 

imply that the first administration of the sacrament did not work. 

Where the e·ect of a sacrament is not perpetual, this does not apply. 

Clearly it does not apply in the case of the sacrament of penance. In 

disposing of the remaining objections Aquinas allows symbolism 

to dominate his reasoning: 

. . . although a second marriage taken in itself is a perfect sacrament, yet 

taken in relation to a first marriage it has something of a defect in the 

sacrament, since it does not have the full signification, since it is not of one 

woman to one man, as with the marriage of Christ and the Church; and 

by reason of this defect the blessing is withdrawn from second marriages. 

But this should be understood of the case where the second marriage 

is the second for both the man and the woman, or for the woman only. 

For if a virgin contracts marriage with a man who has had another wife, 

the marriage is blessed none the less: for the signification is in some way 

preserved even in relation to the first marriage, since Christ, even if he 

had a single Church as a bride, nevertheless has many persons within one 

Church as brides; but the soul cannot be the bride of any other but Christ, 

since with the demon it commits fornication, and there is no spiritual 

marriage there; and because of this, when a woman marries for the second 

time, the marriage is not blessed because of a defect of the sacrament. 

Aquinas’s argument has taken him on to the issue of the blessing 

of second marriages. He has a symbolic rationale to explain why 

Aquinas’s remaining arguments, or responses to arguments, do not add much 

for our purposes, though they continue the same line of symbolic thought: ‘Ad 

tertium dicendum, quod significatio perfecta invenitur in secundo matrimonio secundum 

se considerato, non autem si consideretur in ordine ad praecedens matrimonium; 

et sic habet defectum sacramenti. Ad quartum dicendum, quod secundum 

matrimonium impedit sacramentum ordinis quantum ad id quod habet de defectu 

sacramenti, et non inquantum est sacramentum’ (ibid. 890).

148 Chapter 3 

amarriagecouldbeblessedifitwasthefirsttimeforthebride 

even if not for the bridegroom. This practice does indeed seem to 

have been found ‘in some churches’. Bernard of Pavia notes it, as 

does Hostiensis. The same evidence proves that it was not the 

general rule. The practice might be explained also in terms of 

the patriarchal assumption that properly speaking ‘man is polygamous, 

woman is monogamous’. Aquinas finds a quite di·erent 

meaning in it. 

Meaning and reception: the ‘inner side’ of ritual 

This raises the crucial question: do meanings imposed a posteriori—as 

this turn at least in Aquinas’s argument may well have 

been—have any relevance to social history? I would suggest that 

the answer is: ‘sometimes but not always’ . For example, most of 

Aquinas’s analysis is really relevant to the social history of bigamy, 

while the idea just mentioned—the explanation of why a marriage 

could be blessed when it was the wife’s first marriage—may be 

interesting for the intellectual historian but not for the social historian, 

as being too much of an afterthought, too remote from 

practice. 

To decide what is relevant to social history one needs to ask 

further questions. One was used in the preceding section, which 

suggested the following criterion: was the internal rationale used 

casuistically, as a way of classifying dicult or marginal practical 

cases? If it was doing that, then it was a·ecting practice, not just 

redescribing it. Here are two more questions. Was the new understanding 

of the social practice so widespread as to change it so to 

speak from the inside? Is this inner change revealed by external 

symptoms, minor in themselves but indicative of the new thinking 

that was altering the social meaning? 

The notion that social practice has an ‘inner side’ which is the 

real object of the social scientist’s (or historian’s) research has been 

around for a long time. In the second half of the twentieth cen- 

See Esmein, Le Mariage en droit canonique, ii. 124–5, with references. 

Nor did it receive general approval. Hostiensis disapproved (see ibid.), and 

the interesting, probably fake bull attributed variously to Pope John XXII and 

Pope Benedict XII generously allowed the maximalist interpretation that if either 

of the couple in a second marriage had not been blessed in a previous marriage, the 

new marriage might be blessed: see the discussion by Johannes de Burgo, below, 

Document 3. 9. 5.

Bigamy 149 

tury there were classic expositions by Peter Winch and Cli·ord 

Geertz. Behind them lies Max Weber. Some key quotations: ‘let 

human behaviour . . . be called “action” if and insofar as the person 

or persons who act connect it with a subjective meaning’ (Weber); 

‘Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in 

webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those 

webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science 

in search of law but an interpretive one in seach of meaning’ 

(Geertz); ‘social interaction can more profitably be compared to 

the exchange of ideas in a conversation than to the interaction of 

forces in a physical system’ (Winch). 

A brief consideration of the history of Christmas suggests that 

Weber, Winch, and Geertz were on the right lines. Christmas was 

celebrated at the winter solstice from Julius Caesar’s time. The 

pagan religious significance grew. The sun came to be regarded 

by many as the divinity behind other gods. In 274 the emperor 

made 25 December the ‘Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun’. The 

idea of Christ as ‘the sun of righteousness’ (Mal. 4: 2) enabled 

the transition to a Christian feast. Then for centuries and for 

many still Christmas celebrated the birth of Christ. Now for many 

others it is instead a secular festival of good fellowship and the 

family. To take celebration of Christmas today as proof of religious 

feeling would be a mistake, just as it is a mistake to assume that its 

incorporation into Christian liturgy indicated the survival of pagan 

religion. What counts is the meaning behind the actions and rituals. 

Nevertheless, a text here and there is not enough to establish that a 

ritual has modified its meaning. The texts suggesting that need to 

be influential and popular. Furthermore, one would expect small 

but symptomatic changes in the mode of celebration. Thus a family 

P. Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London 

etc., 1958). 

e.g. C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (London etc., 

1973; repr. 1993). 

The sentence in full: ‘“Handeln” soll dabei ein menschliches Verhalten (einerlei 

ob •au¢eres oder innerliches Tun, Unterlassen oder Dulden) hei¢en, wenn und 

insofern als der oder die Handelnden mit ihm einen subjektiven Sinn verbinden’ 

(Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1). 

C. Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in 

id., The Interpretation of Cultures, 3–30at5. 

Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, 128. 

The foregoing is taken from B. Blackburn and L. Holford-Strevens, The Oxford 

Companion to the Year (Oxford, 1999), 514–15.

150 Chapter 3 

today that is vaguely Christian but not churchgoing might go to a 

carol service and join in heartily, whereas a wholly secular family 

might not unless some other social obligation were involved. So the 

fine print of practice can usually indicate a shift in the meanings 

behind it. 

Ritual changes and symbolic meaning 

In the remainder of this section, therefore, I shall try to show that a 

strong emphasis on a symbolic rationale correlated with change in 

ritual, and that the symbolic rationale could have penetrated well 

below the theological ‹elite. 

We shall be looking closely at the ritual of second weddings and 

at how this ritual was interpeted at a level less exalted than that of 

Thomas Aquinas. The social history of this ritual seems to have 

received scholarly attention only on the margins of more general 

histories of marriage liturgy, and there is a need for a concentrated 

study of it by a historical liturgiologist. The following reconstruction 

is only sketchy and tentative. It should also be said immediately 

that there was clearly a great range of practice where the rituals of 

second weddings are concerned. We also need to remember that 

there were parts of Europe where no church wedding ceremony 

was required by the Church for a first marriage, apparently. That 

would make the ritual of the second marriage less important. The 

J.-B. Molin and P. Mutembe, Le Rituel du mariage en France du XIIe au XVIe 

si›ecle (Th‹eologie historique, 26; Paris, 1974), 236, 243–4, is useful but very brief. 

There is a useful chapter in L. Duchesne, Christian Worship, its Origin and Evolution: 

A Study of the Latin Liturgy up to the Time of Charlemagne, trans.M.L.McClure, 

5th edn. (London, 1919), ch. 14, but it does not cover the period that mainly concerns 

us. Ritzer, Formen, Riten und religi•oses Brauchtum der Eheschlie¢ung, hassome 

important pages: see index, s.v. ‘Wiederverheiratung’, but mainly pp. 160, 166, 168– 

9 (Ritzer also discusses the history of second weddings in Eastern Christianity, but 

these are not within the scope of this study). B. Binder, Geschichte des feierlichen 

Ehesegens von der Entstehung der Ritualien bis zur Gegenwart, mit Ber•ucksichtigung 

damit zusammenh•angender Riten, Sitten und Br•auche: Eine liturgiegeschichtliche Untersuchung 

(Metten, 1938), 84–8, provides a good miniature history of ‘Segnung 

bei zweiten Ehen’. He gives special attention to English rituals, commenting (88) 

that ‘Aus diesen kurzen Berichten ist bereits ersichtlich, wie schwierig und unklar 

bez•uglich dieser Frage die Verh•altnisse lagen’. See too K. Stevenson, Nuptial Blessing: 

A Study of Christian Marriage Rites (Alcuin Club Collections, 64; London, 

1982), 80–1, 82, and also (important background) 40–1, for the nuptial blessing in 

the Gregorian Sacramentary. 

Esmein, Le Mariage en droit canonique, ii. 124–5. See also Johannnes de Burgo’s 

comment: ‘nisi consuetudo alicuius ecclesie aliter obtineret. Tunc enim possent sine 

periculo benedici’ (Document 3. 9. 4). 

D. L. d’Avray, ‘Marriage Ceremonies and the Church in Italy after 1215’, in

Bigamy 151 

ceremony could be omitted altogether without anything seeming 

odd. Where this was the case the analysis that follows is less applicable. 

So the remarks that follow are certainly not meant to apply to 

Western Christendom generally; and indeed they bear particularly 

on England so far as the later Middle Ages are concerned. 

So what significant patterns can one observe in the history of 

second weddings? For one thing, it looks as though the limitation 

on priestly participation became increasingly specific, in the sense 

that less and less was forbidden, with the consequence that the 

proverbial Martian observer would have found it harder and harder 

to tell a first wedding from a second wedding. 

Back in the fourth century the contrast between first and second 

weddings may have been sharp. The decrees of the Council of Neocaesarea 

as transmitted by Dionysius Exiguus seem to ban priests 

altogether from participating in second weddings. As for interpretation 

of the version in Gratian, Pars II, C. 31, q. 1, cc. 7–8, 

there is a problem of textual criticism to complicate things: there 

are variant readings, one implying a ban on participation in the 

wedding (conubio), another on participation in the banquet (convivio). 

Perhaps the di·erence is not so important. Would it make 

sense to let a priest conduct a wedding but ban him from the banquet? 

More probably, the legislation would be taken to mean that 

the priest should just not be involved in a second wedding, though 

this is no more than a guess. 

The papal decretals from the twelfth century are di·erent and 

already more specific. They both forbid the priest to give ‘the blessing’, 

whatever that may mean. The natural assumption might be 

that ‘the blessing’ is shorthand for the whole celebration of a second 

marriage with a religious ritual. It was not, however, so understood, 

to judge by the texts printed as Documents 3. 8 and 3. 9, and by 

the fascinating discussion in versions of the Sarum Manual. 

An interesting and apparently unstudied text can tell us more 

about the rituals that went with marriage. The questions on Marriage 

in MS BL Royal 11. A. XIV (printed as Document 3. 8) 

indicate that there are several blessings at and around a wedding. 

(Though this text may survive in only one manuscript and its 

T. Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (eds.), Marriage in Italy, 1300–1650 (Cambridge, 1998), 

107–15. 

See above, p. 141. 

See the apparatus critici in Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici, i. 1110.

152 Chapter 3 

author’s theological views have no particular importance, the extract 

printed is valuable for the practices it describes.) Four blessings 

are listed as normal for first marriages: at the entrance of the 

church, at the beginning of the mass, before the kiss of peace, and 

at the marriage bed (Document 3. 8. 8). The author says that he 

does not know of any authority which specifies what blessing Urban 

III intended in the decretal X. 4. 21. 3, and concludes that one 

must go by custom (Document 3. 8. 7; cf.3. 8. 27). According to 

the common custom of the Church, the blessing forbidden by the 

decretal is the one after the Agnus Dei and before the kiss of peace 

(Document 3. 8. 8). 

This gives us a more precise idea of the e·ect of the decretals 

about second marriages. They were not understood to mean that 

such marriages should be without a religious ceremony. Indeed, 

the nuptial mass would seem to have been quite acceptable at a 

second marriage. One particular blessing is omitted, but the priest 

is crucially involved in the wedding throughout. This is a quite different 

picture from what one finds in the Council of Neocaesarea 

legislation as preserved by Dionysius Exiguus and in Gratian. It is 

clear from this document that couples who had been married before 

were not relegated to a dry or secular ceremony. They had plenty 

of religious ritual. However it may have been in late antiquity or 

even in subsequent centuries, any idea that the priest must distance 

himself from second weddings seems to have disappeared. 

The evidence of the Sarum Manual 

The Sarum manual of the dominant liturgical rite in England casts 

even more light on what actually went on in first and second wedding 

ceremonies. It is helpfully explicit and has been edited in a 

critical and thorough manner, so it is useful to follow the relevant 

section in detail. During the canon of the mass, the central section 

that includes the consecration, the bride and groom prostrate 

themselves before the altar. If they are both getting married for 

the first time, four clerics in surplices hold a cloak (pallium) over 

them, each cleric holding a corner. This eye-catching ritual was 

apparently to be left out of second marriages. That may have been 

a disappointment to some couples on those occasions. 

See Manuale ad usum percelebris Ecclesie Sarisburiensis, ed. A. J. Collins (Henry 

Bradshaw Society, 91; London, 1960), 53–8. 

‘ad gradum altaris’ (ibid. 53).

Bigamy 153 

Textually, however, the di·erence between first and second marriage 

seems to come down to one section of one blessing. The 

section is the part in which marriage is compared to the marriage of 

Christ and the Church. The canon of the mass is completed and the 

Lord’s Prayer is said. In a normal mass the Agnus Dei (‘Lamb of 

God who takest away the sins of the world . . .’) and the kiss of peace 

would follow, but the marriage liturgy inserts special blessings at 

this point, after a prayer to God to help the new union. The words 

are as follows, with the blessing that especially concerns us in bold: 

Let us pray. O God, who by the power of your might made everything from 

nothing, who, after ordering the first elements [exordiis] of the universe, established 

for man, made in the image of God, the inseparable assistance of 

woman in order that you might give to the female body a beginning from 

male flesh, teaching that what it was pleasing to establish from one it 

would never be right to put asunder: O God, who consecrated conjugal 

union [copulam] with such an excellent mystery so that you might 

prefigure [presignares] the sacrament of Christ and the Church in 

the covenant [federe] of a marriage [nuptiarum]; O God, through 

whom woman is joined to man and a social bond ordained from the beginning 

has bestowed on it that blessing which alone was not removed either 

by the punishment of original sin or by the sentence of the Flood: look 

favourably on this your maidservant who is to be joined in the partnership 

of marriage and asks to be strengthened by your protection. May the 

bond of love and peace be in her: may she marry as one faithful and chaste 

in Christ: and may she continue to follow the example of holy women. May 

she be lovable as Rachel was to her husband: wise as Rebecca: long-lived 

and faithful as Sara. [The prayer for the bride continues for some lines.] 

The Sarum manual seems to di·er from the anonymous author 

of the questions in MS BL Royal 11. A. XIV (Document 3. 8) 

by omitting still less of the ritual for a first marriage. Instead of 

leaving out the whole blessing, the Sarum rite seems to cut only the 

few words that I have printed in bold. Before these words in the 

manual we find the note: ‘Here begins the sacramental blessing’, 

and after it the words ‘Here the sacramental blessing ends’. At 

The Latin really requires ‘quod quod’ here, but the second ‘quod’ may have 

been omitted because it is inelegant. 

I am emending the edition from ‘tua que’ to ‘tuaque’ as the sense requires. 

For what follows see too Stevenson, Nuptial Blessing, 80–1. By his account the 

Hereford and York rites are in line with the Sarum rite, the only one I have examined 

myself. ‘Hic incipit benedictio sacramentalis’ (53 Collins). 

‘Hic finitur benedictio sacramentalis’ (54 Collins).

154 Chapter 3 

the end of the whole prayer we find the following: ‘Note that the 

clause“OGod,who...withsuchanexcellentmystery”to“O 

God, through whom woman is joined to man” is not said in second 

marriages.’ 

The Sarum manual cites Urban III’s decree (X. 4. 21. 3) about 

the blessing of second marriages by the priest in such a way as to 

imply that the decree was directed only at this one short clause. 

The explanation given is that ‘the flesh that has been blessed draws 

to itself the flesh that has not been blessed’ (56 Collins). 

The manual has not finished. It seems it cannot leave the topic 

of second marriages alone, for there is plenty more. The author 

quotes pseudo-Ambrose’s negative comments about second marriages, 

remarks that there are a number of blessings associated with 

marriage, from that at the entrance to that of the marriage bed in 

the evening, and returns to the question of which blessing should 

be omitted. 

Now his attention is on the prayer beginning ‘O God who by the 

power of your might . . .’, which includes two more ‘O God who . . .’ 

clauses, including the one printed above in bold type. According to 

this long rubric, each of these ‘O God who . . .’ clauses is a separate 

blessing. One imagines, then, that the priest would make the sign 

of the cross three times over the couple during this prayer. 

It is the middle ‘O God who . . .’ blessing that must be omitted in 

second marriages, we are told, and presumably on those occasions 

the sign of the cross would be made only twice. The prohibition on 

blessing such marriages has been reduced to the omission of this 

short clause: ‘O God, who consecrated conjugal union [copulam] 

with such an excellent mystery, so that you might prefigure the 

sacrament of Christ and the Church in the covenant of a marriage.’ 

The reason for narrowing it down to this point is that only this 

clause was about the symbolism of Christ’s union with the Church. 

To put it another way: the interpretation of the prohibition’s rationale 

as symbolic had the practical ritual consequence of retaining 

almost all of the words of the marriage service apart from this brief 

clause. It is a symptom that the symbolism is not just epiphenomenal, 

not merely a surface coating: it has a·ected the social meaning 

of marriage. 

No accident, then, that the manual cites at this point the decretal 

‘plures benedictiones sunt in nuptiis celebrandis .scilicet. in introitu ecclesie et 

super pallium et post missam et super thorum in sero’ (56 Collins).

Bigamy 155 

Debitum of Innocent III, discussed in the previous section, perhaps 

the single most important document for medieval marriage 

symbolism as a practical social force. It will be remembered that 

this was the decretal that prompted Hostiensis’s amazing Tree of 

Bigamy, that visual monument to marriage symbolism. 

The attention shifts briefly from symbolism, as the manual’s rubric 

now moves on to the question of which marriages precisely are 

a·ected by the prohibition, and to a full quotation of the strange, 

probably fake, papal bull that purported to settle such questions. 

The bull also removed the obligation of priests to seek absolution 

from the pope if they had broken the rule. This forgery is a fascinating 

little problem in its own right, but not necessarily relevant 

to the theme of marriage symbolism. The Sarum manual has only 

temporarily let go of that theme, however, and returns with another 

substantial piece of symbolic reasoning before moving on. The passage 

in question is none other than one from Aquinas which was 

quoted above, in which Aquinas explains that a second marriage 

is a perfect sacrament taken in itself, but defective in relation to a 

first marriage because it is not of one woman to one man and thus 

imperfectly represents the marriage of Christ and the Church. 

The rubrics in the Sarum manual illuminate the thinking behind 

the ritual practice and explain how the prohibition against blessing 

second marriages could be interpreted as omission of one small 

clause. This may have been peculiar to England. 

See the excellent discussion of the bull in Manuale, ed. Collins, 54–6 at n. 65. 

The ‘papal bull’ in question was called Concertationi antique, fromitsopening 

words. If forged, the perpetrator knew that discourse. John XXII and Benedict XII 

both used similar language in documents aiming to put an end to controversy. A 

decretal of John XXII settling the question of whether entry into holy orders (as opposed 

to entry into a religious order) dissolved an unconsummated marriage begins: 

‘Antiquae concertationi finem cupientes imponere’ (Extrav. Jo. XXII 6. 1, ii. 1212 

Friedberg). The same pope’s ‘Cum inter nonnullos’ has ‘Nos huic concertationi 

finem imponere cupientes’ (C. Mirbt, Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums und des 

r•omischen Katholizismus, 5th edn. (T •ubingen, 1934), no. 379, p. 219); see also BenedictXII,‘BenedictusDeus’:‘praedecessornoster...addecisionemconcertationum 

huiusmodi se pararet’ (Mirbt, Quellen, no. 382, p. 222). Even so, the consensus is 

that this strange document, brought to England by ‘Master John Haysted’ according 

to the Sarum Missal, is a forgery. 

See above, pp. 145–8, esp. 147. As the editor of the Sarum manual points out, 

the words ‘Ad hoc dico’ are substituted for Aquinas’s ‘Ad secundum dicendum’ 

(omitted from my translation above) (Manuale, ed. Collins, 58 n. 82). 

Molin and Mutembe, Le Rituel du mariage en France, 243–4, suggest that 

in France the changes were more substantial, though they find that at Narbonne 

and Saint-Pons ‘on ne supprime que la formule de b‹en‹ediction Deus qui potestate’

156 Chapter 3 

The evidence of the Pupilla oculi 

Where England is concerned, the evidence of the Sarum Missal is 

complemented by that of Johannes de Burgo, author of the Pupilla 

oculi, ‘The Pupil of the Eye’ (the title is an allusion to the earlier 

‘Eye of the Priest’ by William of Pagula), a late fourteenth-century 

priests’ manual that was influential, to judge by its wide di·usion. 

The Sarum rubrics etc. had probably got into the Sarum books before 

the appearance of the Pupilla, but the popular pastoral handbook 

would have reinforced the message of the liturgical books. 

It was in fact a practically identical message. The following passage 

from Johannes de Burgo is extremely close to the wording of 

a passage from the Sarum rubric translated above: 

But since several blessings are given at a wedding, that is, over the couple 

getting married at the entrance of the church, over a cloak after mass, and 

over the marriage bed in the evening, it should therefore be noted that 

all the blessings or prayers of blessing that are said at a first marriage, 

are said also at a second one—even where both spouses or one of them 

had previously been blessed—apart from the one that begins: OGod,who 

consecrated conjugal union [copulam] with such an excellent mystery up to O 

God, through whom woman, in which the theme is the unity of Christ and 

the Church which is represented in a first marriage, but not in a second: 

see Decretals of Gregory IX, De bigamis, the chapter Debitum. 

These explanations show that the symbolic rationale could have 

penetrated well below the level of the ivory-tower ‹elite, one of the 

criteria suggested above as a ground for treating it as part of the 

social meaning of the ritual practice. This conclusion is strengthened 

if one bears in mind a finding of the first chapter: that the loss 

rate of manuscripts was huge, for some genres of book especially. 

Pastoral handbooks which would lie around a parish priest’s house 

and liturgical books that were functional rather than for show, used 

(243)—that is, all three ‘O God who . . .’ clauses were suppressed, but no other 

words—which would bring them into line with the questions in MS BL Royal 

11. A. XIV. 

On this work see W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century, 

2nd edn. (1962; repr. Toronto etc., 1980), 213–14; see also introduction to Document 

3. 9 for further references. The author was quite an important man: chancellor of 

Cambridge University. 

‘Almost certainly . . . these rubrics, etc., were already in the Sarum books when 

the Pupilla appeared, having probably been introduced before 1370’ (Manuale, ed. 

Collins, 56 (n. 65 from p. 54)). 

Document 3. 9. 8:comparewithManuale, ed. Collins, 56, lines 6–end.

Bigamy 157 

at parish level rather than in cathedral or monastic churches, are 

among the genres of book that would have been vulnerable. Since 

the Pupilla oculi, at least, nevertheless survives in a large number of 

manuscripts, we can be fairly sure that its impact in late medieval 

England was massive. 

The other criterion for detecting a change in social meaning from 

within—an external change symptomatic of the symbolic meaning 

of the ritual practice—was satisfied above: the narrowing down 

of the prohibition, in England at least, to a few words about the 

marriage of Christ and the Church. So whatever the origins of 

the liturgical rules about second marriages, symbolism was part 

of their social meaning in late medieval England. Other parts of 

Europe deserve fuller investigation, but we must now turn to a 

di·erent strand of marriage symbolism’s social meaning and to 

married clerics in minor orders. 

(c) Clerics in Minor Orders 

Clerics in minor orders as a status group 

The first part of this chapter looked at men who wanted to become 

priests or at least to be elevated to the higher orders of subdeacon or 

deacon. The second part dealt with the ceremonies for second marriages 

of laypeople. We may now turn to a third category, a status 

group somewhat neglected by historians: the legimately married 

clerics in minor orders. Of the rungs on the ladder up to holy orders 

the top three were for subdeacons, deacons, and priests, in 

ascending order. Perched on the lower rungs were large numbers of 

legitimately married clerics. We have little idea how many. It may 

have been a substantial class. 

Marriage barred them from ecclesiastical benefices but not from 

the considerable privileges of a separate status group. One important 

privilege was immunitiy from prosecution in secular courts. 

Ecclesiastical courts did not use the death penalty, so this privilege 

could literally be a life-saver. Another advantage was heavy spiritual 

protection against physical assault: anyone who laid violent hands 

on a cleric was under an anathema until he sought absolution from 

the pope; a bishop could not absolve him; only at the point of death 

‘Decretals of Gregory IX’, X. 3. 3. 2 seems to say that a married cleric who 

vowed perpetual chastity might perhaps be eligible for benefices. Such a vow would 

require the wife’s consent, though this decretal does not discuss the matter.

158 Chapter 3 

could the rule be relaxed. Some of the documents to be discussed 

later on point to further advantages. 

Papal bulls to kings of France 

The first document relating to this section (Document 3. 4) is 

relevant to our investigation for a di·erent reason. It is a bull of 

pope Alexander IV, a response to a request by King Louis IX. 

To judge from the response, the request was uncontroversial: if 

married clergy committed some dreadful crime and if they had 

already been stripped of their clerical status for some other reason, 

the prelates of France should not prevent the king’s men from 

bringing these malefactors to justice. Even Thomas Becket would 

not have minded this because the criminals were not being judged 

twice for the same o·ence. 

The bull is relevant because it uses the following formula: ‘clerics 

who are bigamous and husbands of widows and also other married 

clerics’. Assuming that the papal document echoes the original 

request, as was normal, why did Louis IX not simply say ‘married 

clergy’? That would have included the ‘bigamous and husbands of 

widows’. Why mention them separately? 

The following explanation, which does not claim to be more than 

a hypothesis, is that he did so to give his request the most favourable 

spin. Bigamous clergy and husbands of widows were marginal categories 

whose right to ecclesiastical justice even for a first crime was, 

as we shall see, questioned by influential canon lawyers. By listing 

them first, the king would have softened any possible impression 

of a Church–State conflict. The phrase (which may well have been 

formulaic) put a ‘consensus spin’ on the request. 

The other papal bulls edited in the documents section of this 

chapter (Documents 3. 5–7) seem to do the same thing. (I continue 

to assume that they too echo the wording of royal requests to which 

they are responding.) They all say ‘married clerics whether bigamous 

or monogamous’,where ‘married clerics’ would have suced. 

Explicit mention of bigamous clerics subtly emphasized the unreasonableness 

of objecting, even from a high ecclesiastical standpoint: 

rather as if it were said today that ‘asylum-seekers who first entered 

the country illegally or who declared themselves at an immigration 

point should be obliged to carry an electronic tag’. 

Gratian, Pars II, C. 27, q. 4, c. 29. 

The original is now Paris, Archives Nationales J 709 no. 296.

Bigamy 159 

This first point about minor orders is a modest one: a hypothesis 

that marriage symbolism had an indirect e·ect on French royal 

diplomatic practice. It presupposes the findings about ‘bigamy’ 

and symbolism set out in the first two sections, especially the first. 

The sequence of thought is: marriage symbolism put ‘bigamous’ 

clerics in a bad light so far as the Church was concerned, French 

kings knew this, so they put an e·ective rhetorical spin on requests 

to the pope by making an unnecessary allusion to bigamous clerics. 

The ruling of the Second Council of Lyons and its origins 

The next point relates to a larger issue: in 1274 ‘bigamous’ clerics in 

minor orders were stripped of the privileges of their clerical status 

by the Second Council of Lyons, a decision that had major social 

consequences. As should by now be predictable, the decree groups 

together men who had remarried after their first wife’s death and 

men who had married widows. As we shall see, its force could also 

be extended to clerics who married a woman who was not a virgin. 

However, a cleric in minor orders who had been married only once, 

and to a virgin, could continue to enjoy clerical privileges. Here 

we have a legal situation that makes absolutely no sense from the 

outside. 

Up to a point it can be explained by the desire of kings, especially 

the king of France, to extend royal jurisdiction as far as possible. 

(Just before the council Philip III had obtained from the pope an 

instruction to the French bishops to treat the ‘bigamous’ as laymen, 

but there had been a loophole in this preliminary document.)The 

death of Becket had turned the tide in favour of clerical immunity, 

but this does not mean that monarchs were happy with the development. 

Married clerics especially were less likely than beneficed 

priests and the like to be deterred by purely ecclesiastical justice: 

an excommunication by a church court could cut a man o· from 

the income from his benefice and block his career, but none of that 

applied to clerics in minor orders. In e·ect they fell between two 

stools if they were not subject to secular justice either. They were a 

potentially disruptive element. 

B. Roberg, Das zweite Konzil von Lyon [1274] (Paderborn etc., 1990), 319–21. 

Ibid. 320. 

For the consequences of excommunication, the great sanction of ecclesiastical 

justice, for benefice holders and career prospects, see E. Vodola, Excommunication 

in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1986), 58.

160 Chapter 3 

Again, it is not so surprising that the papacy was compliant with 

the wishes of kings in relation to married clerics. Popes did not 

hold any particular brief for this awkward marginal category. It is 

likely that the celibate higher clergy generally looked down on them 

for having things both ways. So if the papacy had simply agreed 

to reclassify married clerics as subject to secular justice, adequate 

explanations in terms of power interests and ingrained prejudices 

would be at hand and one would not have to bring marriage symbolism 

into the account. 

It is clear, however, that popes did not feel they could simply turn 

a large category of clerics over to secular justice without implicitly 

abandoning the idea that only the church courts judged the clergy. 

That idea was clearly stronger than any prejudice there may have 

been against clerics who could not cope with celibacy.The popes 

could not abandon married clerics purely because they were married: 

so long as the marriage was not against canon law, they would 

be abandoning them as clerics. 

The ‘bigamy’ theory helped the popes to meet monarchs half 

way. It gave them a principled rationale for giving kings some of 

what they wanted without running the risk of conceding the thin 

end of the wedge. Their cooperation with kings could be quite 

genuinely presented as a sti·ening of canon-law principle rather 

than a dilution of it. 

In fact, a strong current of academic canon-law opinion seems 

to have been in favour of some such change, though it was not the 

only view. The commentary on the Decretals of Gregory IX by 

Innocent IV (Sinibaldo dei Fieschi) was apparently written when 

he was already pope (incredibly enough, and an encouragement to 

all administrators with academic urges). He argues thus in the passage 

printed below as Document 3. 2. Ifaclericinminororders 

does something altogether contrary to his status, he loses it. The 

examples are: marrying for a second time or marrying a woman 

not a virgin; or becoming a knight and employing violence (seva 

exercuerit)—by which he presumably means becoming a real fighting 

knight as opposed to acquiring this status for the sake of social 

esteem, administrative oce, etc. On the other hand, if someone 

became the kind of knight who did not use violence or if he married 

a virgin, he could keep his clerical status. The fact that Innocent 

IV apparently assumes that one could be a knight and a 

Vergier-Boimond, ‘Bigamie (l’irr‹egularit‹e de)’, 872.

Bigamy 161 

cleric at the same time is an indication of how large this class of 

clerics in minor orders may have been: it could have extended far 

beyond the boundaries of what modern historians normally think 

of as ‘the clergy’. However, the immediately relevant point is the 

canonist pope’s conviction that it was fine to be a married cleric, 

but to marry twice or to marry a non-virgin was totally contrary to 

clerical status. 

The suspicion that symbolism informs this sharp distinction is 

confirmed if one turns to Innocent IV’s commentary on the Decretals 

of Gregory IX, X. 1. 21. 5, the decree Debitum of his predecessor 

but one, Innocent III, a key text in this history. Innocent IV was 

hard-headed as a canonist just as he was as a political decisionmaker, 

but there is nothing pragmatic about his analysis of bigamy 

in the commentary on this decretal (see Document 3. 3 below), 

which is full of symbolism. Interestingly, he uses the word sacramentum 

to mean something close to ‘representation’ (or perhaps the 

union that is represented, for as with the text on which he is commenting 

there is a little ambiguity). Thus carnal union between a 

husband and a wife is a ‘sacrament’ of Christ’s incarnation. Only 

in a marriage between two spouses, and not more than two, is there 

a representation of one Church subject to one Christ. 

Innocent IV asks how one gets this ‘sacrament’ out of the authority, 

by which he seems to mean the Genesis passage (2: 23–4) 

to which the Pauline Ephesians 5: 30 refers. Innocent points to the 

use of the grammmatical singular for ‘bone’, ‘flesh’, and ‘wife’, and 

to the sentence ‘they shall be two in one flesh’. 

Moving down the decretal he is explaining, Innocent IV comments 

that ‘between two only’—indicating that this is the only marriage 

for each partner—symbolizes the one Church subject to one 

husband. In a second marriage this sacramentum, representation, 

is lacking. Such a marriage could actually signify that a plurality 

of Churches were attached to one husband. He is in e·ect saying 

that a second marriage symbolically misrepresents the unity of the 

Church, an idea familiar by now. 

If we take together the two extracts from Innocent IV’s commentary, 

we can say the following. Here we have a work which enjoyed 

Cf.J.F.vonSchulte,DieGeschichte der Quellen und Literatur des canonischen 

Rechts, ii (Stuttgart, 1877; repr. Graz, 1956), 92, on his extremely practical outlook. 

‘AndAdamsaid:Thisisboneofmybones,andfleshofmyflesh;...Wherefore 

a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; they shall be 

two in one flesh.’

162 Chapter 3 

a ‘full and general authority’ until long after the Second Council of 

Lyons. He is for eliminating from the married minor clergy this 

one category: the bigamists, men whose wife was not the first, or 

who had been married before, or even who had not been a virgin before 

the marriage. The Second Council of Lyons duly eliminates the 

bigamists, definitively dislodging from their status a major section 

of the minor clergy. This was surely not due to the pope-canonist’s 

individual influence alone, but he was a particularly powerful representative 

of a strong current of canonistic opinion. In giving his 

views on bigamy and the married minor clergy Innocent does not 

discuss its symbolic rationale, but the symbolic underpinnings of 

his ideas about bigamy are unmistakable in his comments on his 

namesake’s decree Debitum, which deals with candidates for the 

priesthood, rather than with the married clergy who did not aspire 

to rise above minor orders, but where the issue of defining what is 

defective about a bigamist is identical. 

At the risk of repetition, it should be stressed that marriage symbolism 

did not necessarily provide the impetus for removing large 

numbers of men from the privileged ranks of the minor clergy, and 

that the trigger for the change was probably the French king’s desire 

to extend his jurisdiction: but symbolism providedthe rationale 

for the new clear line that was drawn and determined its contours. 

Without the symbolism there is no reason to think that the border 

would have been redrawn in that way at that time, however much 

monarchs may have wanted to get as many individuals as possible 

onto their side of the legal border, and however little popes may 

have cared about the minor clergy as such. 

Consequences in England 

The explanation of the new borderline may lie in the realms of 

symbolism, but its consequences can be called brutally practical, 

notably in England. In no time at all King Edward I passed the 

‘Statute on Bigamists’, turning the council’s new ruling into Englishcommonlaw. 

A concrete case from the reign of Edward’s 

‘Man kann ihm [his Apparatus in quinque libros decretalium] in der That kaum 

einen zweiten Kommentar der Dekretalen als ganz ebenb•urtig zur Seite stellen. 

Seine innere Bedeutung und das Ansehen seines Verfassers vercha·ten ihm eine 

volle und allgemeine Autorit•at bis zu den Zeiten, wo eine g•anzlich unwissenschaftliche 

und geistlose Richtung im kirchlichen Forum den Sieg erlangt hatte’ (von 

Schulte, Die Geschichte der Quellen und Literatur des canonischen Rechts, ii. 92). 

F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of

Bigamy 163 

son Edward II, printed below as Document 3. 10, shows what a 

di·erence could be made in practice—literally between life and 

death. 

At the centre of the case is a fairly big-time criminal named 

John of Worcester (variously ‘Wyrettstre’ and ‘Wyrecestre’). He 

was apparently responsible for some major coups of robbery and 

burglary: for instance, he took goods and chattels to the value of 

£100 from a house (in London) of the bishop of Bath and Wells. 

He also robbed the chancellor of the exchequer, no less, of £40. 

These were large sums in the currency of the time, though he could 

have been hanged for much less, or indeed even for the attempt to 

rob or burgle. When John was captured, he argued that he was a 

cleric and exempt from royal jurisdiction. That would have saved 

his skin, since church courts did not have the death penalty. 

He would have got away with it. The authorities had an answer, 

however: John was a bigamist, the husband of a widow. A jury 

found that his wife Alice had indeed been married previously, to 

a man called William of Thurston who had died in the Tower of 

London. Despite some further legal moves, John’s last good hope 

was gone. He was hanged almost certainly in 1320. In a way, he 

was killed by symbolic reasoning. 

The results of the 1274 ‘bigamy’ ruling have been especially well 

studied for France, by G‹enestal. He relates cases which would be 

grist to the hermeneutic anthropologist’s mill, and which will be 

Edward I, ed. S. F. C. Milsom (2 vols.; Cambridge, 1968), bk. 2, ch. 2, ≈5, i. 445; 

L. C. Gabel, Benefit of Clergy in England in the Later Middle Ages (Smith College 

Studies in History, 14. 1–4; New York, 1969), 88. 

I must have been led to this case via Gabel, Benefit, 89 n. 108, listing references 

to examples of cases involving bigamy from the gaol delivery rolls. She uses an 

outdated numbering system, so the match is not evident. 

‘In neither burglary nor robbery was the value of the goods stolen of any 

relevance to the charge. To have taken nothing at all was immaterial; the mere 

attempting to rob, or simply breaking into a house with that or another felonious 

intent was sucient, if proven, to warrant a sentence of death’ (J. G. Bellamy, The 

Criminal Trial in Later Medieval England: Felony before the Courts from Edward I 

to the Sixteenth Century (Stroud, 1998), 77. 

He abandoned his last legal move on the Saturday after the feast of the Translation 

of the Martyr (Becket) in the fourteenth regnal year. Edward II’s fourteenth 

regnal year started on 8 July 1320. The feast in question falls on 7 July, so in 1320 

the Saturday following it was 12 July. See C. R. Cheney and M. Jones, A Handbook 

of Dates for Students of British History (Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks, 

4; Cambridge, 2000), 34, 85, 173. I am assuming the execution was not much 

further delayed. 

R. G‹enestal, Le Privilegium fori en France du d‹ecret de Gratien ›alafinduXIVe

164 Chapter 3 

discussed in the next chapter because they involve consummation. 

It will be apparent already that the topics of bigamy and consummation 

are closely related. 

There is reason to think that the implications of the 1274 decision 

extended beyond exemption from secular justice. We have already 

noted that clerical status a·orded a spiritual defence against physical 

attack, in that anyone who laid violent hands on a cleric could 

only be absolved by the pope (except at point of death). In losing 

that privilege, bigamous clerics, or ex-clerics as they would now 

be, lost a lot in their violent society. Were there other privileges as 

well? The matter has not been suciently studied, but some pieces 

of evidence suggest that there may have been. Specimens of the 

evidence will be discussed below, but there is an earlier decretal of 

Honorius III that seems to anticipate their main message. It was 

subsequently included in the Decretals of Gregory IX (X. 3. 3. 9), 

in a truncated form, but it is the fuller form that concerns us here. 

Interestingly, it is addressed to Berengaria, the widow of Richard I 

of England, who appears to be living at or around Le Mans, on 

lands received at her marriage. 

Honorius is responding to a complaint that many literati, having 

abandoned their clerical tonsure, entered into marriage, and 

involved themselves in secular business, have then resumed their 

tonsure and clerical status in order to avoid the customary justitiae 

and the due obsequia. (Others never abandon their tonsure, for the 

same reason.) The justitiae could simply be their subjection to the 

secularcourts,butwhatdoesthewordobsequia refer to? 

An obsequium can mean a service and also a payment. That 

strongly suggests that the advantages of being a cleric extended 

beyond legal exemption in the narrower sense of privilegium fori 

(the right to be tried in an ecclesiastical rather than a secular tribunal). 

si›ecle (2 vols.; Biblioth›eque de l’ ‹Ecole des hautes ‹etudes, Sciences religieuses, 35, 39; 

Paris, 1921–4), i. 62–80. 

Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici, i. 459; Regesta pontificum Romanorum inde ab 

a. post Christum natum 1198 ad a. 1304, ed. A. Potthast, i (Berlin, 1874), no. 5755, 

p. 506; E. Hallam, ‘Berengaria’, in H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison (eds.), The 

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 vols.; Oxford, 2004), v. 321–2; Regesta 

Honorii Papae III, ed. P. Pressuti, i (Rome, 1888; repr. Hildesheim etc., 1978), 

no. 1224, p. 202.

Bigamy 165 

Advantages beyond ‘benefit of clergy’: bulls to French kings and 

Penitentiary evidence 

In slightly di·erent language, Documents 3. 5–7 below suggest 

much the same. In these cases a pope writes to a French king who 

has clearly asked for the bull in question; and the bulls (1273, 1317, 

and 1322) follow the same pattern. The king has drawn the pope’s 

attention to an abuse. Clerics ‘both bigamous and monogamous’ in 

his land have given up their tonsure and have taken on secular jobs, 

acting as ‹echevins and the like in towns and other places and as baillis 

etc. of princes. The popes reel o· a list of names of secular oces 

which could involve the shedding of blood (which was forbidden 

to clerics). Now, we may note in passing that the king has apparently 

used the device discussed above of mentioning that some of 

the clerics are bigamous, presumably to get the pope’s sympathy. 

Nevertheless, it is what follows that mainly concerns us: they use 

their clerical status as a pretext to deprive the king of consuetae 

iustitiae and debita servitia, customary ‘justices’ and due ‘services’. 

What are these ‘services’? It sounds as though they are financial 

but in any case it looks like a perk for being a cleric in addition to 

exemption from trial in a secular court. 

Some much later documents about bigamy confirm the impression 

that the advantages of being a cleric transcended ‘benefit of 

clergy’ as normally understood. They are early sixteenth-century 

requests by bigamous clerics to the papal Penitentiary to grant dispensations 

so that they could retain their clerical status. Though 

a negative is hard to prove, it looks as though such dispensations 

were not part of the Penitentiary’s business much before the date 

of these entries in the Penitentiary registers. It is not known why 

the papacy started granting such dispensations around this time. 

There is reason to think that bishops could grant ‘bigamy’ dispensations 

to clerics in minor orders when there was grave cause. 

On the registers of the Penitenzieria apostolica seee.g.L.Schmugge,P.Hersperger, 

and B. Wiggenhauser, Die Supplikenregister der p•apstlichen P•onitentiarie aus 

der Zeit Pius’ II. (1458–1464) (T •ubingen, 1996), and K. Salonen, The Penitentiary 

as a Well of Grace in the Late Middle Ages: The Example of the Province of Uppsala 

1448–1527 (Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, 313; Helsinki, 2001). 

I have asked excellent specialists in the pre-1500 Penitentiary (Prof. Ludwig 

Schmugge, Dr Kirsi Salonen, Dr Peter Clarke) if they have noticed such cases in 

the registers on which they have worked, and they do not remember doing so. 

See the following papal Penitentiary regulations relating to clerical ‘irregularity’: 

‘≈ Qui duas uxores simul vel successive habuerit. . . . ≈ Qui contrahit cum vidua 

vel corrupta . . . ≈ Et nota quod qui duxit viduam a primo viro intactam vel qui

166 Chapter 3 

Probably it was that or nothing until around this time. Bishops 

may have granted dispensations readily in straightforward cases; 

in cases where several ‘bigamies’ were involved, there may have 

been nothing to be done. For whatever reason, in the early sixteenth 

century characters like Five-Wife Francis (Document 3. 11) 

started going to the top and asked the Penitentiary. In his case 

his multiple ‘bigamies’ would probably have made a dispensation 

from the bishop impossible. Even in milder cases like our second 

one (Document 3. 12) the petitioner probably came to the Pentitentiary 

because he had failed with the bishop or knew he had no 

chance. The question of why these cases start to appear is in any 

case unimportant for the immediate purpose. 

‘Five-Wife Francis’, Franciscus Sola from Gerona, had successively 

married no fewer than five women after becoming a cleric: 

three virgins and two widows. Nevertheless, he asked for a dispensation. 

Pedro Martorel of Barcelona was only a double bigamist, so 

to speak. He had married a virgin after becoming a widower, then 

after her death he had married a widow. 

These two cases also imply that a bigamous cleric in minor orders 

lost more than just immunity from secular prosecution. To scrutinize 

the formulae: Five-Wife Francis asked that he might use all the 

‘privileges, graces, concessions, and indults [omnibus et singulis privilegiis, 

gratiis, concessionibus et indultis]’ enjoyed by clerics who are 

married for the first time, to a woman who had been a virgin before 

marriage. Pedro Martorel’s list is a little longer: he wants to use ‘all 

privileges, immunities, exemptions, graces, favours, concessions, 

pre-eminences, liberties, and indults [omnibus et singulis privilegiis, 

immunitatibus, exemptionibus, gratiis, favoribus concessionibus, preeminentiis, 

libertatibus et indultis]’ of such clerics. These formulae 

suggest that the advantages of clerical status even for married men 

in minor orders were multiple, and extended well beyond immunity 

from secular criminal prosecution. 

duas habuit uxores, sed mortua prima in cognita [fo. 36v] nonestbigamus...≈ Qui 

cum virgine contraxit si eam post adulterium cognovit . . . ≈ Qui infra sacros ordines 

de facto contraxit . . . [≈] Qui post votum castitatis emisssum professione regulari 

contenta de facto matrimonium contraxit. . . . ≈ In istis quinque casibus bigamie 

episcopus potest dispensare: in minoribus ordinibus tantum, propter necessitatem: 

xxiiii. Di. Lator [sic ms. in error] (probably Gratian, Pars I, D. 34, c. 18) et c. 

Si subditus [sic ms. in error] (probably Gratian, Pars I, D. 34, c. 17). Et Di. prima 

Placuit [not found]’ (MS Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Vat. Lat. 3994, 

fo. 36r–v).

Bigamy 167 

Both these cases are from Spain. Perhaps clerical status made 

even more di·erence there than elsewhere. The tangible and intangible 

advantages of legitimately married clerics is a subject crying 

out for more research. One would like to know, for instance, how 

much di·erence if any clerical status made to secular financial obligations 

to local and central government in the various regions of 

Europe. The intangible advantages should not be forgotten either. 

Married clerics had a special status in the Weberiansense: they were 

set apart from other laypeople in their own and other people’s estimation. 

A first step, however, would be to investigate systematically 

the practical pay-o·s. 

The more we learn about the advantages married clerics enjoyed 

over other married men, the more we should appreciate the social 

relevance of marriage symbolism. These advantages were forfeited 

by remarriage, marriage to a widow, even marriage to a woman 

no longer a virgin, and the rationale for that was the symbolic 

defectiveness of the clerics’ marriage. For by the thirteenth century, 

when the rule about clerics in minor orders was laid down, the 

symbolic grounds for the rules seem solidly established. 

Bigamy and the Wife of Bath 

Chaucer scholars could learn something from reflection on these 

developments. Much has been written about the Wife of Bath’s last 

husband, Jankyn, and the ‘Book of Wicked Wives’ with which he 

nourished a sturdy anti-feminism. Scholars seem not to have made 

the following connections, of which it seems likely that Chaucer 

was aware. The husband in question had been a ‘clerk’ (cleric) of 

Oxford. The Wife of Bath had got through several husbands before 

him, and when the Oxford man married her he was automatically 

declassified from clerical status. Some of Chaucer’s contemporary 

readers would surely have been more attuned to these implications 

than modern literary scholars. 

‘Bigamy’ is an elegant illustration of the thesis that life a·ected 

marriage symbolism and marriage symbolism life. Consummation 

is another such case.

4 

Consummation 

(a) Consummation and the Medieval Church’s Idea of Sex 

Bigamy and consummation 

A consummated marriage symbolizes the union of Christ and the 

Church, an unconsummated one only the union of God with the just 

soul. So if a woman marries a man but never has sexual intercourse 

with him, and then after his death marries another man and does 

sleep with him, her flesh has not been divided: she is uniquely his 

in flesh and he uniquely hers. Thus the symbolism of the sacrament 

of marriage is not defective, so if she dies, the man is no ‘bigamist’ 

and may become a priest. That is Innocent III’s argument in the 

decretal Debitum. 

Similar reasoning could a·ect the fate of married clerics in minor 

orders. ‘Bigamy’ would normally lose them clerical status and 

immunity, but if the wife’s previous marriage had not been consummated 

(or, according to a strict interpretation, if she had never lost 

her virginity), there was no problem. The man remained a cleric, 

out of reach of secular criminal justice. 

The historian of clerical privilege in France has studied practical 

consequences in concrete cases. There was a cleric named Imbert 

who had been put in a secular prison. The archbishop of Lyons 

demanded that he be surrendered. The royal procurator objected 

that he was a ‘bigamist’. The archbishop replied that Imbert’s wife 

had not been married before, or that if she had, the marriage had 

never been consummated. The procurator still thought that the 

presumption of law was against Imbert, and it may have been to 

avoid such an argument that another cleric called Perrin took an 

extreme precaution. Since the friends of the girl he planned to 

X. 1. 21. 5. 

I follow R. G‹enestal, Le Privilegium fori en France du d‹ecret de Gratien ›alafindu 

XIVe si›ecle (2 vols.; Biblioth›eque de l’ ‹Ecole des hautes ‹etudes, Sciences religieuses, 

35, 39; Paris, 1921–4), i. 73–4.

Consummation 169 

marry told him that she was still a virgin, he set in motion a formal 

legal enquiry to establish her virginity. It was not her virginity 

as such that he was worried about. He wanted to establish ‘the 

privilege of his tonsure’. 

These are quirky cases, exotic curiosities. Bizarre-seeming behaviour 

by people in other cultures is always a cue for historical 

analysis, a challenge to make sense of it by ‘thick description’. In 

the cases just examined, the inner logic is the rationality of marriage 

symbolism, and consummation is at the centre of the symbolism. 

The Church’s endorsement of marital sex 

It is worth pausing to reflect on the implications of this. The ideas 

and practices discussed in this chapter amount to a massive objection 

to the widespread assumption that the medieval Church 

tolerated sex only grudgingly, as a lesser evil. This modern view is 

so deeply embedded in unscholarly and even scholarly writings that 

it will probably always survive the overwhelming evidence against 

it, but there is no real excuse for retaining it as a generalization. 

There is an excuse for the misconception. Medieval religious 

writers were indeed ambiguous about pleasure as a motive for sex, 

but in the thirteenth century and after, pleasure was deemed legitimate 

as an e·ect of marital sex. (An analogy would be the instinct 

quite current today that it is natural to feel good after performing 

a kind act but wrong to perform a kind act in order to feel good 

about oneself. Their attitude was Kantian, avant le mot.) From 

Peter Abelard on, medieval scholasticism moved away from Augustine’s 

view that sexual pleasure did not exist before original sin. 

Grand coutumier, quoted by G‹enestal, Le Privilegium fori,i.74n.2. 

Here it is worth quoting P. Tox‹e, ‘La copula carnalis chez les canonistes m‹edi‹evaux’, 

in M. Rouche (ed.), Mariage et sexualit‹e auMoyenA^ge: accord ou crise? 

(Cultures et civilisations m‹edi‹evales, 21; Paris, 2000), 123–33 at 129: ‘Si les canonistes 

ont r‹epugn‹e ›a une conception trop spiritualiste du mariage qui ne serait 

fond‹e‹e que sur le seul ‹echange des consentements, ce n’est pas seulement pour faire 

droit ›alamentalit‹e ou aux m¥urs du temps pour lesquelles la copulatio joue un rôle 

majeur, mais aussi et surtout ›a cause d’une conception symbolique, spirituelle de 

l’acte charnel, dans le mariage. Quoiqu’on en dise, il y a une valorisation positive de 

cet acte qui n’est pas n‹ecessaire ›a l’union des c¥urs (les th‹eologiens et canonistes sont 

d’accord sur ce point et citent l’exemple du mariage de la Vierge Marie) mais qui 

peut l’exprimer et aider ›a yparvenir.Lacopulatio a pour ces auteurs une dimension 

symbolique, spirituelle, sacramentelle, et c’est pourquoi elle n’est pas un ‹el‹ement 

parmi d’autres des obligations du mariage. . . . L’union charnelle seule, signifie 

l’union du Christ et de son ‹Eglise, indissoluble. Et c’est pourquoi l’union dont le 

mariage consomm‹e estd‹esormais le signe ne peut être dissoute.’

170 Chapter 4 

Sexual pleasure was natural for humans and sex in Paradise, before 

original sin, would have been pleasurable. More gradually, in the 

period of ‘High Scholasticism’, the thought gained ground that sexual 

pleasure need not be wrong at all. John Gillingham’s brilliant 

short synthesis on twelfth-century marriage illustrates this point 

from sources that escape the historians of scholasticism. He quotes 

Matthew Paris’s formula for a proper marriage: ‘Law connects 

them, love and sexual compatibility’, and notes Innocent III’s 

advice to Philip Augustus—that ‘It was not enough to give Ingeborg 

the public status of a queen. He must also sleep with her, 

for “nothing could be more honourable or more holy than this”’ 

(ibid.). The data about consummation’s powerful symbolic status 

converge with these findings. 

Hinduism and Catholicism 

In fact medieval Christianity resembled some Hindu sects in the 

central importance accorded to sexual intercourse as a symbol of 

human union with the divine. In both cases the meaning attaches 

to real sexual intercourse: more is involved than a literary topos. 

There are important anities between the Hindu and the Catholic 

conception of marriage: in addition to the religious meaning attached 

to sex, there is a common emphasis on indissolubility. A 

big di·erence, of course, is the medieval Church’s emphasis on the 

union of one to one, absolutely excluding polygamy, as the symbol 

of Christ’s union with the Church. 


in der Sexualethik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts bis Thomas von Aquin: 

Eine moralgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Studien zur Geschichte der katholischen 

Moraltheologie, 1; Regensburg, 1954), 276–9. 

Ibid. 285–6; P. J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle 

Ages (Toronto etc., 1993), 82–3. Cf. e.g. the supplement to the Summa theologica 

of Thomas Aquinas, q. 41, art. 3–4 (Sancti Thomae Aquinatis . . . opera omnia, 

iussu...LeonisXIIIP.M.edita, xii (Rome, 1906), 79–80) and q. 49, art. 1 and 4 

(ibid. 92–3, 94–5). On Albert the Great, see L. Brandl, Die Sexualethik des heiligen 

Albertus Magnus: Eine moralgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Studien zur Geschichte 

der katholischen Moraltheologie, 2; Regensburg, 1955). 

J. Gillingham,‘Love, Marriage and Politics in the Twelfth Century’ (1989), repr. 

in id., Richard C¥ur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century 

(London etc., 1994), 243–55 at 251; ‘sexual compatibility’ translates ‘concordia lecti’ 

in Gillingham’s paraphrase. 

M. Weber, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Hinduismus und Buddhismus 

(1916–20), repr. in Gesammelte Aufs•atze zur Religionssoziologie, ii. Hinduismus und 

Buddhismus (T •ubingen, 1988), esp. 326–50. 

Or a symbol of his union with human nature: but this is not a separate meaning— 

it is the basis of his union with the Church.


Consummation in marriage symbolism 

These are points that need to be emphasized, but they lie somewhat 

to the side of our central theme. As in the last two chapters, the effects 

on law and through law on social practice will be singled out 

for special attention. It is appropriate to end with consummation 

because it is a central junction in the network of ideas explored in 

this book. We have just noted its connection with ‘bigamy’ symbolism. 

It is a common motif in the marriage symbolism transmitted to 

the masses by preaching, as was noted in Chapter 1. (The formula 

of ‘initiation, ratification, and consummation’ comes up again and 

again. Confining ourselves to the six texts edited in Medieval Marriage 

Sermons, we find it used as a basis for marriage symbolism in 

Jean de la Rochelle (passim), Pierre de Saint-Beno^§t (paragraphs 4– 

10), G‹erard de Mailly (5–7), and Guibert de Tournai (6 and 14).) 

The present chapter will explore more closely its intimate links 

with indissolubility, the theme of Chapter 2. There the e·orts of 

Philip Augustus to extricate himself from his marriage to Ingeborg 

of Denmark were briefly described. One of the lines he tried was the 

following: the marriage was never consummated, and she will go 

into a religious order, so that the marriage can be ended and a new 

marriage becomes possible. Pope Innocent III was unimpressed, 

but not because he rejected the principle. He was simply sceptical 

about the alleged facts in this particular case: non-consummation 

and the queen’s willingness to become a nun. Much of the current 

chapter will turn on the case law made by Pope Alexander III that 

the French king was trying to use for his purpose. 

Consummation is also central in a genre that this study has deliberately 

neglected as lying at some distance from social history: 

scholastic theology. By way of compensation two ‘questions’ from 

the later thirteenth-century theologian Ricardus de Mediavilla 

are printed below as Documents 4. 2 and 4. 3. They show the 

theological importance that he invests in consummation. 

In the ‘question’ printed as Document 4. 3 Ricardus asks 

whether the marriage of Mary and Joseph was perfect. From a 

medieval theologian one would hardly expect anything but an un- 

Here in a negative sense, symbolizing the stages of marriage to sin. 

For a good bibliography on Richard, whose biography is obscure but whose 

intellectual influence was great, see article on ‘Richard of Middleton’, in F. L. Cross 

and E. A. Livingstone (eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd 

edn. (Oxford, 1997), 1396.

172 Chapter 4 

qualified ‘yes!’ to this question. This a priori expectation is misleading: 

instead we get a very qualified ‘yes’ together with a distinction 

between two di·erent sorts of perfection. There is perfection 

in matters pertaining to the essence of a thing and there are perfections 

that do not pertain to the essence. The marriage of Mary 

and Joseph had the first kind but not the second, because it did 

not represent the unity of Christ and Church as perfectly as does 

a consummated marriage. This was not just a hypothesis of ‹elite 

ivory-tower theology. Document 4. 6, from the Pupilla oculi, the 

popular fourteenth-century priests’ manual by Johannes de Burgo, 

shows how the idea could be di·used to a wider circle. 

Ricardus manages to cite the authority of Peter Lombard, who 

was of course the doyen of twelfth-century theologians. In fact, 

however, Peter’s emphasis had been subtly di·erent. The reader 

could come away thinking that a marriage without sex was holier 

than a consummated one, and that the perfect signification of a 

consummated marriage was secondary to that. It is a nuance, but 

not a trivial one. Earlier on the Lombard had said outright of the 

marriage of Mary and Joseph that it was holier and more perfect 

because it was without sex. 

Another of the ‘questions’ by Ricardus de Mediavilla (below, 

Document 4. 2) may explain why he took a di·erent view of unconsummated 

marriages from Peter Lombard. Here he asks whether 

On this issue see P. S. Gold, ‘The Marriage of Mary and Joseph in the Twelfth- 

Century Ideology of Marriage’, in V. L. Bullough and J. A. Brundage (eds.), Sexual 

Practices and the Medieval Church (1982; repr. Amherst, NY, 1994), 102–17 and 249– 

51. This is an honest and intelligent piece of work but leaves out some important 

pieces of the jigsaw, in particular Alexander III’s decision about unconsummated 

marriages and Gaudemet’s work on its origins (both discussed in sect. (b) of the 

current chapter). 

Peter Lombard, Sentences, 4. 30. 2, in Magistri Petri Lombardi Parisiensis Episcopi 

Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, 3rd edn., ed. Patres Collegii S. Bonaventurae 

[I. Brady] (2 vols.; Spicilegium Bonaventurianum, 4–5; Grottaferrata, 1971–81), ii. 

439–41. 

‘Inter quos, ut ait Augustinus, perfectum fuit coniugium: perfectum quidem 

non in significatione, sed in sanctitate. Sanctiora enim sunt coniugia pari voto continentium’ 

(Peter Lombard, Sentences, 4. 30. 2, ii. 440 Brady); ‘Sed intelligendum 

est coniugium perfici commixtione corporali non quantum ad veritatem vel sanctitatem 

coniugii, sed quantum ad significationem, quia perfectius unionem Christi et 

Ecclesiae tunc figurat’ (ibid., ii. 440–1 Brady). 

‘Hanc si secundum superficiem verborum quis acceperit, inducitur in errorem 

tantum ut dicat sine carnali copula non posse contrahi matrimonium, et inter 

Mariam et Ioseph non fuisse coniugium, vel non fuisse perfectum. Quod nefas est 

sentire: tanto enim sanctius fuit atque perfectius, quanto a carnali opere immunius’ 

(Peter Lombard, Sentences, 4. 26. 6, ii. 421 Brady).


a non-consummated marriage can be dissolved by one partner’s 

entry into a religious order. The answer is yes. His explanation involves 

symbolism and is akin to his comments about the marriage of 

Mary and Joseph. An unconsummated marriage is still a spiritual 

union only. It can be dissolved when one party dies to the world by 

entering the religious life. This is in accordance with the meaning 

or symbolism of such a marriage: it stands only for the breakable 

union between God and the soul, not for the indissoluble union of 

human nature to the person of the Son of God. He cites canon law: 

cases decided by the pope and setting precedents. 

Ricardus cites two decisions by Pope Alexander III that are central 

to the argument of this chapter. It was the decision of Alexander 

III (1159–81) that an unconsummated marriage could be dissolved, 

really dissolved after really existing, dissolved as by a divorce 

in the modern sense, so that remarriage was allowed, if one 

partner entered a religious order. The letters are worth quoting. 

Neither seems to be precisely datable, so we shall follow the order 

in which they were inserted into the Decretals of Gregory IX. The 

first is addressed to the bishop of Salerno. These are the the critical 

words: 

It is true that after legitimate consent in the present tense, it is permitted to 

one partner, even against the will of the other, to choose a monastery (just 

as certain saints were called away from weddings), so long as they have 

not had carnal intercourse; and it is permitted to the other who remains 

to marry again, if he or she does not want to keep continence after being 

admonished to do so. For since they have not been made one flesh, one 

may well cross over to God, and the other remain in the world. 

The second is addressed to the bishop of Brescia. The wife had 

been excommunicated for refusing to return to her husband and 

X. 3. 32. 2 and 7. Though neither these cases nor Ricardus de Mediavilla’s ideas 

actually contradict Inga Persson’s comment that ‘Nur das kanonische Ehemodell 

spricht einer Ehe auch ohne copula umfassende G •ultigkeit, Perfektion und volle 

Sakramentalit•at zu’ (I. Persson, Ehe und Zeichen: Studien zu Eheschlie¢ung und 

Ehepraxis anhand der fr•uhmittelhochdeutschen religi•osen Lehrdichtungen ‘Vom Rechte’, 

‘Hochzeit’ und ‘Schopf von dem lône’ (G•oppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 617; 

G•oppingen, 1995), 127), for although an unconsummated marriage was indeed 

valid and sacramental and in a sense perfect, her formula underplays the crucial 

significance of consummation in canon law and theology. 

X. 3. 32. 2, in E. Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici (2 vols.; Leipzig, 1879–81; 

repr. Graz, 1955), ii. 579; cf. Regesta pontificum Romanorum ab condita Ecclesia ad 

annum post Christum natum MCXCVIII, edP.Ja·‹e, W. Wattenbach, et al., 2nd 

edn. (2 vols., Leipzig, 1885–8), ii, no. 14091 (9141), p. 394.

174 Chapter 4 

show him ‘marital a·ection’. Alexander says that she need not do 

so provided that the marriage had not yet been consummated and 

that she enters a religious order. After she has done so, the husband 

can remarry. The passage that matters most is as follows (note that 

the words in italics were in the original letter but were not included 

in the Decretals of Gregory IX): 

...sincethe aforesaid woman, though married to the aforesaid man, 

nevertheless has not yet had intercourse with him, as she asserts, we order, 

commanding you, brother, through apostolic writings, that, if the aforesaid 

man has not known this woman carnally, and the same woman, as we are 

informed by you, wishes to enter a religous order, you should—after receiving 

from her sucient guarantee that she should either enter the religious 

life or return to her husband before two months have elapsed—absolve her 

from the sentence which binds her, no objection or appeal being permitted, 

in such a way that if she enters the religious life, each should restore to 

the other person what they are known to have received from that person, 

and the husband himself, while she takes the habit, should have the freedom 

to remarry. Indeed, when the Lord says in the Gospel that a man is not 

allowed to send away his wife except on account of fornication, it is to be 

understood, if one draws out the meaning of the Scripture, to refer to those 

whose marriage has been consummated by carnal union. 

The possibility of remarriage is explicit in both letters, though the 

second would have lost clarity as transmitted in the Decretals of 

Gregory IX because of the omission of the words ‘should have 

the freedom to remarry’. There is no such unclarity in the letter 

to the bishop of Salerno as transmitted in the Decretals, whose 

gender symmetry is also important. On the other hand, the second 

decretal, to the bishop of Brescia, left all subsequent canonists to 

reflect on the idea that the di·erence between a consummated and 

unconsummated marriage was rooted in the Gospel itself. 

I follow the scholarly edition of the Decretals: see Friedberg, Corpus iuris 

canonici, ii, Prolegomena, p. xlv: ‘Ut vero quae inserui [from other sources for 

the document] a Gregoriano textu discerni possent, illa italicis quos vocant typis 

exprimenda curavi.’ It was unhelpful of Friedberg to hide this line, absolutely 

crucial for the use of his edition, in the middle of a paragraph of a lengthy introduction. 

The word is desponsata, which can also mean betrothed, but that meaning does 

not seem possible in the context. 

X. 3. 32. 7: Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici, ii. 581; Regesta pontificum Romanorum, 

ed.Ja·‹e et al., ii, no. 13787 (8854), p. 371.

The implications of Alexander III’s decision 


Alexander III’s emphasis on consummation has long been recognized 

as decisive for the long-term history of marriage in the 

Catholic Church. Even so, there is room for clarification, since 

the point has not been spelt out in two of the best books on the 

history of marriage, one linking it too closely for complete clarity 

with the distinct issue of annulment on grounds of impotence (distinct 

because in the cases just discussed there is no indication of 

impotence), another just missing it out, though mentioning annulment 

for impotence and impediment of anity. So it is worth 

re-emphasizing that although all cases of impotence must have been 

non-consummation cases, the converse does not hold. With many 

non-consummation cases the ability of the spouses to consummate 

the marriage was not in doubt and not the issue. 

The idea that the marriage of Mary and Joseph was in a certain 

sense imperfect because unconsummated percolated down from 

speculative to pastoral theology. We find it in the late fourteenthcentury 

priests’ manual discussed above and also in connection with 

‘Bigamy’: the Pupilla oculi, by Johannes de Burgo, chancellor of the 

University of Cambridge. The passage is printed and translated 

below, as Document 4. 6. These remarks would have reached a 

relatively wide public, far beyond that of academic theologians and 

theology students, for it was well adapted to its task, and transmitted 

in many manuscripts and then later in print. 

It seems likely that papal case law prompted by actual situations 

Cf.e.g.G.H.Joyce,Christian Marriage: An Historical and Doctrinal Study 

(London etc., 1933), 428–9, 449–63. 

C. N. L. Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford, 1989), 132–3 and 

n. 37. 

D. Lombardi, Matrimoni di antico regime (Annali dell’Istituto storico italogermanico 

in Trento, Monografie, 34; Bologna, 2001), 30: ‘La questione di pi ›u 

dicile soluzione era quando una persona, dopo aver contratto matrimonio per 

verba de praesenti, ne contraeva un altro, con un secondo partner, e lo consumava. 

Quale dei due vincoli era valido? Le risposte date da Alessandro III mostravano 

ancora qualche segno di incertezza. In diverse decretali expresse la validit›a del 

primo, puramente consensuale, . . . In altre decretali, invece, Alessandro insistette 

sul valore della consumazione. Stabil›§ che il rapporto sessuale intervenuto tra il 

partner e un parente dell’altro, prima del matrimonio, impedisse la conclusione del 

matrimonio. O, ancora, che la non consumazione, a causa dell’impotenza di uno dei 

coniugi, rendesse nullo il matrimonio.’ Nothing here about the dissolution of the 

matrimonium ratum sed non consummatum. 

W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century, 2nd edn. (1962; 

repr. Toronto etc., 1980), 213–14 (and on Johannes also above, pp. 156–7 and 172).

176 Chapter 4 

helped deflect theological tradition into a new channel. The following 

fascinating comment by Stephen Langton caught Sir Maurice 

Powicke’s acute eye long ago: 

We say that it is not our business nor is it possible to define how far 

[quantum] the pope can go. For who would have dared to say before the time 

of pope Alexander that a woman who had not consummated her marriage 

could transfer herself to the monastic life? Who would not have denied that 

the lord pope, in the light of the saying in the gospel, ‘whomsoever God 

hath joined let no man put asunder,’ could give dispensation in a matter of 

this kind? But afterwards when the decretal was issued, any man who had 

previously denied it would say that the lord pope could dispense. 

Alexander’s decision was unexpected but it did not come out of 

nowhere. A long tradition of thought about symbolism, consummation, 

and indissolubility lies behind it and makes sense of it. 

Alexander must have been aware of this tradition if only because 

it showed itself in the most influential canon-law text of his time, 

Gratian’s Decretum. The relevant passage is in the section on the 

conversion of married people to the religious life, the part of the 

work directly relevant to the case Alexander decided. 

(b) The Dissolution of the Unconsummated 

Marriage: From Hincmar to Alexander III 

‘One flesh’ and the ‘great mystery’ 

Perhaps the ultimate origins of the developments described here 

lie in the ‘one flesh’ passages in the Gospels combined with St 

Paul’s ‘great mystery’ passage at Ephesians 5: 32. Did a marriage 

where the couple had not become one in flesh mirror the marriage 

of Christ to the Church as perfectly as after consummation? The 

eventual answer given in our period should not astonish us, in view 

of these New Testament passages, with which clerical writers about 

marriage were naturally familiar. Nevertheless, it was a long time 

before theological thought turned in this direction. The process has 

been traced in a fundamental and little-known paper by the legal 

historian Jean Gaudemet, and the next few paragraphs are largely 

apr‹ecis of his findings. 

Langton, quoted in F. M. Powicke, Stephen Langton (Oxford, 1928), 140. 

Pars II, C. 27, q. 2, c. 7. e.g. Matt. 19: 5. 

‘Recherche sur les origines historiques de la facult‹e deromprelemariage


Pope Leo I 

A key text in the story is a passage from Pope Leo I’s decretal letter 

to Rusticus of Narbonne: 

Not every woman joined to a man is the man’s wife, for not every son 

is his father’s heir. The bonds of marriage between free men and women 

follow the rule of law and are between equals, as the Lord established, 

long before the beginning of Roman law. Therefore a wife is one thing, a 

concubine is another, just as a slave girl is one thing, and a free woman 

another. . . . Therefore since the society of marriage was established from 

the beginning in such a way that it should have in it, beyond the union 

of the sexes, the symbol [sacramentum] of Christ and the Church, there is 

no doubt that a woman of whom we learn that the nuptial mystery [mysterium] 

has been lacking has nothing to do with marriage. Therefore, if 

a cleric anywhere has given his daughter in marriage to a man who has 

a concubine, it should not be treated as if he has given her to a married 

man, unless perchance that woman has been freed, and given a dowry 

in accordance with the law, and accorded the honour of a public wedding. 

One of the issues was: when is a marriage not a marriage but 

a sexual partnership? The question arose because in one or more 

cases the daughter of a priest or deacon under Bishop Rusticus’s 

authority had been heading for marriage with a man who already 

had a partner. Should the partner be counted as a wife? Pope 

Leo gives criteria for deciding whether this existing partner is 

a wife. If she is a slave who has not been freed, she is judged 

not to be a wife. (Why does the bishop not extend his question 

to daughters of laypeople too? Probably because his practical 

authority over marriage did not extend beyond the clergy.) 

Behind the assumption that a slave girl was not a wife lay the 

whole tradition of classical antiquity. It was taken for granted 

that slaves could not marry. The only way to marry a female 

slave was to set her free. Christianity’s doctrine of equality before 

God had not yet eroded this assumption. If we look forward 

to the Council of Châlons-sur-Saone in 813, we see that in the 

non consomm‹e’, in S. Kuttner and K. Pennington (eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth 

International Congress of Medieval Canon Law (Monumenta Iuris Canonici, Series 

C, Subsidia, 6; Vatican City, 1980), 309–31. 

Ep. 167. 4, Migne, PL 54. 1204–5, cited by Gaudemet, ‘Recherche sur les 

origines historiques’, 309.

178 Chapter 4 

long run the Church rejected the exclusion of unfreed slaves from 

marriage. 

To return to the text. It shows that priests and deacons had 

daughters and were presumably still married. The discipline of the 

Western Church at this date was that a a man in holy orders should 

live chastely with his wife. One may guess at the following pattern. 

A man becomes a ‘cleric’ and embarks on the road to becoming a 

priest, relatively young. He marries and has children. On one of the 

ritual stages on the way to becoming a priest, the diaconate or the 

subdiaconate, he supposedly stops having sex with his wife. 

What does the sentence about the sacramentum of Christ and the 

Church mean? Leo implies that a bodily union is not itself enough to 

make a marriage. A true marriage is a mirror of the union of Christ 

and the Church. The signs that such a marriage has taken place are 

that the couple are free (freed if necessary), that the woman has a 

dowry (which she could not have if she were a slave and ineligible 

for matrimony), and a public ceremony. Sexual partnership is not 

enough to symbolize the mystery of Christ and the Church. 

Hincmar of Reims to Gratian 

In the ninth century Hincmar, the powerful archbishop of Reims, 

modified the Latin and the sense of Leo’s text to produce a completely 

di·erent meaning: namely, that until the couple have sexual 

intercourse, marriage does not properly symbolize the union of 

Christ and the Church. He developed this new reading in the context 

of a real problem, a case touched on briefly in Chapter 2. A 

nobleman called Stephen of Auvergne had been through a marriage 

ceremony with a woman when he had slept with a close relative of 

hers. By the rules of the time, this made it a sin to sleep with his 

wife. Hincmar was called in to decide what should be done. He said 

that the marriage could be ended. It could not be consummated 

morally. Until it was consummated it did not mirror the union of 

Christ and the Church, so it could be dissolved. 

Concilia aevi Karolini, ed. A. Wermingho· (2 vols.; Monumenta Germaniae 

Historica, Legum Sectio III, Concilia, 2. 1–2; Hanover etc., 1906–8), no. 30, 

i/1. 279. 

We may leave aside here the question of whether or when the rule about chastity 

was applied to subdeacons (the subdiaconate being the antepenultimate rung on the 

ladder of priestly orders). The requirement seems to have included deacons as well 

as priests more or less from its introduction. 

Gaudemet, ‘Recherche sur les origines historiques’, 315–18.


Gaudemet shows that this rereading of the text of Leo did not 

have any impact until the twelfth century. Then some books of 

church law start altering Leo’s text in the same kind of way as Hincmar 

had done. One of them was Gratian’s Decretum. Gaudemet 

is cautious about the connection between the Hincmar–Stephen of 

Auvergne case in the ninth century and Gratian in the twelfth. He 

thinks that the influence of Hincmar’s text on Gratian is not direct 

and that the chain of texts linking them cannot be reconstructed: 

too many links are missing. Nevertheless, he agrees that Hincmar 

was the intellectual ancestor of the text in Gratian, Pars II, C. 27, 

q. 2, c. 17, a transformed version of Leo the Great’s remark, that 

reads as follows: 

Since the social bond of marriage was instituted from the beginning in 

such a way that without sexual intercourse marriages would not contain 

the symbol of the union of Christ and the Church, there is no doubt that a 

woman whom we learn to have been without the nuptial mystery does not 

pertain to marriage. 

Gaudemet concludes his paper with the comment that the interpolated 

passage would ‘leave its impress thenceforward on the canonical 

doctrine of marriage’. He sees this as decisive in the history 

of the origins of the power to break a non-consummated marriage 

(the title of his paper is ‘Investigation into the historical origins of 

the power to break a non-consummated marriage’). If he is right, 

as I believe he is, symbolism was crucial to the reasoning behind 

the development. 

So careful and dense is Gaudemet’s wording, in fact, that one can read his text 

several times without being absolutely sure how much or how little he is claiming. 

His overall conclusion is worth quoting: ‘Doctrine commune des P›eres, le 

consensualisme matrimonial est scrupuleusement conserv‹e par les collections canoniques 

jusqu’aux ann‹ees 1123–1130. Hincmar, pour r‹esoudre une grave dicult‹e, y 

fait ‹echec afin de permettre la rupture d’une union non consomm‹ee. Mais le traitement 

qu’il infligea au responsum de L‹eon n’atteignit pas la transmission du texte 

dans les collections canoniques. La doctrine avanc‹ee par l’archevêque de Reims 

repara^§t entre 1123 et 1130 dans une collection qui du coup interpole le texte 

de L‹eon. Interpolation que l’on retrouve dans le D‹ecret de Gratien et qui marquera 

d‹esormais la doctrine canonique du mariage’ (‘Recherche sur les origines 

historiques’, 331).

180 Chapter 4 

(c) The Social E·ects of Alexander III’s Decision 

John XXII and the count of Anguillaria 

A genuine but unconsummated marriage, then, could be broken if 

one spouse entered a religious order. Does it matter much to the 

social historian? Is it more than a minor curiosity in the history 

of canon-law doctrines? Did it a·ect more than a tiny number of 

couples, where one spouse had suddenly died before the marriage 

could be consummated? 

Here it helps to move forward for a moment to the early fourteenth 

century, to a concrete case that can be reconstructed in detail 

and casts light on the dynamics of marriages between ratification 

and consummation. The transcriptions from a register of Pope 

John XXII printed as Document 4. 4 are enough to suggest that 

Alexander’s decision could have serious social implications. The 

letters relate to a marriage between the count of Anguillaria and 

the daughter of Stefano da Colonna—a member of the great family 

which turns up repeatedly in papal history. In this case the pope 

badly needed Colonna’s help against his arch-opponent Ludwig of 

Bavaria, and may have earned it partly by intervention in the marriage. 

The details are summarized in the introduction to the set of 

documents, but the essence of the situation was as follows. 

The count of Anguillaria had placed Colonna’s daughter Agnes 

in an impossible position by postponing consummation. We have 

no reason to think that the count was contemplating entry into a 

religious order, which would have released Agnes. The only way 

out would be for her to become a nun herself, which was probably 

the last thing she wanted to do. It would also have enabled the count 

to marry another woman, adding insult to injury. In this case the 

pope helped out by putting pressure on the count to consummate 

the marriage and thus make it indissoluble. 

The case points to an unintended e·ect of Alexander III’s decision. 

If the consummation was postponed for any reason, the 

husband was left with a great deal of leverage over the bride and 

her family. Presumably fathers who knew their way around tried 

to take precautions to prevent this situation when arranging a marriage. 

Conversely, delay in consummating could have been a way 

I leave aside the question of whether any solemn vow of chastity even apart 

from entry into a religious order dissolved a marriage: but see P. Glorieux, ‘Le 

Quodlibet de Pierre de Tarentaise’, Recherches de th‹eologie anciennne et m‹edievale, 9 

(1937), 237–80 at 243–4. I owe this reference to Patrick Nold.


to put pressure on the father of the bride to pay the dowry. Thus 

Alexander III’s decision will have been a causal factor not only in 

cases where the marriage was never consummated, but also in cases 

where it was ultimately consummated but only after a significant 

time lag. 

Last-minute conversion to a life without sex 

Moving to a more idealistic level, there may have been more lastminute 

conversions to perpetual chastity than one would imagine, 

for the ideal was widely di·used in vernacular literature. It was 

constantly reinforced by one of the most successful stories current 

in the medieval West, the legend of St Alexis. It survives in many 

vernacular versions, in addition to the Latin ones. The core of 

the story is that Alexis is pressured into marriage by his father, 

leaves to pursue a life of poverty before consummating the marriage, 

returns to his father’s house as a beggar without being recognized, 

where he is given a sort of shelter until his death, after which he 

is recognized and a written explanation of his life is found in his 

clenched hand. According to one version, only his wife is able to 

remove the document. 

The Alexis story is famous among students of medieval heresy. 

According to an account of the origins of the Waldensian movement, 

one of the great heretical movements of the Middle Ages, 

surviving to this day, the founder underwent his conversion when 

he heard the legend of St Alexis being told by a jongleur. Itisa 

symptom of the story’s wide di·usion. Little though it appeals to 

most modern sensibilities, it could have influenced people, just as 

Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther apparently caused a vogue 

for Romantic suicides. 

One real-life counterpart to the story of St Alexis is the case of 

Christina of Markyate. Her parents put heavy pressure on her 

A. Gieysztor, ‘Pauper sum et peregrinus: lal‹egende de saint Alexis en Occident. 

Un id‹eal de pauvret‹e’, in M. Mollat (ed.), ‹Etudes sur l’histoire de la pauvret‹e 

(Publications de la Sorbonne, s‹erie ‘Etudes’, 8; Paris, 1974), 125–39 at 126. For 

a sensitive exploration of the ideas about marriage in one of the versions, see N. 

Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage: Literary Approaches, 1100–1300 (Woodbridge etc., 

1997), 77–106. 

Gieysztor, ‘Pauper sum et peregrinus’, 127. In the canonical version, equally 

interestingly, only the pope is able to take the document from his hand (ibid. 136). 

For two vivid retellings of the story see Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage, 

144–8, and R. Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075–1225 

(Oxford, 2000), 550–1.

182 Chapter 4 

to marry, though she wanted a celibate life devoted only to God. 

They eventually got her to go through with the ceremony, but 

she absolutely refused to consummate the marriage. Her husband 

Burthred made various attempts. On one occasion she managed to 

dissuade him. He lost face with his friends, and on another occasion 

burst into her room with a group of them, but she hid. In the end the 

marriage was never consummated and she was able to have the life 

she wanted. It was just the kind of case for which Alexander III’s 

law was designed, though it came too late to help her. 

The question remains: was a time lag between present consent 

and consummation at all common? If it was not, the dissolution of 

a non-consummated marriage would seldom be an issue because 

most newly-weds would hardly have time to reconsider. Christina 

of Markyate was clear in her mind from the start that she did not 

want to consummate her marriage, but unless there was a time lag, 

second thoughts would rarely have a chance to take root. 

Consummation delayed because of youth 

In fact, however, there is quite a lot of evidence that a significant delay 

between marriage and consummation was normal. There were 

a number of reasons why this was so. One might be the youth of the 

couple or at least of the bride. It was common for women to marry 

young, not long after puberty. The bride’s parents might well 

prefer to keep her at home for a time, while delaying the exchange 

of present consent would carry with it the risk of the bridegroom 

changing his mind and marrying someone else. 

Proxy marriages 

Another reason might be that the words of present consent were 

given by proxy. It had been so with the marriage of the count of 

Anguillaria to Stefano da Colonna’s daughter. An earlier example 

is King Henry III of England’s invalid marriage to Joan of Ponthieu. 

When the abortive marriage was annulled long after, the 

reason given was that Henry and Joan were related within the forbidden 

degrees. This must have been known when the words of con- 

D. Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, Mass., etc., 1985), 103–7. 

See Document 4. 2 below, first full paragraph after the table of contents. 

The whole story is laid out in a massive papal bull, preserved in MS BL Cotton 

Cleopatra E. 1, fos. 194V–195R: see D. L. d’Avray, ‘Authentication of Marital Status: 

A Thirteenth Century English Royal Annulment Process and Later Medieval Cases 

from the Papal Penitentiary’, English Historical Review, forthcoming.


sent were exchanged. Henry was seeking a dispensation from the 

impediment, and dropped the attempt when the marriage ceased to 

seem desirable. It is significant that he nevertheless stressed during 

the annulment proceedings that the marriage had not been consummated. 

Dowry and delay 

Other reasons will be illustrated as the data are presented below: 

the bridegroom might delay consummation until the bride’s father 

had paid the dowry; consent might be exchanged during one of 

the liturgical periods when marriages could not be celebrated, or 

consummation postponed until after a church wedding. Whatever 

the reasons, there is plenty of evidence that sexual intercourse by 

no means always followed quickly on the exchange of consent, even 

though a couple were married from that point on. 

At least so far as Italy is concerned, the convention of a gap between 

consent and consummation has already been noted by some 

historians. Following earlier studies, Brundage notes that couples 

commonly had to wait until the dowry had been paid before sleeping 

with each other. According to another study, there might be 

a gap of at least a year between the exchange of present consent in 

front of a notary and the church ceremony. In the interval the bride 

continued to live with her parents, presumably without sleeping 

with her husband. To this one might add the throwaway line by 

Hostiensis, to the e·ect that it had been normal in Modena for 

a second, consummated marriage to out-trump a first, unconsummated 

one (see Document 4. 1). This comment makes no sense if a 

time lag had not been fairly common in the city. 

Three English cases 

These fairly firm findings can be complemented with evidence from 

England, at the other end of Europe. The twelfth-century Anstey 

Line 33 of the papal bull. 

J. A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago 

and London, 1987), 504: ‘Consummation was also frequently linked to property 

considerations. In Italian towns couples often initiated conjugal relations only when 

the dowry had been paid’ (he gives further references to works by C. Klapisch-Zuber 

and J. Heers). 

E. Hall, The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van 

Eyck’s Double Portrait (Berkeley etc., 1994), 53. 

Alluding to X. 4. 4. 5, as Patrick Nold kindly pointed out to me.

184 Chapter 4 

case, rather famous among historians of marriage because it established 

the principle that consent makes a marriage, might never 

have happened had there not been a long delay between present 

consent and consummation. The following passage is central to the 

history of medieval marriage as well as being directly relevant to 

our specific problem: 

As to your question concerning the sacrament of marriage, I give you this 

brief answer. With regard to the lady who you said was given in marriage 

by her father, and was returned into her father’s keeping by the man to 

whom she had been given until on a day appointed he should take her into 

his own house, I say that, if it was done by lawful consent, she was a wife 

from the moment when by her promise freely given she consented to be 

his wife. For it was not a promise for the future, but a present arrangement 

with immediate e·ect. 

Here we see a decision that present consent alone makes a valid 

marriage. It is also mentioned as if quite normal that the wife went 

back to live in her father’s house for a time. What looks like a similar 

arrangement is agreed in a later thirteenth-century original charter 

in the British Library. It is a marriage agreement, but some complex 

financial arrangements between the fathers of bride and groom are 

included in it. For our purposes what matters is a provision that 

the bride, Maud, would remain with her father for a year after her 

marriage before joining her husband. 

The dowry theme discussed above in connection with Italy is 

made explicit in a Berkshire case from the mid-thirteenth century. 

We read that 

Alexander . . . says that he did not keep any of the chattels of the aforesaid 

The words are purportedly those of Pope Innocent II, as quoted in a letter of 

the bishop of Winchester, quoted in a letter by Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, 

actually composed by his aide John of Salisbury! See The Letters of John of Salisbury, 

ed. W. J. Millor, SJ, H. E. Butler, and C. N. L. Brooke, i. The Early Letters (1153– 

1161) (Oxford, 1986), 228–9. For background see Brooke, The Medieval Idea of 

Marriage, 148–52. 

‘Et por cestes choses le dit Monser Barthe’ dorra au dit Monser Robert mil’ et 

deux centz mars a paier, cest a saver deux centz mars lendemein de la seint Johan 

prochein avenir, a quen iour le dit monser Robert fera la dite reconisaunce de vint 

mil’ mars et deux centz mars ala seint Jake prochein suant a quen iour est acorde qe 

le mariage se fera entre les avantditz Robert et Maud, et deux centz mars au Noel 

prochein suant, deux centz mars ala Pasque prochein suant, deux centz mars ala 

seint Johan prochein suant, et deux centz mars ala seint Michel prochein suant. Et 

la dite Maud demorra en la garde le dit monser Barthe’ a ses custages un an apres le 

iour du mariage’ (MS BL Harley Charter 45. F. 11, lines 18–23 (unprinted so far as 

Iknow)).


Stephen from him, indeed he says that in truth the aforesaid Stephen 

was espoused to the daughter of the aforesaid Walter, and since the same 

Stephen did not want to take his aforesaid wife home after he had espoused 

her, until the aforesaid Walter paid him back twenty shillings that he owed 

him... 

Here a debt is the reason for the delay in consummating the marriage. 

A legal way to end delay: the Audientia litterarum contradictarum 

In such cases an enterprising spouse might have recourse to a routinized 

procedure at the papal court. We know about it through 

a formulary of the Audientia litterarum contradictarum, the papal 

court that dealt with routine cases which would be passed on to 

judges delegate. Di·erent form letters deal with several variants 

of the problem. Thus, the girl might refuse to join her husband, 

or her father might prevent her, or again the wife might use the 

‘Et Alexander venit et de·endit vim et injuriam quando etc., et dicit quod nulla 

catalla predicti Stephani ei detinet immo dicit quod revera predictus Stephanus 

disponsavit filiam predicti Walteri, et quia idem Stephanus noluit predictam uxorem 

suam postquam ipsam desponsaverat ad hospicium suum ducere donec predictus 

Walterus redderet ei xx solidos quod ei debuit’ (The Roll and Writ File of the 

Berkshire Eyre of 1248, ed. M. T. Clanchy (London, 1973), 195). I have used the 

word ‘espoused’ to translate ‘desponsare’, to capture the ambiguity of a word which 

can mean either ‘marry’ or ‘betroth’, but the use of the word ‘wife’, uxor, makes it 

overwhelmingly probable that the espousal had been in words of the present tense, 

so constituting the ‘ratification’ of a true marriage according to the Church. 

On the system see P. Herde, Audientia litterarum contradictarum: Untersuchungen 

•uber die p•apstlichen Justizbriefe und die p•apstliche Delegationsgerichtsbarkeit vom 

13. bis zum Beginn des 16. Jahrhunderts (2 vols.; Bibliothek des deutschen historischen 

Instituts in Rom, 31–2; T •ubingen, 1970). The system, which cannot be 

described here, was a brilliant administrative creation, enabling a combination of 

local knowledge and central authority hard to parallel in world history before the 

twentieth century: though the English system of royal writs and local juries did 

the same over a smaller geographical area. The formulary could be compared to a 

register of writs in England. 

Herde, Audientia litterarum contradictarum, ii. 298–302. One variant (ibid., 

K 155a, ii. 300–1) specifies that the marriage had been consummated. In the other 

variants it would appear that it had not. 

‘Episcopo. Sua nobis . . laicus petitione monstravit, quod, cum ipse cum M. 

filia . . matrimonium per verba legitime contraxerit de presenti, eadem tamen M. 

ab ipso non patitur se traduci.—mandamus, quatinus, si est ita, predictam M., 

quod ab eodem viro se traduci libere patiatur, monitione premissa per censuram 

ecclesiasticam, sicut iustum fuerit, appellatione remota compellas’ (ibid., K 152, 

ii. 298). 

‘Episcopo. Conquestus est nobis . . laicus, quod, licet ipse cum M. muliere . . 

diocesis matrimonium legitime per verba contraxerit de presenti, tamen eadem ab

186 Chapter 4 

procedure when her husband would not let her come to live with 

him after the marriage had been contracted. All these situations 

imply a time lag. The Audientia evidence shows that something 

could be done about a time lag unwelcome to one partner, but the 

remedy would hardly have been rapid. 

The evidence that consummation did not always follow swiftly 

on marriage by present consent may be concluded with two cases 

from Spain, from the very end of the medieval period. They come 

from the registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary, and both read like 

one-paragraph novels. 

Cases from the papal Penitentiary registers 

The first (Document 4. 7) also raises complex legal issues. It was 

handled in 1499. The petitioner and central figure was a woman 

called Constance of Padilla, who was in the service of a nobleman 

named Bonadilla. This man seems to have taken violent exception 

to a marriage that she had contracted by words of the present tense, 

and acted before the couple could consummate it. A likely scenario 

is that her new husband was someone of higher social status, for 

whom her noble master had other plans. This would explain why 

the couple did not live together after getting married. If Bonadilla 

had been informed in advance, presumably he would have tried 

to prevent the exchange of consent. However, the rule that consent 

alone was enough for a valid marriage made it hard to stop a 

determined couple. Bonadilla’s solution was to force Constance to 

enter a Conceptionist nunnery (the Conceptionists were a branch 

of the Franciscan order). As we shall see, it would be crucial to 

Constance’s case that she had been compelled to join the Conceptionists: 

it was not a free choice. Nevertheless, she made the normal 

profession as a nun. She could not tolerate the religious life, however, 

and she left. By this time the man she had married by ‘present 

ipso contra iustitiam non patitur se traduci patre mulieris eiusdem id presumente 

temere impedire.—mandamus, quatinus, si est ita, prefatam mulierem, ut se ab 

eodem viro suo, ut tenetur, libere traduci permittat, et prefatum patrem eius, quod ab 

huiusmodi impedimento desistat, monitione premissa per censuram ecclesiasticam 

appellatione remota previa ratione compellas’ (ibid., K 154, ii. 299–300). 

‘Episcopo. Sua nobis B. de . . mulier petitione monstravit, quod, cum I. de . . 

laicus tue diocesis cum ipsa legitime matrimonium per verba contraxerit de presenti, 

idem tamen I. eam non curat, ut tenetur, traducere in uxorem (vel aliter: eam non 

curat traducere, ut tenetur).—mandamus, quatinus, si est ita, dictum I., ut eam 

traducere studeat, monitione premissa per censuram ecclesiasticam, sicut iustum 

fuerit, appellatione remota compellas’ (ibid., K 156, ii. 301–2).


consent’ had remarried, and this time he had consummated the 

union. Yet when Constance ran away from her life as a nun, he 

clearly wanted her still: the whole point of the case is to allow them 

to live as man and wife. 

How could this possibly be allowed in church law? One would 

have thought that Alexander III’s rulings stood against it: entry 

into a religious order would have dissolved the first unconsummated 

marriage, the second marriage was consummated and so 

indissoluble. The key to her case, however, is that she entered the 

order under compulsion. Becoming a nun was like getting married 

in that true freedom of choice was required and the lack of it 

made the decision void. Constance’s case was that she did not truly 

consent to the religious life, so that her first marriage had after 

all never been dissolved, with the consequence that her husband’s 

second marriage was invalid. The whole story makes vivid another 

way in which the consummation of a marriage might be delayed, as 

well as the interaction of Alexander’s decision in the twelfth century 

with social life centuries later (and with another canon-law 

principle: free consent before lifelong commitment to a religious 

order). The case was committed to judges delegate. If they found 

the facts to be as stated, and if her husband got his second marriage 

annulled, the judges were to give her the means of authenticating 

her marriage to any ignorant persons who called it into question. 

The second case (Document 4. 8) concerns a Juan Sams (?) 

of Burgos diocese. He had married Catherine, daughter of Juan 

Gomez. They did not consummate the marriage immediately, and 

in the interval she slept with another man. Evidently this changed 

everything, and ‘induced by penitence or for some other reason’ she 

entered the Order of the Holy Trinity. At least, she made profession 

of the rule of the order without entering one of its monasteries, but 

it must have been enough to bring her within the scope of Alexander 

III’s decrees. Juan Sams had got as far as getting engaged to a 

woman who is named in the petition. However, he wanted something 

to show the ignorant that he could go ahead and marry her 

validly. This is yet another scenario of how Alexander III’s judgment 

might be applied in practice. 

It should be clear from the above that non-consummation cases 

were di·erent socially, as well as legally, from impotence cases. The 

legal di·erence was in itself profound. Where permanent impotence 

could be established, the marriage would be annulled. That

188 Chapter 4 

would be a declaration that it had never existed. Non-consummated 

marriages were real marriages from the moment the words of present 

consent were spoken. Thus their dissolution was more like a 

divorce in the modern sense. (The medieval word divortium normally 

means either an annulment or a legal separation.) 

So much for the legal di·erence. The social di·erence is that the 

couple had probably never lived together in non-consummation 

cases. We have seen that a variety of situations explain why that 

might be so. 

Thus there is every reason to think that delay was a common occurrence, 

and consequently that the late twelfth-century decision 

of Alexander III opened up an option for a larger proportion of 

newly married couples than one might initially suppose. From the 

fifteenth century on the opening was widened. Reflection in the intervening 

period on the symbolic rationale for Alexander’s decision 

would open the way to a wide papal discretion to dissolve (rather 

than annul) unconsummated marriages. 

(d) Long-Term Developments 

Holy orders 

The symbolic rationale continued to work like a yeast within medieval 

marriage doctrine, producing practical consequences for which 

the thirteenth-century papacy clearly did not feel ready. Symbolism 

was a powerful and active intellectual ingredient, stimulating 

speculation by the Church’s intellectuals. In the early fourteenth 

century the Dominican theologian John of Naples considered the 

question of whether holy orders dissolved an unconsummated marriage 

just as entering a religious order did, concluding that a future 

papal decision was needed to settle the problem. A decision by Pope 

John XXII did in fact follow: holy orders did not dissolve an unconsummated 

marriage unless the man also entered a religious order. 

The pope’s decision marked the di·erence between the priesthood 

and the religious life, but perhaps left open the further question of 

whether a pope could change the law so that in future entry into 

the priesthood had the same e·ect as becoming a religious: we are 

on a borderland between doctrine and law here. So this flurry of 

In the foregoing I have plagiarized my own discussion in D. L. d’Avray, ‘Christendom: 

Medieval Christianity’, in P. Byrne and L. Houlden (eds.), Companion En-


debate led to no practical di·erence. That would come later and in 

a somewhat di·erent form, as will become apparent. 

Contrasting cases from the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries 

Between Alexander III’s decision in the late twelfth century and the 

fifteenth century there is no new substantial change in practice as a 

consequence of symbolic reflection. Then, after this long time lag 

the speculation was translated into more social change. The process 

seems to have begun in the fifteenth century but gathered strength 

in the early modern period. The fifteenth-century changes will be 

discussed shortly, but a good sense of the trajectory and its direction 

can be obtained by confronting an early thirteenth-century case 

with one from the early seventeenth century. The contrast brings 

out more clearly than a detailed narrative the di·erence between 

the period from the late twelfth century to the early fifteenth, on 

the one hand, and the subsequent period (continuing to this day in 

Catholic marriage law) on the other. 

The thirteenth-century case had come to Pope Innocent III because 

of its complexity and the unsolved legal problem it raised. 

Because it set a precedent, it was preserved in the Decretals of Gregory 

IX (X. 4. 15. 6), published in 1234. Innocent’s letter itself was 

sent on 3 July 1206. It was addressed to the bishop of Auxerre, 

as the ordinary responsible. The case turned on a woman who had 

been unable to consummate her marriage. 

The rules for annulments on grounds of impotence were followed. 

Married women inspected her to determine whether she 

really was unable to consummate a marriage, and concluded that 

she was. The bishop annulled the marriage, and persuaded her to 

make a promise to enter a religious order. Whether she simply made 

a promise, or took a solemn vow and entered a religious order, seems 

to have been empirically unclear to Innocent, who would go on to 

give solutions for either case. 

cyclopedia of Theology (London etc., 1995), 206–29 at 220. Dr Patrick Nold has in 

hand a study of the whole problem, on the basis of unpublished opinions by theologians 

consulted by the pope before his decision. He pointed out to me that the 

question related to deacons and subdeacons as well as priests. Examining the ideas 

of theologians consulted by John XXII, he has found interesting discussion of the 

putative unconsummated marriage—at Cana in Galilee—of John the Evangelist. 

That theme does not seem to play much part in the causal sequences studied in the 

present book. 

Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici, ii. 706–7.

190 Chapter 4 

The husband apparently remarried, as he was entitled to do after 

the first marriage had been declared null and void. So far, so 

simple. Complications began when the woman encountered a man 

with whom she found she could have sexual intercourse. They got 

married (whether or not after they had slept together, the letter 

does not say). Her second man appears to have been the bearer of 

the letter to the pope, asking for the marriage to be regularized. 

It was not to happen. Innocent evidently felt that his hands were 

tied by the principle of indissolubility. He could not decide the case 

on sympathy, and drive a wedge through the whole principle of the 

unbreakability of marriage. He therefore gave a decision that would 

bear hard on the woman, who had apparently found happiness. 

Characteristically, Innocent’s analysis was like a precision tool. 

The annulment had been based on an empirical conclusion subsequently 

falsified. The court had thought the woman was frigid, 

unable to have intercourse with a man, and that had been proved 

wrong. Consequently, the court’s verdict had to be reversed. Ecclesiastical 

courts, even the papal court, were not deemed infallible 

in annulment cases, any more than we think our secular courts are 

infallible. The judges had to decide as best they could on the evidence. 

They did not have the power to make a marriage invalid, 

any more than a judge now has the power to make a man guilty 

of murder. They could only declare the proven truth as they saw 

it. If they were proved wrong afterwards, the judgment had to be 

reversed. That would reinstate the first marriage, with one proviso. 

The proviso is the rule that entry into a religious order dissolves 

an unconsummated marriage. If the woman had really done that, 

Innocent reasons, then the first marriage was dissolved. This would 

not be an annulment, for it would have been a real valid marriage, 

and a null marriage is a marriage existing only in appearance, but 

still the marriage would cease to be one. On that assumption the 

first man was free to stay with his new wife. On the other hand, 

the woman would not be free to remarry because she would have 

taken a vow of perpetual chastity. So her second marriage would be 

invalid. 

On the other hand, Innocent is far from sure whether the woman 

did more than promise to enter a religious order. He clearly thinks 

A small caveat here. One never knows exactly what lies behind such legal cases. 

It is conceivable that the woman and her second husband actually wanted that 

marriage declared null and the first reinstated. But it does not seem likely.


she may have stopped short of actually committing herself solemnly 

to that life. If she did not make such a commitment, the picture 

changes, and the first marriage is not after all dissolved. If the first 

marriage is reinstated, the original couple find that they are married 

after all. Both have to leave their current partner. 

It was a hard decision for the parties, one must imagine. On the 

face of it, no one ended up with the desired partner. But we need 

to look at the situation from Innocent’s point of view: he could 

not change his ethical principles because of a hard case, or let the 

hard case make a bad law. The rationality of the pope’s decision can 

hardly be questioned, within the terms of his own ethical and religious 

system. The judgement of impotence had been mistaken, and 

even an unconsummated marriage could not be dissolved except by 

undertaking a solemn vow of chastity. 

If we move fast forward four centuries we find a similar case 

treated di·erently: the principles of Innocent have not been jettisoned, 

in fact a style of reasoning dear to him has been at work, but 

the outcome has been to create more room for man¥uvre. The case 

was decided by the ‘Congregationof the Council’, a body which was 

responsible for implementing the decrees of the Council of Trent 

and whose activity curiously parallels the stream of papal case law 

in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. (The ideal-type which elucidates 

both phenomena is that reform legislation requires concrete 

clarification.) It is reported by the interesting seventeenth-century 

theologian and canon lawyer Jacob Pignatelli. 

The case concerned a Spanish couple, Garc‹§a de Vargas and 

Elizabeth de Lezano. They got married when he was 16 and she was 

14, but she found herself unable to consummate the union. As with 

the thirteenth-century case from Auxerre, she was examined by 

matrons who confirmed that she was too ‘narrow’ for intercourse. 

The bishop seems not to have waited for the usual three years 

of cohabitation (to test whether the impotence was permanent) 

before judging the case. The marriage annulled, the man married 

another woman. Evidently she died, so he married again. Then 

that wife died, and so he married yet again; Garc‹§a seems to have 

J. Pignatelli, Consultationes canonicae, i (Venice, 1736), consultation 148, pp. 

184–6 at 186. I was led to this important source by Joyce, Christian Marriage, 

446 n. 2. On Pignatelli see H. Hurter, Nomenclator literarius theologiae Catholicae 

theologos exhibens aetate, natione, disciplinis distinctos, 3rd edn. (5 vols.; Innsbruck, 

1903–13; repr. New York, n.d.), iv. Aetas recens: Seculum secundum post celebratum 

Concilium Tridentinum. Ab anno 1664–1763 (1910), 264–5.

192 Chapter 4 

been unlucky with his marriages. By the time the case came to the 

Congregation of the Council, Elizabeth was 30. It seems that time 

had cured the problem of narrowness, and now she wanted to marry 

and have children. 

The case is virtually the same as the previous one from the thirteenth 

century, except that no mention is made by Pignatelli of 

entry into a religious order. For Innocent III there would presumably 

have been only one answer: the annulment had been granted 

in error, the first marriage thus remained valid, and so Garc‹§a must 

give up his current wife and return to Elizabeth. 

Instead we get a di·erent outcome. The local bishop is told to 

make sure that the whole story is correct. On that assumption, 

the congregation grants a dispensation to dissolve the marriage, 

provided that this is what both Elizabeth and Garc‹§a want. 

A new kind of reasoning about non-consummation cases lies behind 

this outcome. For Innocent III there were two straightforward 

questions: was the woman really unable to have sex, and had 

she taken a vow of perpetual chastity as a nun? In the early modern 

period the calculations become much more complicated. They 

come under Max Weber’s much-misunderstood rubric Zweckra- 

‘Concinit alia declaratio in una Seguntina, in qua narrabatur, quod alias fuerat 

contractum, matrimonium inter Garziam de Vargas in aetate sexdecim annorum, et 

Elisabetham de Lezano annorum quatuordecim, et quod mulier reperta est arcta, ita 

ut a matronis post inspectionem relatum fuerit eam ad hujusmodi matrimonium esse 

inhabilem. Unde Ordinarius non expectata triennali cohabitatione, matrimonium nullum 

declaravit, et viro licentiam dedit, ut aliam uxorem duceret, prout successive cum 

duabus aliis fecit, et prolem suscepit, et de praesenti cum secunda uxore vivit. Quoniam 

vero dictam Elizabeth annorum triginta, et grandior e·ecta nunc a viro cognosci 

potest, ut matronae, quae illam inspexere, referunt, cupiens esse mater supplicat pro 

dispensatione, ut matrimonium cum alio contrahere posset’ (Pignatelli, Consultationes 

canonicae, loc. cit.). 

‘Die 12. Septembris 1609. Sacra, etc. censuit, hujusmodi dispensationem esse 

concedendam. Id est committendum Episcopo, ut si sibi constiterit Elisabetham hodie esse 

cognoscibilem, veraque esse caetera in supplicatione narrata, atque etiam tam ipsam quam 

Garziam, a quo post matrimonium per verba de praesenti contractum, tanquam arcta 

per sententiam dinitivam separata fuit, concorditer supplicare, petitam dispensationem 

concedat’ (ibid.). 

E. Saurwein, Der Ursprung des Rechtsinstituts der p•apstlichen Dispens von der 

nicht vollzogenen Ehe: Eine interpretation der Dekretalen Alexanders III. und Urbans 

III. (Analecta Gregoriana, 125, Series Facultatis Iuris Canonici, Sectio B, 43; Rome, 

1980), argues that the principle that non-consummated marriages might be dissolved 

for reasons other than entry into a religious order was already embodied in the 

legislation of Alexander III. That view has much to be said for it, but it can take 

a long time before an implicit consequence is fully realized and translated into 

practice, and Innocent III certainly does not seem to have felt ready to do so.


tionalit•at: the weighing up of causes and e·ects, pros and cons, in a 

space left free, but yet usually (as here) defined and constrained by 

values. Pignatelli gives us an imaginary illustration at the beginning 

of the same ‘consultation’. 

A young couple who have barely reached sexual maturity get 

married. The husband’s parents were not informed and are enraged 

on finding out. Great hostility between them and the wife’s 

parents ensues, and the couple themselves become hostile towards 

each other. There is more. The man is unable to consummate the 

marriage, though they live together for five months and he tries 

hard to do it. Moreover, it turns out that he is subject to insane 

rages. This mental instability and the hatred that he has now conceived 

for his wife lead her to fear that he might kill her, and so she 

leaves him. There seems no hope of resolving the situation. The 

anger on all sides only increases. Can the marriage be dissolved? 

Note that the obvious solution, annulment on grounds of impotence, 

seems ruled out by the fear for the woman’s physical safety. 

The medieval Church was quite happy with the idea of a legal 

separation, but it would condemn her to lifelong celibacy, for the 

couple had not cohabited long enough for his impotence to be 

proved in canon law. 

Pignatelli concludes that dissolution of the marriage by papal 

‘Zweckrational handelt, wer sein Handeln nach Zweck, Mitteln und Nebenfolgen 

orientiert und dabei sowohl die Mittel gegen die Zwecke, wie die Zwecke 

gegen die Nebenfolgen, wie endlich auch die verschiedenen m•oglichen Zwecke 

gegeneinander rational abw•agt . . . Absolute Zweckrationalit•at des Handelns ist 

aber . . . nur ein im wesentlichen konstruktiver Grenzfall’ (M. Weber, Wirtschaft 

und Gesellchaft: Grundri¢ der verstehenden Soziologie, ed. J. Winckelmann, 5th rev. 

edn. (3 vols.; T •ubingen, 1976), i. 13). 

‘Quidam juvenes optimates, vix pubertatem excedentes matrimonium per verba 

de praesenti contraxerunt, insciis viri parentibus, quorum indignatio tanta fuit, ut 

inter illos, et parentes uxoris, ac deinde inter ipsos conjuges odium immane, et 

crudele exortum fuerit, ac propterea magnus timor accesserit scandalorum, et infelicis 

exitus matrimonii absque spe remedii. Item vir spatio quinque mensium 

quibus cum conjuge post celebratum matrimonium cohabitavit, detectus fuit nedum 

impotens, eo quia matrimonium, quamvis studiose operam copulae dederit, 

consummare non potuit, verum etiam furiosus, et talia furoris habere intervalla, ut 

probabiliter dubitaretur, quod hujusmodi furore aliquando correptus, juncto odio 

penitus insito, eandem uxorem esset occisurus, quam ob causam se separarunt. 

Furor autem viri, et odium diuturnum tam inter ipsos conjuges, quam inter eorum 

parentes, et consanguineos nequit vel precibus mitigari, vel tempore, communique 

utilitate deponi, vel vetustate sedari: quinimmo in dies magis magisque discordia 

ira acerbior, intimo odio, et corde obstinato concepta exardescit. Quapropter consensu 

omnium exposcitur ejusdem matrimonii dissolutio’ (Pignatelli, Consultationes 

canonicae, consultation 148, p. 184).

194 Chapter 4 

dispensation is justified in view of the serious circumstances he 

has outlined. His reasoning is of the sort that modern secular 

divorce court judges might use. On the one hand, to dissolve a 

marriage is a grave thing, not to be done without powerful reasons; 

but on the other hand, the reasons are weighty, for the marriage has 

irretrievably broken down, and is the source of great animosity. For 

a consummated marriage such reasoning would be inconceivable in 

this tradition. 

The reasons are set out why consequences can be weighed with 

unconsummated marriages while pure principle rules the law on 

consummated marriages. God gave a dispensing power to his vicar 

in matters which are inferred remotely rather than proximately 

from the principles of natural law and which contain an element of 

human rather than divine regulation; at least where ratified (nonconsummated) 

marriages are concerned, the power is a way of 

putting an end to scandals and strengthening peace in the state; 

after all, the signification of marriage is incomplete before consummation; 

before that it merely stands for the union of God and 

the soul through charity, but afterwards, Christ’s union with the 

Church; the Lord’s saying (Matt. 19: 6) that ‘What God has joined 

together, let no one put asunder’ comes after the words ‘and they 

will be two in one flesh’; again, St Paul’s reference in Ephesians 5 to 

‘the great sacrament’ comes after the words ‘they will be two in one 

flesh’; then Pignatelli quotes the passage of Leo the Great which 

was analysed in the first half of this chapter, naturally in the form 

which made the commingling of the sexes a sort of sine qua non of 

marriage’s proper representation of Christ and the Church. It is 

Ibid., passim, esp. pp. 185–6. 

I am paraphrasing the following passage: ‘Quod attinet ad potestatem Pontificis 

dispensandi non est dubitandum ex communi Canonistarum sententia, qui omnes, 

uno vel altero discrepante, docent, posse Summum Pontificem potestate quidem 

ordinaria matrimonium ratum ex causa dirimere. Quia Pontifex potest divina authoritate 

dispensare in aliquibus, quae non deducuntur proxime ex principiis juris 

naturae, sed remote, et quae habent admixtum aliquid obligationis humanae. Credibileque 

omnino est, Deum suo Vicario hanc potestatem contulisse, quae regimini 

Ecclesiae necessaria erat. Nam hac ratione, saltem in matrimoniiis ratis, multa scandala 

cessant, pax in Republica stabilitur, sine qua matrimonium est pactio servitutis. 

Quandoquidem matrimonii Sacramentum, quoad significationem non est completum 

usque ad carnalem copulam inclusive; ita quod matrimonium contractum sive 

ratum significet conjunctionem Dei ad animam per charitatem, consummatum vero 

conjunctionem Christi ad Ecclesiam. Prima autem conjunctio est solubilis, non secunda; 

ideoque matrimonium ratum solvi potest, non vero consummatum. Unde 

Dominus, Matth. 19. non dixit: Quos Deus [p. 185] conjunxit homo non separet, nisi


consummation with its attendant symbolism that takes indissolubility 

from the realm of calculated consequences into the realm of 

unshakeable principle. 

The fifteenth century: from theory to practice 

We have noted several milestones in the history of consummation: 

prelates judging cases where theological theory intersected with 

concrete social practice and developed in consequence. Hincmar of 

Reims was one such milestone and Alexander III another. Somewhere 

in the four hundred years between the two cases narrated 

at the start of this section there must have been another milestone. 

Quite probably it was Martin V (1417–31), the first pope after the 

Great Schism. George Joyce noted long ago a claim by St Antoninus 

of Florence to have seen bulls by Martin V and Eugenius IV 

which actually exercised the power to dissolve unconsummated 

marriages. Much more recently direct evidence of real cases from 

Martin V’s pontificate was brought to light by K. A. Fink. The 

second of the two cases he printed may not have been successful 

(ibid. 436), and the third could have been reformulated as a case 

for annulment on grounds of defective consent, but the first and 

earliest case is a perfect example, and everything suggests that it 

would have gone through if the facts stated were borne out by the 

investigation that the pope entrusted to the bishop of Augsburg. 

The events to be investigated took place in Munich, or at least 

that was the home town of the protagonists, Stefan Puetrich and 

Ursula, daughter of Heinrich Part. According to the documents, 

the story is as follows. The couple were from important families, 

post illa verba: et erunt duo in carne una. Et Apostolus ad Ephes. 5 non dixit hoc 

Sacramentum magnum in Christo, et Ecclesia, nisi post illa verba Et erunt duo in 

carne una. Et ideo Leo Pontifex, inquit, ut referunt Magister in 2 d. 1etGratian.27 

q. 1 Societas nuptialis ita est a principio instituta, ut praeter commixtionem sexuum non 

habeat Christi, et Ecclesiae Sacramentum. Textusestin cap. Ex publico, ubi Gloss. v. 

Consummatum de convers. conjug.’ (ibid., pp. 184–5). 

Joyce, Christian Marriage, 434. Joyce’s treatment of the whole matter, in his 

ch. 10, is as usual remarkably well informed. 

K. A. Fink, ‘Fr•uhe urkundliche Belege f•ur die Aufl•osung des matrimonium 

ratum consumatum durch p•apstliche Dispensation’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung 

f•ur Rechtsgeschichte, 77[Zeitschrift f•ur Rechtsgeschichte, 90], kanonistische Abteilung, 

46 (1960), 434–42. 

‘licet ad iussum matris sue purum emisit consensum, ipsa tamen corde et animo 

semper dissensit’ (ibid. 441). 

Fink prints all the documents he found bearing on the case, ibid. 437–9.

196 Chapter 4 

since the three dukes of Bavaria would intervene with the pope to 

try to obtain a resolution after the marriage had gone sour, emphasizing 

the power of the two families involved and the danger 

to peace resulting from the break-up. The couple had got married 

by present consent but had not immediately started living and 

sleeping together. (As we have seen, there was nothing abnormal 

about this.) Before that could happen, Stefan had a nasty shock: 

it turned out that Ursula was very pregnant. He knew he could 

not be the father. In fact she gave birth to a child only about five 

weeks after the marriage. How he had failed to notice her condition 

is not explained. Perhaps she dressed carefully and perhaps 

he assumed she had a full figure. When the truth came out he was 

apparently enraged, and refused to proceed to solemnize the marriage. 

(This presumably means that the church service had been 

held over after the exchange of present consent, fitting a pattern 

of marriage–delay–church service–consummation.) He would not 

accept her as his bedfellow (conthoralem). Relations between the 

two powerful families became so bad that deaths and injuries were 

feared. It is the kind of story that historians are tempted to tell with 

a smile on their lips, but the humiliation and anger cannot have 

been amusing for anyone involved. 

Could the pope provide a solution? There was no case for an annulment 

here: undisclosed pregnancy was not among the grounds 

deemed sucient to vitiate consent. The pope’s preferred solution 

was for Stefan or Ursula or both to enter a religious order, thus dissolving 

the marriage in the by now time-honouredway. He realized, 

however, that this might not be acceptable to either of them. He was 

therefore prepared to dissolve the marriage on his own authority, 

once he was assured that both parties wanted that. 

The symbolic rationale: William of Pagula 

The symbolic rationale for this remarkable power may by this time 

have become a commonplace in theory. In the extract printed here 

as Document 4. 5, from the fourteenth-century priests’ manual 

by William of Pagula, a work in a pastoral genre drawing on both 

theology and canon law, we find a cautious intermediate position, 

before stating the by now familiar symbolic reasons: ‘A marriage 

See the classic unpublished thesis by L. E. Boyle, ‘A Study of the Works 

Attributed to William of Pagula: With Special Reference to the Oculus sacerdotis 

and Summa summarum’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1956).


can be dissolved before the consummation of the marriage, say by 

entering a religious order’ (emphasis added). The single word ‘say’ 

(puta) has large implications. It indicates that entry into a religious 

order may not be the only reason for dissolving an unconsummated 

marriage. 

It is probably significant that William of Pagula was a trained 

canon lawyer. The influence of canon lawyers was surely central 

in the development we have analysed, for by and large canonists 

admitted the theory behind Martin V’s decision long before 

his pontificate, whereas the weight of theological opinion seems to 

have been rather against it. This might seem like a stereotyped 

clash between pragmatic lawyers and idealistic theologians, but in 

fact the canon-law reasoning is highly theological, and furthermore 

symbolically theological. The analysis of the views about ‘bigamy’ 

of Hostiensis should have prepared us for this. He is perhaps the 

best person to analyse in this connection too, for his influence and 

reputation were enormous—he even gets a mention in Dante’s Paradiso 

(12. 82–97). His opinion would have carried great weight 

with subsequent canon lawyers and popes. 

The symbolic rationale in detail: Hostiensis 

A remarkable passage is printed below as Document 4. 1. It follows 

a long and complex discussion in which symbolism also figures 

largely, but to follow its twists and turns would be a distraction from 

the central points stated in the passage selected. This passage has its 

twists and turns too: sometimes the canonist narrows the focus to 

dissolution by entry into an order, at other moments he is thinking 

about the general power to dissolve, but really he seems to have both 

in mind. Hostiensis concludes, towards the end of the analysis, that 

the pope has the power to dissolve unconsummated marriages provided 

that the partners consent. The implication is that he can do 

this with his ‘unbounded’ (absoluta) power even without a special 

reason. However, the rule that a marriage can be dissolved before 

consummation by one partner’s entry into a religious order is a 

much more normal thing, coming within the pope’s bounded (ordinata) 

power. Hostiensis assimilates this to the papacy’s power to 

Joyce, Christian Marriage, 431–6 (noting important exceptions in each camp). 

Pointed out by J. A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London etc., 1995), 214. 

For Hostiensis’s discussion of the issue in his other synthesis, the Summa aurea, 

see Joyce, Christian Marriage, 432–3.

198 Chapter 4 

tighten or relax impediments to marriage, saying that a particular 

cardinal whom he names had convinced him of this. Keeping the 

focus for the moment on the rule about entry into a religious order, 

he argues that the unconsummated marriage symbolizes only the 

marriage of God and soul through charity. (At this point he makes 

explicit his debt to Innocent III’s decretal Debitum (X. 1. 21. 5), 

which keeps turning up in the history of marriage symbolism as a 

social force.) The union of God and soul is not diminished but enhanced 

by entry into a religious order, he argues. This he links with 

another thought: the Virgin Mary was able to be Joseph’s spouse 

and at the same time truly married to God. The implication is that 

this was possible because the marriage of Mary and Joseph was unconsummated. 

The parallel lines between symbol and symbolized 

seem to come together in these points about virginity and marriage 

to God. Probably he is breaking some basic rule of symbolic 

discourse, but in any case his train of thought moves o· again to 

the power of the Church to dissolve unconsummated marriages not 

only because of entry into a religious order, but for any just cause. Is 

this against Scripture—‘What God has joined together let no man 

put asunder’? No, because that commandment refers to consummated 

marriages. Where a marriage is not consummated, we (here 

he is speaking as if with the pope’s voice) can decree what we like 

about it. In practice the pope should use his bounded rather than 

his unbounded power and only dissolve such marriages for a good 

reason: laxity is not what Hostiensis wants. He is envisaging the 

weighing of consequences or arguments: to outweigh the great undesirability 

of ending a marriage, there should be proportionately 

strong reasons. If, however, the marriage has been consummated, 

the situation is transformed because it symbolizes something that 

cannot be broken. To suggest that a consummated marriage could 

be dissolved by entry into a religious order is like suggesting that 

another faith or Church might replace the one Christ married, and 

this suggestion would be heretical. 

It is a strong statement: divorce and remarriage after consummation 

would be like Christ discarding the Church and replacing 

it with a new one. Throughout the passage symbolism is decisive. 

Is this just a rhetorical ornament? Far from it: Hostiensis seems to 

take it with extreme seriousness. Without the symbolic rationale, 

the law could have been left with a fossilized rule: entering a religious 

order ends an unconsummated marriage. With the symbolic


argument, the intellectual situation was still fluid, leaving open 

the possibility of a further crystallization of practical law in the fifteenth 

century. Marriage symbolism in Hostiensis and the tradition 

he represents is not a discourse of mysticism or a literary trope, and 

it goes far beyond the allegorical interpretation of Scripture that 

we find everywhere in medieval and patristic writings. As has been 

argued throughout, it is a force capable ultimately of shaping social 

practice, as we have seen it was in the case of indissolubility and 

‘bigamy’.

Conclusion 

Synopsis 

Behind all the detail, this book has developed some simple and 

straightforward ideas which can be summarized in a small space as 

a series of propositions. 

Marriage symbolism is common in many religions. There are 

some close parallels between medieval marriage symbolism and 

the marriage/love symbolism of Hinduism in particular, but the 

parallels are still closer with the ancient Hebrew idea of the people 

of Israel as spouse of God, an idea which was of course a lineal 

ancestor of Christian marriage symbolism. 

Marriage symbolism was not preached to a mass public in the 

early Middle Ages. Preaching became a system of mass communication 

in the age of the friars and marriage symbolism was highly 

developed in a genre of preaching from the thirteenth century onwards. 

Only then did preaching about marriage symbolism reach 

a huge public and become a social force in the same kind of way 

that radio is today (that is, not so powerful as television, but still 

a mass medium to be reckoned with). In marriage preaching the 

symbolism rested securely on a literal-sense idea of marriage as 

good and holy. 

Augustine of Hippo developed remarks from the New Testament 

into a strongly stated theology of marriage symbolism, deriving 

indissolubility from the analogy between human marriage and the 

union of Christ and the Church. A wide gulf separated this theory 

from social practice for centuries, but by the end of the Middle Ages 

it had turned into a social force underpinning the unbreakability of 

the marriage bond. 

Marriage symbolism conditioned the rules about who could become 

a priest. It changed the meaning of wedding ritual from 

within. In the thirteenth century it helped reclassify a class of minor 

clerics as laymen. 

Consummation was central to the idea of marriage in the later 

medieval centuries. Symbolic reasoning going back to Hincmar

Conclusion 201 

of Reims lay behind Pope Alexander III’s judgement that a nonconsummated 

marriage could be dissolved by the entry of one partner 

into a religious order. This decision had a social impact. Symbolic 

reflection continued in its wake, eventually enabling popes 

to dissolve unconsummated marriages in the light of instrumental 

calculation. 

Disclaimers 

There have been so many studies of medieval marriage in recent 

years that in this book it has been possible to develop an argument 

and present fresh data without writing a general history of the 

subject to provide context and balance. The general books that are 

available complement each other well, so the danger of imbalance is 

diminished. Ideally, this book would be read after or together with 

Brooke’s Medieval Idea of Marriage, which looks at the subject 

from many angles, without concentrating on one single thesis. The 

present study is, however, monographic, not monocausal. I am not 

saying that symbolism is all that mattered in the social history of 

medieval marriage, far from it. Symbolism deserves a central place 

in medieval marriage’s social history, not the central place (if such 

exists). I have merely tried to show how powerful symbolism was 

even outside the areas studied by historians of religious thought. 

The main vehicles of symbolism’s power in the world, the world 

outside texts, were preaching and law, both of which a·ected all 

social classes and both genders (even the law being gender-symmetrical 

to a greater degree than with the other great systems of 

sacred law). Nevertheless, it seems likely that di·erent classes and 

genders were a·ected in di·erent ways. Again, one would expect 

urbanization to a·ect the overall picture. The evidence I have found 

is, however, too patchy to pursue these lines of investigation systematically. 

I hope someone in the future may do better. 

So far as gender is concerned, this study has not contributed 

much to the recent but already distinguished tradition of analysing 

symbolism in gender terms. There are reasons. The Church as 

bride of Christ is composed of men as well as women. The soul 

as bride of Christ is the soul of a man as much as the soul of a 

woman. The bride can stand for Christ and the bridegroom for the 

Church. This in itself diminishes the impact of the symbolism on 

real gender relations. Furthermore, the point of the symbolism ana- 

The analogy between Christ and the Church could be taken both ways: Christ

202 Conclusion 

lysed throughout this book is not about gender specificity so much 

as unity and indissolubility. Some of the texts used in this study 

could certainly bear a little more gender analysis in the context of 

a di·erent investigation, but it might be somewhat peripheral to 

their principal significance. 

Narrative 

It is an interesting exercise to rerun in pr‹ecis form the preceding 

(primarily) analytical and social history as a narrative, including 

the ‘great men’. An obvious starting point would be Augustine of 

Hippo, c.400. With clarity and force he linked marriage symbolism 

and indissolubility. He also set out lucidly the principles behind the 

rules about ‘bigamy’ in its technical sense. 

Next would come Hincmar, in the mid-ninth century. He put 

consummation in the foreground as crucial to the meaning of marriage. 

He anticipated later developments and had an influence on 

them. Like so much about the Carolingians and their ‘renaissance’, 

future transformations are adumbrated without being actualized, 

except transitorily. 

Then come Peter Lombard and Gratian in the mid-twelfth century. 

They helped put the ideas of Augustine and Hincmar before 

the ‹elite who ran the western Church. After the Lombard’s 

Sentences had become a standard textbook, every serious theology 

student would be likely to come across Augustine’s ideas about 

symbolism and the nature of Christian marriage. The symbolic 

reasons for thinking consummation changed the meaning of marriage 

were inescapably available in Gratian’s Decretum. Hemade 

Hincmar’s line of thought widely accessible, and almost certainly 

as the man or Christ as the woman: ‘vidue, id est, corrupte, quia licet fuisset vidua, 

dummodononcorrupta,nonprohibetur...Sedquareexigiturmaiorcastitasin 

uxore quam in viro, quia maritus corrupte, si cum ea una caro eciatur promoveri 

non potest . . . Sed ille qui habuit concubinam post [potest ms.] uxorem vel ante 

promoveri potest, ut xxxiiii. [xxiiii ms.] Di.Fraternitatis. H. [=Huguccio?] dixit 

quod vir significat ecclesiam, que in parte recessit a Christo adulterando recedendo 

a fide, etsi in parte virgo fuerit, et ideo non deest significatio sacramenti in viro 

quamvis non sit virgo. Uxor *vero significat Christum, qui numquam ecclesiam 

dimisit,...Aliidicunt,etvideturmelius,quodvirsignificat Christum qui primo 

copulavit sibi sinagogam et postea ecclesiam, scilicet de gentibus, *militantem, in 

qua sunt boni et mali, et ideo non nocet si vir non fuerit virgo; uxor vero significat 

ecclesiam triumphantem in qua non est macula’ (Bernard of Parma, glossa ordinaria 

to Decretals, at X. 1. 21. 5, Debitum, inMSBLRoyal9.C.I,fo.35RB, right-hand 

lower margin).


influenced Alexander III’s decision about consummation and entry 

into a religious order. 

Thus Alexander III (d. 1181) has a place in the ‘great men’ narrative. 

His authoritative decisions fixed the principle that consent 

makes a marriage, but that on the other hand only a consummated 

marriage between a baptized couple is indissoluble. This synthesis 

would be explained in coherent and rational symbolic terms by 

scholastic theologians. 

Innocent III in the early thirteenth century has a pre-eminent 

position in the narrative. His thinking on marriage was demonstrably 

entwined with symbolic reasoning, which he translated into 

practice by enforcing indissolubility in the face of very powerful 

men who were his allies, and by changing canon law to close the 

largest loophole for annulments. 

Innocent also approved the Franciscan and Dominican orders, 

whose preachers would popularize marriage symbolism, especially 

the ‘initiation–ratification–consummation’ schema. They will also 

have helped to imprint marriage symbolism on public opinion, 

helped by its convergence with social practices formed by a law 

influenced by the same symbolism. 

Innocent III’s new rules about evidence in annulment cases were 

not properly observed at first, and were quite probably never universally 

enforced. The canonist Hostiensis (d. 1271) not only remarked 

on this but made an impassioned plea to judges to take the 

rules with the utmost seriousness. Since he was widely studied and 

famous—he even has his place in Dante’s Divine Comedy—he is not 

only a witness but in all probability an influence on thought and 

practice, so he too earns a place in the narrative. He adopted such a 

hard line about the rules of proof in annulment cases that we must 

take his strictures with a pinch of salt. The remarkable thing is how 

seriously indissolubility was enforced. Symbolism lay behind the 

seriousness. 

Hostiensis’s canonist contemporary Innocent IV reflected on the 

symbolic rationale of rules about marrying virgins (once only) and 

the path to the priesthood. He also reflected on which married 

clerics in minor orders should keep their status, and decided that 

the ‘bigamous’ should not. He represented a strong current of thirteenth-century 

church law opinion, and in 1274 a large number of 

legitimately married clerics in minor orders were deprived of their 

status because they were, in the technical sense, bigamous.


In the fourteenth century, if not earlier, the meaning of the marriage 

ceremony was changed, at least in England, to foreground 

symbolic reasons for changing the ritual of second marriages (details 

and definitions varying). Paradoxically, this tended to assimilate 

the ritual to that of first marriages, by pinpointing a specific 

symbolic clause that could be excised while the rest was retained. 

In the fifteenth century, under Pope Martin V, we see the beginnings 

of a trend to enlarge the range of reasons for dissolving 

an unconsummated marriage (it should be stressed that the issue 

here is not impotence). This trend continued into the early modern 

period and afterwards. Symbolism provided the rationale. 

In the sixteenth century popes began to grant dispensations for 

‘bigamous’ clerics in minor orders to retain their clerical status 

in circumstances where a bishop was likely to refuse. The papal 

Penitentiary register entries that reveal this also hint at the wide 

range of privileges clerical status might entail, and which many 

would have lost because of bigamy symbolism. 

All these curious details are symptoms of something bigger: a 

strong conviction that the analogy between marriage and Christ’s 

union with the Church was far more than a figure of speech. 

Explanations in a nutshell 

How to explain the influence of marriage symbolism and its timing? 

The symbolic rationale had roots deep in the Christian past, so the 

delayed reaction is interesting. 

In the case of preaching, the explanation is simply that there 

probably was relatively little marriage preaching,symbolic or otherwise, 

until the central Middle Ages. 

In the case of indissolubility, popes were seldom in a position to 

enforce their strong line on a powerful laity. Acceptance of exclusive 

Church jurisdiction in marriage cases was practically a sine qua non. 

So was a religious leadership strong enough to stand up to kings 

and great nobles. 

Why were they so ready to do so? A plausible if undemonstrable 

explanation has to do with the discipline of clerical celibacy. It had 

been in place in theory for centuries. However, from the late twelfth 

century the leadership of the Church systematically tried to impose 

celibacy on the clergy from the level of subdeacon upwards. By the 

end of the twelfth century a de facto wife or public mistress would 

have been an obstacle to high church oce. A celibate clergy is likely


to take a less tolerant attitude to sexual weakness by married males 

than a clergy in the same position as laymen. Brahmins, rabbis, 

muftis were married men and at some level must have sympathized 

with the predicament of other men who wanted to change wives for 

one reason or another. Celibate popes and bishops were more likely 

to feel that if they were doing without any women at all, laymen 

could make do with one. This explanation is an ideal-type. In so 

far as clerics lapsed from their ideal, the reasoning sketched out 

does not apply. Still, to say that clerical celibacy meant no more 

in the early thirteenth century than the early eleventh would be an 

extreme position. So the rise of celibacy would have given impetus 

to the force of marriage symbolism. One cannot footnote it but to 

many it will seem common sense. 

In the case of ‘bigamy’, the sheer appeal of marriage symbolism 

to legal minds like Innocent III and Hostiensis seems to have been 

a considerable factor, paradoxical though it may seem. Alongside 

this, one may set harmonious relations obtaining between popes 

and English and French kings for much of the thirteenth century. 

The monarchs wanted ‘bigamous’ clerics out of the ecclesiastical 

courts, and churchmen could oblige because they were operating 

in a co-operative mode. That was not the whole story, however. 

Kings had learnt to use the language of ‘bigamy’ to put popes in 

the right frame of mind to make concessions, and churchmen could 

see the new rule about bigamous clerics in minor orders as a logical 

consequence of the rationale of marriage symbolism. 

With consummation, the role of canon law as troubleshooter for 

theology is crucial. The position of consummation in marriage had 

been uncertain for centuries. Sooner or later concrete cases would 

turn on the theological questions. With the papacy operating at an 

increasing tempo as supreme court for problematic cases, it is not 

surprising that the question should be settled. If it was to be settled, 

the logic of marriage symbolism would provide the rationale. After 

it had been settled, the symbolic rationale was not forgotten. 

Causal reciprocity of substructure and superstructure 

Mary Douglas has written that ‘without the relevant supporting 

classifications and values the material aspects of an organization 

would not be viable, and, vice versa, without the appropriate or-


ganization, the cultural values would make no sense. Culture and 

society are one as mind and brain.’ 

Mary Douglas’s model probably works for many societies. Even 

so, the interplay of marriage symbolism and practice in the late 

medieval West is not just another case of a common human pattern. 

The symbolism has priority in initiating the system of reciprocal 

forces: it sets the whole thing going. That is not so easy to find 

in other civilizations (scholarly readers are urged to try: I shall be 

glad if they succeed). Symbolic reasoning about marriage had to 

overcome tendencies which are strong in most societies: the desire 

of many men and women (especially men) to change spouses or 

have more than one. The defeat of these tendencies at the institutional 

level was a deep cut against the social grain. Only then, after 

symbolism had cut society into a new shape, did social structure 

serve the symbolism, strengthening the force that had made it what 

it was. Perhaps the more usual human pattern is for the structure 

of the symbolism to mould itself to the structure of society, though 

with most societies studied by twentieth-century social anthropologists 

there was a dearth of historical data about the development 

of the system studied. At any rate, in the medieval West the causal 

influence flowed in the opposite direction, symbolism moulding 

social structure. 

For once the historian has the advantage over anthropologists. 

It is possible to reconstruct the genesis of this system of mutual 

causality. It turns out that intellectuals played a crucial part in the 

process. The reciprocal cycle is started by ideas which had remained 

in a rarefied world until turned into practice by serious energetic 

men who took them seriously. Once they had done so, the flow of 

causation began to go both ways. Symbolism starts the process but 

eventually the process becomes reciprocal. 

In the Middle Ages, then, it was on the whole the marriage symbolism 

that came first, and gradually moulded law and thus society 

in its image. However, that made a di·erence to the symbolism. 

M. Douglas, A Feeling for Hierarchy (Dayton, Oh., 2002), 27. Mary Douglas 

is very good on this this kind of interplay: to quote her slightly out of context, the 

work of anthropologists, ‘especially the French’, shows ‘how the categories of the 

world are established by being embedded in daily practice. This is a marvellously 

dynamic and interactive view of the relation of knowledge to behaviour: the analogies 

from practice justify the knowledge and the knowledge justifies the action’ (M. 

Douglas, ‘Raisonnements circulaires: retour nostalgique ›a L‹evy-Bruhl’, Gradhiva, 

30–1 (2001–2), 1–14 at 8 (this ‘translation’ is in fact Douglas’s original English 

version, which she kindly showed me).


Always a strong image, the union of man and woman, it came to be 

rooted also in social practice, which made it concrete in a di·erent 

way. When ideas are embodied in social practice, they take on a 

new force, even if they helped to create the social practice in the 

first place.

Documents 

The first digit of each document’s number identifies the chapter whose 

arguments it illustrates. 

Documents Relating to Chapter 1: Mass Communication 

1. 1. Marriage symbolism in the Bavarian Homiliary 

This is one of the few examples found of a homily addressed apparently to 

an ultimate lay audience containing marriage symbolism. It comes from a 

collection of Bavarian origin, composed in the ninth century probably for 

the churches of Salzburg and Augsburg, and relatively widely di·used as 

homily collections of this period go. 

MS Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 3833 

Parchment manuscript, 192 folios, ‘in fol.’, two columns (unlike the 

other sermon from the same manuscript, printed below as Document 

1. 2), date c.1000 (the Staatsbibliothek catalogue dates it to the tenth 

century, Barr‹e to the first half of the eleventh). The use of ‘@’ to mean 

‘et’ within a word, the ‘ae’ as well as the ‘e caudata’, and the ‘cc’ type ‘a’, 

as in ‘la@tificccr@’, p. 43, line 7, together with the absence of spacing 

between some words, favour the earlier date, though these indications 

are not decisive. According to the catalogue, the homiliary is preceded 

by ‘capitula sermonum’. 

Note. The ‘e caudata’ is here represented thus: ‘ae’. 

Pp. 57 col. a–59 col. a: 

Omelia. Lectionis eiusdem 

1. In lectione quae nobis recitata est, fratres karissimi, audivimus Dominum 

dicentem (Mt. 25: 1): ‘*Simile est regnum caelorum decem 

virginibus quae accipientes lampades suas, exierunt obviam sponso et 

All this from H. Barr‹e, Les Hom‹eliaires carolingiens de l’‹ecole d’Auxerre: authenticit‹e 

— inventaire — tableaux comparatifs — initia (Studi e testi, 225; Vatican City, 

1962), 26. 

Description based on C. F. Halm et al.. Catalogus codicum Latinorum Bibliothecae 

Regiae Monacensis (secundum Andreae Schmelleri indices), 2nd rev. edn. (2 vols.; 

Munich, 1892–4), i/2, Codices num. 2501–5250 complectens (1894), 143; on Barr‹e, 

Les Hom‹eliaires carolingiens, 26; and on microfilm printout of the homily.

Documents: 1. 1 209 

sponsae’. Haec si secundum litteram tantum intellegimus nimirum durum 

videtur et asperum. Absit hoc a sensibus christianis ut tam parvus 

numerus veniat ad vitam aeternam. Et ideo quia nulla ratione secundum 

litteram intellegi debet, quia et revera ipse Dominus similitudinem esse 

dixit, requiramus quare quinque dictae sunt fatuae aut quinque prudentes. 

Illae enim quinque prudentes significant omnes sanctos qui 

cum Christo sunt regnaturi. 

2. E contrario, illae quinque fatuae figuram habere videntur christianorum 

malorum qui sine operibus bonis de solo tantum christiano nomine 

gloriantur. Ideo autem et ille fatuae quinque et ille prudentes quinque 

dicuntur, quia quinque sensus in omnibus hominibus esse probantur, 

visus videlicet, [p. 57 col. b] auditus, gustus, odoratus, et tactus, et quia 

per istos sensus, velut per quasdam ianuas vel fenestras, aut vita aut mors 

ingreditur ad animas nostras. De quibus et propheta dicit (Jerem. 9: 21): 

Intravit ‘mors per fenestras nostras’. Ideo et ibi quinque virgines dicuntur 

prudentes quae istis sensibus bene utuntur, et ibi quinque fatuae 

quae per istos quinque sensus magis mortem quam vitam excipiunt. 

3. Quomodo autem isti quinque sensus, velut quinque virgines, aut virginitatem 

custodiant, aut corruptioni subiaceant, diligentius requiramus. 

Si aliquis vir aut mulier viderit filium aut filiam alienam, servum 

aut ancillam, et per concupiscentiam diligenter aspexerit, corrupta est 

una virgo, quia per oculos, id est fenestras corporis in secretum cordis 

venenum mortis intravit. Si vero aliquis, sive religiosus clericus sive 

laicus, homines detrahentes, sermones etiam otiosos et cantica luxuriosa 

vel turpia proferentes libenter audierit, et cum delectatione placido auditu 

susceperit, corrupta est alia virgo. . . . [p. 58 col. a] . . . Et revera, 

fratres karissimi, quid prodest viro vel feminae si in corpore virginitas 

custoditur, quando per malas concupiscentias cordis integritas violatur? 

Quid prodest in uno membro preferre castitatem, et in omnibus sensibus 

habere corruptionem? Nam et illae virgines quae ‘agnum secuntur’ 

(Apoc. 14: 4) non propter hoc sequuntur agnum, quia solam virginitatem 

corporis servaverunt: denique, cum dixisset (Apoc. 14: 4): ‘Hi 

[p. 58 col. b] sunt qui cum mulieribus non coinquinaverunt se’, adiunxit 

(Apoc. 14: 5): ‘Et non est inventum in ore eorum mendacium: 

sine macula sunt.’ Qui ergo de sola castitate corporis gloriatur, diligenter 

*attendat quia si mendacium diligit, cum illis sanctis virginibus 

si] interlined 

religiosus clericus] possibly corrected by subsequent punctuation to religiosus, clericus, 

which would change the meaning from ‘whether a religious cleric or a layman’ to 

‘whether a religious, a cleric, or a layman’ 

vel] velut ms., but probably corrected 

secuntur] physical lacuna follows in ms. 

se] physical lacuna follows in ms. 

est] added as correction?

210 Documents: 1. 1 

Christum sequi non poterit. Nulla ergo virgo de sola corporis virginitate 

presumat, quia si inoboediens fuerit, aut linguosa, ab illo thalamo 

sponsi caelestis se noverit excludendam. 

4. Cum ergo virgo centesimum gradum teneat, et mulier coniugata tricesimum, 

melior tamen est mulier casta quam virgo superba. Illa 

enim casta mulier, marito serviens, tricesimum possidet gradum: virgini 

superbae nec unus gradus remanebit. Adimpletur in illa quod 

ait psalmista (Ps. 17: 28): ‘Tu populum humilem salvum facies, et 

oculos superborum humiliabis’. Et quia totam ecclesiam catholicam 

beatus Apostolus virginem vocat, non solas in ea considerans corpore 

virgines, sed incorruptas omnium desiderans mentes, ita dicens 

(2 Cor. 11: 2): ‘Aptavi vos uni viro virginem castam exhibere 

Christo’, non solum sanctarum monialium, sed etiam omnium virorum 

vel mulierum animae, si cum castitate corporis in illis supradictis 

quinque sensibus virginitatem servare voluerint, sponsas Christi 

se esse non dubitent. Non enim corporum [p. 59 col. a] sed animarum 

sponsus intellegendus est Christus. Et ideo, fratres karissimi, tam viri 

quam feminae, tam pueri quam puelle, si virginitatem usque ad nuptias 

servant, et per istos quinque sensus, id est, visus, auditus, gustus, odoratus, 

vel tactus, dum eis bene utuntur, suas animas non corrumpunt, 

in die iudicii, apertis ianuis, ad eternum sponsi thalamum feliciter 

merebuntur intrare. Illi vero qui et corpora sua ante nuptias adulterina 

coniunctione corrumpunt, et postea per totam vitam suam male 

vivendo, male audiendo, male loquendo, animas suas vulnerare non 

desinunt, si eis fructuosa et digna paenitentia non subvenerit, clausis 

ianuis sine causa clamabunt: ‘Domine, Domine, aperi nobis’ (Mt. 25: 

11; cf. Luke 13: 25).—‘Amen, dico vobis, nescio vos, unde sitis’ (Mt. 

25: 12; Luke 13: 25). 

5. Haec ergo, fratres karissimi, si fideliter et diligenter adtendimus et 

cum castitate corporis etiam integritatem cordis auxiliante Domino 

custodiamus, non cum fatuis proiciemur ‘in tenebras exteriores. Ibi 

erit fletus et stridor dentium’ (Mt. 8 12; 22: 13; 25: 30):—sed cum 

sapientibus ad spiritales nuptias intromissi audire merebimur: ‘Euge, 

serve bone et fidelis, intra in gaudium domini tui’ (Mt. 25: 21 and 23). 

Cf.Mark4:20. 

incorruptas] incorruptas esse understood? 

Aptavi] Despondi in Vulgate 

sanctarum] after correction 

animae] guessed from sense—in ms. corrected and hard to read 

cum castitate] castitatem ms. 

ianuis] ianuus ms. 

si] added in margin 

castitate] corr. from castate


1. 2. Homily on the text ‘Nuptiae factae sunt’ (John 2: 1) in 

the Bavarian Homiliary 

See Document 1. 1. This text from the same manuscript illustrates the 

same points. 

MS Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 3833 

For description see Document 1.1. Note that this sermon, unlike the 

previous text, is in one column. 

Pp. 43–46: 

In illo tempore nuptiae factae sunt in Chana Galileae, et erat mater Iesu 

ibi et reliq. 

OMELIA LECTIONIS EIUSDEM 

1. Quod Dominus atque salvator noster ad nuptias vocatus non solum 

venire sed et miraculum ibidem quo convivas laetificaret facere dignatus 

est, audivit in presenti lectione dilectio vestra. ‘Nuptiae’, inquit, 

‘factae sunt in Chana Galileae et erat mater Iesu ibi. Vocatus 

est autem Iesus et discipuli eius ad nuptias.’ Magna quidem humilitas 

est Domini nostri quod ad humanas nuptias venire dignatus est. Sed 

tamen magnum ibidem gessit mysterium. 

2. Venit igitur ad nuptias carnali more caelebratas in terra Dominus et 

salvator noster qui, ad copulandam sibi spiritali amore ecclesiam, de 

caelo descendit ad terras. Cuius quidem thalamus incorruptae virginis 

uterus fuit, in quo deus humanae naturae coniunctus, et ex quo ad 

sociandam sibi fidelium ecclesiam natus processit. Vocatus est autem 

ad has nuptias semper ab initio mundi per sanctos viros et iustos, qui 

eum tota intentione deprecati sunt ut humani generis redemptionem, 

quam promisit, impleret. 

3. ‘Et deficiente vino, dixit mater Iesu ad eum: “Vinum non habent”’ 

(John 2: 4). Veniente autem Domino ad has nuptias in hunc mundum, 

multas pro fidelibus suis iniurias et tribulationes sustinens, [e]os ab 

aeterna morte redemit, et ad regnum caeleste perduxit, cum deficiebat 

vinum veteris observantiae legis ut vinum nobis gratiae spiritalis 

largiretur, per quam omnia secreta legis a nobis spiritaliter intellegerentur, 

et per miracula sua, quae operatus est latenter in homine, 

divinitatis suae potentiam demonstraret, et credentium in eum fides 

aucta proficeret. 

4. Sed audiamus quod sequitur. ‘Dicit ei Iesus: “Quid mihi et tibi est, 

mulier? Nondum venit hora mea”’. Neque enim matrem suam inhono- 

Above the line, in small script: ‘Vocatus est autem Iesus et discipuli eius cum eo 

ad’ (the remainder has probably been cut o· by the binder) 

venire] xv added in margin (later script?) 

[e]os] lacuna in ms., filled from the sense


ravit, qui nos iubet honorare patrem et matrem, nec eam sibi matrem 

negavit esse, ex cuius virginitate carnem suscipere non dispexit. Sed 

‘Quid mihi et tibi est, mulier? Nondum venit hora mea’ ita intellegendum 

est, ac si diceret: ‘Quid divinitati quam ex patre semper habui, 

cum tua carne commune est ex qua carnem suscepi? [p. 44] quia divinitatem 

meam quae *facit miraculum non tu genuisti, sed infirmitatem 

meam peperisti. Nondum venit hora passionis meae, in qua pro salute 

mundi mori disposui. Sed ante sunt fideles elegendi, ante sanitatum 

mirabilia facienda, ante evangelium est predicandum, et sic humanitatis 

meae ostendenda infirmitas in passione, ut mox divinitatis meae 

potentia clarescat in resurrectione’. 

5. ‘Dicit mater Iesu ministris: “Quodcumque dixerit vobis facite”. Erant 

autem ibi lapideae hydriae sex positae, secundum purificationem Iudaeorum. 

Et dicit Iesus: “Implete hydrias aqua” (John 2: 5–7). Et 

impleverunt eas usque ad summum.’ Hydriae vocantur vasa aquae receptui 

preparata. Sex ergo hydrie sex aetates huius seculi designant, in 

quibus omnibus electos suos Dominus suo semper erudivit precepto, 

quae precepta omnia insipida velut aqua fuerunt antequam Christus 

veniens ea in vinum, id est, in spiritalem intellectum, convertit. 

6. Prima ergo aetas ab Adam usque ad Noe atque diluvium. Secunda a 

Noe usque ad Abraham. Tertia ab Abraham usque ad David. Quarta 

a David usque ad captivitatem populi dei. Quinta ab ipsa captivitate 

usque ad Christum. Sexta a nativitate Christi modo agitur usque in 

finem saeculi. Per has ergo sex aetates, precepta Domini semper data 

fuerunt ad electos quosque quae omnia Christus, cum veniret, in 

vinum convertit, id est, spiritaliter intellegenda monstravit. 

7. Audiamus ergo eamdem aquam, id est, divinam scripturam, in vinum 

nobis suavissimum, spiritu sancto monstrante, Christoque operante, 

conversam. 

8. In prima aetate seculi, Abel iustum frater invidens occidit, et ab hoc 

ipse perpetua *martyrum gloria beatus, fratricida impius aeterna maledictione 

damnatus est. Quicumque hoc audiens formidat cum impiis 

damnari, cupiens cum electis beatificari, omnem fomitem odii et invidie 

festinet abicere, deoque placere per sacrificium iustitiae, per 

modestiam innocentiae, per virtutem innocentiae, procurat, aquam 

in] interlined, perhaps in a later hand 

Iudaeorum] corr. from idaeorum 

precepta] cepta ms. 

Fuerunt] corr. from funt 

monstravit] corr. from mostravit 

nobis] corr. from nos 

conversam] conversum ms. 

festinet] read festinat (in line with formidat and procurat)? 

innocentiae . . . innocentiae] sic


hydriae primae in vinum spiritale conversam habet, quia innocentia 

Abel iusti imitando Christum sequitur, qui innocens et sine causa 

damnatus, nobis innocentiae bonum demonstravit exemplum. Qui 

vero cum fratricida invidia stimulatur, etiam quicquid boni operatur 

per invidiam consumitur, quia per invidiam omne malum nascitur, et 

per innocentiam magnum malum extinguitur, et magnum perficitur 

[p. 45] bonum. 

9. Secunda aetate seculi inchoante deletus est diluvio mundus ob magnitudinem 

criminum. Sed solus Noe propter iustitiam cum domo sua 

liberatur in arca. Audita ergo hac vastatione horribili, paucorumque 

liberatione mirabili, quisquis bonis moribus vivere coeperit, timens 

perire cum reprobis, desiderans liberari cum electis, secundam hydriam 

aquae qua mundaretur accipit in vinum spiritalis intellegentiae 

conversam. Nos vero post baptismum, quod diluvium significat, nonnisi 

per iustitiae opera a peccatorum nexibus eripi meremur. Ideo 

iustitiam in omnibus et super omnia diligamus, per quam ad vitam 

perveniamus sempiternam. 

10. In tertia aetate, deus Abrahae temptavit oboedientiam, eique filium 

unicum iussit immolare, sed pro filio aries immolatur. Hoc quasi aqua 

nihil profectus fieri videtur antequam hoc Christus in vinum spiritalis 

intelligentiae convertit. Nam Abraham significat deum patrem, 

qui pro nobis unicum tradidit filium, qui factus est oboediens patri 

usque ad mortem, et mortuus est propter delicta nostra, sicut Abraham 

non filium immolavit sed arietem, quia non divinitas Christi mori 

potuit, sed humanitas, quam pro nobis suscipere dignatus est. Audiens 

quisque quanta virtus est oboedientiae, quam meliorem sacrificio esse 

Dominus testatur, ipsam oboedientiam pro Domino subire et adimplere 

satagerit, perpetuae benedictionis hereditatem cum Abraham 

consequi delectatur, habet aquam tertiae hydriae in spiritale vinum 

conversam. 

11. Quarta aetate David gigantem proprio occidit gladio. Quid nobis 

auditum profuit? Sed Christus, per quem David significatur, antiquum 

hostem humani generis propria sua morte prostravit, nosque ab aeterna 

morte liberavit. Ecce, hic aquam quartaehydriae in vinum spiritalis 

intellegentiae conversam habemus! Quisquis igitur haec audiens, 

Christum imitari desiderans qui pro nobis mori dignatus est, non pro 


cum] cam ms. 


intelligentiae] corr. from intellentiae 

tradidit] letters obscured in ms. 

perpetuae] read et perpetuae? 


gladio] unclear in ms.


Christo corporis mortem subire necesse est, sed mori concupiscentiis 

carnis et desideriis huius mundi studeat, regnum a Christo percipiet 

sempiternum. 

12. Quinta aetate populus dei in Babylonia tenebatur captivus, et per 

Hiesum sacerdotem magnum eiusque socios ad terram repromissionis 

adductus. Hoc cum nobis dicitur quasi aquae saporem sentimus. 

Si ergo intellegimus quod totus mundus captivus tenebatur sub potestate 

diaboli, antequam per Iesum Christum liberaretur et [p. 46]vitae 

aeterne nobis ianuae panderentur, habemus aquam quintae hydriaein 

spiritalem conversam saporem. 

13. Sexta aetate Christus resurrexit a mortuis et ascendit in caelos. Significat 

quod deus pater, qui illum suscitavit a mortuis, omnes quoque 

credentes et in fide eius perseverantes a morte resuscitavit aeterna et 

consedere secum facit in caelesti regno cum Christo. 

14. Nobis ergo fratres karissimi, ut audistis, Christus fecit vinum de aqua, 

quando per sanctos doctores demonstravit quid spiritalis sensus in 

veteri lege latuit. Praeparemus ergo corda nostra ut digna sint accipere 

gratiam spiritalem. Mundemus corda et corpora nostra ab omni carnali 

concupiscentia. Abstineamus nos ab omni immunditia, teneamus 

fidem rectam, et totam spem nostram in dei promissionem et eius 

misericordiam dirigamus. Caritatem dei et proximi super omnia et in 

omnibus observemus. Deprecamur indesinenter misericordiam dei ut 

omnes actus nostros et desideria in suam dirigat voluntatem, et tota 

intentione cordis eius inhereamur preceptis, ut post hanc presentem vitam 

aeterna gaudia cum Christo et omnibus sanctis habere mereamur, 

per eum qui vivit et regnat deus per omnia saecula seculorum, Amen. 

1. 3. Marriage symbolism in the Beaune Homiliary 

This is another of the small number of known cases of marriage symbolism 

in early medieval popular preaching. 

MS Paris, BN Lat. 3794 

A parchment manuscript, 290ÿ185/190 mm., 169 folios, twelfth century, 

in ‘Plusieurs mains de style allemand’ according to the catalogue. 

The provenance is the Hôtel Dieu of Beaune. The manuscript contains 

homilies and sermons. 

Though for the sake of overall consistency I have maintained the policy 

of normalizing ‘n’ to ‘m’ in words where there is no standard medieval 

Description based on Biblioth›eque Nationale, Catalogue g‹en‹eral des manuscrits 

latins, vii. (Nos 3776 ›a 3835): Hom‹eliaires (Paris, 1988), 155–66 (a very full description), 

and on microfilm of the sermon.


orthography and the letter is often swallowed up in an abbreviation, it 

would not have been justified for this scribe alone as he has a distinct 

preference for ‘n’: e.g. for ‘inmutatio’ rather than ‘immutatio’. 

The Biblioth›eque Nationale catalogue classifies the manuscript under 

the general heading of ‘Hom‹eliaires’ and describes it as a ‘Sermonarium’. 

As noted in the text, the Beaune Homiliary seems to have been for 

popular preaching. 

‘O holy brothers’ in the final paragraph may suggest that this was at 

least originally addressed to monks. 

Fos. 5V–7R: 

Sermo post Epiphaniam 

1. Audivimus fratres carissimi cum sacrum legeretur evangelium quod die 

tertia nuptie facte sunt in Chana Galileae. Quae sunt ille nuptiae nisi 

nostra adquisitio? Quae sunt illa convivia, nisi nostrae salutis gaudia, 

quae die tertia facta sunt, quia tertio mundi tempore huius convivii 

facta est letitia? Nam unum fuit tempus nature, aliud celestium gratiae, 

quo Christus, ad nuptias invitatus, se ut latentem in homine deum, 

operum virtute detexeret, et ex volubilitate gentium stabilem sibi coniungeret 

sponsam. Sed inter nuptiales prophetarum simphonias, vinum 

gratiae deficiebat. Quod mater querimoniis [fo. 6r] agitcumfilio,utet 

filii gloria innotesceret, et convivis vinum suceret. Cui filius non indignando 

negavit, sed veritatem proferendo respondit: ‘Quid michi et 

tibi est mulier? Nondum venit hora mea.’ Ad quamdam horam in veritate 

rursum agnovit, quasi dixisset: ‘Quod de me facit miraculum, non 

tu genuisti, sed quia genuisti infirmitatem meam, tunc illam agnosces 

cum illa pendebit in cruce. Tunc et te cognoscam etiam ex illa natura 

quae mori non potest. Sed ante sunt discipuli eligendi; ante sunt sanitates 

perficiende; ante evangelium predicandum: et sic est humanitatis 

ostendenda infirmitas in passione, ut mox divinitatis potentia clarescat 

in resurrectione.’ 

2. Post haec tamen veritatis oracula, produnt deum pietatis miracula. Nam 

statuuntur hydriae sex, et insipide legis aqua implentur, quae mox 

in ferventis gratiae vina mutantur. Nec aquis aliquid minuitur, dum 

virtus saporis augetur. Ita legalis iota non solvitur, dum evangelicus 

apex apponitur, sed moriens legis littera, spiritu vivificatur gratiae. Et 

ideo ubi vinum defecit, Christus vinum fecit, quia umbra removetur, et 

veritas presentatur. Credit lex, et gratia succedit, carnalia spiritalibus 

commutantur, in novum testamentum observatio vetusta transfunditur, 

vetera transierunt, [fo. 6v] facta sunt omnia nova. Vino deficiente, vinum 

aliud ministratur, quia lex novum odorem vite reddidit in gratia, et quae 

in sola littera evanescit, spiritali intellectu reviviscit. 

se] om. ms.—conjecture


3. Sex autem hidriae ille, sex significant aetates, quae aetates quasi vasa 

inania permanent, nisi a Christo implerentur. In quibus singulis prophetiae 

non defuerunt de sponso et sponsa, quae in Christo manifestate, 

ad omnium gentium intendebant salutem. 

4. Quis in prima hydria per Adam et Eva figuratur, nisi Christus et aecclesia? 

Et quis in secunda monstratur, in qua Noe misticam regebat 

archam, nisi idem Christus in ligno crucis sponsam sibi aecclesiam 

ex omnibus coniungens gentibus? Et quis in tertia ostenditur hydria, 

ubi Abraham unicum ducebat ad immolandum, nisi unicus filius dei 

traditus a deo patre, pro salute omnium immolandus? Qui crucem 

passionis suae, ut Isaac ligna, propriis portavit humeris? Et quis per 

David in quarta designatur hydria, nisi Christus noster bellator, qui 

superbissimum diabolicae potentiae caput suo potentissimo mucrone 

truncavit? Cui dictum est per eumdem David ex quo carnem habuit: 

‘Exurge deus, iudica terram: tu hereditabis in omnibus gentibus’ (Ps. 

81: 8). In quinta hydria Danihel vidit lapidem precisum de monte sine 

manibus, et fregisse omnia regna terrarum (Daniel 2 esp. 34 @ 44–5). 

Lapis iste est quem reprobaverunt aedificantes: [fo. 7r] in caput anguli 

factus est (Ps. 117: 22), qui facit utraque unum, et non est in alio aliquo 

salus (Act. 4: 12). Sexta hydria Iohannes Baptista clamat: ‘Ecce agnus 

dei! Ecce qui tollit peccata mundi’ (John 1: 29). 

5. Ad Christum vero et advocationem gentium sex hydriarum prophetiae 

pertinebant, quae singule metretas binas vel ternas tenebant, et vel in 

preputio et circumcisione, vel in tribus mundi divisionibus designantur, 

quia Christus sponsus ex omni gente et ex omni genere hominum sibi 

unam sponsam eligere venit, cui gratie vinum miscuit, quod ab architriclino, 

id est, sanctorum choro doctorum, probatur, et omnibus prioris 

seculi deliciis prefertur: quia in prophetia umbra tegebat, in evangelio 

veritas aperuit; in illa figuratio, in hoc manifestatio; illa predixit, 

hoc retexit; illa promisit, hoc reddidit. Ideo obtimum servatum vinum, 

usque dum venit auxilium divinum, et factus est liber, qui fuit servus. 

Et non solum de penali ereptus est miseria, sed etiam caelesti insertus 

est felicitati. Ecce vera, carissimi, ecce predicanda miracula, quaeinnos 

cotidie clementia gerit divina, quando de filiis tenebrarum filios lucis 

ecit. Haec est vero ‘immutatio dextere excelsi’ (Psalm 76: 11), quod 

ipse in nobis, O fratres sancti, ecere dignetur, qui cum patre et spiritu 

sancto vivit et regnat deus per omnia secula seculorum, Amen. 

sponsa] sponsae ms. 

traditus] traditur ms. 

designantur] designatur ms. 

hoc] illa ms.


1. 4. Nonconformist variants in Hugues de Saint-Cher 

This extract, together with Documents 1. 5–8, illustrates the argument in 

Chapter 1 that many sermon manuscripts were written by intelligent users 

(like friars) rather than scribes working for pay, who would have not felt 

entitled to modify the text as if it belonged to them. This implies an army 

of friars and other such people copying sermon manuscripts, alongside 

paid scribes, so that there was a double labour force that can explain the 

large number of sermon manuscripts which must have been in circulation. 

text 

13/1/ Primum est ut sit iusta et in se discreta per refrenationem illicitorum 

et punitionem uitiorum. /2/ Osee ii (19): ‘Sponsabo te michi in iustitia et 

iudicio’—ecce primum quo ad se; et bene addidit ‘in iudicio’, quia sine discretione 

et iudicio iustitiam exercere de carne non prodest. /3/ Eccli. xxxiii 

(31): ‘Si est tibi servus fidelis, sit tibi quasi anima tua’, etc. 14/1/ Secundum 

est ut sit misericors et leta quoad familiam et amicos sponsi. /2/ Unde 

sequitur in auctoritate premissa: ‘in misericordia et miserationibus’—ecce 

secundum quoad proximum, ut dicatur misericordia in compassione cordis 

et miseratio in exibitione operis. 

(For a translation, see Medieval Marriage Sermons, 159.) 

free variants 

13/1/ iusta . . . uitiorum] munda et iusta in se per resecationem illicitorum et discreta 

ad aliqua licitorum M in se] tamen Be refrenationem] districtionem Vo 

13/2/–14/2/ (all)] Unde sponsabo te michi in iustitia et iudicio—ecce prima duo.—Ut 

sit misericors et leta quo ad familiam et amicos sponsi. Unde sequitur: In misericordia 

et miserationibus. Ecce tertium. Misericordia notatur in cordis compassione, 

miseratio in exibitione operis M 

1. 5. Nonconformist variants in Jean de la Rochelle 

See introductory comments on 1. 4. 

text 

4/1/ Secunde nuptie significate sunt in desponsatione Ysaac cum Rebecca, 

Gen. xxiiii, et ibidem (Gen. 24: 63) dicitur quod Ysaac exivit in agro ad 

meditandum, et ideo per ipsum significatur spiritus, qui ad meditandum 

exivit in agro contemplationis, in quo est proprie meditatio. 


free variant 

significatur . . . meditatio] significantur nuptie spectantes ad meditandum in agro 

contemplationis, ad quem agrum exire oportet Mu


1. 6. Nonconformist variants in Pierre de Saint-Beno^§t 


text 

9/1/ Cuius matrimonii convivium celebratur cotidie in convivio eucharistie. 

/2/ Sed iste nuptie non solum habent convivium in presenti, sed etiam 

in futuro. /3/ Ita enim sollempnes sunt quod nec in presenti nec in futuro 

deficiunt, sed in presenti habent quasi prandium matutinum, in futuro 

quasi cenam vespertinam, et ille sunt nuptie eternales. 


free variants 

9/1/ convivio] sacramento M eucharistie] Quarte nuptie sunt nuptie glorie added in 

Pv: Quarte sunt nuptie eternales added in V,whichomits9/2–3/ 9/2–3/ (all)]Sed 

iste nuptie non solum habent convivium in presenti, sive prandium matutinum, sed 

in futuro habent quasi cenam, et iste sunt nuptie eternales M 9/3/ deficiunt] 

desinunt Pv et ille . . . eternales] Item quarte sunt nuptie eternales Wi 

1. 7. Nonconformist variants in G‹erard de Mailly 


text 

31/1/ Propter quod preceptum est in Levit. 21 (13–14) quod sacerdos, id 

est Christus, ‘virginem ducat uxorem; viduam autem et repudiatam et sordidam 

et meretricem non accipiat’. /2/ Per ‘meretricem’ intelligitur anima 

que omnibus immunditiis et peccatis mortalibus se exponit. /3/ Per ‘sordidam’, 

illa que, licet a peccatis mortalibus se abstineat, adhuc habet sordidas 

a·ectiones, quia adhuc nimium acitur circa temporalia. /4/ De qua dicitur 

Tren. primo (9): ‘sordes eius in pedibus eius’. /5/ Per ‘repudiatam’ 

intelligitur anima que licet non aciatur circa temporalia uel carnalia, hoc 

tamen non est quia ea repudiaverit, immo potius quia ab ipsis repudiata 

est; et libenter se ingereret adhuc si posset recipi—sicut lecatores nutriti 

in curiis, quando eiciuntur per unum hostium, redeunt per aliud. /6/ Per 

‘viduam’ intelligitur anima cui mundus mortuus est, sed non ipsa mundo, 

que adhuc libenter de mundanis et carnalibus loquitur et cogitat, sicut 

vidua de marito mortuo, licet fuerit ei pessimus. 

(For a translation, see Medieval Marriage Sermons, 265 and 267.) 

free variants 

31/1/ Propter . . . 21] Leui. xxi precipitur P7 Propter quod] Propter hoc Pr 

31/2–6/ (all) Vidua appellatur anima peccatrix que separata est a Christo. Repudiata, 

quia derelicta a deo. Sordida, quia maculata peccato. Meretrix, quia exposita 

dyabolo P7 31/2/ mortalibus] etiam mortalibus Pr 31/3/ adhuc] tamen 

adhuc Pr 31/5/ aciatur] multum aciatur Pr immo] sed Pr


1. 8. Nonconformist variants in Guibert de Tournai 


text 

15/1/ Debet autem sponsa que vocatur ad has nuptias esse casta quo ad 

carnis aut saltem mentis integritatem, quia, Levit. xxi (10–13), summus 

pontifex ducit tantum virginem. 


free variant 

15/1/ (all)] Sed advertendum quod anima sive sponsa que ad has nuptias invitatur 

debet esse multipliciter ornata, scilicet anima [natura ms.?] debet esse casta quo ad 

carnis et mentis integritatem; debet esse discreta per veram humilitatem; debet esse 

maxime libera per ipsam caritatem. Primo dico quod anima debet esse, etc. A2 

1. 9. A sermon on marriage by Jean Halgrin d’Abbeville 

This sermon emphasizes marriage symbolism and at the same time the 

goodness of marriage on the human and literal level. The sermon and 

collection belong to the ‘model sermon’ genre. To judge from the date of 

manuscripts of it that I have seen over the years, the collection seems to have 

been popular in the generation immediately before the friars’ collections 

became widely di·used: indeed, it was possibly the most popular of its 

generation. Jean Halgrin d’Abbeville was a learned member of the secular 

clergy and a trusted agent of papal policy. A generation later he might well 

have been a friar. 

MS BL Arundel 132 

A parchment manuscript, 315ÿ194 mm., last folio number 145, 2 columns, 

probably second quarter of the thirteenth century. Palmer, Zisterzienser, 

puts it in the third quarter, but the writing is above the top 

line, and where the ‘a’ has two compartments, the top one is not closed, so 

a slightly earlier date is more probable. Note the reversed-‘c’ ‘con-’ sign, 

another early indication except with German manuscripts (there seems 

no reason to think that this book was made in Germany, though it ended 

up in the library of the Cistercian monastery of Eberbach). From spot 

checks at the beginning and end, it seems that the manuscript is filled 

Second sermon on the text Nuptie facte sunt (J. B. Schneyer, Repertorium der 

lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters f•ur die Zeit von 1150–1350 (11 vols.; M•unster, 

1969–90), iii. 512, Johannes Halgrinus de Abbatisvilla, no. 32). 

Description based on personal examination, and on N. F. Palmer, Zisterzienser 

und ihre B•ucher: Die mittelalterliche Bibliotheksgeschichte von Kloster Eberbach im 

Rheingau unter besonderer Ber•ucksichtigung der in Oxford und London aufbewahrten 

Handschriften (Regensburg, 1998), 282.


with the Sermones de tempore of Jean Halgrin/‘Johannes Halgrinus de 

Abbatisvilla’. 

Fos. 23VA–24RB: 

1. ‘Nuptie facte sunt in Chana Galilee, et erat mater Iesu ibi’, etc. Prima 

est inter religiones matrimonium, quod Dominus noster instituit in 

paradyso, et ante peccatum, et nuptias sua presentia honoravit, et 

signorum suorum initio, quod fecit coram discipulis suis. Declaratur 

autem et religio matrimonii designatione loci, in quo facte sunt nuptie, 

et miraculi qualitate. Facte sunt quidem nuptie in Chana, vico Galylee. 

Chana zelus interpretatur, et proprie zelus est amor coniugis ad coniugem. 

Zelatur enim alter alterum tamquam sibi soli proprium, et 

in hoc fides coniugii designatur. Galylea transmigratio interpretatur, 

et in coniugio unus coniugum transmigrat in alterius potestatem, dicente 

Apostolo, prima ad Chor. vii (4): ‘vir non habet potestatem sui 

corporis, sed mulier’, et e converso. 

2. Aque in vinum muta tio [fo. 23vb] significat quod tantum debet distare 

vita coniugatorum a vita ante coniugium, quantum distat aqua a vino, 

quoniam carnalis societas ante coniugium comparatur aque, que fluit 

sine ordine. Inordinatus est enim cursus fluvii et distortus. Vinum 

vero non sine ordine fluit, sed cum ordine et mensura, et significat 

coniunctionem viri et mulieris in matrimonio. Nam in carnali commixtione 

matrimonii, tempus, locus, voluntas, et actus: omnia debent 

esse ordinata. 

3. ‘Mater Iesu erat ibi’: in quo ostenditur castitas et fecunditas. Non enim 

propter fecunditatem in matrimonio perit castitas. De qua dicit angelus 

ad Thobiam, reddens rationem quare diabolus interfecisset vii viros 

qui Saram filiam Raguel duxerant, dicens (Tob. 6: 14): ‘Hii namque 

qui ita suscipiunt coniugium ut deum a sua mente excludant, et libidini 

vacent, in hiis potestatem habet demonium’. Et iterum Tobias viii (9) 

orans ad Dominum ait: ‘Et vero Domine, tu scis quod non libidinis 

causa accipio sororem meam, sed sola dilectione posteritatis, in qua 

nomen tuum sit benedictum in secula.’ Hoc etenim fine desideranda 

est posteritas, ut educatur proles ad cultum dei, et parentes filios, 

quos genuerunt ad huius seculi miseriam, per malam doctrinam non 

generent ad gehennam. 

4. ‘Vocatus est Iesus et discipuli eius ad nuptias’, ostendens qui debeant 

vocari ad convivium nuptiale, scilicet pauperes et boni, non scurre et 

‘Chana “zelus” vel “emulatio” vel “possedis eos” aut “possessio eorum”’ (MS 

BL Add. 31,830, fo. 447RA). 

‘Galilea “rota” vel “volubilis” sive “transmeans” aut “transmigratio mea”’ (ibid., 

fo. 452RA). 

With apl’ in margin 

viii] vii ms.


hystriones. Sed hodie, sicut habetur in Exodo viii, Egypti rane intrant 

in cibos pharaonis, scilicet hystriones garruli et clamosi qui intrant in 

reliquias ciborum et vestimentorum nobilium que debent pauperibus 

erogare. 

5. Nuptie iste significant nuptias divinitatis et humanitatis in utero virginis 

celebratas. In hiis nuptiis erat vinum quamdiu apostoli gaudebant 

de presentia sponsi, dicente Domino in Matheo ix (15): ‘Non possunt 

filii nuptiarum lugere quamdiu cum eis presens est sponsus. 

6. Defecit vinum cum Dominus, transiturus ad patrem, dixit eis, Ioh. xvi 

(20): ‘Amen, dico vobis, plorabitis et flebitis, mundus autem gaudebit; 

vos contristabimini’; conversa est aqua in vinum cum dixit: ‘Tristitia 

vestra vertetur in gaudium’. 

7. Item hee nuptie significant nuptias Christi et fidelis anime, quod matrimonium 

describit, Osee ii (20 @ 19), dicens: ‘Sponsabo te in fide; 

sponsabo te in iustitia et iudicio et in misericordia et miserationibus; 

sponsabo te in sempiternum’. Ter dicit ‘sponsabo’ ut ostendat illud 

matrimonium initiatum, ratum et consummatum. 

8. Initiatur enim in fide, per quam anima dei sponsa ecitur, anulo fidei 

subarrata, de quo Ihere. ii (32): ‘Numquid obliviscetur virgo ornamenti 

sui, id est, anuli desponsationis sue, aut sponsa fascie pectoralis 

sue’, tu autem ‘oblita es mei in diebus innumeris’. Arguit animam que, 

oblita anuli de sponsationis, [fo. 24ra] fidem non servat coniugii, cum 

mulieres consueverint servare anulum desponsationis sue toto tempore 

vite sue’. 

9. Ratum et consumatum ecitur hoc matrimonium ‘in iustitia et iudicio 

et misericordia et miserationibus’. Iudicium est in discussione boni et 

mali et duorum malorum inter se; iustitia in punitione culpe. Sunt 

multi qui bene iudicant, sed non sunt boni iustitiarii: peccata sua condempnant 

sed districte non vindicant. Unde Ysaias xxviii (17) ‘Ponam 

iudicium in pondere et iustitiam in mensura’. Iudicium quasi in statera 

diiudicat pondera, et penam culpe commensurat iustitia. Misericordia 

est in eorumdem compassione. Miseratio, in beneficii datione. Et precedit 

misericordia miserationem. Unde ‘iustus miseretur et tribuet’ 

(Ps. 36: 21), et ‘plus est compati ex corde quam dare’, sicut dicit Gregorius. 

Consumatur autem matrimonium in eternitate, sed in quo sit 

consumatio non dicit propheta Osee, sed hoc tantum: ‘Sponsabo te in 

sempiternum’, ostendens quod ine·abilis est consumati matrimonii 

beata delectatio. 

10. In hiis nuptiis vinum deficit, scilicet amor huius seculi inebrians, de 

quo Ysa. xvi (10) ‘Auferetur letitia et exultatio de Carmelo’. Carmelus, 

nuptiarum] sponsi in Vulgate 

consummatum] confirmatum ms. 

xxviii] xxii ms. 

Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, 36 (Migne, PL 76. 180).


‘mons fertilis’, significat sterilitatem bonorum temporalium, et interpretatur 

‘mollis’ vel ‘tener’, et ‘ab omni rigore per delicias dissolutus’: 

a quibus auferetur letitia et exultatio, data ipsis gratia penitentie. Sequitur 

(ibid.): ‘vinum non culcabit in torculari’. Qui calcare consueverat, 

calcans in torculari multo labore vinum exprimit, et seipsum 

totum polluit in exprimendo: et amator huius seculi vix a suis laboribus 

modicum delectationis exprimet, et hoc non habebit sine peccati 

macula. 

11. ‘Deficiente vino dicit mater Iesu: “Vinum non habent”. Et ait Iesus: 

“Quid michi et tibi est, mulier?”’, quasi dicat: ‘Quid a te accepi, per 

quod vinum eis miraculose dare possim? A te quidem accepi carnem 

que velut uva premetur in cruce, et fluet vinum sanguinis mei: sed 

numdum venit hora, quia nondum Iudas extendit calcaneum super 

uvam. Siquidem beata virgo vitis. Unde in Ecc(li) xxiiii (23) habetur: 

‘Ego quasi vitis fructificavi suavitatem odoris, et flores mei fructus 

honoris et honestatis’, scilicet Christum, qui duo attulit unguenta, 

unum contra infirmitatem anime, aliud contra infirmitatem corporis. 

Sanavit enim infirmitatem anime unguento gratie remittentis peccata, 

et sanabit infirmitatem corporis immortalitatis et incorruptibilitatis 

unguento. Unde in Cant(ico canticorum) (1: 2–3): ‘in odore unguentorum 

tuorum curremus; adolescentule dilexerunt te nimis’. Bene dicit 

‘in odore’. Semper enim canis venaticus nasum habet in odore illius 

fere quam querit. In hunc modum, qui querit Dominum ab odore 

suavitatis eius non recedit, donec invenerit et plene perceperit quod 

intendit. 

12. Sequitur: ‘Dicit Iesus: “Implete ydrias aqua”’. Ydrie sunt corda nostra, 

ab ‘ydor’, quod est aqua. Non enim debent esse corda nostra 

vasa vinaria, sed aquatica, lacrimis scilicet compunctionis plena, non 

[fo. 24rb] vino terrene delectationis, et debent impleri ydrie iste usque 

ad summum, quia in pleno non amplius apponi potest, in semipleno 

autem potest, quia si plenum fuerit cor hominis lacrimis contritionis, 

non poterit diabolus infundere venenum prave suggestionis. 

13. Sex autem ydrie dicte sunt propter sex facies sive peccatorum latera, 

que designantur in sex lateribus lapidis quadrati, de quibus in Trenis 

(3: 9): ‘conclusit vias meas lapidibus quadris’. Sunt enim peccatis 

propriis concluse vie peccatoris, ut clausus peccati carcere prodire 

non possit cum voluerit. Sex autem peccati latera sunt consensus in 

I have checked a thirteenth-century version of the Interpretationes nominum 

Hebraicorum, but found only the following, an imperfect match: ‘Carmelus “mollis” 

vel “tenellus” sive “cognoscens circumcisionem” aut “scientia circumcisionis”’ (MS 

BL Add. 31,830, fo. 446RA). 

calcaneum] calneum ms. 

Siquidem] ms. unclear 

curremus] Vulgate: currimus ms.


peccatum, consuetudo vel iteratio mali operis, gloriatio de peccato, 

excusatio peccati, postremo desperatio venie vel nimia presumptio 

venie, que peccandi securitatem inducit. 

14. Capiunt autem singule ydrie metretas binas vel ternas. Due metrete 

sunt contritio et confessio, que suciunt exeuntibus de seculo. Tres 

metrete sunt confessio, contritio, satisfactio, que manentibus in hac 

vita sunt necessaria. 

15. Igitur ydrie cordium, que sex varietatibus peccatorum deformantur, 

predictis aquis per compunctionem impleri iubentur. Si autem hiis 

aquis implete fuerint ydrie iste, Dominus aquas convertet in vinum et 

tristitiam penitentie commutabit in gaudium et letitiam felicitatis, et 

glorie sempiterne. Quod nobis prestare dignetur, etc. 

1. 10. A sermon on marriage by Konrad Holtnicker 

This sermon also illustrates the combination of marriage symbolism and 

emphasis on the holiness of marriage on a literal and human level. The 

sermon and collection belong to the ‘model sermon’ genre. The author 

was a thirteenth-century German Franciscan. 

MS Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 2946 (=M), with 

occasional corrections from MS Paris, BN lat. 3742 ( =P) 

M is a parchment manuscript, ‘in 4O’, of 308 folios. The catalogue dates 

it to the fourteenth century; I would put it in the first or even second 

half of the thirteenth. In addition to the ‘de tempore’ sermon collection 

from which this comes, and what looks from the description like an 

index applying the sermons to liturgical slots, it contains the ‘Liber 

scintillarum’, presumably the work by Defensor of Li›ege. It came to the 

Staatsbibliothek from the Bridgettine nunnery of Altm•unster. 

There is an exemplary scholarly description of P in Biblioth›eque Nationale, 

Catalogue g‹en‹eral des manuscrits latins, vi.(Nos 3536 ›a 3775B) 

(Paris, 1975), 701–5. 

M,fo.28RA–VA, corrected from P, fos.xR–xiR: 

1. ‘Nuptie facte sunt’ et cetera, Io. 2 (1). Nota quod sunt nuptie ociose, 

perniciose, gratiose, gloriose. Prime sunt viri et mulieris cohabitantis, 

secunde sunt anime peccantis et dyaboli, tertie sunt Christi et ecclesie 

militantis, quarte sunt Christi et ecclesie triumphantis. 

2. Prime igitur sunt nuptie ociose viri et mulieris contrahentis. Tob. 9 

(12): Cum timore Domini nuptiarum convivium exercebant. Expone 

Schneyer, Repertorium, i. 751, ‘Conradus Holtnicker de Saxonia OM’, no. 54. 

Description based on Hahn et al., Catalogus codicum Latinorum Bibliothecae 

Regiae Monacensis, i/2. 52, and on a microfilm printout of the sermon. 

Tob. 9] Iob. 49 M.


hystoriam quomodo 7 viros Sare demonium occidit, et quomodo tribus 

noctibus orationi vacabant. 

3. Has nuptias honoravit Dominus quadrupliciter: scilicet: 

4. Institutione. Institute enim sunt non a vili persona, non ab homine, 

non ab angelo, sed a deo. Institute sunt non in vili loco, non in stabulo, 

non in angulo, sicut iam fiunt clandestina matrimonia, sed in paradyso. 

Institute sunt non in statu culpe, sed innocentie, non post lapsum 

hominis, sed ante. Sed heu, modo post multos lapsus et fornicationes 

multi contrahunt. 

5. Associatione, quia Iesus et mater et discipuli eius in nuptiis erant, non 

histriones, non corizantes, ut modo. 

6. Operatione, quia in nuptiis aquam in vinum convertit. Sed heu, modo 

magice artes non divine exercentur in nuptiis. 

7. Significatione. Eph. 5 (32): Sacramentum hoc magnum est. Augustinus: 

Bone sunt nuptie in quibus tanto sunt meliores coniugati, quam 

castiores ac fideliores deum timent, maxime si filios carnaliter desiderant, 

spiritualiter nutriunt. 

8. Secunde sunt nuptie perniciose, scilicet dyaboli et anime peccantis. 

1 Macc. 9 (41): ‘Converse sunt nuptie in luctum et vox musicorum 

in lamentum’. Nota hystoriam, quomodo filii Zambri cum tympanis 

et musicis adduxerunt sponsam filiam unam de magnis principibus 

Chanaan, super quos irruit Ionathas et interfecit eos. Zambri 

Luciferum significat. Interpretatur enim ‘dies amaricans’. Lucifer 

autem ante lapsum dies fuit, post lapsum vero amaricans totum 

mundum. Sap. 2 (24) ‘Invidia dyaboli mors intravit in orbem’, etc. 

Huius filii sunt demones, non natura sed imitatione. Ps. (143: 11): 

‘Erue me de manu filiorum alienorum’. Chanaan mundum significat. 

Interpretatur enim ‘commutatus’. Mutatio est autem mundi primo 

per aquam diluvii, in fine per ignem iudicii, medio autem tempore 

per aquam baptismi et ig nem [fo. 28rb] spiritus sancti. ‘Hec mutatio 

dextere excelse’ (Ps. 76: 11). Principes Chanaan sunt demones. Eph. 

6 (12): ‘Non est nobis colluctatio (adversus carnem et sanguinem: sed 

adversus principes, et potestates, adversus mundi rectores tenebrarum 

harum, contra spiritualia nequitie, in celestibus)’ etc. Anima ergo pec- 

enim sunt] sunt enim sunt M 

clandestina] clamdestina M 

nutriunt] nutriantur M: nutriant P 

Macc.] Mach. corrected from Mich. in M 

significat] signat is also a possible extension of the abbreviation 

‘Zambri, “iste lacescans” vel “iste amaricans”’ (MS BL Add. 31,830, fo. 470RA). 

amaricans] amorificans M 

2] 1 M 

‘Canaam “commutatus” vel “commutatio”’ (BL Add. 31,830, fo. 446RA). 

est autem] corrected from autem est in M


catrix filia est et sponsa dyaboli, que nunc dyabolo cum mundanis 

gaudiis adducitur. Sed Ionatha, id est Christo, in morte vel in iudicio 

superveniente mala societas dampnatione percutitur. Iob 21 (12–13): 

‘Tenent tympanum et cytharam’, etc., usque ‘et in puncto ad inferna 

descendunt’. In hiis nuptiis non aqua in vinum, sed vinum temporalis 

lascivie in aquam eterni fletus convertitur. Unde supra bene dicitur 

quod converse sunt nuptie in luctum. Bernardus: ‘Eia letare, iuvenis, 

in adolescentia tua, ut decedente pariter cum etate temporali letitia, 

succedat que te absorbeat eterna tristitia.’ 

9. Tertie sunt nuptie gratiose, Christi scilicet et ecclesie militantis. Mt 

22 (2): ‘Simile factum est regnum celorum homini regi qui fecit nuptias 

filio suo’, id est, Christo, cuius sponsa est ecclesia sive anima 

fidelis. Io. 3 (29): ‘Qui habet sponsam, sponsus est’. Sicut autem 

in nuptiis convivium constituitur, vestes et dona largiuntur, sic et 

Christus fecit, sicut signatum est Hester 2 (18), ubi dicitur quod iussit 

Assuerus ‘convivium preparari permagnificum pro coniunctione 

et nuptiis Hester’: ‘dona largitus est’, etc. Assuerus Christum, Hester 

ecclesiam significat, quam pro Vasti, id est synagoga reprobata 

assumpsit. Convivium permagnificum est in quo corpus suum ad 

comedendum et sanguinem ad bibendum dat. Largitus est etiam dona 

in cruce ubi sponsam duxit. Dedit enim corpus tortori, spiritum patri, 

matrem Iohanni, paradysum latroni. Sed postmodum etiam dedit 

dona. Spiritus sancti, Ps. (67: 19), dedit ‘dona hominibus’; vestes 

etiam dedit et nudus in cruce remansit. In hiis nuptiis aqua in vinum 

convertitur cum lacrimas doloris gratia spiritus sancti sequitur. Ps. 

(103: 15): ‘Vinum letificet cor hominis’. Crisostomus: ‘Dominus ipse 

est qui consolatur flentes, dolentes curat, penitentes informat’. 

10. Quarte sunt nuptie gloriose, Christi scilicet et ecclesie triumphantis. 

Mt. 25 (10): ‘Que parate erant, intraverunt cum eo ad nuptias’. 

Omnem iocunditatem et delectationem quam visus, auditus, gustus 

aut omnium hominum sensus omnes habent vel habebunt in omnibus 

cum] P:etiamM? 

21] 31 M 

Bernard of Clairvaux, Ep. 2. 10, in Sancti Bernardi opera, ed. J. Leclercq and 

H. Rochais, vii. Epistolae, I: corpus epistolarum 1–180 (Rome, 1974), 20–1. 

Tertie] Tertio M? 

constituitur] P: construitur M 

signatum] significatum also a possible extension of the abbreviation 

permagnificum] per manus per magnificum M 

significat] or signat 

Permagnificum] permagnum M? 

Spiritus sancti, Ps. dedit] P:Spiritums.deditM 

informat] corrected from format in M 

Not found. 

Quarte] iiii ms.


nuptiis mundi que fuerunt et sunt et erunt, incomparabiliter excedit 

gaudium nuptiale in celis. Apo. 19 (7): ‘Gaudeamus et exultemus et 

demus gloriam deo, quia venerunt nuptie agni’. In hiis nuptiis aqua in 

vinum con vertitur [fo. 28va] dum presens miseria in eternam iocunditatem 

et in eternas delicias commutatur. Ieronimus: ‘Miserie deliciis 

et delicie miseriis commutantur. In nostro arbitrio est vel divitem sequi 

vel Lazarum’. 

1. 11. A sermon on marriage by Servasanto da Faenza 

This text provides further illustration of the combination of marriage symbolism 

and emphasis on the holiness of marriage on a literal and human 

level. Regarding the goodness of human marriage, note the attack on contemporary 

dualist heretics, the ‘Patareni’, clearly the Cathars. The Aristotelian 

colouring and the formal logic are also a striking feature, untypical 

of thirteenth-century sermons generally, though the misnomer ‘scholastic 

preaching’ has tended to obscure the general pattern. Servasanto was a 

preacher active in Florence in the later thirteenth century. The unusually 

sophisticated lay audience there may have had a taste for rather intellectual 

sermons (more intellectual, paradoxically, than sermons for university 

audiences of the same period at Paris, where there was a genre distinction 

between preaching on the one hand and scholastic teaching with ‘quaestiones’, 

logic, and philosophy on the other). This Florentine milieu could 

have a·ected Servasanto’s perception of a lay congregation’s horizon of 

expectation, even though his sermon collection is not just intended for a 

Florentine public—it belongs to the genre of model sermon collections, 

containing texts meant to be preached by friars and other preachers to 

congregations anywhere. 

MS Troyes, Biblioth›eque Municipale 1440 

Parchment manuscript, ‘In-quarto’, 372 folios, two columns, coloured 

initials. The manuscript is probably Italian, because it has the distinctive 

Italian superscript ‘r’ abbreviation, which looks like an ‘a’with the 

convertitur] concealed by crease but supplied from sense 

Jerome, Epistola 48, para. 21 (Migne, PL 22. 511). 

Schneyer, Repertorium, v. 378, ‘Servasanctus de Faenza OM’, no. 32. There is 

an incunable edition of this (1484), to which Carlo Delcorno and Nicole B‹eriou drew 

my attention. I have examined it in the Reuttlingen, shelfmark IB. 10693, ‘sermo 

xxxii’, but there is no reason to prefer it to the manuscript used here, which is a 

couple of centuries earlier. 

See D. L. d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Di·used from Paris 

before 1300 (Oxford, 1985), 76–7, 155 n. 2, 158. 

Description based on Minist›ere de l’‹education nationale, Catalogue g‹en‹eral des 

manuscrits des biblioth›eques publiques des d‹epartements (7 vols.; Paris, 1849–85), ii. 

Troyes (1855), 603, and on microfilm printout of the sermon.


top sliced o·, or like a ‘u’ (e.g. fo. 98RA, 10up,honorare) .Thetwocompartment 

‘a’ is sometimes closed and sometimes not, which suggests 

a date in the mid- to late thirteenth century. The many paragraph 

marks also place it in the second half of the century rather than earlier. 

The fairly ample space between the lines and relative regularity of the 

script are more characteristic of thirteenth- than fourteenth-century 

hands. 

The manuscript contains a collection of sermons on the epistles and 

Gospels of the liturgical year. 

Fos. 95VB–98VA: 

1. ‘Nuptie facte sunt in Chana Galilee, et erat mater Jesu ibi’, Io. 2 

(1). Tales sunt qui dampnant matrimonium quales sunt illi qui in 

die media impingunt in murum propter defectum luminis oculorum. 

Nam omni ceco ille magis cecus esse probatur qui oculos habens 

videre non sinitur. Adeo enim constat esse clarissimum, et veris testimoniis 

comprobatum, a deo esse matrimonium institutum, ut omni 

ceco fit cecior quicumque dicit contrarium. Nam matrimonium esse 

bonum probat natura; probat scriptura; et probant sanctorum exempla. 

2. Dico quod primum argumentum sumitur ex natura. Natura enim 

refugit omne superfluum, nec admittit aliquid diminutum. Unde nec 

habundat superfluis, nec deficit in necessariis, nec aliquid frustra facit, 

sicut omnis *phylosophya dicit. Ergo, si natura ad generationem facit 

membra apta et congrua, et fecit ea non superflua neque frustra, ergo 

generare est de intentione nature. Sed quod naturale est, peccatum 

non est, si fiat [fo. 96ra] eo modo quo institutum est. Actus ergo 

generative de se peccatum non est. Non ergo matrimonium malum 

est. 

3. Item sicut natura dedit homini potentiam nutritivam, sic dedit et generativam. 

Sed non peccat homo si debito modo et tempore congruo 

satisfaciat *nutritive. Ergo non peccat si debito modo a deo ordinato 

tempore congruo et loco debito satisfaciat generative. 

4. Item longe maius est et nobilius est et magis necessarium est speciem 

quam individuum conservare. Sed per generativam fit conservatio 

speciei, per nutritivam vero fit conservatio individui. Ergo universo 

magis est necessarius actus generative quam nutritive. Ergo si non 

peccatur in nutritiva, multo minus nec in generativa. 

5. Item, cuius finis bonus est, ipsum quoque bonum est. Sed finis generative 

est ad cultum dei filios generare et divinum esse in successionibus 

conservare. Et constat hoc bonum esse. Ergo et bonum est generare. 

comprobatum] comprobatur ms. 

nec] om. ms.


Phylosophus: Ad hoc data est homini vis generativa ut conservetur 

esse divinum. 

6. Item, matrimonium esse ex instinctu nature [fo. 96rb] docent omnes 

sensibiles creature. Quis docuit omnia animalia aquatica, aerea, et 

terrea ut coniungantur bina, masculus et femina? Quis docuit ipsa animalia 

masculina esse zelotipa et unumquodque bellare pro sua femina? 

Quis docuit ipsa animalia masculina vindicare adulteria? Nonne leo 

pardum mortaliter odit, et eum persequitur et occidit, quia cum leena 

concumbit? Et ipsam suam feminam dum adulterium sentit, quod flatu 

cognoscit, verberibus acit, et quandoque interimit? Quis docuit ciconiam 

masculam femine fidem thori servare, et in ea adulterum concubitum 

vindicare, quod ex solo cognoscit odore? Quis docuit turturem 

tantam fidem coniugi marito servare, ut eo mortuo nulli umquam alteri 

se coniungat, sed omnem societatem refugiat, sola semper incedat, 

et amissum comparem semper gemat? Quis marinos pisces instruxit 

ut inter eos nulla adulteria committantur, sed sic unusquisque suo 

compari iungitur, ut numquam alteri uniatur? 

7. Hec est igitur lex illa, quam natura docuit omnia animantia. Ex instinctu 

ergo nature sunt matrimonia, [fo. 96va] et ideo iusta et sancta, 

si debito fuerint modo servata. 

8. Secundo patet hoc ipsum ex divina scriptura. Nam dicitur Mt. 19 (4) 

quod deus ab initio masculum et feminam fecit eos. Sed non frustra 

fecit eos in sexu distinctu, non incassum. Precepit eis ut crescerent, 

cum crescere nisi per mutuam coniunctionem non possent. Ergo ad 

hoc eos sic fecit, ut mutuo se coniungerent. 

9. Item si matrimonium malum esset, eius separatio bona est, quia cuius 

coniunctio mala est, eius divisio bona est. Sed Dominus dicit matrimonium 

preter adulterium nulla esse causa alia separandum. Ergo matrimonium 

non est malum. Et est malum vel bonum. Ergo est bonum. 

Minor probatur Mt. 19 (3–9), ubi pharisei querentes dixerunt: ‘Si licet 

homini dimittere uxorem suam quacumque ex causa?’ Quibus Dominus 

ait: ‘Non legistis quia qui fecit homines, ab initio, masculum et 

feminam fecit eos? Propter quod’, inquit, ‘dimittet homo patrem et 

Perhaps Arist. De anima, 415a–b, in William of Moerbeke’s translation, 2. 7 

(Sancti Thoma Aquinatis . . . opera omnia, iussu Leonis XIII P.M. edita, xlv/1. 

Sentencia libri de anima, ed. [R.-A. Gauthier] (Rome, 1984), 95 (the editor, who 

modestly left his name o· the title-page, gives a critical edition of William of Moerbeke’s 

translation of Aristotle as well as of Aquinas’s commentary); Aristotle’s De 

anima in the Versions of William of Moerbeke and the Commentary of Thomas Aquinas, 

ed. and trans. K. Foster, S. Humphries, and I. Thomas (London, 1951), 210. 

terrea] read terrena? 

Quis . . . femina] supplied in margin 

servare] supplied in margin 

Set non frustra fecit eos] supplied in margin 

est] read esset?


matrem et adherebit uxori sue, et erunt duo in carne una.’ [fo. 96vb] 

Et subdit: ‘Quos ergo deus coniunxit, homo non separet.’ Et illi e 

contra dixerunt: ‘Quid ergo Moyses mandavit dari libellum repudii 

et dimitti?’ Et Dominus: ‘Ad duritiam cordis vestri permisit vobis 

*dimittere uxores vestras. Ab initio autem non sic fuit. Dico ergo vobis 

quia quicumque dimiserit uxorem suam nisi ob causam fornicationis, 

et aliam duxerit, mechatur.’ Quid istis expressius? Quid apertius? Est 

igitur cecus qui doctrine tam aperte et solutioni tam solide a doctore 

veritatis date nititur contraire. 

10. Item Apostolus 1 Cor. 7 (2): ‘Bonum est’, inquit ‘homini mulierem non 

tangere. Sed propter fornicationem unusquisque suam uxorem habeat, 

et unaqueque suum virum.’ Nunc quero: aut propter fornicationem 

vitandam, aut faciendam? Non utique faciendam, quia ipse alibi prohibet, 

1 Cor. 6 (18): ‘Fugite fornicationem’. Ergo uxorem haberi concedit 

propter fornicationem vitandam. Ergo dum uxor cognoscitur, 

peccatum vitatur. Matrimonium igitur bonum esse probatur. [fo. 97ra] 

Nec te moveat quod dicit: ‘bonum est mulierem non tangere’ (1 Cor. 7: 

1). Vult enim dicere quod melius est caste vivere quam non continere. 

Unde subdit (1 Cor. 7: 9) ‘Volo omnes homines esse sicut ego sum’, 

unde ‘bonum est si sic permaneant sicut ego’, sed ‘si non continent, 

nubant: melius est’ inquit, ‘nubere, quam uri’. Et multa apertissima 

sunt ibi de materia ista. 

11. Item 1 Ti. v (11): ‘adolescentiores viduas devita’, et subdit (1 ad Tim. 5: 

14): ‘Volo ergo iuniores viduas nubere, filios procreare, matresfamilias 

esse’. Nichil istis apertius. Igitur errant qui matrimonium dampnant. 

Unde dicitur 1 Ti. 4 (1–3) ‘Spiritus manifeste dicit quia in novissimis 

temporibus discedent quidam a fide, attendentes spiritibus erroris et 

doctrinis demoniorum in ypocrisi loquentium mendacium, et cauteriatam 

habentium suam conscientiam, prohibentium nubere et abstinere 

a cibis quos deus creavit’. Manifestum est igitur quod omnes illi errant 

qui nuptias dampnant et cibos aliis comedere vetant. Sed ista faciunt 

Patareni. Isti igitur sunt illi heretici de quibus prophetavit spiritus 

Apostoli. 

12. Item, si nuptie male essent, Dominus ma las [fo. 97rb] esse docuisset, 

nec eas sua presentia decorasset, nec ibi comedisset, nec eas tam 

sollempni miraculo adornasset, nec matrem suam sanctissimam adesse 

permisisset. Ergo dum istis omnibus nuptias decoravit, bonas eas esse 

ostendit. 

13. Item canon dixit, et hoc per se notum existit, quod error cui non 

dimitti] dimittere in Vulgate 

Non utique faciendam] supplied in margin 

Note that the scribe uses both roman and arabic numerals for biblical chapters: 

the latter here, the former a couple of lines above. 

et doctrinis . . . conscientiam] supplied in margin


resistitur, approbatur, nec caret scrupulo societatis occulte qui manifesto 

facinori desinit obviare. Ergo, si matrimonium malum esset, 

cum Dominus presens esset, et non illi malo resisteret cum resistere 

posset, nec illud redargueret, cum doctor veritatis existeret, dum non 

impediebat malum, approbat. Sed hoc est impossibilissimum. Ergo, 

et primum: matrimonium scilicet esse malum. 

14. Item Apostolus, Ro. 1 (32), loquens de peccatis, sic in fine concludit 

quod ‘non solum facientes, sed qui consentiunt facientibus digni sunt 

morte.’ Sed consentire est tacere cum possis arguere. Sed si matrimonium 

malum erat, et Dominus redarguere poterat, et non redarguebat, 

ergo consentiebat, ergo peccabat, ergo filius mortis erat. Sed hoc impossibilissimum 

erat. Ergo matrimonium non est malum. 

15. Tertio probatur hoc ipsum per sanctorum exempla. Nam constat dominam 

nostram matrimonio Joseph fuisse coniunctam. Unde dicitur, 

Mt. 1 (20): ‘Ioseph fili David, noli timere accipere Mariam coniugem 

tuam’. Sed nulli matrimonialiter iuncta fuisset, si matrimonium 

malum esset. Ergo matrimonium bonum est. 

16. Item, si dicas matrimonium ratione carnalis copule, non in se, esse 

malum, quare domina nostra potuit matrimonialiter Ioseph iungi, sed 

non ab eo cognosci, contra dicitur Luc. 1 (6–7) quod Zacharias et uxor 

illius erant ambo iusti ante deum incedentes in omnibus mandatis 

Domini sine querela: et addiditur ibi quod sterilis erat Elysabeth. Sed 

sterilem se esse nescivisset nisi vir suus *eam cognovisset. Ergo non 

peccat eam cognoscens, quia si peccasset, iustus non fuisset. 

17. Item ibidem (13) dicitur: ‘Ne timeas’, inquit angelus, ‘Zacharia, quoniam 

exaudita est deprecatio [fo. 97vb] tua, et Elysabeth uxor tua pariet 

tibi filium’, etc. Sed filium non pareret nisi eam cognosceret; nec ad 

eam ipse accederet, nec angelus ei hoc diceret, si hoc esset peccatum. 

Ergo uxorem cognoscere causa prolis habende et ad cultum dei 

nutriende non est peccatum, sed potius magnum bonum. 

18. Item dicitur in Mt. (8: 14) quod Dominus intravit domum ubi socrus 

Petri tenebatur magnis febribus. Sed si socrus Petri erat, ergo eius 

filiam in uxorem Petrus habebat, nec eam ob Christi discipulatum 

dimiserat, quia Christus contrarium docebat. Non est ergo malum, 

sed bonum. 

19. In verbo premisso ostenduntur nuptie honorabiles: primo ex parte 

invitantium, secundo vero ex parte convivantium. Nam ad nuptias 

invitantes fuerunt sancti et Domini consobrini. Sed ad nuptias convivantes 

fuerunt sanctissimi, quia mater Domini, Christus et eius discipuli. 

Primum notatur cum dicitur (Io. 2: 1): ‘Nuptie facte sunt’, 

1] 2 ms. 

et] d’Avray: om. ms. 

nutriende] d’Avray: nutriendum ms. 

vero] supplied in margin


supple, a consobrinis. Secundum notatur cum additur (ibid.) ‘et erat 

mater Iesu ibi’ tunc. 

20. Ut ergo de carnalibus nuptiis nichil ultra dicamus, quia habun danter 

[fo. 98ra] iam diximus quantum ipse Dominus donare est dignatus, notandum 

est breviter quod Dominus noster triplices nuptias fecit. Nam 

primas nuptias celebravit in utero virginis per nostre nature assumptionem. 

Secundas nuptias celebravit in crucis patibulo per ecclesie sibi 

copulationem. Tertias nuptias fecit in celo per eternam refectionem. 

21. Dico quod primas nuptias Dominus fecit in virginis utero, dum nostram 

naturam assumpsit et sibi eam perpetuo copulavit. O quales 

nuptie fuerunt iste, quam humano generi pretiose, quam deliciose, 

quam amande, quam venerande, quantisve laudibus extollende! In 

quo rex noster nos magis potuit honorare, quam nostram naturam sibi 

in unitate persone unire, ut non sit alius Dominus, alius hominis filius, 

sed idem et unus simul homo et deus? O quanta gratia, quam ampla 

misericordia, quam caritas immensa, quia non angelos apprehendit, 

sed semen Abrae apprehendit. Et propterea ad [fo. 98rb] gaudendum 

invitamur, Apoc. 19 (7): ‘Gaudeamus’, inquit, ‘et exultemus, et demus 

gloriam deo, quia venerunt nuptie agni’, etc. 

22. Et vere dicuntur facte in Chana Galilee, quia et zelo amoris maximi 

factum est, ut ‘a summo celo esset egressio eius’ (Ps. 18: 7), et quia 

‘ipse tamquam sponsus esset procedens de thalamo suo’ (Ps. 18: 6). 

23. Secundas nuptias Christus fecit in ligno quando ecclesiam sanguine 

suo mundavit et eam sibi perpetuo federe copulavit. Hee nuptie quamvis 

fuerint sponso valde amare, nobis facte sunt valde proficue, dum 

nobis tradidit carnem in cibum, sanguinem in potum, et se totum in 

pretium. Unde dicitur ad Eph. v (25) ‘Sicut Christus dilexit ecclesiam’, 

etc. Et ideo de hiis nuptiis exponitur illud Mt. (22: 2) ‘Simile factum 

est regnum celorum homini regi qui fecit nuptias filio suo.’ Tunc enim 

deus pater nuptias filio suo fecit quando ei ecclesiam copulavit. 

24. Tertias nuptias Dominus fecit et facit in celo, dum suos dilectos sibi 

in gloria copulat. De [fo. 98va] torrente voluptatis sue satiat, et de vino 

sue ubertatis inebriat: Ps. (35: 9–10) ‘Inebriabuntur ab ubertate domus 

tue, et torrente voluptatis tue potabis eos, quoniam apud te est fons 

vite’. Et ideo ipse dicit in Luc. (14: 17) Ecce parata sunt omnia: venite 

ad nuptias. 

25. O felices nuptie, ubi omnes *convivantes sunt reges, ubi ferculum 

mense appositum est omne bonum et ubi ministrator est summum 

bonum. Et propterea dicitur, Apoc. (19: 9) ‘beati qui ad cenam agni 

vocati sunt’. 

26. Nonne illi vere beati sunt, cui omnia optata succedunt, omnia bona 

Paraphrase more than direct quotation. 

cui] quibus recte


apposita sunt, et omnia mala absunt? Ad hanc igitur cenam nos Dominus 

introducat, cui soli cum patre et spiritu sancto est honor et gloria 

in secula seculorum, Amen. 


(Schneyer no. 404) 

This sermon and the next one both illustrate the same main argument that 

marriage symbolism goes together with a highly positive presentation of 

marriage on the literal and human level. The two texts belong to the ‘model 

sermon’ genre. Like Servasanto, Aldobrandino likes quoting Aristotle. He 

too lived in the midst of a sophisticated Florentine public and it is probably 

no accident that these two preachers include much more philosophy in their 

sermons than was usual in their time among preachers based elsewhere. 

A glance at the notes will show, furthermore, that Aldobrandino draws 

much more learning into his preaching than any of the other preachers 

transcribed here, including Servasanto. 

MS Rome, Casanatense 4560 ( =C) 

In C the sermon is written in a clear expert hand, in two columns, with 

paragraph marks, perhaps in the first half of the fourteenth century. The 

scholarly catalogue of the Casanatense manuscripts that is in progress 

has not progressed as far as this one. 

Fos. 42VA–45RB: 

Dominica prima post octavas Epiphanie. De evangelio. 

1. Nuptie facte sunt in Cana Galilee, Io. secundo (1) [fo. 42vb] Secundum 

quod vult beatus Ieronimus super Ioanne, iste nuptie celebrantur 

pro Iohanne evangelista sponso, quem Iesus vocavit de hiis nuptiis, 

volentem nubere sponse carnis, quam non nominat. Vocatus autem est 

ad perpetuam virginitatem, unitus sponso deo, qui requirit spirituale 

connubium. Unde ea que in *evangelio ponuntur ad congruitatem 

nuptiarum carnalium, accipienda sunt ad necessitatem spiritualium, 

que sunt tria. Et primum est circumstantia temporis, quia ‘die tertio’. 

Schneyer, Repertorium, i, no. 404, p. 254. 

I use a siglum in the apparatus rather than ‘ms.’ because in Document 1. 13 I 

use this manuscript together with others. 

Cf. ps.-Jerome, Expositio quattuor evangeliorum, at the words ‘Discipulus, quem 

amabat Iesus’ (Migne, PL 30. 588); cf. E. Dekkers et al., Clavis patrum Latinorum, 

3rd edn. (Turnhout, 1995), no. 631, p. 219; K. Froelich and M. T. Gibson (eds.), 

Biblia Latina cum glossa ordinaria: Facsimile Reprint of the Editio Princeps, Adolph 

Rusch of Strassburg 1480/81 (4 vols.; Turnhout, 1992), iv, Prologue to John, p. 223 

(thanks to Patrick Nold for the reference). 

evangelista] evangelica C


Secundum est congruentia loci, quia ‘in Chana Galilee’. Tertium est 

presentia matris, quia ‘erat ibi mater Iesu’. 

2. Quo ad primum, attendendum quod ad spirituale connubium oportet 

attendere ternarium in ‘die’, et hoc quia anima maxime perficitur cum 

coniungitur suo principio, propter quod facta est, scilicet deo: sicut 

vestimentum est perfectum cum induitur et equus cum equitatur. 

Omnis autem perfectio consistit in quodam ternario:—sicut videmus 

perfectionem in divinis esse in ternario personarum patris et filii et 

spiritus sancti; in angelis, perfectionem in tribus ierarchiis et ter ternis 

ordinibus; in corporibus: longitudinem, latitu dinem [fo. 42va] etprofunditatem; 

in naturalibus: substantiam, virtutem et operationem; in 

moralibus: scire, velle et delectabiliter operari; in peccatoribus: concupiscentia 

carnis, concupiscentia occulorum et superbia vite; in medicina 

peccati: contritio, confessio, et satisfactio; in virtutibus: fidem, 

spem, et caritatem. Ergo, die tertio fit et perficitur connubium spirituale. 

3. Primo namque die inchoat fides, per cognitionem; secundo spes, per 

extensionem; tertio vero die perficit caritas per amplexativum amorem, 

per quam dicit (Cant. 3: 4): ‘Tenui eum nec dimittam’. Fides enim non 

potest cum deo perficere nuptias primo die, quia compatitur secum 

peccatum mortale, licet remaneat informis: nam ‘demones credunt et 

contremiscunt’ (Iacob. 2: 19). Item, secundo die non facit spes, quia 

etiam peccator potest habere eam. Sed tertio die facit caritas, quia 

qui adheret deo, unus spiritus est. Amor enim est virtus unitiva, et 

transformans amantem in amatum. Exemplum: sicut beatus Ignatius, 

desponsatus deo per amorem, non potuit a suo sponso nec tor mentis 

[fo. 43rb] nec morte separari ab eo, unde eum inter tormenta nominans 

occisus est, in cuius corde diviso inventum est nomen Iesu, unde 

Apostolus, Ro. 8 (38–9) ‘certus sum quod nec mors, nec vita, nec angeli 

poterunt nos separare a caritate dei, que est in Christo Iesu’. Et sic 

patet primum, scilicet circumstantia temporis. 

4. Secundo, oportet attendere quod sit congruentia loci, quia ‘in Chana 

Galilee’, quod interpretatur ‘zelus transmigrationis’. Unde oportet 

nos per zelum et amorem de hoc mundo transmigrare ad consummandum 

istud spirituale matrimonium, quod bene per Ysaac significatur, 

de quo adiuravit Habraam servum suum ne acciperet ei uxorem de filiabus 

terre in qua habitat, sed iret in Mesopotamiam Sirie, ut notatur 

Ge(n.) 24. Nam in mundo isto non potest fieri matrimonium. 

perfectum cum induitur] perfectivum cum induimur C 

contritio] contrititio C 

‘Chana “zelus” . . .’ (MS BL Add. 31,830, fo. 447RA). 

‘Galilea “rota” vel “volubilis”sive “transmeans” aut “transmigratio mea”’ (ibid., 

fo. 452RA). 

significatur] om. C


5. Primo, quia in mundo non est aliqua creatura que conveniat nostre 

nobilitati. Videmus enim quod deus unicuique creature dedit locum 

secundum suam nobilitatem: ut plantis terram; et quia pisces sunt nobiliores 

plantis, dedit eis nobiliorem locum, scilicet aquam; [fo. 43va]et 

quia aves sunt nobiliores piscibus, dedit eis nobiliorem locum, scilicet 

aerem; et illa que conveniunt in natura, conveniunt in locum, sicut 

plante omnes in terra, et omnes pisces in aqua, et omnes aves in aere. 

Homo autem habet similitudinem cum deo, quia ad eius similitudinem 

factus, ergo conveniens est quod conversetur cum deo in celo, propter 

suam nobilitatem, et ibi matrimonium faciat. Apostolus, Ph. 3 (20): 

‘Nostra conversatio in celis est’, id est, esse debet. Videmus enim quod 

peregrinus nobilis non libenter contrahit matrimonium in terra peregrinationis 

sue, specialiter si terra illa sit ignobilis, sed revertitur ad 

locum nativitatis sue, per quem modum Apostolus, volens connubium 

facere conveniens sue nobilitati, quia non habebat hic manentem civitatem, 

dixit (Philipp. 3: 13): posteriorum oblitus, ‘ad anteriora me 

extendo’. 

6. Secundo, quia mundus iste non competit nostre quieti. Nullus enim 

in mundo isto est bene quietus, eo quod mundus est semper in motu. 

Videmus autem quod qui est in re mota semper movetur ipse, sicut qui 

est in navi fluctuanti, fluctuat et ipse. Unde Augustinus: ‘Fecisti nos, 

Domine, [fo. 43vb] ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat 

in te.’ Unde Boetius dicit: ‘Quis est tam composite felicitatis qui non 

ex aliqua parte cum status sui qualitate rixetur?’ Et Gregorius: ‘Qui 

labenti innititur, necesse est ut cum labente labatur.’ 

7. Tertio, quia mundus iste non convenit nostre sanitati. Videmus enim 

quod locus est conservativus locati: sicut rosa quamdiu est in spina 

virens conservatur, sed in manu pallescit; et piscis in mari vel in aqua 

vivit, extra aquam moritur. Ita, in mundo isto tristamur, exurimur, 

sitimus, dolemus, infirmamur. Unde Augustinus dicit: ‘Quesivi in 

mente mea et non inveni locum anime mee, nisi te, deus, in quo colliguntur 

dispersa.’ In mundo enim isto nullus est qui habeat omnia 

omnes] supplied in margin 

dixit] .d. C 

Cf. Phil. 3: 13: ‘Unum autem, quae quidem retro sunt obliviscens, ad ea vero 

quae sunt prior, extendens meipsum’. 

Augustine, Confessions, 1.1(Migne,PL 32. 659). 

Boethius, Philosophiae consolatio,2.4.12(Anicii Manlii Severini Boethii Philosophiae 

consolatio, ed. L. Bieler (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 94; Turnhout, 

1984), 24). 

Not found under Gregory in the CD-ROM of Migne, PL, but see Peter of 

Blois, De XII utilitatibus tribulationis (Migne, PL 207. 994): ‘et inde consequi 

nullum bonum imo malum finem, secundum Gregorium, dicentem “Qui labenti 

innititur, necesse est ut cum labente labatur”’. 

Augustine, Confessions, 10. 40 (Migne, PL 32. 806).


bona sine aliquo malo. Aliqui enim sunt pulcri, et tamen pauperes; 

aliqui nobiles, sed mendici; aliqui divites et nobiles, sed infirmi; aliqui 

divites et nobiles et sani, sed sine liberis; aliqui autem, licet sint cum 

filiis, tamen habent eos insensatos, vel malos; et si sint boni, sunt brevis 

vite. Et ideo Boetius dicit: ‘Anxia est [fo. 44ra] conditio humanorum 

bonorum, que vel numquam tota proveniat, vel numquam perpetua 

subsistat’: sed in deo sunt omnia bona collecta sine aliquo malo’. 

Unde David (Ps. 16: 15): ‘Satiabor cum apparuerit gloria tua’. Exemplum 

de filio cuiusdam regis, qui intravit religionem. Cum autem 

pater voluit eum extrahere, dixit filius: ‘Libenter faciam, dum tamen 

faciatis quod in regno nostro non infirmentur ita nobiles sicut ignobiles’, 

cui cum pater diceret se non posse: ‘Et ideo volo properare ad 

illud regnum ubi nullus infirmatur.’ Quod pater audiens compunctus 

corde adquievit. Et sic patet secundum. 

8. Tertio, oportet quod sit presentia matris, scilicet Maria, que interpretatur 

‘maris amaritudo’, et significat penitentiam de peccatis. Nullus 

enim se potest de peccato excusare, quia sicut dicit Apostolus, Ro. 3 

(23) ‘Omnes peccaverunt et egent gratia dei’. Mare autem, sicut sapiens 

dicit, in superficie est amarum et salsum, quia calor solis trahit 

partes subtiles aque, et grosse remanentes aduruntur, et fiunt amare; 

profundum vero, quia calor solis non potest attingere nec agere, partes 

eius rema nent [fo. 44rb] dulces: sic penitentia in presenti quidem, sicut 

in superficie, est amara, sed in fundo, id est, in futuro, dulcis erit, quia 

recipiet fructum pacatissimum. Et ideo dicit Apostolus, Ad He(br.) xii 

(11) ‘Omnis pena in presenti quidem videtur non esse gaudii, sed 

meroris, sed in fine recipiet fructum pacatissimum’. 

9. Et convenienter penitentia etiam in presenti debet esse dulcis de peccato, 

quia ipsum peccatum infert multum dampnum, penitentia vero 

restituit dampnum. Ro(m): Peccatum enim tollit naturam. Nam 

homo est substantia *animata, sensibilis, rationalis. 

10. Sed peccatum primo tollit substantiam. Substantia enim dicitur quasi 

per se stans. Sed peccatum non per se stat, sed est ipsum nichil. Nichil 

enim est illud quod non includit finem, sicut dicitur de pomo putrido, 

quia nichil valet quia non includit debitum finem, scilicet manducationem. 

Ita peccatum dicitur nichil quia excludit a fine, scilicet a vita 

This echoes the sentiments though not the precise wording of Boethius, Philosophiae 

consolatio, 2. 4. 13–14, p. 24 Bieler. 

Boethius, Philosophiae consolatio 2. 4. 12, p. 24 Bieler. 

‘Maria . . . aut “mare amarum” . . .’ (MS BL 31,830, fo. 458VB). 

Cf. Aristotle’s Meteorology in the Arabico-Latin Tradition: A Critical Editon 

of the Texts, with Introduction and Indices, ed. P. L. Schoonheim (Leiden, 2000), 

tractatus secundus, 3, p. 72. 

pena] disciplina in Vulgate 

Not found: perhaps Aldobrandinus misremembered. A space is left in C.


eterna. Et ideo dicit Augustinus quod peccatum nichil est, et nichil 

fiunt homines cum peccant; et propheta (Ps. 72: 22): ‘Ad nichilum 

redactus sum et nescivi’; et propter exclusionem a fine dicebat (Ps. 68: 

3): ‘Infixus sum in limo profundi, et non [fo. 44va] est substantia’. 

11. Item secundo tollit animatum. Nam anima magis est ubi amat quam 

ubi animat, sicut Augustinus dicit. Sed omne peccatum causatur 

vel ex amore vel ex timore deordinato: sicut Augustinus dicit super 

illum Psalmi (79/80: 17): ‘Incensa igitur et su·osa’, etc., quod omne 

peccatum provenit vel ex amore male inflammante, vel ex timore male 

humiliante. Sed avarus deordinate amat pecuniam, et ideo anima eius 

plus est in bursa quam in corpore, et ita etiam de concupiscentia, quia 

anima plus est in re quam concupiscit quam cum corpore proprio. 

Unde propheta Osee 7 (11) dicit in persona peccatoris: ‘E·raym 

quasi columba non habens cor’. 

12. Item, tertio, peccatum tollit sensum. Nam, ut dicit sapiens, nichil est 

sensitivum sine calore. Videmus enim quod paraliticus et dormiens 

non sentiunt, et ratio huius est quia calor in eis recolligitur ad cor, 

et sic remanent membra stupida, sicut in mortuis. Hoc autem facit 

peccatum. Nam facit sicut venenum, quod statim ut sumitur vadit 

ad cor, quod est fons vite, et occidit. Ita peccatum vadit ad fontem 

vite [fo. 44vb] spiritualis et caloris, scilicet ad ipsam caritatem, et occidit 

animam, quia accipit ab ea virtutem sensitivam. Unde in Cant. 

anima peccatrix, insensibilis facta, dicit: ‘Traxerunt me et non dolui, 

vulneraverunt me et non sensi’. 

13. Item, quarto, peccatum tollit rationem. Nam peccatum est contra rationem 

facere, sicut dicit Dam(ascenus). Videmus autem quod unum 

Augustine, In Joannis evangelium tractatus CXXIV, 13, on John 1: 3 (Migne, 

PL 35. 1385). 

Not found in Augustine, but see Bernard of Clairvaux, De praecepto et dispensatione, 

60inƒuvres compl›etes, xxi. Le Pr‹ecepte et la dispense. La Conversion, ed.F. 

Callerot, J. Miethke, and C. Jaquinod (Sources chr‹etiennes, 457; Paris, 2000), 276 

(the tag is much quoted with various attributions). 

Augustine, Ennarationes in Psalmos, at Ps. 79 (80): 17 (Sancti Aurelii Augustini 

Ennarationes in Psalmos LI–C, ed. D. E. Dekkers and I. Fraipont (Corpus Christianorum 

Series Latina, 39, Aurelii Augustini Opera, 10/2; Turnhout, 1956), para. 

13, pp. 1117–18), possibly via Peter Lombard, Sentences, 2. 42. 4 (262) (Magistri 

Petri Lombardi Parisiensis Episcopi Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, 3rd edn., ed. 

Patres Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas [I. Brady] (2 vols.; Spicilegium 

Bonaventurianum, 4–5; Grottaferrata, 1971–81), i/2. Liber I et II, 569). 

7] between lines 

Aristotle, De anima, 425a6, in William of Moerbeke’s translation, 2. 25, p. 172 

Gauthier; Aristotle’s De Anima in the Versions of William of Moerbeke and the Commentary 

of Thomas Aquinas, ed.Fosteret al., p. 348. 

The quotation is a mixture of Prov. 23: 35 and Song of Songs 5: 7. 

Possibly an erroneous reference from memory to ps.-Dionysius, De divinis 

nominibus, 4. 32, perhaps via Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, 1–2 q. 71 a. 6:


contrarium destruit aliud, sicut egritudo destruit sanitatem, et frigiditas 

caliditatem: sic peccatum, quia est contra rationem, destruit 

eam. Ablata vero ratione, homo remanet bestia, quia nulla est differentia 

inter hominem et bestiam nisi per rationem, sicut sapiens 

dicit. Et ideo in octavo Methaphysice dicit quod ita se habent differentie 

in speciebus, sicut unitates in numeris. Videmus enim quod 

unitate remota a quinario constituit aliam speciem, scilicet quaternarium; 

addita autem, constituit aliam, scilicet senarium. Ita est in 

speciebus, quia quedam sunt que habent esse tantum sicut unitatem, 

ut lapides; quedam autem habent dualitatem, scilicet esse et vivere, ut 

plante; quedam habent trinitatem, scilicet esse, vivere, et sentire, ut 

animalia; quedam [fo. 45ra] autem habent quaternitatem, scilicet esse, 

vivere, sentire, et intelligere vel ratiocinari, sicut homo. Sed peccatum, 

ut dictum est, aufert rationem ab homine, et ita aufert a quaternario 

unitatem, et ita reponitur in alia specie, scilicet in ternario, qui competebat 

bestiis. Unde propheta dicit de peccatore (Ps. 48: 13 @ 21): 

‘Homo cum in honore esset non intellexit. *Comparatus est iumentis 

insipientibus’, etc. 

14. Item tollit peccatum potentiam. Omnis enim potentia dicit ordinationem 

ad actum, sicut posse videre ordinatur ad videre et non ad 

cecari vel cecum esse; et posse ambulare ordinatur ad ambulare et non 

ad claudicare, quia claudicare est defectus potentie. Cum ergo potentia 

hominis ordinetur ad aliquid perfectum, quia egreditur a perfecto sicut 

ab ipso homine, peccare autem tollat perfectionem, ergo tollit potentiam, 

quia fornicari non est posse, sed defectus potentie, quia est vinci 

a passione concupiscentie, et decipi non est potentia sed impotentia. 

In omni enim peccato est victoria alicuius virtutis vel potentie a vitio, 

sicut in avaro vincitur liberalitas, et vincit avaritia, et in guloso vincitur 

temperantia, et vincit gula. Et propterea [fo. 45rb] dicebat propheta, tali 

potentia destitutum se videns, ‘Miserere mei, quoniam infirmus sum’; 

et alibi (Ps. 30: 11): ‘infirmata est virtus mea’. 

15. Item, peccatum tollit vitam, quod super omnia diligitur, quod patet 

‘Sed malum hominis est contra rationem esse, ut Dionysius dicit, 4 cap. De div. nom. 

Ergo potius debuit dici quod peccatum sit contra rationem, quam quod peccatum sit 

contra legem eternam.’ For a roughly similar thought, but not in the same wording, 

in Burgundio of Pisa’s translation of St John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa, 95, see 

Saint John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa: Versions of Burgundio and Cerbanus, ed. 

E. M. Buytaert (Franciscan Institute Publications, Text Series, 8; St Bonaventure, 

NY, etc., 1955), 359–60. I may have missed a closer match at some less obvious place 

in the text. 

Possibly a reference to the discussion of Aristotle’s views in Thomas Aquinas, 

Summa theologica, 1, q. 85, a. 3. 

Cf. Aristoteles Latinus, xxv/3.2. Metaphysica Lib. I–XIV, ed. Gudrun Vuillemin-Diem 

(Leiden etc., 1995), 173–4 (Metaph. 1043B35 and 1044A10).


quia omnis operatio hominis ordinatur ad vite conservationem, sicut 

agricultura et molendinus et panificatura propter cibum, qui conservat 

vitam; lanificium, texture ars et sutoria propter vestitum qui defendit 

a frigore, quod tollit vitam; hedificativa et medicina et pigmentaria 

propter potionem qua elongatur vita. Et ideo ingeniavit natura quod 

loca illa ubi est vita sint bene munita, quia cerebrum munivit fortissimo 

osse, venas abscondit in occultissimo loco, cor vallavit multis 

costis. Sed peccatum frangit caput, quia abicit Christum. Caput 

enim viri Christus. Item, inficit venas: Ps. (13: 1): ‘Corrupti sunt et 

abhominabiles facti sunt in studiis suis’. Item, occidit cor. Rogemus 

(etc.). 


(Schneyer no. 48) 

See comments on Document 1. 12. 

MS Rome, Casanatense 4560 =C 

Fos. 45RB–47RA: 

1. ‘Nuptie facte sunt’, etc., Io. secundo. In serie presentis evangelii notantur 

quattuor. Et primum est iucunditas coniugii: ibi: ‘Nuptie’. Secundum 

est pietas subsidii: [fo. 45va] ibi: ‘dixit mater Iesu ad eum’. 

Tertium est sublimitas miraculi, ibi: ‘implete ydrias aqua’. Quartum 

est utilitas collegii, ibi: ‘et crediderunt in eum discipuli eius’. 

2. Primo quidem evangelium loquitur de iocunditate coniugii, quia 

‘Nuptie facte sunt’. Matrimonium quidem est res magne iocunditatis, 

et ideo in nuptiis consueverunt ostendi signa magne letitie, ad hoc ut 

sponsus et sponsa mutuo se diligant, qui in tanto gaudio et letitia coniunguntur. 

Et vere est materia *magne iocunditatis, quia: conservat 

naturam, sanat plagam, adquirit gratiam, conservat amicitiam:—que 

omnia sunt iocunda. Et ideo, primo, matrimonium est in ocium 

nature, in remedium concupiscentie, in sacramentum ecclesie, in consortium 

amicitie. 

3. Primo est in ocium nature et conservat eam. Sed res naturales sunt 

iocunde, quod sic patet: Quelibet res est delectabilis in suo tempore, 

sicut vinum dulce in hyeme, acerbum in estate. Et quia ars imitatur 

naturam, videmus quod artes diversa artificiata secundum diversa 

tempora faciunt. Matrimonium autem est nature opus. Unde legitur 

in primo Distinctionum quod ius naturale est maris et femine 

abhominabiles] abhominabilis C 

Schneyer, Repertorium, i, no. 48, p. 226. 

Distinctionum quod ius naturale] supplied from MS Troyes, Biblioth›eque Municipale 

1263, fo. 44r: quamvis naturale C


[fo. 45vb] coniunctio, quam nos vocamus matrimonium. Quod etiam 

patet sic. Natura etiam intendit esse perpetuum et divinum, et ideo in 

rebus incorruptibilibus, in quibus salvatur per unum individuum, non 

dedit generationem. Unde non sunt plures soles, nec lune, nec plures 

stelle unius speciei, sed quelibet facit speciem. Inferioribus autem et 

corruptibilibus, quia individua corrumpuntur, fecit multitudinem individuorum, 

et ideo dicit Philosophus, in secundo de Anima, quod 

data est vis generativa in rebus ut quod non potest salvari in se, salvetur 

in suo simili, propter esse divinum, et sic conservat naturam: quod est 

primum. 

4. Item, secundo, sanat plagam matrimonium. Unde institutum est in 

remedium concupiscentie, si legittime teneatur. Unde facit quod concupiscentia 

carnalis, que alias esset peccatum mortale, si recte teneatur, 

fit sine peccato. 

5. Item, tertio, in matrimonio confertur gratia. In quantum fide Christi 

contrahitur, habet ut conferat gratiam adiuvantem ad illa operanda 

que in matrimonio requiruntur. Et huius exemplum videmus in naturalibus, 

quia cuicumque datur aliqua facultas, dantur etiam auxilia 

quibus ad illa perveniri possit. Unde cum in matri monio [fo. 46ra] 

detur homini ex divina institutione facultas utendi uxore sua ad prolis 

procreationem, datur etiam gratia sine qua id convenienter facere non 

posset: sicut deus, vel natura, que dedit virtutem gressivam animali, 

dedit ei instrumenta, scilicet pedes, per quos gradi posset. 

6. Item, quarto, matrimonium conservat amicitiam, facit societatem 

communicativam, et institutum est in consortium, propter mutuum 

obsequium. Nam quedam sunt que naturaliter viris competunt, scilicet, 

fodere, scribere, hedificare; quedam autem mulieribus, sicut panificare, 

et nere, et huiusmodi, que videntur naturam consequi mulieris, 

quia ab ipsa pueritia panificant de luto, nent lanam, que opera 

muliebria sunt. E converso pueri lignum equitant, gladio se precingunt, 

que opera virilia sunt, sicut Plato dicit. Unde bene dicitur, Gen. 

ii (18): ‘faciamus ei adiutorium simile sibi’. 

7. Sequitur secundum, scilicet pietas patrocinii, quia ‘dixit mater Iesu 

ad eum’. Mater pietatis semper in necessitate succurrit, quod quidem 

competit sibi quadruplici ratione. Et primo propter convenientiam 

Gratian, Decretum, ParsI,D.1c.7. 

corruptibilibus] corrected from incorruptibilibus in C 

Perhaps Aristotle, De anima, 415a–b, in William of Moerbeke’s translation, 2. 7, 

p. 95 Gauthier; Aristotle’s De anima in the Versions of William of Moerbeke and the 

Commentary of Thomas Aquinas, ed.Fosteret al., p. 210. 

peccato] C adds and deletes mortali 

videntur] videtur (viUR) C 

Direct Latin source not found.


vocabuli. Secundo propter congruentiam principii. Tertio propter 

habundantiam beneficii. Quarto propter excellentiam preconii. 

8. Primo propter con venientiam [fo. 46rb] vocabuli. Dicitur enim Maria 

‘stella maris’, id est, peccatoris amari, quia cor peccatoris quasi mare 

fervens. Videmus autem quod stella, quanto plus influit de luce, non 

minus habet. Et ratio huius est quia spiritualia, quanto plus communicantur, 

non minuuntur, sicut scientia, quanto plus communicatur, 

magis augetur, et candele lumen quotcumque candelis communicetur, 

non minuitur. Corporalia vero communicata diminuuntur: sicut panis, 

si a pluribus videatur, non diminuitur, quia color quid spirituale 

est in recipiente, scilicet in organo; si vero a pluribus gustetur, consumitur, 

quia sapor materialiter et naturaliter percipitur. Quia igitur 

beata virgo est ditissima in donis sive bonis spiritualibus, absque sui 

diminutione ea communicat. Unde ipsa invitat, dicens (Eccli. 24: 26): 

‘Transite ad me, omnes qui concupiscitis me, et a generationibus meis 

implemini’. 

9. Secundo propter congruentiam principii. Videmus enim in natura 

quod ea que habent rationem principii, quicquid virtutis habent influunt, 

sicut cor influit spiritus vitales omnibus membris, sicut cerebrum 

influit sensum et motum in totum corpus, [fo. 46va] sicut radix influit 

humorem in omnibus ramis, sicut sol influit lumen omnibus stellis, sicut 

mare influit humorem omnibus humidis, sicut ignis influit calorem 

omnibus calidis, et sicut celum influit motum omnibus elementis. Et 

ideo Bernardus dicit: ‘Intuemini quanto dilectionis a·ectu eam a nobis 

voluit honorari, qui totius boni plenitudinem posuit in Maria, ut si 

quid nobis boni est et virtutis et gratie, ab ea in nos noverimus redundare 

que est ortus plenus deliciarum quem perflavit auster ille divinus, 

ut undique fluant et refluant aromata eius et carismata gratiarum’. 

10. Tertio, propter habundantiam beneficii. Ipsa enim est aqueductus, qui 

quantum recipit, tantum influit, et se omnibus communiter exhibet: 

sic beata Maria omnibus sinum sue pietatis et gratie aperit, ut de 

plenitudine eius accipiant universi, sicut Bernardus dicit. 

11. Quarto, propter excellentiam patrocinii. Sic enim dicit quidam ad 

beatam virginem: ‘Si non essent peccatores, mater [fo. 46vb] dei num- 

‘Maria . . .“stella maris” . . .’ (MS BL Add. 31,830, fo. 458VB). 

The sense of this is made clearer by the free variant in MS Troyes, Biblioth›eque 

Municipale 1263, fo. 45R: ‘Sicut patet in candela, quia licet ad unam candelam 

centum accendantur, non minuitur lumen prime’. 

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo in dominica infra octauam assumptionis, 2,inSancti 

Bernardi opera, v.Sermones II, ed. J. Leclercq and H. Rochais (Rome, 1968), 263. 

aperit] apperit C 

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo in nativitate beatae Virginis, 6, pp. 278–9 Leclercq 

and Rochais. 

patrocinii] preconii C


quam fores, et si non essent redimendi, nulla tibi pariendi fuisset 

necessitas’. Quia ergo propter peccatores et miseros facta est mater 

dei, rependit peccatoribus vicem, admittendo eis et eis impetrando 

gratiam adiutricem. Et sic patet secundum. 

12. Tertio ponitur sublimitas miraculi, ibi: ‘Implete ydrias aqua’. Circa 

quod quattuor includuntur, scilicet: 

13. Transmutatio humoris, quia convertit aquam in vinum. Mutavit enim 

qualitatem, sed servavit quantitatem. 

14. Secundo perfectio saporis, quia optimum vinum fecit. In omnibus 

enim que deus fecit, hoc servavit: quod melius fecit quam natura 

posset, sicut primum hominem pulcriorem omnibus hominibus qui 

post naturaliter generantur, et primam feminam pulcherimam, preter 

Christum et beatam virginem. Et cum illuminavit cecos, dedit eis 

pulcherimos oculos. Et cum sanavit febricitantes, ut socrum Symonis, 

reddidit eam subito perfectissime sanitati, sine langore et aliqua 

debilitate, quod non potest facere natura. Cum autem aquam transmutavit 

in vinum, fe cit [fo. 47ra] melius quam grecum vel vernacinum, 

et melius quam natura facere posset. 

15. Tertio, ostensio vigoris, quia, sicut dicit Crisostomus, istud fuit 

primum miraculum quod Christus fecit, per quod eliditur Liber de 

Infantia Salvatoris, qui dicit eum multa miracula fecisse, quod non 

fuisset conveniens, quia potuisset credi fantasma, et eius miracula fantastica. 

Unde filius dei, verus homo, servavit tempus humane operationis 

conveniens, scilicet xxx annorum, ne phantasma reputaretur. 

16. Quarto ponitur assecutio honoris, quia manifestavit gloriam suam, 

quam prius puerilis etas obtexerat. Rogemus [etc.]. 

pariendi] patiendi C 

admittendo eis] MS Vatican City, BAV Chigi C. IV. 99, fo. 271vb: admittendo C 

vigoris] viroris C (a possible reading) 

For John Chrysostom’s homilies on the Gospel of St John see F. Liotta, ‘Burgundione’, 

in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, xv (Rome, 1972), 423–8 at 425; he 

gives references to incunable editions (Hain, Repertorium, nos. *5036 and *5037), 

but in the absence of a critical edition I have used MS Merton College Oxford 30: 

the passage arguing that Jesus had not worked miracles before the Cana wedding is 

on fo. 155rb–va. 

Cf.M.R.James,The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, 1924), 58–65, 70–9. 

operationis] MS Vatican City, BAV Chigi C. IV. 99, fo. 272ra: generationis C


Documents Relating to Chapter 2: Indissolubility 

2. 1. Proof in ‘forbidden degrees’ cases: Hostiensis attacks 

laxity 

This relates to the discussion in Chapter 2 about the ecacy of the Fourth 

Lateran Council’s measures to reduce the number of annulments. It comes 

from Hostiensis’s Lectura on the Decretals at X. 2. 20. 47, ‘De testibus et 

attestationibus’, c. Licet ex quadam. Hostiensis or Henry of Susa (Henricus 

de Segusio, Henricus de Bartholomaeis) was with Innocent IV probably 

the greatest and most influential canonist of the Decretalist period (1234– 

1917). He wrote in the established genre of commentary on the Decretals of 

Gregory IX. Here he attacks judges who ignored the Lateran IV rules. This 

passage seems to suggest that the council did not achieve its objective with 

respect to annulments, but the inference may be false, because Document 

2. 2 gives reason to think that Hostiensis set the bar of legally valid proof 

exceptionally high. 

MS Oxford, New College 205 (=O), using MS BL Arundel 485 

(=A2) to illustrate the second edition of the Lectura 

O 

A parchment manuscript, 400ÿ280 mm. Script is second half of the 

thirteenth century (I concur with Pennington’s dating). One might even 

narrow it down further. The Decretals text is written below the top 

ruled line, a sign that the manuscript is after 1250, but there are twocompartment 

‘a’s where the top compartment is not closed, so it may 

not be after about 1280. The main text is in two columns, the gloss 

spreading over the margins, left and right, head and foot. ‘The format 

of the Decretals of Gregory IX in the manuscript was obviously 

designed to accommodate a much larger apparatus than usual’ (Pennington). 

Both main text and gloss are written in expert hands, both 

of which look Italian. The glossing hand has the distinctive superscript 

‘r’, as in ‘MaUtinus’, which seems peculiar to Italian scribes. Pennington 

describes the glossing hand as ‘small, but careful and clear’, but in places 

I choose this siglum because later on I use A1 for BL Arundel 471. Arundel 485 

contains books 1–2 and Arundel 471 books 3–5. This is why I do not stick to the same 

manuscript of the later version of the commentary. Both the Arundel manuscripts 

seem to be pecia manuscripts, representing a text or texts probably widely available. 

Description based on K. Pennington, ‘An Earlier Recension of Hostiensis’s 

Lectura on the Decretals’ (1987), repr. in id., Popes, Canonists and Texts, 1150–1550 

(Aldershot etc., 1993), no. xvii (retaining the original pagination: 77–90) at 77, and 

on personal inspection of the manuscript.


it is faded and consequently a little dicult. There are initials in red and 

blue, in both the main script and the glossing script. 

On fo. 1 there are tables of contents in later medieval hands. The 

Decretals and Hostiensis’s apparatus on them in the form of a gloss take 

up fos. 2R–241R. ‘The back flyleaf (fol. 242) is the text of a commentary 

on X. 1. 3. 32–1. 3. 37. Several glosses are signed Johannes Andreae’ 

(Pennington). 

A2 

A parchment manuscript, 440ÿ285 mm., 2 columns, the final folio numbered 

320, initials and paragraph marks in red and blue. 

Writing is below the top line. The script or scripts (see below) could be 

Italian to judge from the ‘u’-shaped superscript ‘r/‘re’, but otherwise it 

would be hard to say whether the scribe was Italian and he may not have 

been. It is a pecia manuscript, produced by the university stationers. See 

e.g. ‘finitur hic li’ in the margin on fo. 253VB, alongside what looks like a 

change of handwriting. 

The manuscript is taken up with Hostiensis’s Lectura on the first two 

books of the Decretals of Gregory IX. 

The discoveries of Kenneth Pennington have shown that it is desirable 

to compare manuscripts of the two authorial ‘editions’ of this 

commentary. I use the early recension, transmitted in O. Pennington 

says of this manuscript that it ‘will be an indispensable text for those 

whowishtostudyHostiensis’sideas....Ihavecheckeditsreadingsin 

many passages, and they are most often as good or better than the best 

manuscripts we have of his second recension. With it we will be better 

able to understand his thought and trace its development’ (86). It was 

apparently completed between1254 and 1265 (ibid. 81); the terminus post 

quem may be pushed a little later, to 1262. 

To compare the passages in question in this manuscript with the 

second edition, which was the version most people would have known, I 

have given variants from MS BL Arundel 485 in the apparatus (ignoring 

orthographic variants, transpositions, a few silly errors, and other trivia). 

As noted above, it is a pecia manuscript—a further reason for using it, 

since it was probably representative of an important proportion of the 

transmission of the text. 

The early printed editions of Hostiensis’s Lectura on the Decretals are 

Description based on personal inspection. 

Pennington, ‘An Earlier Recension’, 82, 85. 

K. Pennington, ‘Henry de Segusio (Hostiensis)’ (1993), repr. in id., Popes, 

Canonists and Texts, no.xvi (paginated 1–12) at 8. For the dates of the other great 

synthesis of Hostiensis, see ibid. 5–6. Note that the information about the dating of 

the two syntheses in J. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London etc., 1995), 214, 

does not correspond to Pennington’s findings and may be mistaken.


not necessarily reliable: see Pennington, ‘An Earlier Recension’, 85. I did 

consult the Paris 1512 edition (British Library call number C.104.l.10), 

and in fact it does not give a substantially di·erent text from that of A2. 

Still, the text of a pecia manuscript from around 1300 is clearly better 

for our comparative purpose: it takes us directly to what was widely 

available in the second half of the thirteenth century. 

O, fo.91RA, left-hand gloss, and A2, fo. 238VB: 

1. ‘quia tamen,verboexemplis—puta Raymundi Barelli, habitatoris castri 

de Pilia Niciensis diocesis, qui hac occasione omnia matrimonia separabat. 

Erat enim antiquus homo et statim adinveniebat parentelam et 

ipsam computabat, dicens se quasi omnes vidisse. Et hoc asserebat 

coram x vel xii. Postea dividebat illos per partes tres vel quatuor, et 

sic tres ex illis coram aliis x hoc idem asserebant simul, dicentes quod 

ita audierant a maioribus suis; et illos secundos inducebat postea ad 

probandam consanguinitatem. Experimentis: experto crede magistro. 

Et de hoc nota supra, eodem, Preterea, ad finem. 

O, fo.91RB, right-hand gloss, and A2, fo. 239RB–VA: 

2. . . . Primum est quod considerari oportet utrum testis sit gravis vel 

levis. Secundum utrum ante litem motam testificata didicerit. Tertium, 

utrum ab antiquioribus suis hoc audierit. Quartum, utrum ad 

minus a duobus hoc audierit. Quintum, utrum illi duo essent suspecti 

vel infames vel fidedigni et omni exceptione maiores. Sextum, utrum 

unus tantum hoc audierit a pluribus, quamvis bone fame, vel plures 

infames ab hominibus etiam bone fame. Septimum, esto quod plures 

sunt bone fame, qui a pluribus bone fame hoc audierunt, utrum odio, 

amore, timore vel commodo ad hoc procedant. Octavum utrum propriis 

nominibus vel saltem sucientibus circumloqutionibus personas 

graduum duxerint exprimendas. Nonum, utrum singulos gradus 

ab utroque latere clara computatione distinguant. Decimum, utrum 

concludant in suo iuramento quod secundum quod deponunt a suis 

maioribus acceperunt. Undecimum, utrum credant ita esse. Duode- 

se] om. A2 

idem] om. A2 

nota] no. O, A2:notaturispossible ‘Etenim circumspectus judex atque discretus motum animi sui ex argumentis et 

testimoniis, quae rei aptiora esse compererit, confirmabit’ (X. 2. 20. 27 =E. Friedberg, 

Corpus iuris canonici (2 vols.; Leipzig, 1879–81; repr. Graz, 1955), ii. 324, 

omitting the words in italic, since these were not in the Decretals as ‘published’ in 

the Middle Ages: Friedberg restored them from the sources of the Decretals). 

audierit] audiverit A2 

sunt] sint A2 

Octavum] Octavo A2 

duxerint] dixerint A2 (evident error) 

credant] credan then space then erasure in A2


cimum, utrum viderint aliquas de personis graduum quos computant 

pro consanguineis se habere. 

3. Hec sunt xii, per ordinem supra specificata, que sunt omnino consideranda, 

et super maiori parte querendo a testibus examinatio facienda, 

quorum si unum deficiat, testimonium insuciens reputatur, 

ut patet in hoc verbo in principio. Et hec duodecim interrogatoria 

circa causam matrimonialem, quando ob causam consanguinitatis seu 

anitatis ad divortium agitur, debet habere iudex in memoria, et super 

ipsis sive maiori parte ipsorum testem quemlibet interrogare, ita 

quod nec unum dimittat, imo ad unguem examinet, etsi partes etiam 

contradicant. Argumentum infra ‘De eo qui cognovit consanguineam 

uxoris sue’, Super eo; ... 

4. Hec tamen male servaverunt actenus iudices nostri temporis, de talibus 

parum aut nichil curantes. Unde contra deum et iustitiam, hac 

forma canonica spreta, multas sententias divortii, non sine animarum 

suarum et multarum aliarum periculis, protulerunt:—que obsecramus 

de cetero non negligant, sed advertant. 

5. Diceret quis: quare sic artatur hic probationis facultas, cum alias subveniatur 

probationibus: supra, eodem, Significavit, et c. Albricus. 

Respondeo: quia plurimis exemplis, etc., ut supra, eodem, rubrica i, 

verbo Quia tamen plurimis; et quia quartum gradum hec prohibitio non 

excedit: supra, eodem, ≈i, in principio. 

6. Diceret alius: si hec forma servetur, ob causam consanguinitatis vel 

anitatis dabitur divortii sententia vix aut numquam: numquid tutius 

esset hanc formam omittere et sententiam divortii ferre, et si 

omittantur aliqua de predictis? Respondeo: Non! Imo melius est, 

nisi ad unguem probentur omnia, pro matrimonio iudicare. Et sic 

continuatur sequens verbum tolerabilius,etc. 

7. tolerabilius,verbohominum. Ergo loquitur quando queritur de secundo 

vel saltem tertio vel quarto gradu, quos non prohibet lex divina, ut 

patet in eo quod legitur et notatur infra ‘De divortiis’, Gaudemus 

X. 4. 13. 5. 

X. 2. 20. 41. 

X. 2. 20. 43. The two decretals just cited both tend to maximize the amount of 

evidence legally admissible. 

The part of the decretal which deals with the dangers of hearsay evidence, and 

where Hostiensis’s commentary discusses the scam of Raymundus Barellus. 

That is, after the forbidden degrees had been reduced from seven to four, it was 

no longer necessary to reconstruct the distant genealogical past, and it was possible 

to insist on rigorous evidence for the relatively recent genealogies required. 

numquid] numquid igitur A2 

omittantur] omittatur A2 

est] om. A2 

tolerabilius, etc.tolerabilius, verbo]tolerabilius verbo A2 (error by eyeskip) 

X. 4. 19. 8.


rubrica i. Primus enim et secundus pro maiori parte reputantur 

notorii. Unde in illis non requireretur accusator vel testis, ut patet 

infra, ‘De divortiis’, Porro, ≈ Praeterea. 

8. Dimittere copulatos. Hic enim nullum periculum est, ex quo is qui 

impedimentum induxit dicit quod tolerabilius est, cum et ipse videatur 

tacite dispensare. Et ex hoc, in dubio debeant coniuges ad sui 

prelati consilium suam conscientiam informare: infra, ‘De sententia 

excommunicationis’ Inquisitioni. 

9. Et ex hoc nota quod quandocumque agitur de impedimento canonico 

semper est in dubio pro matrimonio iudicandum, ut hic, et infra, ‘De 

[Sententia et] re iudicata’, circa finem. Et appello ‘dubium’ ex quo 

deficit testis in uno de xii superius numeratis. Et est istud contra 

magistros qui consueverunt glosare contra matrimonia et pro divortiis 

iudicare, ut patet supra, eodem ≈, verboet ab utroque, super verbo 

singulos gradus. 

10. Non dicat ergo se ubi dubitandum est certum iudex; supra, ‘De rescriptis’, 

Cum contingat, ≈ penult. Domini separare, sive coniungere: 

hic enim semper periculum est, quia nec papa potest in talibus dispensare, 

ut legitur et notatur supra, ‘De restitutione spoliatorum’ 

Litteras. 

2. 2. Proof in ‘forbidden degrees’ cases: the rigorism of 

Hostiensis 

The following passage from the same commentary of Hostiensis dilutes 

the force of the preceding passages: it suggests that he was a hard-liner on 

the calculation of degrees, and that the canonists he accuses of laxity may 

rubrica] responsio or respondeo A2 

et] vel A2 

reputantur] ruputantur A2 

requireretur] requiretur A2 

X. 4. 19. 3. 

dispensare] dispensare. Et super hoc ius istud promulgatur: licet ad quodlibet 

preceptum iudicis non intendat dispensare, ut legitur et notatur supra, ‘De restitutione 

spolii’, Litteras, ≈ Opinioni (X. 2. 12. 13) A2 

X. 5. 39. 44. 

nota] no A2 (could be extended as notatur) 

X. 2. 27. 

supra, eodem ≈, verboet] om. A2 

These references are to phrases within the decretal which is the subject of the 

whole analysis, X. 2. 20. 47. 

certum] A2: certus O, in error 

X. 1. 3. 24. 

hic] hoc A2 

restitutione] rescriptis A2 

X. 2. 13. 13.


have been within the limits of honest interpretation of the law. In fact, he 

seems to be addressing his polemic against a particular canonist, Johannes 

Teutonicus, who wrote a commentary on the decrees of the Fourth Lateran 

Council. The passage printed here in heavy type and between brackets 

from ‘singulos gradus’ to ‘improbari, ut supra, eodem, Series’ isaclose 

paraphrase of the earlier writer. Hostiensis is quoting him in full before 

refuting him. It is not the historian’s place to pass judgement on the dispute 

between canonists, but it does not look as though Johannes Teutonicus is 

deliberately playing fast and loose with the law and with indissolubility. 

That alters the picture significantly. Hostiensis may be right in thinking 

that some people were cutting corners to obtain fake annulments, but he 

may exaggerate the problem and his fellow canonists may have been less 

complicitous in subverting the law than might at first appear. 

The transcription is based on the same manuscripts as Document 2. 1, 

q.v. for sigla and descriptions. 

O, fo.91RB, gloss at foot of the page, and A2, fo. 239RA–B: 

1. Et ab utroque verbo: et est hoc tertium quod requiritur quo ad dictum 

singulos gradus. ÉSed numquid tenetur probare de stipite? 

Non, quia non reperitur cautum. Imo sucit incipere a germanis, 

infra ‘De consanguinitate’, Tua; supra, eodem, Series, 

dummodo gradus ex utroque latere distinguantur, ut hic, et ibi, 

et supra, eodem, Cum in tua Rubrica i; xxxv q.v. c.i etc., 

Parentele. Sed quid si quidam testes probant de uno latere 

tantum et alii de alio tantum? Numquid erat probata consanguinitas? 

Quidam dicunt quod non, quia nec isti probant consanguinitatem 

nec illi. Sed certe qui hoc dicunt ceci sunt, quia si 

probatur de Martino quod sit filius Iohannis, per consequens 

probatur quod Iohannes est pater Martini. Item si aliqui alii 

testes probant quod Berta est filia Iohannis, per consequens probatum 

est quod Iohannes est pater Berte. Cum ergo constet iudici 

quod Iohannes est pater Martini, item constet ei quod est pater 

Berte, ergo constat ei quod Martinus et Berta sunt frater et soror, 

et ita probata est consanguinitas—quod concedo. Etiam sic non 

semper requiritur quod testes ex utroque latere notam habeant 

For the passage in question, see Constitutiones Concilii Quarti Lateranensis una 

cum commentariis glossatorum, ed. A. Garc‹§a y Garc‹§a (Monumenta Iuris Canonici, 

Series A: Corpus Glossatorum, 2; Vatican City, 1981), 261. 

X. 4. 14. 7. 

X. 2. 20. 26. 

X. 2. 20. 44. 

Rubrica] Probably a reference to the first section of Hostiensis’s own commentary 

on this decretal 

Decretum, Pars II, C. 35, q. 5, c. 1: especially c. 4. 

erat] erit A2


consanguinitatem. Item, si volo improbare consanguinitatem, 

non est necesse quod omnes gradus improbentur, sed sucit 

unum gradum improbari, ut supra, eodem, Series.Ö—Secundum 

Io(hannem Teutonicum). 

2. Sed, salva pace sua, magis cecus est qui non videt: nam hic aperte dicitur 

contrarium, scilicet quod non sucit computatio unius lateris: imo 

necesse est quod utrumque latus computent iidem testes, . . . Nec obstat 

exemplum Iohannis, cum alius Iohannes posset esse pater Martini, et 

alius Iohannes pater Berte. 

3. Etsi etiam constaret quod utrique testes de eodem Iohanne intelligerent, 

ad hoc ut vera probatio esset non suceret testimonium de auditu: imo 

multa alia requirerentur ad hoc ut filiatio probaretur, quia nec facilis, 

imo valde dicilis est probatio, ut patet in eo quod notatur supra, ‘De 

filiis presbiterorum’, Michael. In casu autem isto sucit testimonium 

de auditu pro maiori parte, et ideo non admittitur nisi consanguinitas ex 

utroque latere computetur. Et est ratio quare sub hac forma restringitur, 

quia plurimis exemplis, etc, ut supra, eadem Rubrica, verbo quia tamen; 

et quia tolerabilius est, etc., ut infra, eodem capitulo, ante finem. 

4. Cecus est ergo qui per glosam capitaneam conatur textum maxime tot 

virium contra rationem et in periculum animarum subvertere et hanc 

destruere formam scriptam quam omnino servari oportet. Argumentum 

supra, ‘De electione’, Quia propter; supra, ‘De rescriptis’, ‘Cum 

dilecta’; ≈ fi(ne), clara. Non ergo ab uno latere tantum, alioquin computatio 

reputari debet obscura que nec gradus hinc inde distinguit. 

5. Et in suo, verbum: quasi dicat: adhuc non sucit quod testes computent 

clare distinguendo gradus ex utroque latere, quicquid scribat 

Iohannes. Imo adhuc requiritur quod in suo nichilominus etc. Et est 

hoc quartum quod requiritur quo ad dictum. Quod deponunt: dictam 

scilicet claram computationem ex utroque latere. Et credere: et hoc est 

quintum quod requiritur. Sed nec tales, verbum: adhuc addit sextum, 

Item . . . consanguinitatem] om. A2 

X. 2. 20. 26: Garc‹§a y Garc‹§a, Constitutiones, 261 n. 17, gives the reference X. 2. 

20. 30, which does not seem to fit. 

contrarium] contrarius A2 

pater] esse pater A2 

X. 1. 17. 13. 

plurimis] pluribus A2 

virium contra] fultum viribus et contra A2 

X. 1. 6. 42. 

X. 1. 3. 22. 

‘≈ fi(ne), clara’ is almost certainly a reference to the words ‘clara computatione’ 

towards the end of the decretal Licet ex quadam (X. 2. 20. 47) which is the subject 

of this whole part of the commentary. 

testes computent] testis computet A2 

computent] computet O 

et hoc] verbum: ethocA2


ad maiorem confusionem Iohannis, quod si deficiat *quantumcumque 

testis ex utroque latere gradus computet, testimonium non valebit. Et 

hoc est Sed nec tales suciant etc. vidisse. Sic nec sucit testimonium 

de auditu per omnia. 

Documents Relating to Chapter 3: Bigamy 

3. 1. Johannes de Deo, De dispensationibus, on bigamy 

This passage shows symbolism providing the principles for a casuistry 

of the applications of the bigamy rules to concrete cases: illustrating the 

important point that where symbolism provides a criterion for settling 

tricky specific cases it is more than just a traditional survival without causal 

importance. The work from which the passage comes belongs to the genre 

of canon-law treatises on special topics. 

MS London, BL Royal 5 A 1 

Parchment manuscript, originally belonged to Rochester Priory, 170ÿ 

130 mm., 206 folios, thirteenth century, ‘in several di·erent hands’, 

paragraph marks and initials in red; the section from which this passage 

comes is in one column. The contents are a varied selection of theological, 

moral, and canon legal writings, fully listed in the admirable Royal 

catalogue. 

Fo. 157R–V: 

Dicturi de bigamia, distinguendum est que sit causa quare dispensatur in 

una bigamia et non in altera, et debes tenere quod non possit cum vero bigamo 

dispensare quia non est in eo signatum nec consignatum. Signatum 

est coniunctio vel unio inter Christum et ecclesiam, quod signatur per illam 

unionem maris et femine [fo. 157v] in commixtione carnis. ≈ Item consignatum 

est, scilicet unio deitatis ad carnem Christi, que unio numquam fuit 

divisa. Tres enim sunt uniones, scilicet: deitatis ad carnem Christi: hec 

numquam separata fuit. ≈ Item unio deitatis ad animam. Similiter hec 

numquam divisa fuit. ≈ Item unio anime ad carnem: hec in morte Christi 

fuit separata. ≈ Est etiam unio anime iuste ad deum per fidem et caritatem. 

Hec quandoque propter peccatum mortale separatur. Sic ergo propter defectum 

non dispensatur in bigamo vero, quia esset contra Apostolum. Ut 

Description based on personal inspection and on G. F. Warner and J. P. Gilson, 

Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Old Royal and King’s Collections (4 vols.; 

London, 1921), i. 93–4. 

signatum] sigAtum, which can also be extended as significatum. Here and in subsequent 

cases I have chosen the more probable alternative 

divisa] diversa ms.?


ergo sciat quis sit vere bigamus, et quis presumptivus, sic distinguimus. 

≈ Verus bigamus est qui duas uxores successive habuit. ≈ Item bigamus est 

qui contraxit cum vidua vel repudiata ab alio et cognita. ≈ Item bigamus est 

iuris interpretatione qui cum prima contraxit de iure et cum secunda de 

facto. Credo tamen quod papa possit cum tali dispensare, quia non deficit 

in illo sacramentum. Item bigamus est qui post ordinem sacramentum contraxit 

cum corrupta, scilicet *iuris interpretatione. Si tamen contraheretur 

cum virgine, possit post longam penitentiam ab episcopo dispensari. ≈ Item 

bigamus dicitur monachus si contraxit matrimonium, cum in talibus possit 

dispensari, quia non verum fuit matrimonium. ≈ Item qui similiter 

contrahit cum duabus vel de facto contraxit successive cum duabus. Queritur 

utrum possit esse uxor, et tum presumptive vel interpretative dicitur 

bigamus, et possit cum talibus dispensare. Hii sunt modi bigamie. Unde 

versus: Bigamus est factus hic si transibis ad actus. 


Gregory IX, X. 5. 9. 1: bigamy and loss of clerical status 

In the following passage Innocent IV anticipates the ruling of the Second 

Council of Lyons that clerics in minor orders lost their status and privileges 

if they did something ‘altogether contrary to [their] order, such as marrying 

a second wife or a woman who was not a virgin’: a strict definition of the 

‘irregularity’ of bigamy and one that would be applied in secular courts. I 

put the most significant passages in heavy type. 

Printed edition, BL L. 23. f. 3. (1): Apparatus . . . Innocentii pape . . . 

super V libris decretalium (Lyons, 1525) 

Fo. cxciiiiRB: 

Item no. H. dixit quod nedum alii sed etiam psalmista et lector semper 

gaudebunt privilegio clericali, et ulterius non possunt vivere seculariter nec 

fieri milites. xx. q. iii. Eos. Sed alii contradicunt, cum quibus et nos sentimus, 

distinguentes: si sumpsit aliquid penitus contrarium ordini, ut 

si accepit secundam uxorem vel corruptam vel fecit se militem et seva 

exercuerit: tunc privatur omni privilegio clericali. lxxxiiii. di. Quisquis. Si 

vero non fecit penitus aliquid contrarium ordini, scilicet ducendo 

virginem, vel fiendo miles, dummodo non exerceat seva, potest vivere 

non] autem ms., making no sense 

Hostiensis? 

xx] xxi in edition 

Gratian, Pars II, C. 20, q. 3, c. 3. 

Gratian, Pars I, D. 84, c. 5.


clericaliter, et privilegio clericali gaudere. xxxii. di. Seriatim, Si qui vero. 

Sed si velit vivere seculariter, negotiando, tabernam tenendo, vel tonsuram 

dimittendo, tunc nullo gaudebit privilegio. 


Gregory IX, X. 1. 21. 5: the symbolic understanding of 

bigamy 

This passage shows that Innocent IV explained ‘bigamy’ in symbolic 

terms. 

In the analysis in Chapter 3 I do not discuss the last part of this extract. 

This is because I believe that at this point in his argument the symbolism 

may be simply rationalizing a position that he and others held for other 

reasons (whereas in the rest of the extract the symbolism is an active 

ingredient in his thought, so to speak). Innocent seems to make his own 

the strong line on bigamy, viz., that the wife the candidate for the priesthood 

has lost must have been a virgin when they married. It must not only have 

been her first marriage: she must not have had any other sexual partner 

before. This raised for him and others the following tricky question. If the 

wife had to have been a virgin when they married, why did it not matter 

for strict legal purposes if the candidate had slept with a concubine since 

his wife’s death? 

I suspect the real reason was that too many men would have been barred 

from the priesthood if there had been a rule that candidates be virgins 

or even a rule that they had not slept with a woman since their wife had 

died. The rule that if a candidate had been married before it must have 

been once only and to a virgin would not eliminate so many. Who was 

going to test whether the deceased wife was a virgin? In any case it was 

more likely that a respectable woman would be a virgin before marriage 

than a man of the same social status. In other words, there is a gender 

asymmetry here explicable from the simple fact that it was a man’s world, 

rather than from symbolism. Symbolism explains why the deceased wife 

had to be a virgin, or the living wife, in the case of clerics in minor orders, 

but not why the priest or cleric did not have to be a virgin too: there 

a degree of pragmatic indulgence is a more probable explanation than 

symbolism. Some symbolic justification or other had to be found, but it 

could have been simply epiphenomenal, a cloak for the real reason, even if 

contemporaries would not have seen that clearly. If I thought that this was 

the case with symbolic reasoning generally, the thesis of this book would be 

much weaker; however, it does seem to be true in the case of this particular 

gender asymmetry. 

Gratian, Pars I, D. 32, c. 14. 



Even so, the symbolic reasons, or rationalizations, discussed by Innocent 

IV are quite interesting. He alludes to an explanation o·ered by 

Huguccio (perhaps the most famous of commentators on the Decretum of 

Gratian, though his great work has never been printed). According to this 

reading of the symbolism, the husband is the Church, and the Church 

often commits adultery by straying from the faith. This view sounds controversial, 

if Huguccio did indeed say that. It seems to suggest that the 

Church as a whole regularly errs. The line of thought deserves investigation 

from the manuscripts, though it is tangential here. Also interesting 

is the reversal of the gender roles, so that the wife represents Christ, who 

never sent the Church away. Again, this is a motif worthy of investigation. 

Innocent IV in any case gives a di·erent symbolic account. For him, the 

husband is Christ. He married first the Synagogue and then the Church. 

Thus it does no harm if the husband’s flesh is divided. But the Church, in 

the wife’s role, remains always a virgin, at least in mind. Here he quotes 

1 Corinthians 11: 2: ‘For I have espoused you to one husband, that I 

may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ’. Thus the sacramentum, the 

representation, is defective in the wife if she should divide her flesh. 

Transcription is from the early printed edition used for Document 3. 2, 

q.v. Note that here I use square brackets where elsewhere I would use round 

parentheses. This is because this early printed edition, unlike medieval 

manuscripts, uses round brackets, which I have retained. 

Fo. xlvRB–VA: 

Debitum....≈ (Iuxta quod) id est ad ostendendum quod carnalis copula est 

sacramentum incarnationis Christi, et quod tantum inter duos coniuges 

est sacramentum illud quod in matrimonio signatur, id est, una ecclesia 

uni viro Christo subdita; non est autem sacramentum hic ubi alter coniugumcarnemsuaminpluresdivisit....[fo. 

xlvva] ...≈ Sed queres 

quomodo ex hac auctoritate sumitur hoc sacramentum. Respondeo: exeo 

quod in singulari numero posuit [Gen: 2: 23; Eph. 5: 30] ‘os’ ‘caro’ ‘carne’ 

‘uxori’, et ex verbo ultimo [Gen. 2: 24; Eph. 5: 31]: ‘erunt duo in carne 

una’, quasi non divident carnes suas in plures. (Sacramenti): illius scilicet 

quia matrimonium inter duos tantum signat unam ecclesiam uni viro 

Christo subditam: in secundo autem coniugio non est hoc sacramentum, 

nec esse potest: immo potius posset significare plures ecclesias uni viro 

subditas. Ministerium autem incarnationis bene potest signare in secundo 

matrimonio. . . . (≈ Carnem): sed quare magis exigitur in uxore quam in 

viro? Nam maritus corrupte promoveri non potest, xxxiiii. di. Curandum, 

Precipimus, sicut si vir. Ille autem qui post uxorem habuit concubinam 

Rn’] can also be extended as Responsio 

signare] read signari? 




promoveri potest, xxxiiii. di. Fraternitatis. Ugo dicit quod vir significat 

ecclesiam que sepe adulteratur exorbitando a fide, et ita non deest significatio 

sacramenti, licet vir adulteretur. Uxor autem significat Christum qui 

numquam ecclesiam dimisit. Ipse enim est fons vivus cui non communicat 

alienus. Ego credo quod vir significat Christum qui sibi copulavit sinagogam 

et post ecclesiam, et ideo non nocet si vir dividit carnem suam in 

plures. Uxor autem ecclesiam que semper virgo permansit, saltem mente: 

unde ‘Despondi enim vos uni viro’, etc. [2. Cor. 11: 2]: C. xxvii. questio. 

i. Nuptiarum. Unde si uxor in plures carnem suam dividat, deficit in ea 

sacramentum. 

3. 4. Bull of Pope Alexander IV to the prelates of France 

Unlike the bulls that follow, this has been printed, and in a modern edition, 

but it is useful to publish it afresh here as background to the others. For 

the existing edition see Archives Nationales, Layettes du tr‹esor des chartes, 

ed.J.B.A.T.Teuletet al. (5 vols.; Paris, 1863–1909), iii, ed. J. de Laborde 

(1875), no. 4580, p. 504. 

For description see Les Actes pontificaux originaux des Archives Nationales 

de Paris, ed. B. Barbiche (3 vols.; Vatican City, 1975–82), i. 1198– 

1261 (1975), no. 1037, p. 400. 

Bulls like this would not normally result from an unprompted papal 

initiative. The words ‘bigami et viduarum mariti et alii etiam clerici uxorati’ 

(lines /2/–/3/) probably reflect the phraseology of the letter to which the 

pope is responding. The hypothesis is that the French king had begun by 

mentioning ‘bigamous’ clergy to weaken any instinct to back the clergy’s 

privileges in any circumstances. Papal bulls were more often than not 

a response to a request from someone else rather than an independent 

initiative. The form of the bull is quite normal. 

Paris, Archives Nationales J 709 no. 296 

31 Jan. 1260 (Anagni): 

Alexander episcopus servus servorum dei. Venerabilibus fratribus archiepiscopis 

et episcopis et dilectis filiis aliis ecclesiarum /1/ prelatis per regnum 

Francie constitutis salutem et apostolicam benedictionem. Exparte 

carissimi in Christo filii nostri .. regis /2/ Francorum illustris fuit propositum 

coram nobis quod nonnulli clerici bigami et viduarum mariti et alii 

etiam /3/ clerici uxorati regni sui diversa maleficia committere non verentur 

que oculos divine maiestatis o·endunt /4/ et homines scandalizant. 

Quocirca universitati vestre per apostolica scripta mandamus quatinus non 


i.e. Huguccio (I have not traced the passage). 

Gratian, Pars II, C. 27, q. 1, c. 41.


impediatis /5/ quominus idem rex comites et barones ipsius regni sub quorum 

iurisdictione malefactores ipsi consistunt /6/ ipsos in enormibus dumtaxat 

criminibus deprehensos que sanguinis penam requirunt eis primitus 

/7/ clericali gradu previa ratione privatis puniant secundum quod iustitia 

suadebit, consuetudine contraria /8/ non obstante. Datum Anagnie ii kal. 

Februar’ /9/ pontificatus nostri anno sexto. /10/ 

3. 5. Bull of Pope Gregory X to King Philip III of France 

For the source genre see Document 3. 4. For description see Les Actes 

pontificaux originaux des Archives Nationales de Paris, ii. 1261–1304, ed. 

B. Barbiche (Vatican City, 1978), no. 1511, p. 189. 

The words ‘consuetas iustitias et debita servitia’ (lines /4/–/5/) suggest 

that clerical status exempted a man from more than just secular jurisdiction. 

This helps establish the social impact of the denial of clerical status 

to ‘bigamous’ clerics in minor orders by the Second Council of Lyons. 

Paris, Archives Nationales J 709, no. 296 (2) 

31 March 1273 (Orvieto): 

Gregorius episcopus servus servorum dei. carissimo in Christo filio .. regi 

Francorum illustri salutem et apostolicam /1/ benedictionem. Ex parte tua 

fuit propositum coram nobis quod nonnulli clerici coniugati, tam bigami 

quam mo nogami, /2/ terre tue habitu et tonsura clericali reiectis civitatum 

et aliorum locorum eciuntur maiores, pares, /3/ et scabini, et principum 

ballivi, vicomites seu prepositi seculares, et, per exigentiam ociorum taliter 

as sumptorum, /4/ sanguinis vindictam exercent, clericis interdictam, 

et tamen sub pretextu clericatus tibi consuetas /5/ iustitias et debita servitia 

subtrahere non verentur. Cum igitur reddenda sint que sunt Cesaris Cesari, 

et /6/ que sunt dei deo, equanimiter duximus tolerandum si a talibus iustitias 

debitas velut ab aliis uxo ratis /7/ exigas et servitia consueta. Datum 

apud Urbemveterem ii kal. aprilis /8/ pontificatus nostri anno secundo. /9/ 

3. 6. Bull of Pope John XXII to King Philip V of France 

The interest of the phrase ‘consuetas iustitias et debita servitia’ is explained 

in the introduction to Document 3. 5. Philip V became king in this year and 

presumably wanted the privilege renewed, suggesting that the issue was 

still alive. For the source genre see Document 3. 4. For description see Les 

Actes pontificaux originaux des Archives Nationales de Paris, iii. 1305–1415, 

ed. B. Barbiche (Vatican City, 1982), no. 2547, p. 129; see too Jean XXII 

(1316–1334): Lettres communes, ed. G. Mollat (16 vols.; Biblioth›eque des 

‹Ecoles franc«aises d’Ath›enes et de Rome; Paris, 1904–47), no. 4740, i. 436.



13 Aug. 1317 (Avignon): 

Johannes episcopus servus servorum dei, carissimo in Christo filio .. regi 

Francie et Navarre illustri, salutem et apostolicam benedictionem. Ex parte 

/1/ tua fuit propositum coram nobis quod nonnulli clerici coniugati, tam 

bigami quam monogami, terre tue, habitu et tonsura cleri cali /2/ reiectis, 

civitatum et aliorum locorum eciuntur maiores, pares, et scabini, et principum 

ballivi, vicomites seu /3/ prepositi seculares, et, per exigentiam 

ociorum taliter assumptorum, sanguinis vindictam exercent, clericis interdictam, 

et /4/ tamen, sub pretextu clericatus, tibi consuetas iustitias 

et debita servitia subtrahere non verentur. Cum igitur redden da /5/ sint 

que sunt Cesaris Cesari, et que sunt dei deo, felicis recordationis Gregorii 

papae X predecessoris nostri, /6/ qui super hoc litteras apostolicas clare 

memorie .. regi Francie, proprio nomine non expresso, concessit, vestigia 

immittantes /7/ equanimiter duximus tolerandum si a talibus iustitias 

debitas velut ab aliis uxoratis exigas et servitia consueta. /8/ 

Datum Avinion’ idus augusti pontificatus nostri anno primo. /9/ 

3. 7. Bull of Pope John XXII to King Charles IV of France 

The interest of the phrase ‘consuetas iustitias et debita servitia’ is explained 

in the introduction to the Document 3. 5. Charles IV became king in this 

year and presumably wanted the privilege renewed. For the genre see 

above, Document 3. 4. For description, see Les Actes pontificaux originaux 

des Archives Nationales de Paris, iii. 1305–1415, ed. B. Barbiche, no. 2646, 

p. 169; cf. Jean XXII (1316–1334): lettres communes, ed. Mollat, no. 15725, 

iv. 122. 


3 July 1322 (Avignon): 

Iohannes episcopus servus servorum dei carissimo in Christo filio .. regi 

Francie et Navarre illustri, salutem et apostolicam /1/ benedictionem. Ex 

parte tua fuit propositum coram nobis quod nonnulli clerici coniugati, tam 

bigami quam monogami , /2/ terre tue, habitu et tonsura clericali reiectis, 

civitatum et aliorum locorum eciuntur maiores, pares, et scabini /3/ et 

principum ballivi, vicomites seu prepositi seculares, et per exigentiam officiorum 

taliter assumptorum, sanguinis /4/ vindictam exercent, clericis 

interdictam, et tamen, sub pretextu clericatus, tibi consuetas iustitias et 

debita servitia subtra here /5/ non verentur. Cum igitur reddenda sint que 

sunt Cesaris Cesari et que sunt dei deo, felicis recordatio nis /6/ Gregorii 

pape X predecessoris nostri, qui super hoc litteras apostolicas clare me-


morie regi Francie, proprio nomi ne /7/ non expresso, concessit, vestigia 

immitantes, equanimiter duximus tolerandum, si a talibus iustitias debitas 

velut /8/ ab aliis uxoratis exigas et servitia consueta. Datum Avinione v 

non. Iulii pontificatus nostri anno sexto. /9/ 

3. 8. Questions on marriage in MS London, BL Royal 11. 

A. XIV 

The following question on second marriages is relevant in the context 

of ‘Bigamy’, especially for the light it sheds on marriage liturgy and its 

meaning. 

MS London, BL Royal 11. A. XIV 

Parchment manuscript, 215ÿ160 mm., last parchment folio numbered 

312, initials and paragraph marks in red and blue. Ian Doyle dates it to 

the early to mid-fifteenth century. 

Fos. 184V–187R: 

1. Sic igitur expeditum est de hiis que querebantur de matrimonii fundamento 

et de eius complemento. Consequenter querebatur de eiusdem 

ornamento, ad quod pertinet solempnis benedictio. 

2. Circa quam querebuntur duo, quarum prima est Cum benedictio in 

secundis nuptiis simpliciter prohibeatur, Extra ‘De secundis nuptiis’, 

Capellanum et in solempnizatione nuptiarum plures fiunt benedictiones, 

querebatur utrum illa prohibitio se extendat ad omnes illas 

benedictiones vel ad unam tantum illarum, et, si ad unam, quero: Ad 

quam? Quod autem ad omnes videtur, quia decretalis nullam excipit. 

3. In oppositum est communis consuetudo que solam illam benedictionem 

que sit circa Agnus dei in secundis nuptiis dimittit. Hec questio 

est michi multum dubia: tum quia qui nichil excipit totum includere 

videtur, nunc autem decretalis predicta prohibens benedictionem in 

secundis nuptiis nullam excipit; tum quia sola consuetudo est in contrarium. 

Scribitur enim Extra, ‘De secundis nuptiis’, Capellanum: 

‘Capellanum, quem benedictionem cum secunda constiterit celebrasse 

ab ocio beneficioque suspensum cum litterarum tuarum testimonio 

ad sedem apostolicam nullatenus destinare postponas.’ 

Description based on Warner and Gilson, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts, i. 

341–2, and on personal inspection. 

To whom I showed the manuscript. 

Consequenter] Convenienter could be read 

Questio trigesima tertia added in margin in ms. 

X. 4. 21. 1. 

Scribitur] Scibitur ms. 

X. 4. 21. 1. 

Capellanum . . . postponas] underlined in red


4. Dicunt autem hic quidam, sicut patet in quodam apparatu super Reymundum 

libro tertio, t(itulo) ‘De sacramentis iterandis vel non et 

consecratione ecclesiarum’, quod predicta decretalis potest intelligi 

de illo qui, sciens maritum alicuius vivere, benedixerit uxorem eius 

cum alio; vel secundum consuetudinem illarum ecclesiarum in quibus 

non adhibetur benedictio secundis nuptiis. 

5. Nescio unde istud dictum autoritatem habeat. Nam infra, e(odem) 

t(itulo), scilicet ‘De secundis nuptiis’, Vir autem, simpliciter interdicitur 

benedictio supradicta hoc modo: ‘Vir autem aut mulier ad 

bigamiam transiens non debet a presbitero benedici, quia, cum alia 

vice benedicti sint, eorum benedictio [fo. 185r] iterari non debet.’ Hic 

autem dicit Rymundus ubi supra quod *hoc intelligendum est ubi de 

consuetudine alicuius ecclesie aliud obtineret; tunc enim possent sine 

periculo iterari: ‘De penitentia’, D(istinctio) tertia [Gratian, Pars II, 

D.3depen.c.33],≈ ex persona. Videtur tamen aliis, ut Hostiensi, 

quod nulla consuetudo hoc operatur. Sed quicquid sit de hoc, hic 

in primis est sciendum, quod secunde nuptie dicuntur quecumque secuntur 

primas, etiam si millesime sint, ut patet ≈ ‘De secundis nuptiis’, 

Si quis, ≈ Talem; licet vulgo ‘secundum’ dici consueverit quod statim 

post primum sequitur. 

6. Secundo est sciendum quod in illo capitulo Vir autem aut mulier ad 

Gloss by Guillelmus Redonensis on Raymond of Pe~naforte’s Summa for confessors: 

‘Capellanum. Ibi precipitur quod capellanus qui benedictione cum secunda 

celebraverat ab ocio et beneficio suspensus mittatur ad curiam: sed istud potest 

intelligi de illo qui, sciens maritum alicuius vivere, benedixit uxorem eius cum alio; 

vel intelligitur vel [vel ...velsic ms.: read vel...secundum?] consuetudinem 

illarum ecclesiarum in quibus non adhibetur benedictio secundis nuptiis, nec debet 

nisi ubi est consuetudo quod iteretur. Ambr(osius) De Penitentia di. i. iii Reperiuntur 

[=Gratian, D. 1 de pen. c. 3]. Licite ibi vero notavit H. quod Lazarus post 

suscitationem suam non posset repetere uxorem suam vel e converso, et quod si 

vellet eam [fo. 148r, right-hand gloss] iterum [interim ms.] habere uxorem, oporteret 

contrahere de novo. Non tamen esset bigamus quia [corr. from qui] non divideret 

carnem suam propter hoc in duas’ (MS BL Royal 8. A. II, fos. 147v–148r, gloss). 

Incidentally, this manuscript has an extraordinary layout, in which the main text 

and gloss are laid out in a varied series of geometric patterns. 

X. 4. 21. 3. Rymundus] sic ms. aliud] aT ms. 

i.e. Gratian speaking in his own person rather than quoting an authority. 

Cf. Hostiensis, Lectura, on X. 4. 21. 3: Vir autem (MS BL Arundel 471, fo. 193RB, 

lines 24 ·.). 

hoc] hic could be read 

Corpus Iuris Civilis,code5.9.8.2,quotedbyHostiensis(HenricusdeSegusio, 

Summa aurea (Lyons, 1548 edn.), fo. 225VB), probably in the light of the ordinary 

gloss on ‘secundo toro’, which reads: ‘id est, tertio. omne enim matrimonium potest 

dici secundum, quod primum sequitur. Vel forte respectu secundi quod est primum 

post secundum. et sic de aliis’ (Corpus iuris civilis, ed. I. Fehi, iv (Lyons, 1627; 

repr. Osnabr•uck, 1966), col. 1174). (Many thanks to Martin Brett, Gero Dolezalek, 

Charles Donahue, and Anders Winroth for finding these sources for me after an 

appeal to a canon lawyers’ e-mail list.)


bigamiam transiens, per bigamiam intelliguntur secunda vota, hoc est, 

matrimonia secundo contracta, ut sit sensus ad bigamiam transiens, id 

est, ad secunda vota, vel matrimonia secundo contracta, supra eodem 

titulo, capitulo illo—Quod ideo fit quia per secunda vota sepius contrahitur 

bigamia. 

7. Quantum autem ad questionem in se, nullam penitus invenio autoritatem 

qua possumus informari de qua benedictione intelligi debeat 

decretalis, et ideo in proposito sola consuetudo locum tenet, et summe 

valet autoritas illa que scribitur Extra ‘De consuetudine’ Cum dilectus, 

quod consuetudo approbata est optima legum interpres, nam 

Decretorum Distinctio prima Consuetudo dicitur sic: ‘Consuetudo 

autem est ius *quoddam moribus institutum quod pro lege suscipitur 

dum decit lex, ubi Glossa dicit sic, quod tunc demum recurrendum 

est ad consuetudinem cum lex deficit. Sed planum est quod hic 

deficit nobis lex quantum ad expressionem supradicte benedictionis. 

Unde quantum est ex parte legis scripte, non magis est omittenda vel 

danda tanquam prohibita una benedictio in secundis nuptiis quam alia. 

8. Nunc autem communis ecclesie consuetudo est quod ista benedictio 

que datur post Agnus dei, et ante osculum pacis datum, in secundis 

nuptiis est omittenda seu non danda: ergo pro prohibita est habenda: 

et quod ista consuetudo tamquam rationabilis sit *approbanda declaro 

sic. Nam, cum quattuor dentur benedictiones in primis nuptiis, una 

in ostio ecclesie, alia in principio misse, tertia ante pacis osculum et 

quarta ad lectum: inter istas tertia benedictio principalitatem tenet, 

quia maxime respicit totius matrimonii perfectionem et consummationem. 

Nunc autem benedictio potissime respicit matrimonii consummationem, 

et hoc attestatur quod scribitur Gen. 2: ‘Masculum et 

feminam creavit eos, benedixitque illis deus, et ait: Crescite et multiplicamini 

et replete terram’. Unde beatus Augustinus De Civitate Dei 

Libro decimo quarto capitulo vicesimo secundo dicit sic: ‘Nos 

autem nullo modo dubitamus secundum benedictionem dei “Crescite 

et multiplicamini et implete terram” donum esse nuptiarum, quas deus 

ante peccatum hominis ab initio constituit, creando masculum et feminam, 

qui sexus utique in carne est’; hec Augustinus, et infra [fo. 185v], 

dicit quod cum ‘evidentissime appareat in diversi sexus corporibus, 

X. 4. 21. 3. X. 1. 4. 8. autem] pro ms. 


‘is lacking—Here it seems recourse is made to custom only when ordinance 

is lacking’ (Gratian, The Treatise on Laws (Decretum DD. 1–20) with the Ordinary 

Gloss, ed. and trans. A. Thompson, J. Gordley, and K. Christensen (Studies in 

Medieval and Modern Canon Law, 2; Washington, 1993), 5. 

ergo] igitur could be read 

decimo quarto] 14O ms. 

vicesimo secundo] 22.a ms. 

Augustine, De civitate Dei, 14. 22 (Migne, PL 41. 429).


masculum et feminam, ita creatos, ut prolem generando crescerent, 

et multiplicarentur, et impleant terram, magne surditatis est reluctari’, 

dicendo scilicet predictam benedictionem non referri ad prolis 

multiplicationem. Hec ergo multiplicatio est principalis e·ectus predicte 

benedictionis. Sed hec in sola tertia benedictione imprecatur: 

ibi enim dicitur: ‘Sit fecunda in sobole’, et nusquam alibi in tota 

sollempnitate nuptiali. 

9. Nam loquendo de prima benedictione que fit in ostio ecclesie ibi dicuntur 

tres orationes, in quarum prima pro sponsis petitur longevitas 

secure conversationis, in secunda sagacitas superne cognitionis, in tertia, 

condignitas divine acceptationis. 

10. Prima oratio incipit: ‘Respice Domine de celo’, etc. Secunda incipit: 

‘Deus Abraham, deus Ysaac’, etc. Tertia: ‘Benedicat vos omnipotens 

deus’, etc. 

11. De benedictione vero anuli nichil ad propositum nostrum. 

12. In secunda vero benedictione que fit ante inchoationem misse tres dicuntur 

orationes in quarum prima pro sponsis petitur benignitas paternalis 

remissionis; in secunda iocunditas filialis consolationis; in tertia 

stabilitas visceralis copulationis. Prima oratio incipit sic: ‘Benedicat 

vos deus pater’ etc. Secunda sic: ‘Respice Domine propitius super 

hunc famulum tuum et hanc famulam tuam’, etc. Tertia sic: ‘Omnipotens 

deus, qui primos parentes’ etc. 

13. In tertia vero benedictione, que fit post Agnus dei et ante osculum pacis, 

dicuntur due tantum orationes: una brevis, in qua pro sponsis petitur 

celestis auxilii assistentia, et alia bene prolixa, in qua petitur finalis 

matrimonii ecacia. Prima incipit: Propitiare Domine etc. Secunda 

incipit: Deus qui potestate virtutis tue, etc. 

14. In ista vero ultima oratione, in qua petitur finalis matrimonii ecacia 

surditatis] absurditatis Augustine 

referri] referi ms. benedictione] benedictio ne ms. 

Cf. Manuale ad usum percelebris Ecclesie Sarisburiensis: From the Edition Printed 

at Rouen in 1543 . . ., ed. A. J. Collins (Henry Bradshaw Society, 91; London, 

1960), 54. 

I have not found this exact pattern of blessings, but cf. J.-B. Molin and P. 

Mutembe, Le Rituel du mariage en France du XIIe au XVIe si›ecle (Th‹eologie historique, 

26; Paris, 1974), 288, 305. 

Cf. Manuale, ed. Collins, 49 (where this blessing is placed before the rubric 

‘Hic intrent ecclesiam usque ad gradum altaris’); Missale Romanum Mediolani, 1474, 

facsimile ed. R. Lippe (2 vols.; Henry Bradshaw Society, 33; London, 1899–1907), 

ii. 320. Cf. Manuale, ed. Collins, 50. 

Cf. ibid. (which adds ‘sempiterne’ after ‘Omnipotens’). 

Ibid. 53; The Gregorian Sacramentary under Charles the Great, ed. H. A. Wilson 

(Henry Bradshaw Society, 49; London, 1915), 121; Missale Romanum, ed. Lippe, 

ii. 321 

Manuale, ed. Collins, 53; Gregorian Sacramentary, ed. Wilson, 121; Missale 

Romanum, ed. Lippe, ii. 321. For this prayer see MS BL Add. 41174, fo. 264va–b.


cum suis annexis, ad inclinandam clementiam et benivolentiam autoris 

matrimonii, qui deus est, allegantur in principio eiusdem orationis tria 

bona matrimonii tamquam propterea matrimonium instituerit. 

15. Primo igitur pro bono prolis allegatur fecunditas propagationis, et 

hoc est quod in primis dicitur: Deus qui potestate virtutis tue de nichilo 

cuncta fecisti, qui dispositis universitatis exordiis homini ad ymaginem dei 

facto, ideo inseparabile mulieris adiutorium condidisti, ut femineo corpori 

de virili carne dares [fo. 186r] principium docens quod ex uno placuisset 

institui numquam liceret disiungi. 

16. Secundo pro bono sacramenti allegatur significationis congruitas, et 

hic est quod convenienter in eadem oratione dicitur: Deus qui tam 

excellenti misterio coniugalem copulam consecrasti ut Christi et ecclesie 

sacramentum presignares in federe nuptiarum. 

17. Tertio pro bono fidei, quod etiam in prima parte tactum est, allegatur 

coniunctionis inseparabilitas, et hoc est quod continue dicitur in 

predicta oratione: Deus per quem mulier iungitur viro et societas principaliter 

ordinata, ea benedictione donatur que sola nec per originalis penam 

peccati nec per diluvii est ablata sententiam, respice propitius super hanc 

famulam tuam, etc. Et versus finem orationis dicitur: sit fecunda in 

sobole,etc. 

18. Ex quibus omnibus patet quod ista benedictio est principalis, tamquam 

ad quam cetere precedentes ordinantur, et pro cuius e·ectus conservatione 

fit sequens benedictio, scilicet ad lectum, sicut patet intuentibus. 

19. Ad hoc etiam poterit esse congruitas bona, nam, secundum beatum 

Augustinum, in illa oratione Summe sacerdos, in communione corporis 

et sanguinis Christi yma *summis coniunguntur, scilicet mens 

humana corpori Christi, immo ipsi deo. Quia ergo copulatio maritalis 

istam coniunctionem significat, immo et ipsam unionem qua 

personaliter ipsa deitas humanitati in Christo unitur, qui verissime 

in sacramento predicto continetur, ordinatissime institutum est quod 

illa benedictio qui principalitatem in matrimonio tenet ante communionem 

seu perceptionem eiusdem corporis benedicti solempniter 

conferatur tamquam signum ante signatum. 

20. Propterea due ponuntur rationes quare benedictio in secundis nuptiis 

non est danda. Una est sacramenti attestatio, in signum enim quod 

hec benedictio que datur in primis nuptiis est quasi sacramentalis, 

ideo iterari non debet. Prima q. prima Quod quidam et trigesima 

secunda q. septima *Quemadmodum, et De Consecratione Distinctio 

quarta, Ostenditur; et hec ratio implicatur in decretali supradicta Vir 

autem. 

igitur] ergo could be read 

Gratian, Decretum, Pars II, C. 1, q. 1, c. 97. 


Gratian, Decretum, Pars III, D. 4 de cons., c. 32. X. 4. 21. 3.


21. Alia ratio est secundarum nuptiarum detestatio, quia quantum ad istam 

benedictionem iterandam secunde nuptie fornicatio dicuntur: trigesima 

prima q. prima: Hac ratione. Ibi enim sic scribitur: ‘Hac 

ratione Apostolus precepit secundas nuptias adire propter incontinentiam 

hominum. Nam secundam quidem accipere secundum preceptum 

Apostoli licitum est, secundum autem veritatis rationem vere 

fornicatio est’: quasi dicat, secundum Hostiensem, titulo ‘De secundis 

nuptiis’ super primum capitulum: Sicut nec fornicatores benedicendi 

sunt, sic nec secundo contrahentes, quia alias benedicti fuerunt. 

22. Illa igitur benedictio inter ceteras principalitatem tenet in qua maxime 

exprimitur ipsum matrimonii sacramentum quantum ad eius bona et 

eis annexa quo ad primam [fo. 186v] rationem, et in qua maxime imprecatur 

castitatis et honestatis munditia quo ad secundam rationem. 

Sed hec est illa tertia benedictio, que datur post Agnus dei. Inipsa 

enim maxime exprimitur ipsum sacramentum et eius triplex bonum, 

ut patuit ex predictis. 

23. In ipsa etiam maxime castitas et honestas petitur seu imprecatur. Ibi 

enim dicitur: Fidelis et casta nubat in Christo, imitatrixque sanctarum 

permaneat feminarum, etinfra,Uni thoro iuncta contactus illicitos fugiat,etinfra,Sit 

verecundia gravis, pudore venerabilis doctrinis celestibus 

erudita. 

24. Predictam igitur consuetudinem tamquam rationalem approbando, 

dico pro questione quod prohibitio papalis expressa in decretali supradicta 

se extendit vel ad illam solam tertiam benedictionem que datur 

post Agnus dei; vel ad omnes adeo quod quicumque sacerdos illam 

dederit in secundis nuptiis, etiam ceteris omissis, penam superius taxatam 

a iure eo facto incurrit, si vero eam non dederit, nulla ceterarum 

benedictionum omissa, credo quod ratione predicte consuetudinis predicte 

pene subiacere non debet. 

25. Nec obstant communes rubrice que ponuntur in oratione ad sponsalia 

facienda, quia quamvis in prima benedictione, que fit in ostio, et in secunda, 

que fit in principio misse, tituli seu rubrice sint ‘benedictiones’, 

in tertia vero benedictione, que fit post Agnus dei, titulus seu rubrica sit 

‘orationes’, ille tamen orationes verius et realius sint benedictio quam 

prime, ut prius ostensum est. 

26. Hoc iterum patet. Nam prime due benedictiones non sunt nisi divine 


Apostolus precepit] apostoli preceperunt Friedberg edn. 

veritatis] unclear in ms. 

Hostiensis, Lectura, at X. 4. 21. 1 (MS BL Arundel 471, fo. 193RA, from line 

15 up). 

Fidelis] delis ms. 

Cf. Manuale, ed. Collins, 54. 

extendit] extentit ms.


benedictionis imprecationes, et hoc quo ad quedam que tam sponsis 

quam aliis sunt communia, sicut intuentibus patet. Tertia vero benedictio 

est divine benedictionis imprecatio, non solum pro vite sanctitate 

et honestate et aliis huiusmodi, sed etiam pro propagationis fecunditate, 

et non solum est divine benedictionis imprecatio, immo eius 

domini benedictionis tamquam collate rite contrahentibus explicatio. 

Deus, inquit, per quem mulier iungitur viro et societas principaliter 

ordinata ea benedictione donatur, etc. 

27. Ad argumentum in oppositum cum dicitur quod decretalis illa nullam 

benedictionem excipit, igitur ad omnes se extendit, dicendum quod 

aliud est nichil excipere, et totum exprimere. Nam sequitur: qui totum 

exprimit vel dicit, nichil excipit, non tamen e converso: quia et si in 

aliqua lege vel iure nichil expresse excipiatur, poterit tamen aliquid 

excipi, vel per consuetudinem, vel per aliquam aliam legem: et sic est 

in proposito. 

28. Non enim prohibet expresse predicta decretalis omnem benedictionem 

dari nec precipit nullam benedictionem dari, sed absolute interdicit 

benedictionem dari [fo. 187r] cum quo stare potest quod alique dentur 

et alia tanquam principalis non detur. 

3. 9. Passage on bigamy in the Pupilla oculi of Johannes de 

Burgo 

This passage shows the impact of the rule against blessing second marriages. 

The penalty for blessing them clearly caused so much worry that 

someone took the trouble of forging a decretal diminishing the consequences. 

Pope John XXII was the alleged author of this decretal, which 

allowed the local bishop to absolve priests who blessed second marriages. 

Note that the symbolic rationale of the rule against blessing second marriages 

comes out clearly. 

The work comes within the genre of pastoral manuals. It was probably 

intended primarily for ecclesiastical administrators with an academic 

training behind them, and it was popular, to judge from the surviving 

manuscript di·usion. For the author see R. Sharpe, A Handlist of the 

Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540 (Publications of the 

Journal of Medieval Latin, 1; [Turnhout], 1997), no. 626, p. 222. 

The passage comes in part 8, ch. 18, of the Pupilla oculi. 

Cf. Manuale, ed. Collins, 54. 

This is convincingly argued by R. M. Ball, ‘The Education of the English 

Parish Clergy in the Later Middle Ages with Particular Reference to the Manuals of 

Instruction’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 1976), 70–1.

MS London, BL Royal 11. B. X 


Parchment manuscript, 265ÿ170 mm. ‘iii+188 folios’, possibly late 

fourteenth century, initials blue with red decoration, paragraph marks 

in red (but blue in some passages written in red). In addition to the 

Pupilla oculi, it includes pastoral materials, a defence of religious images 

by Walter Hilton, the ‘Vision of St Paul’, and an ‘Apocryphal epistle of 

Christ to St Peter’: full details in the scholarly catalogue. It is the sort 

of combination of texts that an educated parish priest in late medieval 

England might be expected to enjoy and find useful. 

Fos. 146VA–147RA: 

1. Capitulum decimum octavum. De secundis nuptiis et quomodo uxor 

est tractanda. 

2. Infra tempus luctus, id est, infra annum post mortem mariti sui, mulier, 

sine aliqua legalis infamie iactura seu alia pena, nubendi alteri liberam 

habeat facultatem: Extra de secundis nuptiis, capitulo ult. 

3. Nullus ad secundas nuptias migrare presumat donec ei constet quod ab 

hac vita migravit coniux eius. Si autem alter coniugum non certificatus 

de morte sui coniugis alteri nupserit, debitum tenetur reddere, sed 

non potest exigere, et si de prioris coniugis vita postmodum constiterit, 

relictis adulterinis amplexibus ad priorem coniugem revertatur. Extra, 

eodem titulo, capitulo 2. De hac materia vide supra, capitulo 12.s. 

4. Item vir vel mulier ad bigamiam transiens non debet iterum a presbitero 

benedici. Extra eodem titulo Vir autem. Hoc intelligunt B(ernardus) 

et Go(·redus): nisi consuetudo alicuius ecclesie aliter obtineret. Tunc 

enim possent sine periculo benedici. De Penitentia Di. 3 ≈ ex per- 


348, and on personal inspection. 

decimum octavum] 18M ms. 

X. 4. 21. 5. 

nupserit] nupterit or nupcerit ms.? 

X. 4. 21. 2. 

The ‘s’ refers to a subdivision of ch. 12. In this manuscript at least marginal 

letters mark sections of the text of chapters. 

eodem] c. ms.? 

X. 4. 21. 3. 

I initially read the ‘B’ in ms. as a ‘W’, and it is not like the ‘B’ a few lines 

later (see below at n. 15), but both cases must refer to Bernard of Parma, Glossa 

ordinaria on X. 4. 21. 3: ‘Et benedictio ista cum aliquis secundam ducit virginem 

iteratur secundum consuetudinem quorumdam locorum; et hoc si papa sciat talem 

consuetudinem: alias non licet’ (MS BL Royal 9. C. I, fo. 152VA, left-hand gloss). 

This must be Go·redus de Trano but I have not identified the passages with 

certainty. Go·redus de Trano, Summa super titulis decretalium at X. 4. 21 (I have 

used MS BL Arundel 431, fo. 80VA)—a dense mass of cross-references—might be 

one of them but the wording does not seem very close. 

De benedictionibus in secundis nuptiis in margin


sona. Et quod dicitur de secundis nuptiis non benedicendis intelligi 

debet quando tam ex parte viri quam ex parte mulieris sunt secunde, 

vel saltem ex parte mulieris. Si autem virgo contrahat cum illo qui 

prius habuit uxorem aliam, nichilominus nuptie benedicentur, secundum 

Tho(mam), Di. 43. Et concordat Ber(nardus) super capitulo Vir 

autem. 

5. Dicit Hostiensis: persone nubentes non benedicuntur in secundis nuptiis: 

cuius ratio est quia per carnem a lias [fo. 146vb] benedictam caro non 

benedicta cum qua iungitur benedicitur. In commixtione enim corporum, 

per quam eciuntur una caro vir et mulier, caro benedicta trahit 

ad se non benedictam, sicut oleum sanctum trahit ad se oleum mixtum, 

non sanctum: et sic totum fit sanctum, secundum Hostiensem in Glosa 

super capitulo Vir autem. Hic videtur Hostiensis innuere quod nulle 

secunde nuptie sint benedicende. Cuius contrarium dicit Tho(mas), sed 

huic antique concertationi finem ponit quedam constitutio que creditur 

fuisse Io(hannis) 22, ubi dicitur quod si forsan alter eorum vel ambo ad 

secundas nuptias transeuntium in primis benedicti non fuerint, danda 

est benedictio in secundis nuptiis: quod sic intelligo: quod si maritus 

vidue mortue, qui non fuit benedictus in secundis nuptiis illius vidue, 

contraxit cum relicta vidua, que non fuit benedicta in secundis nuptiis 

mariti sui, debent nuptie eorum secunde benedici, quia neuter eorum 

prius in nuptiis fuerat benedictus. 

6. Consimiliter, si ille qui prius contraxit cum vidua, et non fuit in secundis 

nuptiis eius benedictus, contrahat cum virgine, seu e converso, 

benedicende sunt nuptie eorum. Sic intelligo illam constitutionem que 

incipit Concertationi antique. 

7. Item, de iure antiquo capellanus benedicens secundas nuptias suspensus 

erat ab ocio et beneficio, et mittendus fuerat ad sedem apostolicam 

pro absolutione obtinenda, ut Extra, eodem titulo, capitulo 1. Sed 

iste rigor hodie temperatur, ita quod presbiteri qui secundas nuptias 

benedixerint, etiam scienter, ex hoc ad sedem apostolicam venire minime 

teneantur, sed a pena suspensionis in hoc casu a iure inducta per 

suos possunt diocesanos absolvi. Hec habentur in dicta constitutione 

Concertationi antique, que dicitur fuisse Johannis 22. 

8. Sed quia in nuptiis plures dantur benedictiones, videlicet super nu- 

Gratian, Pars II, D. 3, de pen., c. 21. 

For ‘43’ read ‘42’: see S. Tommaso d’Aquino: Commento alle Sentenze di Pietro 

Lombardo e testo integrale di Pietro Lombardo. Libro quarto. Distinzioni 24–42. 

L’Ordine, il Matrimonio, trans. and ed. ‘Redazione delle Edizioni Studio Domenicano’ 

(Bologna, 2001), dist. 42, q. 3, a. 2, solutio, p. 890. 

Bernard of Parma, passage cited above (n. 10). 

Hostiensis, Lectura, on X. 4. 21. 3 (MS BL Arundel 471, fo. 193RB). 

See above, p. 155, on this probably fake bull. 

See above, p. 155. 

X. 4. 21. 1.


bentes introitu ecclesie, super pallium post missam, et super thorum 

in sero, ideo notandum quod omnes benedictiones sive orationes benedictionales 

que dicuntur in primis nuptiis, dicuntur etiam in secundis, 

etiam ubi uterque coniugum vel alter prius fuerat benedictus, preter 

illam que incipit Deus qui tam [fo. 147ra] excellenti misterio coniugalem 

copulam consecrasti etc., usque Deus per quem mulier, in qua agitur 

de unitate Christi et ecclesie que figuratur in primis nuptiis non in 

secundis, ut Extra, De Bigamis, capitulo Debitum. Ideo in secundis 

nuptiis illa oratio penitus omittenda est, ubi videlicet alter nubentium 

est bigamus prius benedictus vel vidua prius benedicta. 

9. Si vir et mulier contrahant in facie ecclesie et benedicantur, et postea 

divortietur inter eos ante carnalem copulam propter aliquod impedimentum 

legitimum, neutrius secunde nuptie benedicentur si convolent 

ad secunda vota, quia benedictio spiritualis tante ecacie est quod 

semper operatur nisi recipiens fuerit contrarie voluntatis, et benedictio 

semel accepta non potest amitti: quod enim factum est, nequit non fieri, 

secundum Hostiensem in Summa, rubrica ‘De secundis nuptiis’. 

3. 10. A ‘bigamy’ case from the gaol delivery rolls (6 June 

1320) 

This document shows how the rules about ‘bigamy’ could be a matter of life 

and death. The Second Council of Lyons ruled that clerics in minor orders 

who married widows or were otherwise ‘bigamous’ lost their clerical status, 

and hence their immunity from secular justice. This was rapidly adopted 

in England. Because he was married to a widow, John of Worcester was 

unable to plead his clergy and escape hanging for his very considerable 

felonies. 

For a brief mention of this case see J. R•ohrkasten, Die englische Kronzeugen 

1130–1330 (Berliner historische Studien, 16; Berlin, 1990), 345 and 

n. 837. For gaol delivery rolls as a genre of source see ibid. 44–58. 

The National Archives, JUST 3. 41/1 

The manuscript consists of long strips sewn together, varying in length 

but very approximately 700ÿ220 mm., with cases recorded on both 

sides. The following summary is attached to the document on a modern 

etc.] c. ms. 

X. 1. 21. 5. 

benedicantur] benedicuntur ms. 

et] om. ms. 

divortietur] divortiatur ms., with a mark over the a 

Hostiensis (Henricus de Segusio), Summa aurea (Lyons, 1548 edn.), fo. 225VB. 

I owe this reference to Dr Susanne Jenks.


typed sheet: ‘Newgate gaol deliveries by Henry Spigurnel and fellows, 

10–14 Edward II (1316–1320). Plea Roll.’ 

Membrane xxxviii d: 

Iohannes de Wyrcestre captus ad sectam Iohannis de Weston’ militis pro 

quadam roberia ei facta apud Novum Castrum /1/ super Tynam de quindecim 

libris sterlingorum in denariis numeratis, anulis, et firmaculis au reis 

/2/ et Ciphis argenteis et aliis iocalibus et bonis et catellis ad valentiam 

centum librarum. Et pro burga ria /3/ domus Roberti de Kestevene in 

Distaflane in Warda de Bredstrete London’ et quadam /4/ roberia ibidem 

noctanter felonice facta de bonis et catallis . . Bathonensis et Wellensis 

Episcopi ad valentiam /5/ centum librarum etc. Et etiam pro burgaria 

domus Hervici de Staunton’ Cancellarii de Scaccario domini Regis /6/ infra 

Aldredesgate, et roberia eidem Hervico ibidem felonice facta de bonis 

et catallis ad valentiam quadra ginta /7/ librarum. Unde rettatus est, etc. 

Venit et quesitus qualiter se velit de feloniis predictis acquietare, /8/ dicit 

quod clericus est, etc., et non potest hic inde respondere, etc. Et super 

hoc obiectum est eidem Iohanni /9/ quod privilegio clericali gaudere non 

debet, eo quod bigamus est, eo quod duxit in uxorem quamdam viduam 

/10/ nomine Aliciam, que prius fuerat uxor cuiusdam Willelmi de 

Thurston’, qui obiit in prisona domini Regis /11/ in Turri London’ etc. 

Et predictus Iohannes dicit quod ipse non est bigamus, et quod numquam 

aliquam /12/ habuit uxorem, etc. Ideo inquiratur per patriam, etc. Et super 

hoc Robertus de Ware, Iohannes de Waleden’, /13/ Willelmus le Maderman, 

Gilbertus le Sherman, Willelmus le Skynnere, Johannes de Kent, 

deyere, Simon /14/ de Tournham, Henricus de Somerset, Willelmus le 

Hastere, Thomas atte Ramme, Simon le Taillour, /15/ et Willelmus de 

Nottele, iurati Warde Castri Baynardi et de visneto kaii Sancti Pauli, ubi 

predicti Iohannes et predicta /16/ Alicia fecerunt moram iam per quinquennium, 

dicunt super sacramentum suum quod predictus Iohannes de 

Wyrecestre, post mor tem /17/ cuiusdam Willelmi de Thurston’ primi viri 

predicte Alicie, qui obiit in prisona in Turri London’, duxit /18/ eamdem 

Aliciam viduam in uxorem, et in eorum visneto ipsam tenuit pro uxore sua. 

Unde dicunt precise quod predictus /19/ Iohannes bigamus est, etc. Ideo 

idem Iohannes respondit de feloniis predictis. Et quesitus qualiter se velit 

de roberiis, /20/ burgariis, et feloniis predictis acquietare, precise refutat 

se ponere inde super aliquam patriam, etc. Ideo, tamquam /21/ refutans 

communem legem, committitur gaole ad penam, etc. Postea, coram eisdem 

i.e. Dista· Lane. 

Thurston’] or Thurstoun 

London’] or Londoun 

i.e. St Paul’s wharf or quay. 

Thurston’] or Thurstoun 

London’] or Londoun


iustitiariis et coram Iohanne de /22/ Shirbourn’, tenente locum Stephani 

de Abyndon’, coron(atoris) domini Regis Civitatis London’, predictus 

Iohannes de Wy recestre /23/ cognovit roberias, burgarias, et felonias ei 

impositas, et se esse latronem, et devenit probator, etc. Et fecit /24/ appellum, 

etc. Postea coram eisdem iustitiariis, die sabbati proxima post festum 

translationis sancti Thome Martiris anno /25/ Regis nunc quartodecimo, 

idem Iohannes probator recusavit se de appello suo predicto. Ideo ipse 

suspensus, etc. /26/ 

At head of recto folio: 

Adhuc de Deliberatione Gaole de Neugate Die Veneris proxima post 

Octabas sancte Trinitatis Anno regni regis E. filii regis E. tertiodecimo. 

—Spigurnel. 

In margins: 

by line 1: Northumbr’ 

by line 2: Lond’ 

by line 4: Bredstr’ 

by line 6: Aldredesg’ 

by line 22: pena 

by line 24–5: probator 

by line 26: suspensus 

3. 11. The case of Five-Wife Francis, from the archive of the 

Apostolic Penitentiary 

This document suggests that the privileges of clerics in minor orders did 

not stop with ‘privilege of clergy’ (subjection to church courts rather than 

secular courts). These privileges were forfeited through ‘bigamy’ (unless 

the cleric could obtain a dispensation, as here). Thus the loss of a range of 

real privileges can be traced back causally to marriage symbolism, another 

example of its practical impact on society. 

The document comes in a register of decisions by the Apostolic Penitentiary. 

Archivio Segreto Vaticano Penitenzieria ap. 75 

Paper manuscript, 295ÿ215 mm.; the last modern folio number is 478. 

According to the Prospettivo (a very brief unprinted conspectus of 

Penitentiary registers), vol. 75 is Clem VII, 1526. The volume identifies 

itself throughout as ‘Anno 4O Clementis papa VII’. 

Abyndon’] or Abindoun 

London’] or Londoun 

See above, p. 165 n. 88, for bibliography on the Penitentiary. 

Description based on personal inspection.


Fo. 298R, new foliation: 

At head of page Anno 4O Clementis Pape vii 

Heading, left-hand margin: Bigamia 

Heading, centre: Cordellas. Taxatio xiii1- 2 

Halfway down entry, left-hand margin: iiii Idus Aprilis 

Halfway down entry, right-hand margin: Gerundensis 

Franciscus Scola clericus Gerundensis exponit quod /1/ ipse ex magno 

devotionis fervore desiderat suo cleri cali /2/ caractere, quo alias rite insignitus 

fuit, et illius /3/ privilegiis uti et gaudere. Sed quia postmodum 

cum /4/ tribus virginibus et duabus viduis mulieribus /5/ successive matrimonium 

contraxit et consumavit, bigamiam /6/ incurrendo, desiderium 

suum in hac parte adimplere /7/ posse dubitat inconsulta desuper apostolica 

sede. Quare /8/ ipse asserens se cum prima muliere matrimonium 

/9/ forsan consumasse et similiter, antequam ultimo contraheret, /10/ ut 

clericali caractere et privilegiis clericalibus uti vale ret /11/ a sede apostolica 

indultum forsan fuisse, supplicatur, etc. /12/ sibi ut dicto suo clericali caractere 

ac omnibus et singulis /13/ privilegiis, gratiis, concessionibus et 

indultis quibus clerici /14/ cum unica et virgine coniugati utuntur, potiuntur, 

et /15/ gaudent, seu uti, potiri et gaudere poterunt quomodolibet, 

/16/ in futurum uti, potiri et gaudere libere et licite /17/ valeat in omnibus 

et per omnia, citra tamen ascensum /18/ ad superiores ordines, perinde 

ac si bigamiam huiusmodi /19/ F. nullatenus incurrisset, veris, etc., concedere 

et in dulgere, /20/ non obstantibus premissis et apostolicis ac in 

provin cialibus /21/ et sinodalibus conciliis editis generalibus vel /22/ specialibus 

constitutionibus et ordinationibus, necnon impe rialibus /23/ ac 

regiis, regnique legibus et practmaticis /24/ sanctionibus, statutisque municipalibus 

privilegiisquoque in dultis /25/ et literis apostolicis etiam felicis 

recordationis dominorum Innocentii viii, Alexandri vi, /26/ et aliorum 

Romanorum pontificum etiam super observantia dictarum sanctionum et 

certi /27 habitus delatione concessis ceterisque contrariis quibuscumque 

dignemini /28/ de gratia speciali. 

Fiat de speciali M. R(egens). 

1- 2 ] looks like a division sign. 

mulieribus] ms. adds and deletes viduis 

desuper] de super ms. 

The implication is that this previous dispensation had been meant to take care of 

past marriages but not to allow him to marry again and yet keep his clerical status. 

F.] deleted? I am also not quite certain that this is an F 

Practmaticis] sic ms.


3. 12. The case of Petrus Martorel, from the archive of the 

Apostolic Penitentiary 

This reinforces the points made on the basis of Document 3. 11. 

Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Penitenzieria ap. 75 

See Document 3. 11. 

Fo. 473V, new foliation: 

At head of page: Roma apud S.P. [ =Sanctum Petrum] 

Head of facing page: Anno 4O Clementis pape vii 

Heading, left-hand margin: Bigamia cum assistentia. 

Heading, centre: Villa Nova, tax. xviiii1- 2 

Halfway down entry, left-hand margin: xi kl. decembr. 

Halfway down entry, right-hand margin: Barchinonen(sis) 

Petrus Martorel Clericus coniugatus Barchinonesis /1/ exponit quod ipse 

ex magno devotionis fervore cupit /2/ clericali caractere quo alias rite 

insignitus fuit uti, sed /3/ quia postmodum matrimonium per verba de 

presenti cum una, /4/ virgine, et, illa de medio sublata, cum alia, vidua, 

mulie ribus /5/, contraxit, illudque carnali copula consumavit, /6/ bigamiam 

incurrendo, desiderium suum in hac parte adim plere /7/ posse non 

sperat, sede apostolica de super inconsulta. /8/ Supplicat igitur humiliter 

S(anctitati) V(estre) idem orator quatenus sibi ut /9/ dicto suo clericali 

caractere, illiusque omnibus et singulis privi legiis, /10/ immunitatibus, 

exemptionibus, gratiis, favoribus /11/ concessionibus, preeminentiis, libertatibus 

et indultis /12/ quibus alii clerici, cum unica et virgine coniugati, 

utuntur, /13/ potiuntur, et gaudent, seu uti, potiri, et gaudere pote runt 

/14/ quomodolibet, in futurum uti, potiri et gaudere libere /15/ et licite possit 

et valeat, citra tamen ascensum ad /16/ superiores ordines, indulgere ac 

secum misericorditer dispensare, /17/ non obstantibus premissis necnon 

constitutionibus et ordinationibus /18/ apostolicis ac tam provincialibus 

quam sinodalibus etiam Barchinonensis /19/ ecclesie iuramento confirmatione 

apostolica vel quavis /20/ firmitate alia roboratis statutis et consuetudinibus 

/21/ privilegiisquoque, indultis et litteris apostolicis ac legibus 

/22/ imperialibus et regalibus ac pragmaticis sanctionibus /23/ quibus omnibus 

illorum omnium tenores ac si de verbo ad /24/ verbum insererentur 

presentibus pro sucienter expressis /25/ habendis, illis alias in suo robore 

permansuris, hac vice /26/ dumtaxat specialiter et expresse placeat derogare 

/27/ ceterisque contrariis quibuscumque dignemini de /28/ gratia speciali. 

/29/ Fiat de speciali L. Gomez Regens /30/ 

Cum assistentia que committatur discretis /31/ viris priori monasterii 

desuper] de super ms.


sancti Dominici Barchinonensis /32/ et Iacobo Zaragossa Canonico Barchinonensi 

et /33/ eorum cuilibet. 

Fiat L 

Documents Relating to Chapter 4: Consummation 

4. 1. Consummation and its consequences in a canon-law 

commentary: a link to late medieval papal dissolutions 

of ratum non consummatum marriages 

This text shows how closely marriage symbolism is bound up with the 

question of the dissolution (not annulment) of a non-consummated (but 

valid) marriage in the thought of one of the most influential medieval 

canonists. It sets the background to the late medieval and early modern 

developments analysed in Chapter 4. It is from Hostiensis’s Lectura on 

Decretals of Gregory IX, X. 3. 32. 7, ‘De conversione coniugatorum’, Ex 

publico instrumento. For a good analysis based on the 1581 Venice edition 

see T. Rinc‹on, El matrimonio, mistero y signo: siglos IX al XIII (Pamplona, 

1971), 397–402. 

For the reasons for using two manuscripts rather than the edition see 

above, introduction to Document 2. 1. As noted there, Kenneth Pennington’s 

discovery of the early version in MS Oxford, New College 205 opened 

up the whole question of the manuscript tradition of the Lectura. The Oxford 

manuscript represents an edition probably completed between 1262 

and 1265. 

To see the early and late versions of this passage together is extremely 

interesting: one can see how Hostiensis’s thought developed. The long 

additions in the later version show how much his mind had continued to 

work on the topic. 

The case deals with a woman who had not yet consummated her marriage 

and who wanted to enter a religious order instead of doing so. The bishop of 

Verona had ordered her to return to her husband or face excommunication. 

Innocent had reversed this: she had two months to enter a religious order or 

return to her husband. If she entered the order, the marriage was dissolved. 

MS Oxford, New College 205 (=O), using MS London, BL Arundel 

471 (= A1) to illustrate the second edition of the Lectura 

For the base manuscript, see above at Document 2. 1. It will be remembered 

that MS Oxford, New College 205 (fo. 151RB, right-hand gloss) 

Pennington, ‘An Earlier Recension of Hostiensis’s Lectura on the Decretals’. 

To distinguish it from A2, MS BL Arundel 485, used above at Documents 

2. 1–2.


(=O) is the earlier edition of Hostiensis’s Lectura. AsatDocument2. 1 

(and 2. 2), the later edition’s readings are shown in the apparatus criticus, 

though from a di·erent manuscript since the manuscript used for 2. 1 

and 2. 2 does not cover this part of the Lectura. 

For the later edition I have chosen MS London, BL Arundel 471 (fo. 

95RA) (=A1). This is a parchment manuscript, 440 mm.ÿ280 mm.; the 

last folio number is 308. There are initials and paragraph marks in red 

and blue. It contains the commentary by Hostiensis on the last three 

books of the Decretals of Gregory IX, and is a pecia copy: see below. 

The script seems to be Italian: at least, it has the ‘u’-shaped superscript, 

which is a fairly good indication of Italian origin when it replaces ‘r’ or 

‘er’. Thus it may have been produced by the pecia system at Bologna, 

though further research (e.g. into the number of peciae) would be needed 

to establish this with certainty. It could be late thirteenth century. It is 

thus a good manuscript of the later recension to compare with O, the 

carrier of the early version. 

A section of the passage edited below is also irreproachably edited 

by Pennington in the article discussed above. He was illustrating the 

di·erence between the two recensions. The passage he edited begins 

‘Hac etiam ratione . . .’ and ends ‘. . . melius commutavit, infra de vot. 

Scripture’ (see p. 83 of Pennington). I have marked the passage clearly 

in my edition, and duplicated Pennington’s work in order to help the 

reader by keeping the passage as a whole. I retain my own slightly different 

editorial style and I have clearly marked the point where I continue 

without Pennington’s guidance. 

The small duplication of e·ort is useful for another reason than the 

reader’s convenience. It suggests that the version in the 1581 edition 

used by Pennington for Hostiensis’s ‘second edition’ is fairly close to 

the manuscript I used, which is representative of a family almost certainly 

widely available, because it is a pecia manuscript, di·used by the 

university system of multiple copying. In A1 the pecia evidence is clear: 

e.g. fo. 95VA, four lines up: ‘fi. xlvii.pe.’. To show how a pecia text compares 

with the first recension, I have recorded all significant readings, 

including errors: it is useful to be reminded how poor pecia texts can be. 

Note, however, that though the scribe has a habit of writing ‘coniuc-’ for 

‘coniunc-’, I have not recorded these cases. 

O, fo. 151RB, right-hand gloss; A1, fo.95RA: 

1. Hac etiam ratione considerata possent sponsi de presenti ante carnis 

copulam auctoritate pape se adinvicem absolvere, sicut legitur in 

sponsalibus ‘De Sponsalibus’ c. ii, quia contrarius actus congruus intervenire 

potest. Argumentum infra, ‘De regulis iuris’, Omnis res: licet 

sponsalibus ‘De Sponsalibus’ c. ii, quia] sponsalibus de futuro. Infra de spon- 

[See p. 272 for n. 3 cont. and nn. 4 and 5.


altero invito hoc non posset. . . . Sed post carnis copulam non posset 

hoc fieri, quia nec actus congruus intervenire posset. . . . 

2. Hoc autem intelligo de potestate absoluta, non de potestate ordinaria, 

nisi alia causa subesset. Non enim fit quod hic statuitur sine causa. 

3. Potuit ergo papa circa non consumatum matrimonium hanc constitutionem 

facere etiam de potestate ordinata: et est ratio quia, cum per 

tale matrimonium caritas, que consistit in spiritu inter deum et iustam 

animam, tantum representetur, supra, ‘De bigamis’, Debitum nichil 

absurdum sequi si talis possit religionem intrare, quia non dissolvitur 

sed potius augetur hoc vinculum caritatis, nec videtur voti violator qui 

hoc in melius commutavit, infra ‘De voto’, Scripture. 

salibus c. ii. Et posset reddi ratio quia ante carnis copulam utroque consentiente in 

dissensu A1 

X. 4. 1. 2. X. 5. 41. 1. hoc non] hoc vero A1 

carnis] carnalis A1 congruus] contrarius congruus A1 

ordinaria] ordinata A1 

causa] causa. Sed et probabiliter dici potest quod cum ecclesia circa impedimenta 

matrimonii restringenda vel laxanda potestatem habeat, ut patet in eo quod legitur 

et notatur infra ‘De consanguinitate’, Non debet (X. 4. 14. 8), statuere vero [corrected 

from non?] potuit et hoc: quod coniunx ante carnis copulam etiam invito consorte 

posset religionem intrare, et alius in seculo remanens cum alia contrahere, impedimento 

hoc non obstante. Et hanc rationem reddidit [corrected from reddit] michi 

Dominus Matheus Sancte Marie in Portic. Dyaconus Cardinalis. Et si queras unde 

procedit tanta potestas ecclesie, vide quod legitur et notatur supra, ‘De translatione 

*episcopi’c.iR(ubrica)ietc.iietiii(X.1.7.1–3).A1 

X. 1. 21. 5. 

sequi] sequitur A1 hoc] per hoc A1 infra] vel infra A1 

Scripture. Verum]Scripture. [Extract edited by Pennington ends here.] Ad 

quod etiam designandum gloriosa domina nostra [interlined] beatissima virgo Maria, 

quamvis vera sponsa Ioseph, hoc tamen non obstante vero deo matrimonialiter 

iuncta fuit. xxvii q. ii, Beata Maria et ≈ Cum ergo (Gratian, Decretum, Pars II, C. 27, 

q. 2, c. 3 and c. 2). Unde et circa matrimonium non consummatum potest ecclesia 

interpretari et statuere quicquid placet, dum tamen iusta causa subsit, ut notatur 

infra, eodem, Ex parte ii ≈i, verbo Etiam et si unus (X. 3. 32. 14). Et hoc est [cum ms.?] 

quod hic evidenter voluit ostendere quando dixit: Sane quod Dominus, etc.[=Sane, 

quod Dominus in Evangelio dicit, non licere viro, nisi ob causam fornicationis, uxorem 

suam dimittere: intelligendum est, secundum interpretationem sacri eloquii, de hiis quorum 

matrimonium carnali copula est consummatum, sine qua consummari non potest], 

quasi dicat: ‘Nec obstat si [sed ms?] opponas: quando interpretamur vel statuimus 

per quod videatur solvi matrimonium coniugale videmur facere contra deum, qui 

dixit: ‘Quos deus coniunxit’, etc. (Matt. 19: 6; Mark 10: 9); et per consequens videmur 

errare, cum nichil possumus statuere contra deum, ut patet in eo quod notatur 

supra ‘De restitutione spolii’, Litteras, ≈ Opinioni. Vere dico: Non obstat talis oppositio, 

quia illa auctoritas intelligenda de coniunctis non tantum animo sed et corpore. 

Ubi ergo deest coniunctio corporum, nichil facimus contra deum, et ideo circa tale 

matrimonium possimus [posimus ms.] statuere quicquid placet de potestate nostra 

absoluta, id est de plenitudine potestatis. Quod et verum est: sed non expedit quod 

in hoc nimis laxet habenas, nec etiam tutum est. . . . Verum A1 

X. 3. 24. 4.


[Extract edited by Pennington ends here.] 

4. Verum, ex quo matrimonium consumatum est, hoc nequit fieri, quia 

cum per ipsum representetur conformitas que consistit in carne inter 

Christum et ecclesiam, ut supra, ‘De bigamis’, Debitum, hec nullatenus 

rumpi potest. Ideo si quis diceret quod postea posset vir vel uxor ad religionem 

migrare, unionis dicte conformitatis violator esset, et innueret 

quod expectaret adhuc aliam fidem et aliam ecclesiam quam Christus 

sibi uniret, et iterum desponsaret, quod falsissimum et hereticum 

esset . . . 

4. 2. Ricardus de Mediavilla: marriage and entry into a 

religious order before consummation 

In this text a thirteenth-century theologian gives a symbolic rationale for 

the law or principle that a non-consummated marriage, though real and 

valid, could be dissolved by one partner’s entry into a religious order. The 

author is rather an obscure figure but the work from which this comes was 

very widespread and influential. It is a commentary on the Sentences of Peter 

Lombard, the most common genre for high-level theological synthesis 

in the last three medieval centuries. 

I have used the 1499 Venice edition Ricardus de Media Villa super quarto 

Sententiarum (BL call number IA 23001). A comparison with MS Oxford, 

Bodl. 744 leads me to think that the edition gives a reliable text. 

Fos. 189VB–190RA: 

[Distinctio XXVII, Articulus II, Questio II] 

1. Secundo queritur utrum matrimonium non consumatum possit dissolvi 

per religionis ingressum: et videtur quod non, quia, matrimonio contracto, 

statim alter coniugum tenetur alteri petenti reddere debitum, 

quia, sicut dicitur ·. ‘De regulis iuris’, In omnibus: ‘In omnibus obligationibus 

in quibus dies non ponitur presenti die debetur.’ Sed hoc 

non esset verum si matrimonium non consumatum solvi posset per religionis 

ingressum, quia coniunx exactus obiicere posset petenti se velle 

religionem intrare. Ergo non solvitur tale matrimonium per religionis 

ingressum. 

2. Item altero intrante religionem, aut alter statim potest contrahere aut 

non. Si non, non est solutum matrimonium. Si sic, cum ille qui intravit 

consumatum est] consumatum A1 

quia] quod A1 

X. 1. 21. 5. 

conformitatis] conformitas A1 

quam] qua A1 

Cf. Aquinas, Summa theologica, 3, q. 29, a. 2. 

‘·’ =Justinian, Dig. 50. 17. 14.


religionem possit ante suam professionem redire ad seculum, contingere 

posset quod una esset sponsa duorum simul in seculo remanentium, 

quod falsum est. 

3. Item, aut ille qui remansit in seculo potest contrahere matrimonium 

ante alterius professionem, aut non. Si sic, tunc solveretur matrimonium, 

nulla interveniente morte, nec corporali, nec spirituali, quia intrans 

religionem non moritur spiritualiter seculo usque ad suam professionem. 

Si non, tunc ille qui religionem intravit posset parum ante 

suam professionem aliam religionem intrare, et postea aliam, et sic remanens 

in seculo sine culpa sua defraudaretur multo tempore suo iure, 

quod est inconueniens. 

4. Contra, Magister, huius Di[stinctionis] c. 6, et est 27 q. 2, Desponsatam 

‘Desponsatam puellam non licet parentibus alii viro tradere, tamen licet 

monasterium sibi eligere’: quod verum non esset nisi illa obligatio solvi 

posset per religionis ingressum. 

5. Item, Extra ‘De conversione coniugatorum’, Verum: ‘Post consensum 

legitimum de presenti, licitum est alteri, altero etiam repugnante, eligere 

monasterium’. Et parum post: ‘dummodo carnalis commixtio non intervenerit 

inter eos, et alteri remanenti, si commonitus continentiam 

[fo. 139va] servarenoluerit, licitum est ad secunda vota transire.’ 

6. Respondeo: quod in matrimonio non consumato adhuc non est nisi coniunctio 

spiritualis, et ideo per mortem qua homo spiritualiter seculo 

moritur potest solvi: qua morte moritur per hoc quod in religione 

profitetur. Et hec ratio tangitur Extra, ‘De conversione coniugatorum’, 

Verum, ubi dicitur quod ‘cum non fuissent una caro simul e·ecti, satis 

potest unus ad deum transire, et alter in seculo remanere.’ Huic concordat 

significatio predicti matrimonii, quo non significatur unio humane 

nature ad personam filii dei, que est indissolubilis, sed significat dissolubilem 

unionem que est inter deum et animam per charitatem vie; 

nec illud verbum salvatoris scriptum, Matth. 19—Non licet viro nisi ob 

causam fornicationis uxorem suam dimittere—intelligendum est: nisi 

de his quorum matrimonium carnali est copula consumatum: Extra, 

‘De conversione conjugatorum’, Ex publico. 

7. Ad primum in oppositum dicendum quod in illa obligatione, si alter 

coniugum proponat se velle religionem intrare, est indulta a iure dilatio 

duorum mensium ad reddendum debitum: Extra, ‘De conversione 

See Peter Lombard, Sentences, 4. 27. 6, ii. 425 Brady. Brady, the anonymous 

editor, notes that the Decree beginning ‘Desponsatam puellam . . .’, attributed here 

by the Lombard to Eusebius papa, is spurious. 

X. 3. 32. 2. 

noluerit] voluerit 1499 edition 

X. 3. 32. 2. 

X. 3. 32. 7.


coniugatorum’, Ex publico. In casu tamen committitur arbitrio iudicis 

utrum plus vel minus tempus indulgeat ad profitendum, ut dicit 

Gl(ossa) ibidem. 

8. Ad secundum dicendum quod remanens in seculo non potest contrahere 

matrimonium ante professionem alterius in religione, quia tunc primo 

ille qui est in religione moritur spiritualiter mundo, et ideo tunc primo 

vinculum matrimonii solvitur. 

9. Ad tertium dicendum quod ille qui remanet in seculo non potest matrimonium 

contrahere ante professionem illius qui religionem intravit: et 

si de facto contraheret, et alius ante suam professionem de religione 

exiret, ei esset restituendus. Ad subveniendum tamen remanenti in 

seculo, ne suo iure fraudulenter privetur, iudex illi qui intravit religionem 

prefigere debet terminum peremptorium infra quem profiteatur, 

aut consumet matrimonium: alioquin ipsum excommunicet: ut habetur 

in predicta decretali in gl(ossa), et supra, titulo proximo, capitulo 

Statuimus, in glo(ssa). 

4. 3. Ricardus de Mediavilla on the marriage of Mary and 

Joseph 

See introduction to Document 4. 2. 

Fo. 202RB–VA: 

[Distinctio 30, Articulus 2, Questio 2] 

1. Secundo queritur utrum inter Mariam et Ioseph fuerit perfectum matrimonium. 

Et videtur *quod non. . . . Item, ad perfectum matrimonium 

requiritur consensus in carnalem copulam, quia ad hoc requiritur obligatio 

ad reddendum debitum cum ab altero coniuge exigitur. Sed beata 

virgo in carnalem copulam non consensit, quia, ut habitum est in questione 

precedenti, voverat virginitatem: et constat quod votum suum 

Ibid. 

Bernard of Parma, Glossa ordinaria, X. 3. 32. 7: ‘Licet dicatur de duobus mensibus, 

credo quod istud committeretur arbitrio iudicis utrum plus vel minus tempus 

indulgeat ad profitendum dicenti se velle intrare religionem, et currit a tempore illo 

quo iudex statuit terminum’ (MS BL Royal 9. C. 1, fo. 123VB, right-hand gloss). 

X. 3. 32. 7. 

For the gloss of Bernard of Parma see above, n. 9. 

X. 3. 31. 23. 

The following passage fits well enough. Bernard of Parma starts with the case of 

a church left vacant while the prospective monk is trying his vocation, then moves 

on to the case of a married man: ‘Idem credo servandum si alter sponsus intret 

religionem quod infra certum tempus profiteatur, alioquin compellitur redire ad 

sponsam, quia et ibi periculum imminet fornicationis’ (MS BL Royal 9. C. 1, fo. 

123 RB, right-hand gloss).


non violavit. Ergo inter ipsam et Ioseph perfectum matrimonium non 

fuit.... 

2. Respondeo quod perfectio rei duplex est: quedam in esse primo, quedam 

in esse secundo. Prima in hoc consistit quod res habet omnia que pertinent 

ad eius essentiam. Secunda consistit in quibusdam perfectionibus 

non pertinentibus ad essentiam. 

3. Primo modo fuit perfectum matrimonium inter Mariam et Joseph, 

non secundo: quia non ita perfecte significavit *indivisibilem unionem 

Christi et ecclesie et humane nature cum divina persona sicut matrimonium 

consumatum. Unde dicit Magister huius distinctionis c. 3 quod 

fuit perfectum: non in significatione, quia, ut infra dicitur, eodem, matrimonium 

consumatum perfectius unionem Christi et ecclesie figurat 

[fo. 202va] . . . Ad tertium dicendum quod ad primam matrimonii perfectionem 

non requiritur consensus in carnalem copulam, nisi implicite et 

sub conditione, scilicet, si alter coniunx eam exegerit, et si deus debitum 

reddendi non relaxaverit: et sic beata virgo in carnalem copulam consensit. 

Nec in hoc periculo se exposuit, nec suo voto in aliquo derogavit, 

quia divina inspiratione certificata fuit quod Ioseph ab ea numquam exigeret 

carnalem copulam, et quod si Joseph exigeret, deus eam a debito 

absolveret reddendi. Et sic intelligitur auctoritas allegata secundo ad 

secundam partem, quod patet, quia postquam dictum est: ‘consensit 

in carnalem copulam’, statim subiungitur: ‘non illam appetendo, sed 

divine inspirationi in utroque obediendo.’ 

4. 4. A consummation case in the papal registers (John XXII) 

These passages show that the practical social and political implications 

of the symbolic theology and canon law of non-consummated marriages 

are more far-reaching than is at first apparent. They are from Archivio 

Segreto Vaticano, Vatican Register 115, which has not been calendared 

except for entries connected with France. This is a register deriving from 

Peter Lombard, Sentences, 4. 30. 2. 3, ii. 440 Brady (note: chapter 2, not chapter 

3). 

Ibid. 4. 30. 2. 5, ii. 440–1 Brady. 

The following note in the calendar for France is worth quoting as a warning 

about the numbering of the folios: ‘Les lettres secr›etes des ann‹ees XIII et XIV 

du pontificat de Jean XXII (5 septembre 1328–4 septembre 1330) sont conserv‹ees 

dans le registre Vatican 115. Chacun des feuillets de celui-ci porte une double 

num‹erotation, la premi›ere en chi·res romains dans la marge sup‹erieure du recto, 

l’autre, en chi·res arabes, dans le coin sup‹erieur droit de la même page. Ces deux 

num‹erotations ne co•§ncident pas car, d’une part, le premier num‹erorateur n’a pas 

tenu compte des feuillets contenant l’Index plac‹e entête du registre, et d’autre 

part, pour les lettres de l’ann‹ee XIV, il a recommenc‹e la num‹erotation au fol. 1, qui 

correspond ainsi au folio 205 de la num‹erotation en chi·res arabes, alors que celle-ci 

est continue du premier au dernier feuillet du registre’ (Lettres secr›etes et curiales du


the Camera Apostolica (as opposed to the Cancellaria Apostolica): see M. 

Giusti, Studi sui Registri di bolle papali (Collectanea Archivi Vaticani, 1; 

Vatican City, 1979), 27–8, 130, 139. 

On the Vatican Registers of this period see K. A. Fink, Das vatikanische 

Archiv: Einf•uhring in die Best•ande und ihre Erforschung, 2nd enlarged edn. 

(Rome, 1951), 36–7, one good guide among several. 

The background to these extracts from the uncalendared papal register 

is elucidated by documents printed in Vatikanische Akten zur deutschen 

Geschichte in der Zeit Kaiser Ludwigs des Bayern, auf Veranlassung seiner 

Majest•at des K•onigs von Bayern herausgegeben durch die historische Commission 

bei der k•oniglichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. S. von Riezler 

(Innsbruck, 1891): no. 785, p. 311; no. 864, p. 331; no. 890, p. 338; no. 911, 

p. 347; no. 943a, p. 357; no. 1000, p. 374. 

Pope John XXII was in the middle of a struggle ›a l’outrance with Ludwig 

of Bavaria. John refused to recognize Ludwig as Holy Roman Emperor 

elect. Ludwig countered by leading an army into Italy, allying with the papacy’s 

Ghibelline opponents, capturing Rome, installing an antipope, and 

declaring John a heretic and no pope. Ludwig controlled Rome from 7 

January to 4 August 1328. Historians have perhaps tended to underestimate 

the degree of danger to John XXII as pope. At any rate, it would have 

taken a clairvoyant to be sure in 1327 that Ludwig was certain to lose. 

Stefano da Colonna was on the papal side—more or less. In fact, John 

XXII seems to have been far from confident of his loyalty. In January 

1327 John wrote to Stefano about news that the latter had received rebels 

against the Roman Church, ‘which we can scarcely believe’; on 16 June 

of the same year he provided Jacopo son of Stefano with a canonry at 

the Lateran church, presumably to keep him sweet; on 28 November 

1327 he wrote to tell Stefano of his trust in him despite the rumours, but 

exhorted him to think of his good name; in a letter of 24 September to 

the legate of Tuscany John expresses what sounds like genuine confidence 

in Stefano; on 17 April 1328 he expresses surprise at Stefano’s apparent 

pape Jean XXII (1316–1334) relatives ›a la France, publi‹ees ou analys‹ees d’apr›es les 

registres du Vatican, ed. A. Coulon and S. Cl‹emencet, fasc. 8 (Paris, 1965), 3 n. 1). 

For a convenient summary of these events and their context see H. Thomas, 

Deutsche Geschichte des Mittelalters 1250–1500 (Stuttgart etc., 1983), 177–80, or the 

old but good G. Mollat, Les Papes d’Avignon 1305–1378 (Paris, 1949), 330–46. 

Vatikanische Akten, no. 785, p. 311. 

Ibid, no. 864, pp. 331–2. 

Ibid., no. 943a, p. 357. 

‘Et ut melius et utilius procedere valeas ad premissa, datis in oblivionem preteritis, 

que tuis possent in hac parte processibus multipliciter obviare, te cum dilecto 

filio, nobili viro, Stephano de Columpna, quem circa ea, que honorem ecclesie 

ac regium respiciunt, promptum reperies, (ut) credimus, et devotum, amicabiliter 

habeas et . . . favorabiliter prosequaris’ (ibid., no. 911, p. 347).


inactivity in the cause. However, it appears that Stefano came through in 

the end, spearheading with one other man the papal come-back in Rome 

after Ludwig had left the city. 

Thus John XXII owed much to Stefano da Colonna. Against this background, 

the documents printed below fall into place. The count of Anguillaria 

had married Colonna’s daughter by consent but had not yet 

consummated the union. That put the woman in a very dicult position. 

An unconsummated marriage could be dissolved, but only through entry 

into a religious order. In all probability, she did not want to do this, which 

would have allowed the count to marry another woman and add insult to 

injury. She herself could not marry anyone else, since the count evidently 

had no plans to become a monk. John XXII helped out by putting pressure 

on the count to consummate the marriage and make it indissoluble. 

Vatican Register 115 

Fo. 1RA, from the table of contents to the volume: 

Episcopo Mothon’ et duobus collegis scribitur quod cogant comitem Anguillarie 

resilientem a consumatione matrimonii cum Agnete de Columpna, 

quam desponsaverat, ad consummandum matrimonium cum eadem. 

Eiusdem super eodem quod summarie et de plano eundum Comitem compellant. 

Eidem comiti quod adimpleat promissum matrimonii contrahendi. 

Eidem comiti conceditur quod dictum matrimonium solempnizare possit 

temporibus prohibitis a iure. 

Johanni sancti *Theodori diacono cardinali legato scribitur quod nedum 

desistat ab impedimento dicti matrimonii, ymmo inducat dictum comitem 

ad consumandum. . . . 

‘Miramur, quod de aliis devotis ipsarum partium in imminentibus negociis ibi 

ecclesie audivimus devocionem, quam operose curant ostendere, de te autem nichil, 

quod in faciendo consistat, ab aliquo nunciatur. Rogamus igitur discretionem tuam 

et hortamur attente, ut te promptius quam abhactenus habeas in agendis, unde tibi 

laudis premium non immerito redimas et uberiorem benivolenciam consequaris 

ecclesie, sicut optas, non omittens carissimi in Christo filii nostri R. Regis Sicilie 

illustris te in premissis voluntati et placito coaptare’ (ibid., no. 1000, p. 374). 

In a letter of 28 August 1328 John XXII reported thus to the king of France: 

‘die4.presentismensisAugustiLudovico....Urbemcumignominiaetdispendiis 

plurimis exeunte dilecti filii, nobiles viri, Stephanus de Columpna miles et Bertuldus 

de Filiis Ursi Urbem intraverunt eandem, per quorum solertem industriam 

Romanus populus se peccasse considerans et cognoscens, pacificatus et humiliatus 

extitit et eosdem nobiles pro nobis et st. Dei ecclesia constituit senatores’ (ibid., 

no. 1075, p. 396).

Fos. 29RA–30RA, from the letters as registered: 


Episcopo Mothonensi et Laurentio Capocie Lateranensi ac Nicolao de 

Fuscis de Berta Tiburtinensi ecclesiarum canonicis. 

Significavit nobis dilectus filius nobilis vir Stephanus de Columpna quod 

dilectus filius nobilis vir Ursus comes Anguillarie tractatu prehibito de 

matrimonio inter ipsum Ursum et dilectam in Christo filiam nobilem 

mulierem Agnetem eiusdem Stephani filiam contrahendo sponsalia primo 

cum eadem Agnete tunc etatis nubilis existente per procuratorem ad id 

suciens mandatum habentem contraxit et de huiusmodi sponsalibus non 

violandis sed ad e·ectum deducendis prestitit sacramentum per procuratorem 

eumdem; et deinde, non multo tempore post, Ursus prefatus ad contrahendum 

matrimonium per verba de presenti cum Agnete prefata certum 

constituit solemniter et legittime procuratorem et nuncium specialem, dans 

etiam in mandatis eidem quod iuraret ad sancta dei evangelia in animam 

ipsius comitis quod idem comes quando ipse procurator et nuntius esset 

in presentia dicte Agnetis ex tempore ipsius mandati pro tempore eiusdem 

presentie et ex tempore ipsius presentie pro tempore eiusdem mandati in 

eamdem Agnetem velut in suam veram et legittimam uxorem per ipsum 

procuratorem et nuntium consenserat et eam ab ipsa vel illa hora in antea 

[fo. 29rb] in suam veram et legittimam uxorem haberet, et ea vivente, 

aliam non reciperet temporibus vite sue, ac ipsam Agnetem ad domum 

suam traduceret et cum eadem matrimonium carnali copula consummaret 

ac potestatem liberam omnia alia faciendi que in premissis forent oportuna 

etiam si mandatum exigerent speciale, promisit tuncque idem comes 

se gratum et ratum habiturum perpetuo quicquid in premissis et circa 

premissa procuraret et ageret procurator et nuntius antedictus, et quoquomodo 

vel causa non contra faceret vel veniret, hecque omnia et singula ipse 

comes iuravit ad sancta dei evangelia semper grata et rata habere et tenere 

et contra ea quovis tempore quomodolibet non facere vel venire. Procurator 

itaque et nuntius sepedictus huiusmodi mandato suscepto ad dicte 

Agnetis accedens presentiam cum ipsa vice et nomine dicti Ursi comitis, et 

pro ipso, matrimonium per verba de presenti rite contraxit et ipsam anulo 

subarravit. Ad maiorem huiusmodi rei firmitatem ad sancta dei evangelia 

in animam dicti comitis ipsi Agneti iuravit vice et nomine quibus supra hoc 

matrimonium perpetuo tenere, et nullo umquam tempore quomodolibet 

contrafacere vel venire; ac nichilominus nomine dotis a Stephano supradicto 

certam recepit pecunie quantitatem. Et insuper, ut fertur, prefatus 

comes Agnetem predictam post premissa suam nominavit uxorem. Cum 

autem idem comes, ut dicitur, seductus, supradictum matrimonium distulerit 

atque di·erat plus debito ac etiam recusaverit et recuset solemnizare 

et consumare ac sepedictam Agnem traducere in uxorem, eamque maritali 

a·ectione tractare, pretendens supradictum mandatum ad dictum matrimonium 

contrahendum priusquam idem matrimonium contraheretur se


revocasse, post tamen sponsalia predicta, ut premittitur, iurata, et penitus 

ignorante sepedicta Agnete, fuit nobis pro parte dicti Stephani suppliciter 

postulatum ut providere super hoc de oportuno remedio digneremur. Nos 

itaque, huiusmodi supplicationibus inclinati, mandamus quatenus vos, vel 

alter vestrum, si summarie, de plano, sine strepitu et figura iudicii premissis 

vel alicui ex ipsis quod suciet veritatem reperitis su·ragari, prefatum 

comi tem [fo. 29va] ad observandum et implendum promissiones et 

iuramenta predicta dictumque matrimonium solemnizandum et prefatam 

Agnetem in suam uxorem traducendam, eamque maritali a·ectione tractandum, 

per censuram ecclesiasticam ratione previa compellatis. Datum 

Avinione X. kal. januarii anno tertiodecimo [23 December 1328]. 

Eisdem 

Significavit nobis, etc., ut in precedenti usque ad illum locum ‘et penitus 

ignorante sepedicta Agnete’, super hoc per dictum Stephanum provisionis 

nostre remedio suppliciter implorato. Nos suis in hac parte supplicationibus 

inclinati committimus et mandamus quatenus, vocatis qui fuerint 

evocandi, faciatis super premissis simpliciter summarie et de plano, sine 

strepitu et figura iudicii iustitie complementum, facientes quod inde decreveritis 

per censuram ecclesiasticam firmiter observari, contradictores, 

etc., nonobstant’ si eis, etc. Quod si non omnes hiis exequendis potueritis 

interesse, tu, frater episcopus, una cum eorum altero, ea nichilominus 

exequaris. Datum Avinione X kal. martii anno tertiodecimo [20 February 

1329]. 

Urso Comiti Anguillarie 

Attendentes impedimenta varia que morosa dilatatio coniugalem consumandi 

copulam matrimoniis interdum ingerere consuevit, cupientesque 

eisdem quantum cum deo possumus obviare, ut matrimonium, quod inter 

te et dilectam in Christo filiam nobilem mulierem Agnetem natam 

nobilis viri Stephani de Columpna contractum asseritur, vel, si illud contrahi 

contigerit, postquam contractum, alias tamen canonice, fuerit, possitis 

temporibus a iure vel consuetudine seu statuto prohibitis in facie 

solemnizare ecclesie impune devotioni vestre tenore presentium indulgemus. 

Nulli ergo, etc. Datum Avinione XVII kalendas maii anno tertiodecimo 

[15 April 1329]. 

In eumdem modum dilecte in Christo filie nobili mulieri Agneti nate dilecti 

filii nobilis viri Stephani de Columpna verbis competenter mutatis. Datum 

ut supra. 

... 

[fo. 29vb] 

...


Urso comiti Anguillarie 

Alias tibi, fili, post nostre salutationis eloquium per nostras litteras scripsimus 

in hac forma: Scias, fili, ex quorumdam relatione fideli ad nostram 

pervenisse notitiam quod dilectam in Christo filiam nobilem mulierem 

Agnetem natam dilecti filii nobilis viri Stephani de Columpna in uxorem 

tuam desponsasti per verba matrimonium exprimentia de presenti. Sane, 

quia, ut intelleximus, quorumdam seductus consilio a contracto intendis 

et niteris resilire, nos, attendentes quod hoc tibi non licet nec posses, 

nisi de facto dumtaxat, perficere sine dei o·ensa, tue periculo anime, ac 

scandalo plurimorum, nobilitatem tuam rogamus et hortamur attente, tibi 

nichilominus paterno ac sano consilio suadentes, quatenus prudenter tue 

in hac parte saluti providens et honori sine de·ectu adimpleas quod laudabiliter 

actore Domino promisisti. Verentes autem quod propter viarum 

discrimina non sic cito ut cupimus ad te littere ipse perveniant, et habentes 

cordi predictum negotium pro partis bono et commodo utriusque, predictas 

litteras paterna solicitudine duximus iterandas. Datum V kal. januarii 

anno tertiodecimo [28 December 1328]. 

Johanni Sancti Theodori diacono cardinali apostolice sedis legato 

Quorumdam relatione fideli ad nostram noveris notitiam pervenisse quod 

quamvis dilectus filius nobilis vir Ursus Comes Anguillarie dilectam in 

Christo nobilem mulierem Agnetem natam dilecti filii nobilis viri Stephani 

de Columpna desponsaverit in uxorem suam per verba matrimonium exprimentia 

de presenti, impedimentum, quod [fo. 30ra] vix credere possumus, 

per te tamen ingeritur, quominus ipsum matrimonium consummetur. 

Sane, attendentes quod ab hoc eidem comiti resilire non licet nec 

posset nisi de facto dumtaxat aliud perficere sine dei o·ensa, sue periculo 

anime, ac scandalo plurimorum, discretionem tuam rogamus et hortamur 

attente, tibi nichilominus, fili, salubriter suadentes ut, premissis attentis, 

nedum a predicto impedimento desistas, sed quantum in te alias fuerit et a 

Domino tibi conceditur illius complemento ecacem prebeas operam, et 

diligenter obstacula quecumque removeas, si per alios ingerantur. Datum 

II non. Novembris anno tertiodecimo [4 November 1328]. 

In eumdem modum, mutatis mutandis, nobili viro Neapoleoni de Filiis 

Ursi de Urbe 

In eumdem modum nobili viro Bertoldo de Filiis Ursi de Urbe. 

In eumdem modum mutatis mutandis nobili mulieri Constantie matri dicti 

Ursi relicte quondam Francisci Comitis Anguillarie. 

perficere] perficere?


4. 5. Consummation and indissolubility in the Oculus 

sacerdotis of William of Pagula 

This document shows that di·usion to a wider audience of the symbolic 

rationale of the rule that entry into a religious order by one partner in an 

unconsummated marriage left the other partner free to remarry. Pastoral 

manuals like this were designed for ordinary priests to help them look after 

their lay parishioners better. The Latin is simple and clear. The Oculus 

sacerdotis is an exellent example of the genre, especially well developed 

in England, apparently. For the author see Sharpe, Handlist, no. 2141 

(‘William of Paull’), p. 799, with further references, especially to work by 

Leonard Boyle. The passage is from Oculus sacerdotis, 3.14. 

London, BL MS Royal 6. E. I 

Parchment manuscript, 390 mm.ÿ270 mm., 121 folios; paragraph marks 

in red and blue, initial letters mostly or all in blue but with red decoration. 

The manuscript looks late fourteenth century, according to Warner and 

Gilson. In addition to the Oculus sacerdotis, itcontainstheSacramentale, 

‘a treatise, mainly theological, on the sacraments, by the canonist 

W[illelmus] de Monte Hauduno . . . d. circ. 1343’. There is more pastoral 

material at the extremities of the manuscript. 

Fo. 68VA: 

Matrimonium solvi potest ante consummationem matrimonii, puta per 

ingressum religionis, et non post matrimonium consummatum. Ratio est 

quia in coniugio sunt duo, videlicet consensus animorum, et commixtio 

corporum. Consensus *animorum significat caritatem, que consistit in 

spiritu inter deum et iustam animam—et anima separari a deo potest per 

peccatum: sic matrimonium *solvi potest per ingressum religionis, sed 

commixtio corporum significat conformitatem que consistit in carne inter 

Christum et ecclesiam, et illa coniunctio Christi ad ecclesiam designatur 

per unionem qua iuncta est divinitas carni humane in utero virginali. Unde 

quia humana caro nunquam a deitate separata est, ideo propter talem 

coniunctionem nunquam dissolvitur matrimonium. Vel potest dici quod 

facilius potest una anima separari a deo quam tota ecclesia: Extra ‘De 

Bigamis’ c(apitulo). Debitum, et xxvii q. ii. c(apitulo) Qua propter in 

Glosa et Extra ‘[De] Conver. Coniugatorum’ c(apitulo) Ex publico in 

Glosa ult. 


150, and on personal inspection. 



X. 1. 21. 5. 

Pars II, C. 27, q. 2, c. 37. 

‘Qua propter. perficiunt.—Non quo ad sui essentiam, sed ad significatio- 

[See p. 283 for n. 6 cont. and nn. 7 and 8.


4. 6. Johannes de Burgo on the marriage of Mary and Joseph 

This text is from the Pupilla oculi (8. 1–2). The work is another pastoral 

manual. It was in fact based on the Oculus sacerdotis of William of Pagula, 

though it was probably aimed at a somewhat di·erent readership: 

academically trained ecclesiastical administrators as opposed to ordinary 

parish priests (see discussion in the introduction to Document 3. 9). It puts 

over in a practical genre the view that the marriage of Mary and Joseph 

was in a sense lacking in perfection because it had not been consummated. 

Johannes agrees that in another sense it is perfect, but the passage shows 

how far the importance of consummation had penetrated into the world of 

religious administration and high-level pastoral government. 

Johannes de Burgo was learned and cites interesting authorities. The 

ideas of Duns Scotus to which he alludes are interesting in their own 

right and deserve close study, which the references below in n. 2 aim to 

facilitate. 

nem. Non tamen sequitur quod ante non fuerit perfectum, quia perfectum amplius 

potest perfici: xi. q. iii Quod predecessor (Pars II, C. 11, q. 3, c. 105), perficitur 

autem matrimonium per coitum quo ad sui significationem, quia tunc utramque 

habet significationem, scilicet, coniunctionem anime fidelis ad deum, et Christi ad 

ecclesiam, ut Extra ‘De bygamis’ in c. Debitum (X. 1. 21. 5). Sed quare separatur 

matrimonium causa religionis post coniunctionem anime fidelis ad deum et non 

post coniunctionem Christi ad ecclesiam? Ratio est quia anima separatur a deo per 

peccatum. Unde non est mirum si post talem *coniunctionem matrimonium separetur. 

Sed illa coniunctio Christi ad ecclesiam designatur per unionem qua unita est 

divinitas carni humane in utero virginali, unde quia humana caro numquam a deitate 

separata [separatur ms.] est ideo per talem coniunctionem numquam dissolvitur 

matrimonium; vel potest dici quod facilius est quod una anima separetur a deo quam 

tota ecclesia, immo impossibile est quod tota ecclesia separetur a deo, quia ecclesia 

non potest nulla esse’ (MS BL Royal 9. C. III, fo. 225RB, right-hand gloss). 

X. 3. 32. 7. 

The following passage from Bernard of Parma’s Glossa ordinaria to the Decretals 

could be meant (‘Duplex’ is supplied in the margin in a di·erent hand before initial 

‘Est’): ‘Est consummatio que sit quo ad matrimonii essentiam que fuit facta in 

paradiso ab ipso Domino per coniunctionem animorum que designat conformitatem 

fidelis anime ad Christum, ut ibi; et est consummatio quo ad sacramentum Christi 

ad ecclesiam per incarnationem verbi dei in utero virginali quod designatur per 

illud matrimonium quod est carnali copula consummatum, ut hic, et supra, “De 

Bigamis”, Debitum (X. 1. 21. 5); xxvii. q. ii, In omni, R(ubrica) (Pars II, C. 27, q. 2, c. 

36); vel saltem quo ad hoc quod impedire possit propositum religionis: Lau(rentius). 

Notavit hic Alanus quod matrimonium non consummatum sortitur naturam ex 

constitutione ecclesie, et ideo circa illud latissime patet pape potestas. Vin(centius) 

dixit quod papa per dispensationem posset dissolvere tale matrimonium, posset 

etiam statuere quod secundum matrimonium rumperetur; secus de consummato, 

quod ab ipso Domino rationem suam [sortitur], et ideo sola interpretatio circa illud 

pertinet ad papam, non dispensatio vel contraria constituendo [read constitutio?]. 

Contra tamen infra “De sponsa duorum”, c. ult.’ (MS Royal 9. C. 1, fo. 123VB, 

right-hand gloss).


MS London, BL Royal 11. B. X 

For a brief description of the manuscript see Document 3. 9. 

Fo. 124RA–B: 

Item ad verum matrimonium requiritur intentio specialis vel generalis, ut 

scilicet vir intendat tradere mulieri perpetuam potestatem corporis sui, et e 

converso, ipsa corporis sui potestatem viro suo quo ad carnalem copulam, 

saltem sub conditione implicita, videlicet si petatur. Unde inter beatam 

Virginem et Ioseph fuit perfectum matrimonium perfectione quam facit 

consensus per verba de presenti expressus, sed non perfectione quam facit 

carnalis copula, que est actus proprius matrimonii, in quem numquam 

consensit explicite, sed implicite solum, ut dicit Tho. Di. 30: id est, sub 

conditione implicita, si peteretur. Et hoc in nullo preiudica vit [fo. 124rb] 

voto suo de virginitate servanda, quia sucienter certificata fuit a deo 

quod actus huiusmodi matrimonialis numquam a suo coniuge peteretur. 

Transtulit ergo in virum suum potestatem sui corporis, sed non usum, 

secundum Scotum Di. 30. q. 2. Hec dicit Ber. in Glossa, quod quamvis 

alter coniugum vel uterque intendat numquam reddere debitum alteri, 

quin etiam negare petitum, tenet matrimonium, ut creditur, dum tamen 

illud non deducatur in pactum. 

Cf. Aquinas, Commento alle Sentenze di Pietro Lombardo, trans. and ed. ‘Redazione 

delle Edizioni Studio Domenicano’, dist. 30, q. 2, a. 1, solutio ii, p. 346. 

The critical edition of John Duns Scotus has not reached book 4 of either his 

Oxford or his Paris commentary on the Lombard’s Sentences. Sharpe,Handlist, 

no. 674, p. 239, comments with respect to the Opus Oxoniense that the ‘text printed 

byWaddingandreprinted...isnotpure’.Hedoesnotmakethesamecommentof 

the pre-critical edition of the Opus Parisiense, but it has seemed simpler and safer 

to use manuscripts. The relevant passage from the Oxford Sentence commentary 

is in a question inc. ‘Secundo quero utrum inter Mariam et Iosep fuerit verum 

matrimonium’ (MS Oxford, Merton College 66, fos. 214VB–215RB, a manuscript 

contemporary with the author, to judge from the script, and designated one of the 

‘codices constanter adhibiti’ in the introductory volume to the critical edition which 

is in progress: see Ioannis Duns Scoti opera omnia, ed. C. Balic et al., i (Vatican City, 

1950), 32*–34*). Note especially the passage beginning ‘Respondeo [or Responsio]: 

In contractu matrimonii [matrimonium ms. here and below?] mutua est datio corporum 

ad copulam carnalem nonnisi sub conditione implicita, scilicet: si petatur’ and 

ending ‘propter honestam causam aliquam’ (ibid., fo. 215ra–b). The pertinent passage 

in the Paris Sentence commentary of Scotus is also in a question ‘Utrum inter 

Mariam et Ioseph fuerat [sic] verum matrimonium’ (MS Oxford, Merton College 

63, fos. 63R–64R). Note especially the passage beginning ‘Ideo dico quod absolute 

vovit castitatem’ and ending ‘Ergo potest esse dominium corporis sine usu perpetuo’ 

(ibid., fos. 63V–64R). 

Hec] sic ms. 

Not found (but presumably a gloss of Bernardus of Parma).


4. 7. A case from the archive of the Apostolic Penitentiary: 

Constance of Padilla 

The case, discussed in detail in Chapter 4, illustrates the way in which 

high-level ideas about consummation could a·ect real-life situations. 

Penitenzieria Apostolica Register, vol. 48 

Paper manuscript, 285ÿ215 mm. The last folio in the volume is numbered 

989. Line numbers refer to the main body of the entry only. 

Fo. 634R–V: 

Head of the page: Anno octavo domini Alexandri pape vi 

Above the entry: Octobr’ 1499 

Halfway down the entry, left-hand margin: Rome iiii Non. Septembris 

Halfway down the entry, right-hand margin: Segobien [ =Segubien(sis)] 

Constantia de Padilla, mulier Segoviensis, exponit /1/ quod alias, postquam 

ipsa matrimonium per verba legitima /2/ de presenti cum quodam viro 

nullo iure sibi prohi bito /3/ coniuncta contraxerat, carnali copula minime 

/4/ subsecuta, ipsam per vim et metum cuiusdam nobilis /5/ Bonadille 

Marchisie Modie Conchensis diocesis, cui /6/ tunc ipsa exponens inserviebat 

et forsan certarum /7/ aliarum personarum *compulsi monasterium 

Sancti Petri /8/ de Las Ducuans ordinis *Conceptionis sub regula 

Sancte Clare /9/ Toletan’ ingressa fuit et professionem pro moniales 

/10/ dicti monasterii emitti solitam *emisit; et deinde dictus /11/ eius vir 

matrimonium seu potius contubernium pro simi lia /12/ verba de presenti 

cum quadam alia muliere nullo /13/ etiam sibi iure prohibita contraxit, illudque 

carnali /14/ copula consumavit. Postmodum vero dicta exponens 

/15/ dictum monasterium illicentiata exivit et ad civitatem /16/ Abulen- 

I ignore all foliations apart from the modern stamped foliation. 

At the head of fos. 633V and 634V: ‘Rome apud sanctum Petrum’. 

But this may not relate to this particular case. 

ipsam] ipsa recte 

i.e. of Cuenca 

*compulsi] compulsa recte. The scribe may have been unsure how to extend the 

abbreviation: he had written ipsam above, as if for an accusative and infinitive construction, 

but then goes on to write ingressa fuit below 

*Conceptionis] ms. very unclear: looks like Conceptianum 

This may be the same as the house listed as ‘Toledo, Sancta Maria Immaculada’ 

in the brief article by T. Morel in Diccionario de historia eclesiastica de Espa~na (5 

vols. so far; 1972–87, the last being suppl. 1), iii (Madrid, 1973), 1684. According to 

Morel, it was only long afterwards that the community joined the Benedictine Order. 

He makes no mention of the Franciscan rule, but the ‘Immaculate’ (an allusion to 

the Immaculate Conception) fits the description in our case. 

pro] per recte 

moniales] m’LES ms. 

pro] per recte


sem se transtulit, in qua est de presenti. Cum autem, /17/ Pater Sancte, 

dicta exponens *antequam *dictum monasterium /18/ ingrederetur, matrimonium 

per verba de presenti cum /19/ dicto viro nullo sibi *iure prohibito 

consueta ut /20/ premittitur contraxit et pro vi et metum ingressa 

/21/ et in eo cum animi sui quiete manere non valens /22/ ut premissum 

est exivit, cupiatque in seculo cum dicto /23/ suo viro remanere, et 

mater eci liberum, a nonnullis /24/ tamen simplicibus et iurisignarus 

ac ipsius ex ponentis /25/ forsan emulis asseritur ipsam propter premissa 

/26/ dicto ordini astrictam esse et propterea in seculo /27/ cum dicto suo 

viro /28/ licite remanere non posse, ad ora igitur talium et /29/ aliorum 

sibi super hiis obloqui volentium emulorum obstruenda, /30/ [fo. 634v] 

quare, etc., quatenus ipsam ab excessibus hiusmodi absolvi /31/ necnon 

in seculo cum dicto suo viro postquam a dicta /32/ secunda muliere in 

iudicio ecclesie separatus fuerit rema nere /33/ possit libere et licite, alio 

tamen canonico /34/ non obstante, prolem suscipiendam exinde legitimam 

decer nere /35/ declarari mandare dignemini: ut in forma. /36/ 

Et committatur vicario generali ordinis /37/ sancte Clare provincie Hispanie 

/38/ et archdiacono de Sepulveda in /39/ ecclesia Segobiensi. 

Fiat Iul. 

Videat eam D. Do. De Iacobatiis Iul. /40/ 

Committatur eisdem ut vocatis vocandis constito de assertis et quod 

per metum quod caderet in constantem professionem emi serit nec postea 

expresse vel tacite ratificaverit declaret ut petitur. 

4. 8. Another non-consummation case from the archive of 

the Apostolic Penitentiary 

In this case Juan from the diocese of Burgos claims that he married Catherine 

daughter of Juan G‹omez, who committed adultery with another man 

before the marriage had been consummated; she then repented and entered 

a religious order. Juan subsequently became engaged to Maria and asks 

permission to marry her. It is a classic ‘ratum non consummatum’ case and 

illustrates the same point as Document 4. 7. 

i.e. Avila. 

pro vi et metum] sic ms. 

liberum] liberorum recte 

tamen] tamen et could be read 

iurisignarus] iurisignaris recte 

viro] remanere et mater eci liberum (sic) added and deleted in ms. 

Presumably a Penitentiary ocial. 

The following passage is indented and behind a bracket; I discontinue the line 

numbering

Penitenzieria Apostolica Register vol. 60 


Paper manuscript, 285ÿ205 mm. The last folio in the volume is numbered 

468. Line numbers refer to the main body of the entry only. 

Fos. 21V–22R: 

Head of fo. 21v: Rome apud s. P. 

Head of fo. 22r: Anno quarto Leonis pape X 

Above the entry: Contreras taxatio iiii Ÿ 3 

Heading, left-hand margin: Declaratio matrimonialis 

Halfway down the left-hand margin: iiii Id. Aprilis 

Halfway down the right-hand margin: Burgen. 

Iohannes Sams de Rochas laicus Burgensis diocesis /1/ exponit quod 

postquam ipse alias matrimonium per verba /2/ de presenti cum Catherina 

filia Iohannis Gomez /3/ muliere loci de Rochas dicte diocesis contraxerat, 

non /4/ tamen cognoverat, eademque Catherina post commissum /5/ cum 

alio viro adulterium, penitentia ducta seu alias, habitum /6/ ordinis sancte 

Trinitatis per manus ministri monasterii eiusdem /7/ sancte Trinitatis 

probe et extra muros Burgen. /8/ [fo. 22r] assumpserat, et professionem per 

moniales dicti ordinis /9/ emitti solitam, absque tamen ingressu alicuius 

monasterii earumdem /10/ monialium, in manibus dicti ministri emiserat 

regularem, /11/ prefatus orator sponsalia per verba de futuro cum quadam 

/12/ Maria filia Gundisalvi Martieres de Quexiquata, /13/ muliere dicte 

diocesis, contraxit. Cuperet idem orator cum eadem /14/ Maria matrimonium 

contrahere et in eo postquam contractum /15/ foret licite remanere, 

ab aliquibus tamen simplicibus /16/ et iurisignaris etc. Ad igitur talium 

et aliorum sibi /17/ in futurum obloqui volentium ora obstruenda, supplicatur 

etc. /18/ quatenus, si vocatis vocandis constiterit de assertis, oratorem 

/19/ ipsum premissis non obstantibus, matrimonium cum prefata 

/20/ Maria contrahere, et in eo postquam contractum fuerit /21/ remanere, 

licite posse declarari, prolem exinde suscipiendam /22/ etc. man(dare) 

dignemini in forma. FIAT IN FORMA M. R(egens) 

This is repeated halfway down the left-hand margin of the continuation of the 

entry on fo. 22R. 

This is repeated halfway down the right-hand margin of the continuation of the 

entry on fo. 22R. 

Sams] Sa followed by three minims and an s in ms., so could also be Savis or Sains 

or Sanis 

Quexiquata] I transcribe this tentatively as I have not been able to find the name

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im Mittelalter (Bibliotheca Eruditorum, 7; Goldbach, 1993), new pagination 

at foot pp. 307*–341*. 

fieisheipl, J., Friar Thomas d’Aquino: His Life, Thought, and Works 

(Oxford, 1974). 

fihitelock, d. (ed.), English Historical Documents c. 500–1042 (London, 

1955). 

fiilliam of moerbeke: see Aquinas; Aristotle. 

fiillibald, Saint: see The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. 

fiinch, P., The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy 

(London etc., 1958). 

fiinroth, a., The Making of Gratian’s Decretum (Cambridge, 2000). 

firight, ¢. d., ‘Vercelli Homilies XI–XIII and the Anglo-Saxon Benedictine 

Reform: Tailored Sources and Implied Audiences’, in C. Muessig 

(ed.), Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages (Leiden etc., 

2002), 203–27. 

fiulff, d. m., ‘Radha: Consort and Conqueror of Krishna’, in Hawley 

and Wul·, Devi, 109–34. 

fflarri, G., Recinti: donne, clausura e matrimonio nella prima et›a moderna 

([Bologna], 2000). 

ffliegler, J. G., Die Ehelehre der P•onitentialsummen von 1200–1350: Eine 

Untersuchung zur Geschichte der Moral- und Pastoraltheologie (Regensburg, 

1956).

Index of Manuscripts 

I include only manuscripts I have personally used at least on microfilm. Manuscripts 

discussed at second hand are included in the main index. 

London, BL Add. 33956: 120 n. 126 

London, BL Add. 18347: 122 n. 132 

London, BL Add. 31830: Documents 

1. 9–13 notes passim (I use this 

manuscript as a source for interpretations 

of Hebrew names) 

London, BL Arundel 132: Document 

1. 9 

London, BL Arundel 431: 263 n. 11 

London, BL Arundel 471: 257 n. 14, 

261 n. 44, 264 n. 16, Document 

4. 1 

London, BL Arundel 485: Documents 

2. 1–2, 270 n. 2 

London, BL Cotton Cleopatra E. 1: 

182 n. 41, 183 n. 42 

London, BL Cotton Domitian XV: 90 

n. 59 

London, BL Harley 2385: 120 n. 126 

London, BL Harley Charter 45. F. 11: 

184 n. 47 

London, BL Lansdowne 397: 122 n. 

130 

London, BL Royal 5. A. I: Document 

3. 1 

London, BL Royal 6. E. I: Document 

4. 5 

London, BL Royal 8. A. II: 257 n. 9 

London, BL Royal 8. B. XV: p. 117 

nn. 121–2 

London, BL Royal 9. C. I: 263 n. 10, 

275 nn. 9 @ 13, 283 n. 8 (from 

282) 

London, BL Royal 9. C. III: 282–3 n. 

6 

London, BL Royal 11. A. XIV: 145, 

151–2, Document 3. 8 

London, BL Royal 11. B. X: p. 118 n. 

123, Document 3. 9 

London, BL Royal 11. B. X: Documents 

3. 9, 4. 6 

London, The National Archives, 

JUST 3. 41/1: Document 3. 10 

Munich, Staatsbibliothek Clm 2946: 

Document 1. 10 

Munich, Staatsbibliothek Clm 3833: 

Documents 1. 1–2 

Oxford, Merton College 30: 241 n. 18 



Oxford, New College 205: Documents 

2. 1–2, 4. 1 

Paris, Archives Nationales J 709 no. 

296 [sic]: 158, Document 3. 4 


296 (2): Document 3. 5 


298 (10): Document 3. 6 


298 (12): Document 3. 7 

Paris, BN lat 3742: Document 1. 10 

Paris, BN lat. 3794: Document 1. 3 

Rome, Casanatense 4560: Documents 

1. 12–13 

Troyes, Biblioth›eque Municipale 

1263: 238 n. 2, 240 n. 10 

Troyes, Biblioth›eque Municipale 

1440: Document 1. 11 

Vatican City, Archivio Segreto Vaticano 

Penitenzieria ap. 48: Document 

4. 7 


Penitenzieria ap. 60: Document 

4. 8 


Penitenzieria ap. 75: Documents 

3. 11–12

Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica 

Vaticana Chigi C. IV. 99: 241 nn. 

16, 20 

Index of Manuscripts 311 

Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica 

Vaticana Vat. Lat. 3994: 165–6 n. 

90

General Index 

Though I have not attempted to index all the scholars whose works are cited in 

the notes, I have included some where I thought this would help readers. The 

line is rather arbitrary and there is a bias towards more recent writers. I include 

also manuscripts which are mentioned as studied by other scholars but which I 

have not consulted personally (conversely, I have not included these in the Index 

of Manuscripts). When indexing the Documents, I have not included names and 

themes if the appropriate forward references are already provided in the main text; 

nor do I index the sources identified in the notes. Thus the index is highly selective 

so far as the Documents are concerned. 

Abbo of St-Germain 30 

Abelard 98–9 

Adelaide, wife of Louis the Stammerer 

83 

Adela•§de, wife of Louis V of France 

92 

adultery 82, 123 

creatures and Document 1. 11. 6 

ªlfric 34, 36 

a·ectio maritalis: see marital a·ection 

anity 14, 175 

see also forbidden degrees 

Agde, Council of (506) 79 

age of first marriage 182, 191 

ages of history 32, 33 

Agobard of Lyons 29 

Ahasuerus 60 

Aldobrandino da Toscanella 63–4, 


Alexander III, Pope 126–7, 143–5, 

171, ch. 4 passim, 201, 203 

Alexander IV, Pope 142, 158 

allegory 61 

Alpaida, wife of Pippin of Herstal 80 

Altm•unster, Bridgettine nunnery 223 

Amandola, partner of Rozelin 90 

Amos, T. 21–31 passim 

Angers, Council of (453) 79 

Anglo-Saxon England: 

divorce in 79–80 

preaching in 33–4 

see also Bede 

Anguillaria, Count of 180–1, 182, 

Document 4. 4 

annulments ch. 2 passim 

Ansgard 83 

Anstey case 183–4 

anthropology 17 

Antibes 110 

Antoninus of Florence, St 195 

Aquinas 8, 9, 145–8, 150 

Archon Basileus 4 

Aris, Marc-Aeilko 42 n. 79 

Aristotle, 226, 232 

see also marriage, Aristotle and 

Assuerus 60 n. 146 

Asti 115, 123 

asymmetry, gender 251 

Atto of Vercelli 29 

attrition of manuscripts ch. 1 (c) 

passim 

Audientia litterarum contradictarum 

122 n. 130, 124, 185–6 

Augsburg, ninth-century homily composed 

for church of Documents 1. 

1–2 

Augustine of Hippo 30, 75–8, 81, 88, 

129–30, 202 

and ‘bigamy’ 133 

Augustinian Hermits 57 

Aurelle, M. 101 

Auxerre, School of, audience of homilies 

from 25–7 

Baldwin, J. W. 14, 94 n. 73, 100 n. 87, 

102 n. 94, 104 nn. 97–8 

Ball, R. M. 262 n. 1 

banns 65

Barellus, Raymund 109–10, 119 

Barr‹e, H. 25–6, 208 n. 1 

Barrow, J. 91 n. 62 

Bartlett, Robert 1 n. 3, 116, 181 n. 38 

Basilinna 4 

Bataillon, L.-J. 37 n. 69, 55, 56 n. 122 

‘Bavarian Homiliary’ 30, 31, 32, 


‘Beaune Homiliary’ 32–3, Document 

1. 3 

Becket, Thomas 158 

Bede 24–5 

Pseudo-Bede 28 

Bellamy, J. G. 163 n. 84 

Benedict XII, Pope 148 n. 46, 155 n. 

66 

Benedictine libraries 41, 46 

benedictio sacramentalis 118 n. 124, 

153–5 

benefit of clergy, and ‘bigamous’ 

clerics 159–65 

B‹eriou, N. 37 n. 69, 226 n. 1 

Berkshire Eyre, 184–5 

BernardofClairvaux,St3,5,7,9, 

10–11, 20 

Bernard of Parma 144 

Bernard of Pavia, 118 n. 124, 148 

Bertram, Martin 54 n. 117 

BertranddelaTour45 

betrothal 60 

see also initiation 

Bhakti 4 

bigamy, irregularity of 111, ch. 3 

passim, 168–9, 171, 199 

Tree of 137–9 

Biller, P. 144 n. 37 

Binder, B. 150 n. 53 

binding, and book destruction 42–4 

bishop, marriage to his church 16, 87, 

138–9 

Blair, J. 35 nn. 61–2, 36 n. 64 

blessings, at weddings ch. 3 (b) passim, 

200 

Blickling Homilies 34 

B•ohringer, L. 85–6 nn. 41–2 

Bonaventure 39, 118 n. 124 

Boniface, St 25 

homilies attributed to 28 

‘book massacre’ 42–4 

Book of Two Principles 66 

books: 

borrowing of 44, 47–8 

cost of 55–7 

General Index 313 

history of the book ch. 1 (c) passim 

production by friar scribes 53–7 

sale of by friars 49 

unattached to libraries 46–8 

utilitarian attitude to 41 

see also manuscript books; printed 

books; small manuscripts 

Borgolte, M. 15, 92 n. 63 

Borst, A. 66 n. 165 

Bouchard, C. B. 92 n. 66, 94 n. 72 

‘Bouhot–Folliet’ sermon collection 28 

Boyle, L. E. 196 n. 69 

Brandl, L. 12, 170 n. 6 

Brautmystik 5, 6 

Brescia, bishop of 173–4 

bridegroom, qualities of 63 

Brooke, C. N. L. 14, 90 n. 57, 91 n. 

61, 93 n. 69, 95–6, 126–7 n. 144, 

175 n. 22, 181 n. 38, 184 n. 46, 

201 

Brown, Peter 78 

Brugui›ere, M.-B. 104 n. 97 

Brundage, J. 13, 118 n. 124, 126 n. 

142, 131 n. 1, 183, 197 n. 71 

Bruno of Segni 37 

‘B•uchersterben’ 43 

Burgos 187 

Burk, Kathy 125 n. 139 

Bynum, Caroline Walker 11 n. 36 

Caesarius of Arles 23–4 

Cana, marriage feast of ch. 1 passim 

canon law 10, chs. 2–4 passim 

German Protestant scholars and 

11–12 

canon-law manuscripts, lack of improvisation 

in 54 

Canticle of Canticles: see Song of 

Songs 

Capetian dynasty, marriage policy of 

96 

Carmelites 57 

Carolingian period 22, 25–33, 72, 73, 

82–8 

see also Hincmar of Reims 

Cartlidge, N. 13, 181 n. 36 

casuistry, as index of symbolism’s 

force 140–1 

‘Cat‹ech›eses celtiques’ 27 

Cathars 21, 65–7, 226 

Catherine Gomez 187, Document 4. 8 

causation 74, 88 

‘neutralizing’ causation 74

314 General Index 

reciprocity of substructure and 

superstructure 205–7 

time lag in 129 

celibacy of the clergy 88–91, 129 

Charlemagne 82, 83 

Charles Martel 80 

chastity, marital, according to Jean 

Halgrin Document 1. 9. 3 

Chaucer 167 

childlessness: 

and indissolubility 76 

as a}iction 63, Document 1. 12. 7 

child psychology, in the Supplement 

to the Summa theologica 106 n. 

102 

China, classical, marriage in 75 

chivalry 63 

Chr‹etien de Troyes 63, 99 

Christ, represented by the wife 252 

Christina of Markyate 181–2 

Christmas, meaning of 149–50 

Chrysostom, John, homilies on John 

241 n. 18 

Cistercian libraries 41, 46 

Clanchy, M. T. 98 nn. 81–2, 185 n. 48 

clandestine marriages 65 n. 164, 68, 

105 

Clarke, Peter 165 n. 89 

Clayton, M. 34 n. 55 

clergy, and celibacy 74, 88–91, 204–5 

minor orders 133 and ch. 3 (c) 

passim, 200 

marriage of clerics in major orders 

invalid (from 1139) 140 

marriage without sex 133, 178 

see also celibacy of the clergy; minor 

orders, clerics in 

Clig›es, ofChr‹etien de Troyes 99 

Clm. 12612: 29 

coercion, marriage voided by 124–9 

Collins, A. J. 152–6 notes passim, 

259–62 notes passim 

Colonna, Agnes 180, Document 4. 4 

Colonna, Stefano da 180, 182, 277–8 

‘commensurable household units’ 78 

Common Law, English, and ‘bigamy’ 

162–3 

Compi›egne, Council of (757) 83 

Conceptionists 186 

Congregation of the Council [of 

Trent] 191–2 

consanguinity 14, 92–3 

see also forbidden degrees 

consent to marriage, free 75, 124–9 

Constance of Padilla 186–7, Document 

4. 7 

consummation and indissolubility 

59–60, ch. 4 passim 

consummation of marriage 58, 60, 61, 

86, 97, 111, ch. 4 passim, 201, 205 

and decretal Debitum 136, 198 

and John XXII 155 n. 66 

Contreni, J. 30 

Council of Lyons, Second (1274) 

159–64 

councils 79, 82 

courts, ecclesiastical 73, 74, 94–5, 

107–16, 123–4, 127–8 

and clerical privilege ch. 3 (c) passim 

fallibility of 190 

criminous clercs ch. 3 (c) passim 

Crouzel, H. 77 n. 7 

custom Document 3. 8. 7 

Dante 197 

Daudet, P. 92 nn. 64–5, 93 n. 68, 94 

n. 74, 96 n. 77 

David, P. 28 

Davidsohn, R. 103 n. 97 

Davies, W. 35 

Dean, T. 115 n. 117 

Decretals of Gregory IX 107, 143– 

4 nn. 34–5, 156, 164, 173–4, 

Documents 2. 1–2, 3. 2–3, 4. 1, 

source references beginning ‘X.’ 

passim 

de Jong, Mayke 92–3 n. 67 

Delcorno, Carlo 226 n. 1 

Denmark 102 

Denzler, G. 90 nn. 56 @ 58 

Desiderius 82 

desponsata, meaning of 174 n. 19 

Destrez, Jean 50–52 

Devil, ‘marriage’ to 58 

Dionysius Exiguus, 141, 151, 152 

Dionysus (Greek god) 4 

dispensations: 

and ‘bigamy’ 139–40 

to dissolve unconsummated marriage 

192–5, 204 

distinction collections 39 

divorce, 14, 84, 88, 92, 99, 191–4 

formularies and 81 

in modern sense 78 

in world religions 75

Dolezalek, G. 127 n. 147 

Dominicans 20 

as preachers ch 1 (d) passim 

as scribes 53–7 

Donahue, C. 12, 114–16, 126 nn. 141 

@ 143, 127 n. 145 

Douglas, M. 132, 205–6 

Doyle, Ian 256 

Duby, G. 1 n. 3, 14–15, 93 n. 69, 103 

n. 96 

Duns Scotus 118 n. 124, 283–4 

Dyer,C.56n.126 

Eberbach, Cistercian monastery of 219 

ecclesiastical courts: see courts 

economic infrastructure, weak in 

Carolingian period 73 

economics and monogamy 75 

Edward I of England 162 

Edward II of England 163 

Egbert, Archbishop of York 25, 35 

Eliduc 96, 99 

Eligius, homilies attributed to 28 

Elizabeth de Lezano 191–2 

Elliott, D. 15 

Emery, Kent 54, 116 

endogamy 14 

ends–means calculation 132, 192–5 

enforcement of indissolubility 121–2 

England, marriage ritual in 155 and 

ch. 3 (b) passim, 204 

cases of delayed consummation 

from 183–5 

Ephesians 5: 32: 176, 194 

Erec and Eneide, ofChr‹etien de 

Troyes 99 

Esmein, A. 131 n. 2, 142, 144 nn. 

38–9, 145 nn. 40–1, 148 n. 45 

Esther 6, 60–1 

as Church 61 

‹Etaix, R. 29 

Eucharist 60, 145 

Eugenius II, Pope 84 

Eugenius IV, Pope 195 

excommunication for deserting spouse 

74, 122 

exempla 39 

ex ocio prosecutions in ecclesiastical 

courts 114, 116 

exogamy 14 

fallibility of the Church, according to 

a canonist 252 


False Decretals 87–8, 129 

fasting, homily on 29 

Fedele, P. 131 n. 1 

Fink, K. A. 195–6, 277 

Florence, intellectual milieu 226, 232 

Florus of Lyons 29 

Folliet: see ‘Bouhot–Folliet’ sermon 

collection 

forbidden degrees 14, 92–4, 104–16, 

175, 182 

pope’s power to dispense 197–8 

forged bull 148 n. 46, 155 

forms of life 88, 91 

formularies 81, 122 n. 132, 185–6 

and divorce, 81 

Fouracre, Paul 80 n. 19 

Fourth Lateran Council 14, 65, 104–8 

commentary on by Johannes Teutonicus 

247 

France: 

bulls to kings of 158–9, Documents 

3. 5–7 

c.1200, power of 102 

Franciscans, 20 

as preachers ch. 1 (c) and (d) passim 

as scribes 53–7 

Franciscus Sola 166 

friars 20 

‘honorary’, educated secular clergy 

as 49 

as preachers ch. 1 (d) passim 

as scribes ch. 1 (c) passim 

Fuhrmann, H. 87 n. 49 

FulbertofChartres96 

Gabel, L. C. 162–3 nn. 82–3 

Garc‹§a de Vargas 191–2 

Gaudemet, J. 12, 16–17 n. 69, 81 n. 

24, 82 n. 27, 83–7 notes passim, 

102 n. 93, 104 n. 98, 176–9 

Gaunt, S. 89–90 n. 54 

Gautier d’Arras 96–8, 99 

Geertz, C. 17, 149 

gender 10–11 n. 36, 89–90, 201–2, 

204–5, 251–2 

G‹enestal, R. 163–4, 168–9 

G‹erard de Mailly ch. 1 (d) passim, 171 

Gervase of Mont Saint- ‹Eloi 49 

gifts, books as 53 

Gillingham, J. 93 n. 69, 170 

Goethe 181 

Go·redus of Trani 144–5 

Gold, P. S. 172 n. 12


Gomer 59 

Goody, J. 12 

gopis 4–5 

Grand coutumier 169 n. 3 

Gratian 93, 125–6, 142–4, 176, 179, 

202, 252 

Greece, classical, marriage symbolism 

in 4 

Gregorian Reform 88, 90–1 

Gregory II, Pope 84 

Gregory the Great 22, 30, 66–7 

Gregory VII, Pope 75, 90, 134 

Gregory IX 120 

see also Decretals of Gregory IX 

Guglielmo Cassinese 115 n. 116 

Guibert de Tournai ch. 1 (d) passim, 

171 

Guido Faba 42 

Guillelmus Redonensis 257 n. 9 

Gullick, M. 55 n. 121, 56 n. 125 

Haistulf of Metz 28 

Hallam, E. 56 n. 124, 164 n. 87 

Haymo of Auxerre 20–1, 25–6, 67 

heaven, ‘marriage’ of soul to God 

located in 63–4 

Hebrew names, interpretation of 59 

Heiric of Auxerre 25–6 

Helmholz, R. H. 12, 105 n. 101, 112, 

114 

H‹elo•§se 98–9 

Henricus de Bartholomaeis: see 

Hostiensis 

Henry III of England 182–3 

Henry of Susa: see Hostiensis 

Herde, P. 122 n. 130, 185–6 nn. 50–3 

Hereford Cathedral, canons at 91 

Hereford rite 153 n. 62 

Herlihy, D. 78, 182 n. 39 

Hildebrand: see Gregory VII, Pope 

Hildegard, and Charlemagne 82 

Himiltrud, and Charlemagne 82 

Hincmar of Reims, 85–7, 178–9, 195, 

200–1, 202 

Hindu marriage 142 

and indissolubility 7, 89, 170 

and marriage symbolism 3, 4–8, 200 

and polygamy/polygyny 5–6, 88–9, 

170 

history, six ages of 32, 33 

holy orders, and non-consummation 

188–9 

homiliaries 20–37 passim, Documents 

1. 1–3 

homilies transmitted in vernacular 

33–4 

‘honorary friars’, educated secular 

clergy as 49 

Honorius III, Pope 164 

Hosea 59 

Hostiensis 74, 107–12, 148 n. 46, 183, 

197–9, 205, Documents 2. 1–2, 4. 

1 

and Tree of Bigamy 137–9, 203 

Hughes, D. O. 127 n. 147 

Huguccio 252 

Hugues de Saint-Cher 60 n. 142, 67 

n. 170, 68 n. 175, 69 n. 180 

humanism 63 

Christian Document 1. 12. 5 

Humphreys, K. W. 44, 46 n. 90, 47–8 

ideal type, as explanation 91–5 

Ille et Galeron 96–8, 99 

ill health, 63 Document 1. 12. 7 

Imbert, cleric 168 

Imkamp, W. 100 n. 87, 101 n. 89 

impotence 175, 189–94 

incarnation as marriage 59, Document 

1. 2. 2 

indissolubility 14, 73, 59–61, ch. 2 

passim, 176, 199 

individuals, influence of on social 

history 74 

Ingeborg of Denmark 102–4, 171 

Ingram, M. 112–13 

initiation of marriage 58, 60, 61 

initiation–ratification–consummation 

58, 61, 171 

Innocent II, Pope 184 n. 46 

Innocent III, Pope 73, 74, 75, 85, 

91–2, 203, 205 

advice on sex and marriage to Philip 

Augustus 170 

analytical abilities of 190 

and a case from Auxerre 189–91 

changes law to make annulments 

hard to get 104–8 119, 121 

decretal Debitum 136–7, 155, 156, 

161–2, 168, 198 

influenced by marriage symbolism 

99–102 

refuses annulments to rulers 101–4, 

171 

Innocent IV, Pope 160–2, 203 Documents 

3. 2–3

instrumental rationality 132, 192–5 

intellectual property 40 

Islam, marriage in 75, 89 

Israel, people of, as bride of God 7–8, 

75, 200 

Jacques de Lausanne 42 

Jean d’Essômes 49 

Jean de la Rochelle 171 

Jean Halgrin ch. 1 (d) passim, Document 

1. 9 

Jenks, Susanne 265 n. 1 

jesters (hystriones), at marriage celebrations 

Document 1. 9. 4 

Jewish people: see Israel 

Joan of Ponthieu 182–3 

Johannes de Burgo 117–18, 148 n. 46, 

156–7, 172, 175, Documents 3. 9, 

4. 6 

Johannes de Deo 139–40, Document 

3. 1 

Johannes Teutonicus 247 

John, King of England 102 

John XXII, Pope 148 n. 46, 155 n. 

66, 180–1, 188, Document 4. 4 

John Chrysostom, St 62 n. 149 

homilies on John 241 n. 18 

John the Evangelist, marriage of 11 n. 

36, 58 n. 130, 189 n. 54 

John of Naples 188 

John of Worcester 163 

Joseph, marriage to the Virgin Mary 

171–3, 175, Document 4. 3 

Joyce, G. H. 12, 83, 175 n. 21, 195, 

197 nn. 70 @ 72 

Juan Sams (?) 187, Document 4. 8 

Judaism, marriage in 75, 89 

judges delegate, papal 185–7 

Judocus, St, sermon on 29 

Jussen, B. 131 n. 1 

Kay, R. 101 n. 91 

Kelly, W. 83–4 n. 35, 84 n. 39 

Ker, N. 44–5 

knight, image of 63 

Knowles, D. 57 n. 129 

Konrad Holtnicker ch. 1 (d) passim, 

Document 1. 10 

Koran 89 n. 53 

Kottje, R. 85 n. 41 

Krishna 3, 4, 5 

Kuhrt, Amelie 3–4 n. 12 

Kuiters, R. 76–7 


Kuttner, S. 16 n. 69, 131 n. 2, 133 n. 

7, 144 n. 36 

Lakshmi 3 

Langton, Stephen 176 

Lantperhtus of St Michael 30 

Laon, School of 30 

Lateran IV: see Fourth Lateran Council 

Latin, parish priests’ knowledge of 22, 

26, 34–6, 72 

law as social force chs. 2–4 passim 

Le Bras, G. 12, 118 n. 124 

Leclercq, Jean 12–13, 15, 26 

legal separation of spouses 74–5, 123– 

4 

Legifer, sermon collection called 50, 

51 

Le Jan, R. 80 n. 20, 81 n. 22 

Leo I, Pope 177–9, 194 

Lerner, Robert 39 n. 72, 41 n. 78, 52 

n. 109, 55 n. 119, 57 n. 127 

Le Roi Ladurie 66 n. 165 

Le Saulchoir 51 

Leyser,H.80n.16 

libri inutiles 42–6 

logic, formal 226 

Lombardi, D. 114, 175 n. 23 

London, Dominican and Franciscan 

convents 45 

loss rate: see manuscript books 

Lothar II, king of the Middle Kingdom 

82, 85 

Louis V of France 92 

Louis IX of France 158 

Louis the Pious 82 

Louis the Stammerer 83 

love: 

transforms lover into loved one 

Document 1. 12. 3 

see also marriage, love and 

Lucius III, Pope 142 

Ludwig of Bavaria 180, 277–8 

Lupus of Ferri›eres 29 

Luscombe, D. 98 n. 83 

Lutterbach, H. 13, 92–3 n. 67 

Maccarrone, M. 101 n. 88 

McNamara,J.A.79nn.11@ 15, 80, 

82 n. 25 

Maitland, F. W. 162–3 n. 82 

‘Makulierung’ 42–4, 46 

manuscript books, loss rate of 20, ch.


1(c)passim 

see also small manuscripts 

Marculf, formulary of 81 

Maria de Montpellier 101 

Marie de France 96, 99 

marital a·ection 122, 125, 174 

marriage: 

Aristotle and 71–2 

Cathar view of 65–6 

church wedding not always required 

by Church 65, 105, 150 

controlled by lord 1, 126 

to create family alliances 1, 2 

of Christ and Church passim 

of Christ and human nature 59 

and Christ’s passion 9, 59 

of Christ and soul passim 

consent enough for sacramentality 

117–19 

free consent to, 1–2, 75, 124–9 

goodness of 21, 64–72 

goodness of sex in 72, 146, 169–70 

and grace 70–1 

heretics condemn 21 

layers of meaning in sacrament of 8 

love and 2, 9, 69, 127; see also 

marital a·ection 

marriage debt 21 

‘marriage’ to the Devil 58 

married woman can be better than 

proud virgin 31 

medieval model unique in world 

history 2 

preaching and sacralization of 65, 

200 

remarriage legitimate 142 

second marriages ch. 3 (b) passim 

sex before 31, 68 

‘spiritual marriage’, meaning of 

phrase 15 

symbolic marriages 16–17 

topoi about, 68–70 

see also clandestine marriages 

marriage feast of Cana ch. 1 passim 

Martin V, Pope 195–7, 204 

Mary the Virgin, marriage to Joseph 

171–3, 175, Document 4. 3 

mass communication ch. 1 passim, 200 

e·ects, 19, 39, 58 

Matthew, Book of: 

19: 5: 176 

19: 6: 194 

meaning: see social meaning 

Mechtild of Magdeburg 5 

Mercier, P., homilies edited by 22, 28 

Merton College, books lost 44 

Mesopotamia, marriage symbolism in 

3 

metaphor 17 

Mikat, Paul 92–3 n. 67 

Minaksi 3 n. 9 

minor orders, clerics in 133 

minster system 35 

missionaries, English, to the Continent 

25 

model sermons 37–8 and ch. 1 passim 

Modena 183 

Molin, J.-B. 150 n. 53, 155 n. 68, 259 

n. 30 

monastic libraries 46 

‘Mondsee Homiliary’ 30 

monogamy 14 

see also polygyny and polygamy 

Morin,D.G.29 

‘mother churches’ 35 

MS Cambridge, Trinity College 347: 

347–8 

MS Cracow, Capitular Library 43: 28 

MS Laon, Biblioth›eque Municipale 

265: 30 

MS London, BL Royal 4. D. iv: 45 n. 

93 

MS Montpellier H308: 29 

MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodl. 

429: 45 

MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, 

Bodleian Lat. bib. d. 9: 45 

MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 

239: 45 

MS Oxford, Merton College 132: 45 

MS Paris, BN lat. 16499: 49 

MS Vatican Library Reg. Lat. 49: 27 

MS Verdun 64: 29 

MS Wolfenb•uttel 4096: 30–1 n. 50 

Mulchahey, M. 53 n. 112 

M•uller, M. 12, 69 n. 176, 170 n. 5 

Munich 195–6 

Mutembe, P. 150 n. 53, 155 n. 68, 259 

n. 30 

Mynors, R. A. B. 44 

mysticism, bridal 4–5 

narrative history, the book’s argument 

rearranged as 202–4 

nature and marriage 71–2 

Neddermeyer, U. 41 n. 78, 52 n. 110

Nelson, J. L. 82 n. 27, 83 n. 28, 85 n. 

41, 86 n. 45 

Neocaesarea, Council of 141, 151, 152 

‘Newberry Library Homiliary’ 28 

Newman, B. 5 n. 18, 10 n. 36 

newspapers, impact of on opinion 39 

Nice, diocese of, annulments in 109 

Nicholas I, Pope 85 

nobility 63 

and indissolubility 14 n. 65 

of man Document 1. 12. 5 

Noble, T. F. X. 84 nn. 37-8 @ 40 

Nold, Patrick 180 n. 35, 183 n. 45, 

189 n. 54, 232 n. 3 

Noonan, J. T. 125–6, 127, 128 

norms and social behaviour 75 

Nuptiae factae sunt sermons, ch. 1 

passim 

nuptial blessing 118, ch. 3 (b) passim 

Oliver Sutton, bishop of Lincoln 122 

oral events 52, 61 

Orange, bishop of, scandalous behaviour 

of 120–1 

Order of the Holy Trinity 187, Document 

4. 8 

Origen 8 

originality in preaching 40, 49, 62 

original sin 69 

Osee 59 

Oxford Medieval Texts 14 

Pacaut, M. 16 

Padua, Franciscan Library at 46 

Palmer,N.F.219n.2 

Pantin, W. A. 156 n. 69, 175 n. 24 

papacy, compliant attitude towards 

kings 160 

papal registers, evidence of 120–1, 

127–8, Document 4. 4 

Paradise: 

marriage instituted in 68, 69 n. 176 

pleasure of sex in 170 

parchment, cost of 55–6 

Paris, Council of (829) 83 

parish priests, knowledge of Latin 22, 

26, 34–6, 72 

parish system 20, 35 

Parvati 3, 6, 

Parzifal, of Wolfram von Eschenbach 

99 

Passion, Christ’s, and marriage 9 

pastedowns 42–6 


Patareni (i.e. Cathars) 226, Document 

1. 11. 11 

patriarchal societies, and indissolubility 

of marriage 88–9 

Patrologia Latina, containsfewsermons 

on text Nuptiae factae sunt 

36–7 

Paul, St 31 

Payer, J. 170 n. 6 

peasant girl, social condition of 62 

pecia transmission 50–2, 54, 243, 271 

Pedersen, F. 103 n. 95, 104 n. 97, 113 

Pedro Martorel 166 

Pegg,M.G.65n.163 

Penitentiary: see next entry 

Penitenzieria Apostolica 165–7, 186–7, 

204, Documents 3. 11–12, 4. 7–8 

Pennington, K. 107 n. 103, 242–4, 

270–1 

perfection, triple in character Document 

1. 12. 2 

Perrin, cleric 168–9 

Persson, I. 173 n. 16 

Peter I of Aragon 101 

Peter the Chanter 94, 119 

Peter Damian 119, 134–5 

Peter Lombard 8–9 n. 29, 99–100, 

142–6, 172–3, 202 

Peter of Poitiers 100 

Peters, Christine 118–19 n. 124 

Pfa·,V.93n.71 

Philip III of France 159 

Philip Augustus, king of France 85, 

102–4, 170, 171 

Pierre de Reims 42, 51 n. 108, ch. 1 

(d) passim 

Pierre de Saint-Beno^§t ch. 1 (d) passim, 

171 

Pierre de Tarentaise 8–9 n. 29, 32 

Pignatelli, Jacob 191–5 

pilgrimage, life as 63, Document 1. 

12. 5 

Pippin, first Carolingian king 83 

Pippin of Herstal 80 

‘plagiarism’ 40, 49 

Plectrudis, wife of Pippin of Herstal 

80 

pocket books for preachers 38 

polygyny and polygamy 5, 6, 15, 75, 

78, 88–9, 91, 92 

power, absolute and ordained 197–8 

Powicke, Sir Maurice 176 

Powitz, G. 42–4


preaching, popular ch. 1 passim 

‘pre-contract’ cases 74, 115 n. 117, 

116–20 

priests: 

knowledge of Latin 22, 26, 34–6 

as scribes 53 

printed books, survival rate of 52 

‘print revolution’, relativized 41, ch. 1 

(c) passim 

Prisoner’s Dilemma 95 

privilegium fori: see benefit of clergy 

proof in annulment cases 105–12 

proxy marriages 182–3 

Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals: see False 

Decretals 

Pupilla oculi: see Johannes de Burgo 

quaterni 37, 41, 48–9, 50–2, 57 

quires: see preceding entry 

Radha 3, 4, 5 

Rama 3 

ratification of marriage 58, 60, 61, 180 

rational-choice theory 95–6 

rationality 95–6 

Raymund Barellus 109–10, 119 

reason, destroyed by sin Document 1. 

12. 13 

reception, reconstruction of 62–3 

recycling of manuscripts 42–4, 46 

Remigius of Auxerre 25 n. 18 

Reynolds, R. E. 28 

Reynolds, R. L. 77–8, 79, 86 n. 45 

Rhabanus Maurus 28 

Ricardus de Mediavilla 171–3, Documents 

4. 2–3 

Rinc‹on, T. 9 n. 32, 10, 100, 102 n. 92, 

270 

Ritzer, K. 141 n. 19, 150 n. 53 

Robb, Fiona 100 n. 86 

Rochester Priory 249 

Roger Bacon 48–9 

R•ohrkasten, J. 45 n. 88, 265 

Roman synod of 826: 84–5 

Rome, classical, marriage in 75 

Rouse, R. H. and M. A. 44, 45 

royal annulments 121 n. 129 

see also Innocent III 

Rozelin, and his partner Amandola 90 

rulers, sexual power of 80, 82, 88 

Rusticus, Bishop 177 

sacrament 8 

sacramentality: 

of marriage without a wedding 

117–19 

of second marriages 146–8 

St Alexis, legend of 181 

St Paul’s Cathedral, canons at 91 

‘Saint P›ere de Chartres’ homiliary 28 

saints’ lives, as preaching aids 39 

Salerno, bishop of 173–4 

Salonen, K. 113 n. 112, 165 nn. 88–9 

salvation history 61 

Salzburg, ninth-century homily composed 

for church of Documents 1. 

1–2 

Sanmark, Alexandra 104 n. 97 

Sarum manual 118 n. 124, 152–5 

Schadt, H. 131 n. 2, 137–9 

Schmugge, L. 113 n. 112, 165 nn. 

88–9 

Schnell, R. 13 

Schneyer, J. B. 38 

scholastic method, rare in thirteenthcentury 

preaching 226 

scribal variation 41 n. 78, Documents 

1. 4–8 

scribes, friars as 53–8 

commercial 53 

script, German features 219 

script, indications of date 219, 227, 

242–3 

script, Italian features 226–7, 242–3, 

271 

scriptoria, monastic 53 

second marriages ch. 3 (b) passim 

secular clergy, educated, as ‘honorary 

friars’ 49 

Segor 66–7 

senses 31, Documents 1. 1. 2–4, 1. 10. 

10 

separation, legal 123–4 

sermo de conscientia 28 

Servasanto da Faenza 60 n. 142, 69– 

70, 71–2, Document 1. 11 

servile status 62 

sex: see marriage 

Sharpe, R. 262, 282 

Sheehan, M. M. 112, 114 

Sinibaldo dei Fieschi: see Innocent IV 

Sita 3 

Siva 3, 6 

slavery 78, 177–8 

wrong to look lustfully at servus or 

ancilla Document 1. 1. 3

small manuscripts, disproportionately 

low survival rate of 52 

Smaragdus of St Mihiel 27 

Smetana, C. L. 26 

social meaning 75, 148–50, 154, 157, 

169 

Sodom 67 

Song of Songs 3 

soul, as bride 5–6 

Southern, R. W. 38, 57 n. 128 

Spain, clerical status in 167 

Spigurnel, Henry 266 

Sta·ord, P. 79 n. 13, 80 n. 17, 82 n. 

25, 83 nn. 28 @ 31, 92 n. 64 

stationers, university: see pecia transmission 

Statute on Bigamists 162–3 

Stephen II, Pope 84 

Stephen Langton 176 

Stephen of Auvergne 86, 178–9 

Stevenson, K. 150 n. 53, 153 n. 62 

Stone, Lawrence 1 

subdeacons 133, 157, 178 

substructure, 205–6 

Summa theologica, Supplement to 106, 

129 

Sundare‹svara, 3 n. 9 

superstructure 205–6 

Sutton, Oliver, bishop of Lincoln 122 

symbolism, literal foundation of 64–5 

Tarentaise, Pierre de 8–9 n. 29 

teleological thinking 71 

Tenbrock, R. H. 103–4 n. 97 

Theodore of Tarsus 79, 83 

Theutberga, wife of Lothar II 85 

Thomas Aquinas, St: see Aquinas 

Thomas Becket 158 

threes, and perfection Document 1. 

12. 2 

timing, explanation of 204–5 

tithes, homily on 29 

tonsure 164 

topoi about marriage 68–70 

Tox‹e, P. 169 n. 4 

Tree of Bigamy 137–9 

Trent, Council of 191 

universe, structured 63, Document 1. 

12. 5 

university stationers: see pecia transmission 

Urban III, Pope 144–5, 154 


urbanization 201 

vade-mecum books 38 

value rationality 132 

Vanderbilt heiress 125 

Van der Walt, Andries 24 

Vannes, Council of (465) 79 

variants, textual, implications of 53–5 

Vashti,6,61 

as synagogue 61 

vernacular 33–4, 38 

vernacular romances and marriage 

96–7, 99 

violence, husband’s against wife 124, 

193 

virginity 31 

loss of 168 

virgins, wise and foolish Document 1. 

1 

Vishnu 3 

Vleeschouwers-Van Melkebeek, M. 

116 n. 119 

Vodola, E. 159 n. 77 

Volfing, A. 11. n. 36, 58 n. 130 

von Riezler, S. 277 

von Schulte, J. F. 161 n. 79, 162 n. 81 

Waldensian movement 181 

Wallace-Hadrill, J. M. 80, 83 n. 31 

Weber, I. 125 n. 138 

Weber, Max 4–5 n. 16, 132, 149, 167, 

170 n. 8, 192–3 

wedding ritual ch.3 (b) passim 

Weigand, R. 113, 115 n. 117 

Wemple,S.F.79nn.11@ 13, 80, 82 

nn. 25–6 

Wertrationalit•at 132, 194–5 

Wickham, Chris 115 n. 116 

wife, represents Christ 252 

Wife of Bath, Chaucer’s 167 

William of Pagula 117, 156, 196–7, 

Document 4. 5 

Wilmart, A. 27 

Winch, P. 149 

Winroth, A. 93 n. 70 

Wolfram von Eschenbach, 99 

world, unsatisfactoriness of 63–4 

writs, in England 185 n. 49 

‘X.’: see Decretals of Gregory IX 

Xerxes 60 n. 146 

York rite 153 n. 62


Yvain,ofChr‹etien de Troyes 99 

Zachary, Pope 83 

Zarri, G. 17 

Zweckrationalit•at 132, 192–5

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