Othello

An excerpt from “Medieval and Renaissance Marriage: Theory and Customs,” by Kirsti S. Thomas.

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to provide a very general overview of Christian wedding customs in Western Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Most of the sources I found were in agreement that little is known of wedding customs and practices prior to the tenth or eleventh century. Moreover, most of the information given in this paper is drawn from the Renaissance period of Western European history, simply because information on this time period is more readily available than that from earlier centuries. My research was also primarily limited to works in English and German. I was, unfortunately, unable to make use of several fine works in French and Italian, as I do not read those languages. I have, however, included those works in the bibliography which accompanies this paper.

The paper is divided into two sections. The first section deals with the evolution of popular and ecclesiastical thought on what made a marriage valid and legally binding. The second section covers the actual rituals and customs associated with wedding ceremonies.

Part 1: What makes a marriage?

In order to understand wedding customs of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it is necessary to first understand two things – what made a marriage (that is, what actions a couple needed to perform for society to recognize them as husband and wife); and what sexual relationships outside that of marriage were socially valid and binding. Before we delve further into these two questions, let us first define what marriage is. For this, the words of the New Shorter Oxford Dictionary will serve well. “Legally recognized personal union entered into by a man and a woman usu., with the intention of living together and having sexual relations, and entailing property and inheritance rights” (p. 1209).

It is also worth noting that marriage contains both secular and sacred aspects. To quote French historian Georges Duby, “Marriage, which is necessarily overt, public, ceremonious … is at the center of any system of values, at the junction between the material and the spiritual. It regulates the transmission of wealth from one generation to another … because marriage also regulates sexual activity concerned with procreation it belongs to … the realm of what is numinous and sacred” (The Knight 19). On the one hand, marriage is secular because it involves the transfer of property. On the other hand, it is sacred because it can result in procreation, and because the bond between husband and wife mirrors the bond between mankind and the Divine. In Christian terms, the husband-wife relationship is analogous to that of Christ and the Church. This dual sacred/secular nature had a definite impact on the development of both the philosophy and the customs of marriage, as we will see later.

As was alluded to earlier, during the Middle Ages, Western European cultures recognized more than one form of socially acceptable and binding union between men and women. In contrast to twentieth-century society, where the only legally recognized union is marriage, early medieval society held concubinage, as well as marriage to be socially acceptable and legally valid.

The main difference between concubinage and marriage seems to have been the social status of the woman in relation to the man. As was mentioned earlier, marriage serves to transfer wealth or property and to continue the family line. It therefore follows that to achieve these ends it is preferable to marry one of the same social status or higher. So while marriage fulfilled the desire of a family to maintain or improve its social standing, concubinage, in contrast, fulfilled the desire of the individual for companionship and/or sexual satisfaction. This is not to say that concubinage was not a formally recognized relationship. Indeed, the formal agreement for entering into such a union had its own rites, much like marriage (Duby, The Knight 44).

. . . .

Northern Europeans considered consummation to be the element which truly sealed a legally binding marriage. This does not necessarily mean that sexual intercourse and only sexual intercourse formed the marriage bond. Rather, sexual intercourse followed by the couple living together is what created a marriage.* Moreover, the consent of the bride’s family (i.e. her father) was held to be more important than the couple’s consent. This is clearly illustrated by a decree issued by the Merovingian king, Childebert, in 596, which stipulated the death penalty for abduction by force. Even in cases where the woman agreed to marriage after the fact, if parental approval was not forthcoming the couple was sentenced to exile or death (Gies and Gies 55). Here we see that there is no question that the couple is married as a result of sexual consummation. There is, however, a price to be paid for violating the social norm requiring parental consent.

Meanwhile, in Anglo-Saxon England, marriage by purchase was common. That is, a man paid money for his bride, although there seems to be some debate as to whether the money bought the woman herself, or the guardianship over her. In other words, it is possible that by paying the bride price, the man purchased a wife; it is also possible that the bride price purchased the right to act as guardian over the woman’s property. It is also worth noting that when a bride price was paid, it was paid to the bride, rather than her family. Anglo-Saxon law, like Frankish law under the Merovingians, also considered marriage by abduction to be a punishable offense, although, if the abductor later paid the bride price, the marriage would be legally recognized (Fischer 20-21).

The three elements which marriage rites contained were sacrament, mutual consent, and sexual union (Gies and Gies 97). So here we see that Hincmar recognizes both the Roman tradition which requires consent, and the Germanic tradition which requires consummation. In addition, it is worth noting that Hincmar states that the marriage must be celebrated in public, rather than secretly. Had Hincmar’s views prevailed, the history of marriage in Western Europe would have been quite different.

During the Reformation, Martin Luther questioned whether the Church should involve itself in the business of celebrating marriage, arguing rather strenuously that marriage was a “worldly business [where] we clergy ought not to meddle or direct things” (qtd. in Roper 106). Luther did agree that the Church should bless those who married and even presented a basic marriage rite in 1529, but maintained that “the regulation of marriage was a proper matter for the civil authority rather than the Church” (qtd. in Searle and Stevenson 210).

Quite possibly in response to Luther and the Reform movement, but also to deal with the increasing problem of clandestine marriage, the Council of Trent agreed to review the Church’s stance on marriage, issuing its decision in 1563. First, let me explain that “clandestine marriage” does not necessarily refer to marriage contracted in secret without the presence of witnesses. The term was used in reference to “any contract of marriage made other than in the approved manner at the church door” (Goldberg 241).

In any case, the Council of Trent finally put an end to the chaos generated since the twelfth century by the insistence that only the mutual consent of the couple was necessary to create a binding marriage. The Tametsi decree, issued in 1563, stated that for a marriage to be recognized by the Church: a) the partners must give their consent, and b) the priest must say a formula (such as “I join you together in matrimony”) ratifying the marriage (Searle and Stevenson 14).

The Church of England, however, continued to recognize clandestine marriages as late as the eighteenth century (Brooke 250) and in Scotland it was possible to marry by the exchange of consent in the presence of witnesses until 1940 (Anton 99). Still, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the general opinion was much like that expressed by John Donne in 1621, “As marriage is a civil contract, it must be done so in public, as that it may have the testimony of men. As marriage is a religious contract, it must be so done as it may have the benediction of the priest” (qtd. in Cressy 295).

So we can see that ideas about what was required to form a legally binding marriage changed through the ages. The Germanic form of marriage involved consent of the parents, purchase of the bride, and consummation. In contrast, the Roman form required only that the man and woman give their consent. The Roman form won out in the late twelfth century. The presence of a priest, while strongly urged, was not necessary in Catholic weddings until 1563. This said, let us now examine marriage rites and customs of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Part 2: How was marriage celebrated?

Western European cultures throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance recognized two distinct phases in the process of marrying a couple-- the betrothal and the wedding. The betrothal ceremony is described as being grave, solemn and formal. During this ceremony, the parents of the groom came to the house of the bride’s family. They exchanged words promising the union of the two families and objects were passed from hand to hand to symbolize the transfer of possessions

At this point, it is worth noting that betrothal ceremonies frequently involved symbolic actions which were later to become part of the wedding ceremony. Pope Nicholas in 860 wrote that the giving of a ring to the woman by the man, as well as a kiss, was part of the betrothal ceremony. This is believed to date back to the ancient Romans (Urlin 48). In fourteenth and fifteenth century Florence, the betrothal was sealed by a handshake between the father of the bride and the prospective groom. In Rome of the same period, a kiss performed the same function (Klapisch-Zuber 28). The joining of hands to seal the betrothal was common in Anglo-Saxon England as well, as is evidenced by the use of the term “handfasting” in Scotland and Northern England to refer to a betrothal (Anton 91). Indeed, in Anglo-Saxon, the term “handfasting” refers to any pledge by the giving of the hand (qtd. in Anton 91).

Aside from rites which were later incorporated into the wedding ceremony, certain symbolic actions seem to have been limited solely to betrothal agreements. Records from fifteenth and sixteenth century France show people drinking wine or eating a piece of fruit “in the name of marriage” to seal a betrothal. Indeed, the ritual exchange of almost any object could be used to form a betrothal agreement, from a string of wool, to a flute, to some coins, to (in one extreme case) putting one’s tongue in another’s mouth* (Burguiere 15-16).

There is no doubt that one of the functions of betrothal was to finalize arrangements concerning property, dowry and inheritance (Roper 65; Klapisch-Zuber 28), but it has also been suggested that the betrothal was the ritual where the woman was ceremonially bestowed on the man (Duby, The Knight 44). If we accept this premise, then we can see the wedding ceremony as a celebration of the man taking possession of the woman. Or, in less incendiary terms, we can see the wedding as the celebration of a finalized union between two people. The betrothal began the process; the celebration of physical union ended the process, at least in early medieval society.

It seems quite telling that in early medieval Western European history, more rituals are associated with the betrothal than with the wedding. The closer we get to the present day though, the more rituals become associated with the wedding celebration, rather than the betrothal. I would argue that this stems directly from the Church’s adoption of Roman law on marriage. The Church considered betrothal to be dissoluble while marriage was indissoluble

After the ceremony at the church was done, the wedding party returned home for the feast. The report of a double wedding of two English sisters in 1560 mentions “fine flowers and rosemary strewed for their homecoming, and so to their father’s house, where a great dinner was prepared” (qtd. in Cunnington and Lucas 93). Elsewhere, poor folks in Germany would hold the wedding feast in a tavern where the guests paid for their own meals (Roper 78).

Weddings of the Italian Renaissance were different than those found in the rest of Western Europe. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber describes three distinct phases of wedding ceremonies in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence (28-30). The first phase was the meeting of the men of both families to draw up the marriage contract. At this meeting, a notary would draw up the document stipulating the dowry and other financial arrangements. Guarantors and arbiters were appointed to see to the execution of the contract.

The second phase took place in the bride’s home. The bride’s relatives were present, along with a notary. Once the groom and his relatives arrived, the notary asked questions prescribed by the Church and received the couple’s statement of mutual consent. Then he took the woman’s right hand and led her to the groom who placed the ring on her finger. The “ring day” ended with a banquet provided by the bride’s family. After this, the couple was considered husband and wife. It is also worth noting that in Italy at this time the act of marrying was referred to as ‘giving someone the ring’. For example, Andrea di Tommaso Minenbetti complained that his brother “without our knowledge and against our intentions, on 17 November 1504, took for a wife the daughter of messer Cristoforo da Pratavecchio and gave her the ring” (Molho 188).

The final phase of the wedding was the ceremonial removal of the bride to her husband’s house. This usually occurred at the end of the ring day. Escorted by her husband’s friends and family, the bride rode a white palfrey through town to her new home, the way lit by torchlight. Altieri in his book, Li Nuptiali (ca. 1509) writes that in Rome, the spouses met Sunday at church, where they attended Mass and received a blessing from the priest (qtd. Klapisch-Zuber 30). In Florence, however, the entire ceremony remained secular.