"I DO, I DO": MEDIEVAL MODELS OF MARRIAGE AND CHOICE OF PARTNERS IN MARIE DE FRANCE'S "LE FRAISNE"

Romanic Review, Nov 2001 by Hurtig, Dolliann Margaret

The Church looks to the marriage of Mary and Joseph, a marriage perceived by ecclesiastics as consensual but not consummated, for an answer. Church lawmakers soon found themselves in a dilemma as Resnick observes:

If the absence of sexual intercourse were to invalidate the marriage bond between Joseph and Mary, then Mary would suddenly appear as an unwed mother-a conclusion as unacceptable to the twelfth or thirteenth centuries as to our own! But if their relationship resulted in a chaste spiritual marriage, and if lay people were encouraged to realize this model too, then the distinction between a celibate clergy and a laity would be threatened. (364)

What Gratian offers to ease "the tension between these two positions"(369) is a revolutionary stratagem to reconcile opposing views as John Perry comments:

In advancing the position that the married state begins with an exchange of uncoerced, sincere consent between bride and groom and becomes complete only by consummation, Gratian's Concordia discordantium canonum (c.1140)-or Decretum, as it became known-departs from both the Jewish and Roman traditions upon which the medieval Church has previously relied ... the canonist managed to unite previously scattered sources in marshaling his model and to argue, from the Roman law, for consent based on 'marital affection.' (137)

Gratian, doubtless following the tradition of churchmen since the ninth century, redefines the term "marital affection" as it relates to the act of marriage. Whereas the Roman Law assigns to the term "intent to get married," an emotive or affective quality is what the canonists now sought to convey (Noonan 425).

Finally, according to Christopher Brooke in his book, The Medieval Idea of Marriage, the Decretum of Gratian secures victory for the Church as the aristocrats embrace his definition: "... for the first time in the history of the Church, a single definition of what constituted a valid marriage was devised ... What is astonishing is the degree of acceptance that it received from the lay aristocracy...." (141). The question presents itself, then, as to how theology gave new meaning to marriage among the aristocracy. Brooke remarks that "the aristocratic societies of western Europe were increasingly concerned with the effective passage of landed estates and kingdoms by hereditary succession ... you can not work a hereditary system at all unless the nature of inheritance is tolerably clear; ... in the marriage market and the marriage games of medieval catholic Europe, the Church and the papacy acted as umpires, and were blessed and cursed accordingly"(142-43).

For the clergy, marriage acquired meaning as one of the seven sacraments. Among marriage legislators to succeed Yves de Chartres and Hugues of Saint-Victor emerges Peter Lombard who manages to frame a definition of sacrament. For Duby, the definition worked out by Lombard in his Livre des Sentences ( "A sacrament is an outward and efficient sign of grace" ), carries with it the notion of the indissolubility of marriage ( The Knight, The Lady, and The Priest 184). Duby describes how a privileged moment for the sacrament of matrimony occurs about midpoint into the twelfth century: