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Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society. By David L. d'Avray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 322. $195.00 (cloth); $45.00 (paper).
David d'Avray opens Medieval Marriage with a 2004 quotation from the New Yorker, outlining, as d'Avray puts it, "how die modern intellectual sees medieval marriage." According to Adam Haslett, the New Yorker writer, marriages in the Middle Ages were made for political and financial reasons. Emotional bonds between husband and wife were thus not central to marriage, the idea of companionate marriage arriving only with the Reformation. The medieval Catiiolic Church, which prized sexual chastity above all, held marriage (and marital sexuality in particular) to be no more than a remedy for human frailty, "a more or less unfortunate necessity" for those who could not remain pure (1). If marital sexuality was less sinful than extramarital sexuality, it remained suspect.
Few scholars of medieval marriage would agree with much of this caricature - as d'Avray points out, this is a clear example of a gap between scholarly consensus and the general knowledge even of the intelligentsia. The great contribution of d'Avray's Medieval Marriage is its lucid and masterful explanation for why one of the key aspects of this general picture is wrongheaded: contrary to easy assumptions that the medieval Catiiolic Church's prizing of clerical celibacy entailed abhorrence of sexuality of all kinds, d'Avray shows that the dominant line of ecclesiastical thinking from about 1200 onward turned in a different direction, toward an extraordinarily high valuation of the sexual union of husband and wife. D'Avray's argument turns on an analysis of the social power of a symbolic idea, traceable to early Christianity but only achieving its full force from the thirteenth century, that the consummation of a Christian marriage, the sexual union of a husband and wife, symbolized the mutual commitment between Christ and his church.
In about 400 CE Augustine of Hippo linked die symbolism of God's union with the church to the indissolubility of earthly Christian marriage: just as the...