Book description
The Middle Ages are often viewed as a repository of tradition, yet
what we think of as traditional marriage was far from the only
available alternative to the single state in medieval Europe. Many
people lived together in long-term, quasimarital heterosexual
relationships, unable to marry if one was in holy orders or if the
partners were of different religions. Social norms militated against
the marriage of master to slave or between individuals of very
different classes, or when the couple was so poor that they could not
establish an independent household. Such unions, where the protections
that medieval law furnished to wives (and their children) were absent,
were fraught with danger for women in particular, but they also
provided a degree of flexibility and demonstrate the adaptability of
social customs in the face of slowly changing religious doctrine.
Unmarriages draws on a wide range of sources from across Europe
and the entire medieval millennium in order to investigate structures
and relations that medieval authors and record keepers did not address
directly, either in order to minimize them or because they were so
common as not to be worth mentioning. Author Ruth Mazo Karras pays
particular attention to the ways women and men experienced forms of
opposite-sex union differently and to the implications for power
relations between the genders. She treats legal and theological
discussions that applied to all of Europe and presents a vivid series
of case studies of how unions operated in specific circumstances to
illustrate concretely what we can conclude, how far we can speculate,
and what we can never know.
"This important book summons from the shadows those
heterosexual relationships that were destined to become marginal.
Through an admirably wide array of sources, Karras retrieves forgotten
arrangements like concubinage, clerical marriage, bigamy, and
clandestine unions, and in so doing reanimates the couples who shunned
conventional marriage. This work is a must for historians of gender,
sexuality, and marriage. It helps us understand not only what society
would become, but what it might have been"-Dyan Elliott,
Northwestern University
Ruth Mazo Karras is Professor of History and Director of the Center
for Medieval Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author
of Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe, both available from the
University of Pennsylvania Press.
