Friedrichs, Rhoda L.

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

Comptes rendus / Book ReviewsDyan Elliott - Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pp. xv, 375.St. Frances of Rome, according to the New Catholic Enyclopedia (Washington,D.C., 1967), "aided the poor with great generosity and provided for the care of thesick in the city hospitals". The O:iford Dictionary ofSaints (2nd ed., Oxford, 1987)adds that she was always accompanied by a guardian angel, which may explain whyshe was named the patron saint of motorists. This tidy, if rather dull, portrait of apious and· charitable fifteenth-century matron omits all mention of the real reasonshe was acclaimed as an extraordinary and saintly figure by her contemporaries:after many years of marriage and many children, Frances, who as a young girl hadwanted to become a nun, persuaded her husband to forego sexuality and transformtheir union into what was known as a spiritual marriage. In this form, joined byconcord and harmony but not carnality, they lived together for many years more.Other women may have aided the poor, but they did not become canonized; it wasFrances's late-blooming celibacy that won the notice and admiration ofboth laymenand clerics in her own day. This is apparently too alien a virtue for standardtwentieth-century reference works. It is, however, the subject of Dyan Elliott' sSpiritual Marriage, which sets out to examine the theory and practice of this hybridof the monastic and the secular from early Christian times through the late MiddleAges.The medieval Church's attitudes toward sexuality and the body are bothproblematic and fascinating to the modem mind, and to modem historians of genderin particular. This is partly because of the virulent misogyny endemic in medievaltheology, and partly because the virginity the Church valued so highly could serveto give women opportunities for power and self-expression: as nuns they couldevade the established order of male dominance, which, as Elliott reminds us, wasclosely associated with sexual control. Nuns, of course, were properly controlled bythe rule and by their vows. When laywomen, however, sought to take on sorne ofthe attributes of the professed religious, they came to present a troubling problemfor the Church. They had escaped in an essential point from their obedience and556 Histoire sociale / Social Historysubjection to their husbands, and no matter how pious and chaste they were, theChurch saw them as uncontrolled and masterless, a potential source, as Elliottsuggests, of a radical challenge to the divinely established order of things. Not onlywere they perceived as unusually independent by themselves and by society, butthey confused the firm categories of a celibate clergy and a carnallaity.The early centuries of Christianity had provided a number of saints' livesentailing celibacy in marriage - St. Cecilia, who converted her bridegroom to thecelibate life on their wedding night, is the paradigm - and the earlier Middle Agesadded stories of virginal royal marriages. Once we move from a hagiographysteeped in the miraculous and from cases of monasteries seeking to emphasize thespiritual virtues of their lay founders based on dubious evidence, however, we areleft with biographical accounts from the Iater Middle Ages which seem to presentsorne recurring features. There are only a fairly small number of examples ofspiritual marriage of which the details are known with any degree of reliability, butthe typical pattern seems to be that, like St. Cecilia, it was the wives who undertookto convert their often reluctant husbands to this formally mutual decision. UnlikeCecilia' s, however, most spiritual marriages seem to have been initiated by womenwho had been conventionally married for many years and who had had children.Sorne had originally wanted to become nuns, and sorne did so as widows; most,however, had no such intention. Frances of Rome clearly fits this pattern, as doesthe better-known Margery Kemp. Both worked to persuade their husbands to agreeto a vow of celibacy, for they were weIl aware that a unilateral decision involvedthem in the sin of disobedience. Birgitta of Sweden, who as a widow adopted anascetic life in Rome, was distressed that her equally zealous daughter hadabandoned her husband to follow the maternal example. Even Dorothea of Montau,whose domestic austerities and expressed revulsion from physical contact must haveworn on her increasingly exasperated husband, could not renounce her obligationto render the marriage debt unless her husband also agreed to undertake a celibatemode of life. Margery Kemp's famous weeping fits eventually wore down herhusband, and, although Dorothea' s husband saw her mystic raptures as a way ofavoiding housework, the local clergy took a different view. Eventually the pressuresher admirers brought on him to stop obstructing her holy life forced him to agree.Plainly, the ability of these determined women to manipulate their masters bymeans of superior sanctity is not to be dismissed.This tension between the higher calling of celibacy and the fundamental claimsof the social order went back as far as early Christianity, and beyond. Elliott is atpains to demonstrate and explicate the well-known debates over the camal and thespiritual factors in marriage. The first third of the book recapitulates the nature ofthe arguments that were made from the gnostics and St. Paul through the triumphof St. Augustine's moderate views on the sinfulness of sexuality, and on to thevisceral misogyny ofthe Gregorian reformers and the thirteenth-century Franciscans.While the doctrines and debates of a millennium and more of Christian theologycreated the normative views of sexuality, marriage, and the role of women, it is notuntil we reach the eleventh-century aspirations of the laity to emulate monasticvirtues, and still more the penitential movement of the fourteenth and fifteenthComptes rendus / Book Reviews 557centuries, that we find an ethos of spiritual marriage as a well-developed and self-confident phenomenon. Elliott's book sets out to describe the evolution of spiritualmarriage over 1,500 years, but the evidence educed seems to indicate that it was infact a development of the high and later Middle Ages which tumed as a matter ofcourse to the religious traditions of its society for validation and precedent.Elliott makes the convincing argument that spiritual marriage in aIl periods wasa multi-Iayered phenomenon which truly offered women sorne of the independencethe Church feared. Despite the ambivalence of theologians, these spiritual wivesattracted the admiration of a wide circle, both lay and clerical. Though Frankishkings could manipulate claims of religiously inspired chastity to repudiateinconvenient wives, by the fourteenth century spiritual marriage had become achoice for women, one which could establish both their individuality as weIl asspiritual superiority to a weaker, coarser spouse.We cannot know how many women chose this path, or how many couples soughtmonastic piety in the world, in contravention of high theology's divisions of thesocial order. Then, too, the evidence which survives is skewed heavily to the upperend of the social scale. Did peasants, too, adopt this practice? Was it ever an optionfor any but spiritual virtuosos? Despite these remaining questions, Elliott' s book,in examining what was certainly a minority practice, points up sorne of the mostimportant features of popular piety and of a sturdy movement of spiritual self-determination that flourished in the last centuries of medieval Christendom. It wouldperhaps be useful to see a fuller exarnination of the social and possibly theeconomic factors involved, but Elliott's focus lies far more with the religious basesof spiritual marriage. For our twentieth-century society, however, which is ready tosee St. Frances as a hospital volunteer but cringes from mentioning the celibacywhich was central to her being and to her social raIe, this book is a valuablecorrective. Spiritual Marriage is a contribution to our exploration, not only ofcelibacy in marriage, but of the intricacies of late-medieval spirituality andmentality.Rhoda L. FriedrichsDouglas College, New Westminster, Re.Alice Clark - Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (with newintroduction by Amy Louise Erickson). London: Routledge, 1992. pp. vii, 126.Alice Clark's Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century was originallypublished in 1919. It was republished in 1968 and again in 1982. This edition,prefaced by an excellent introduction by Amy Louise Erickson, is the fourth.Why reprint a 1919 monograph? In this particular case, one reason is the unusualgroup of women to which Alice Clark belonged. She was one of several femalehistorians associated with the London School of Economics, founded in 1895. Clarkattended the LSE in 1913, thanks to a Shaw research fellowship. At the time,almost a quarter of the LSE faculty was female, a proportion greater than at any

Dyan Elliott - Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in
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Dyan Elliott - Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)