Thematic Essays // medieval-marriages

What Is Love

This thematic essay explores how evidence, archival or material, might allow for historians to make judgements about the emotional history of the marriages of medieval elites. Certainly, to some extent, the way medieval people conceptualized love remains inaccessible to modern scholars, but drawing out comparisons between medieval representations of love might nevertheless yields meaningful insights about the affective history of medieval marriages.

Spousal Power Dynamics

In this thematic essay, I connect the material objects to what I read during the semester, and earlier in my graduate work, about the internal dynamics between spouses. In this essay, I present some conclusions about how Violant de Bar & Joan I of Aragon, Margaret Paston & John Paston, Catherine of Cleves & Arnold of Egmond, and Margherita Datini & Francesco Datini, represented exceptionality or typified the way that elite women exercised power in cooperation or in competition with their husbands’ power.

Community Social Norms

From literary representations to gossip networks, communities reproduced and challenged social norms. This thematic essay focuses on the way social expectations of marriage might influence choices made by elite women and men. Social pressures from tradition, as well as in response to changing circumstances, likely produced an effect when it came to how medieval elites defined marriage.

Church and State

Institutions shaped practices and expectations regarding marriage. For both elites and non-elites, officials of the church and officials of the state regulated marriage. By adjudicating disputes and administering punishments, these institutions did much to articulate the boundaries of proper behavior for husbands and wives. However, when a member of the highest echelon of the medieval elite, such as a king, behaved in a way that challenged gendered expectations, they sometimes got away with it.