Gender roles and gender norms shaped much of a community’s expectations for marriage and the social sanctions stemming from their disapproval. Often, the ideal husband and ideal wife mapped closely to the meanings associated with an ideal man or an ideal woman. As a reaction to this, priests could find their manhood questioned and would sometimes rationalize concubinage in terms of appeals to socially approved ideals of masculinity.1 As seen in many of the objects on this website, a woman’s role in a marriage centered around her function as the bearers of a man’s heirs. The birth tray as a wedding gift demonstrates this powerfully. With this in mind, Ruth Mazo Karras has argued that, in medieval society, the ‘normative career for a medieval woman was sex work’ because of the focus on offspring as the purpose of marriage.2
Community norms around social class also greatly influenced conceptualizations of marriage in medieval societies. The Paston Letters repeatedly reference marriages as concerns for the well-being of the whole family and each family member routinely weighed in on the class-based suitability of potential matches.3 The portrait of the Jouvenel family illustrates the various class status markers associated with the elite. Clearly, this family saw itself as an exemplar of social standing, with marriages to boast about as well as high-level representation in the clergy.
Economics influenced the communication of affection during courtship as well as the larger social expectations for marriage. The giving of gifts, such the Amor Brooch, took on complex social meanings in the courtship process.4 Tokens of feelings, as well as signifiers of seriousness of marriage plans, these gifts operated to tighten or confirm perceptions of obligation. An ultra-valuable gift such as the sapphire ring would carry enormous connotations based on larger social meanings.
The wedding itself, both in terms of its ritual and its materiality, symbolically enacted the entrance of a couple into their new role in the larger society. The cassone panel that depicts the procession from chapel to feast illustrates this process. The town’s street scene, with mountains in the background, occupies the center and most of the space on the panel. Of course, at the highest elite level, the royal wedding, the ritual demanded that the groom and bride symbolize the ideals of statehood through kingship and queenship.
Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya, (Cornell University Press, 2017). ↩
Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Women’s Labors: Reproduction and Sex Work in Medieval Europe,’ Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 4 (2004): 153–58, at 154-155. ↩
Roger Virgoe, ed., Illustrated Letters of the Paston Family, (Macmillan, 1989), 97. ↩
Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 58. ↩