Performative Acts

 One of the new directions in medieval studies is a focus on performative acts.  Like many aspects of medieval studies, once scholars got past "rise of the nation state" about 50 years ago, this focus can seem obvious when one thinks about it, even if one hasn't thought about it before.  But what are "performative acts?" you say.  I'm about to tell you.

Every act done in public (and for that matter some done in private) is at some level a performance.  A good actor isn't just reading the lines of the script but performing, making you believe that he or she is really that person, really feeling the emotion of the situation.  In the same way, a college professor giving a lecture isn't just conveying information.  She or he is also indicating by subtle or not-so-subtle cues that this is authoritative information, and the professor is very well informed on the topic.  The professor stands up in front, wears more formal clothes than the students, and is the one who announces, "It's time to get started."

In the same way, medieval people surrounded their actions with symbols, visual cues, and ceremonies that reinforced what was happening or supposed to happen.  A king would "wear his crown" (as the chronicles put it) several times a year, when he wanted his loyal men to renew their vows to him.  Normally of course a king would not walk around with jewels and metal on his head, but when he did it emphasized his position.  (Queen Elizabeth II of England did not usually wear a crown either, but she did when addressing Parliament.)

The oath of loyalty itself was full of symbols, the loyal man kneeling to indicate subservience, the lord kissing him on both cheeks to indicate that their bond was one of mutual affection and respect, not just one of master and subject.  Someone making a gift to a monastery would not merely say he was giving something but would do so accompanied by many witnesses, to give the act extra significance.

In eleventh-century Anjou and probably elsewhere, serfs were expected to pay a penny a year to their lord of the body (in addition to any rent they might owe to the same or a different lord), and they didn't just pay it, but came on their knees with a rope around their neck and the penny on their head.  This certainly underscored their subservient position (and it's not surprising that serfs tried to buy their way out of this ceremony, offering far more than the penny-a-year was worth monetarily).

And then there was getting one's doctorate degree from the University of Paris.  One stood on the front steps of Notre Dame and answered all philosophical questions anyone could throw (in Latin of course).  Talk about a performance!

We still do performative acts, even though we're not nearly as conscious of doing so as medieval people were.  Weddings, with a bridal white dress, groups of male and female attendants, rings, and a church setting even for people who rarely attend church are certainly conveying much more than that two people have decided to stay together permanently.  Medieval weddings weren't quite the same as ours, but they had comparable ceremony.

Once you start thinking about such things, you'll be startled at how many such performative acts you do yourself.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval social structures, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Married Life in the Middle Ages

I have previously blogged about how marriages were arranged in the Middle Ages and the way that weddings were held.  Today I want to talk about married life, what happened after the wedding.

As I noted before, marriage as a sacrament required the free consent of both parties.  It doesn't count as a sacrament if you're forced to do something against your will.  Families and powerful neighbors might exercise powerful suasion, but medieval marriages all started from the assumption that both parties, the man and the woman, had agreed to it.  (They did not have same-sex marriages.)  Marriage thus was a constant impediment to any attempt to establish a thoroughly patriarchal society.

Still, families with political agendas would try to make sure that their children agreed to marry who they were supposed to.  Betrothals of children to other children could cement an alliance.  In such a case the girl was often sent to live with the family into which she was expected to marry, to learn the customs of the region (and the language in some cases), and to grow up with the boy who, it was hoped, would be her childhood best friend as well as future spouse.

People lower on the social scale had more freedom to pick out their own spouse than did members of the high aristocracy.  But anyone who determinedly said No would be supported by the priests.  The church generally thought that parents should guide their children in the correct path, but forcing someone's will was never acceptable.

As this suggests, in spite of all the official talk about how a woman was supposed to be subservient to her husband (a lot of it with biblical backing), couples recognized that the wife had a great deal of free exercise of will within a marriage.  There are plenty of examples of wives "disobeying" their husbands, and even more of men being guided by sound wifely advice.  Couples normally shared a bed, both for intimacy and to keep warm at night, and wives were often described as giving their husbands useful advice as they snuggled down.

In practice, husbands and wives needed each other.  If a great lord was going to be away (say on Crusade), the normal practice was for his wife to run the castle in his absence.  She would have been familiar with what was required to do because of having been involved in it since the beginning of their marriage.  Much of running a castle was a woman's prerogative anyway, so she just expanded what she was doing.

For peasants, farming chores really worked better with two adults (as any modern farmer will tell you), and a woman had to know how to plow, cultivate, harvest, and take care of the animals as well as to cook and sew and raise the children.  Among merchant and artisan families in towns, husband and wife typically worked as partners, and widows of guild masters could become masters themselves.

Married couples were assumed to love each other, even if they had not known each other very well before the wedding.  The physical consummation of their union was quite literally portrayed as making love, intensifying their emotional ties to each other.  Letters from Crusaders writing back home to their wives are full of terms of endearment and statements of how much they missed their wives.  In practice, a certain number of wives accompanied their husbands on these expeditions, if there was someone else to keep the home place running in their absence.

Marriage was still oriented more toward the husband and his family than toward the wife, however.  Husbands with concubines were treated relatively indulgently in the early Middle Ages (though by the twelfth century this was increasingly frowned upon), but a wife with lovers was shocking and horrible.  A new couple would typically move to the man's house (or castle or country, depending on social status).  If a husband died, and the wife remarried, she would typically leave her children behind to be raised by her late husband's family.

A lot of widowed people of both sexes, however, never remarried.  A widower with young children might find it expedient to do so, and a young woman still of child-bearing age would be sought after.  But a lot of people who became single, either through death of a spouse or through divorce, just decided to stay single.  One could enter the church as a monk or nun or just carry on in the world.

A good recent book on medieval marriage is by Elisabeth van Houts, Married Life in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2019).


© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on married life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

A Medieval Wedding

These days, it sometimes seems as if it's not a "real" wedding without a few hundred guests, elaborate food, music and dancing, and limousines.  Many (including me) dispute the need to spend tens of thousands of dollars just to get married.  But except for the limousines, a modern blow-out wedding bears many resemblances to a medieval aristocratic wedding.

Earlier I posted on medieval marriage and its slow acceptance as a sacrament, complete with rules against incest (which included marrying quite distant cousins) and against divorce.  Here I want to discuss in a little more detail the wedding itself, which took a form far older than Christian marriage.

The Romans had believed in a big, fancy wedding, with feasting and elaborate clothing.  The bride would process through the streets to the house of her new husband.  A Roman bride was expected to provide a dowry, and in fact she was considered a concubine, not a real wife, if she couldn't produce one.  The males in both the bride and groom's families made most of the arrangements.

Early medieval weddings followed the same pattern.  A priest might be invited in to bless the bed, but if he had any sense he went home before things got too raucous.  By the Carolingian era, however, a priest would commonly perform a nuptial mass, having at least some say in the events.

But the heart of a valid marriage was the oaths exchanged by the couple, commonly symbolized by the exchange of rings.  Modern weddings still have the couples recite (or repeat) oaths to stay true to each other forever.  This was supposed to take place before witnesses, who would be able to say later that the oaths had indeed been exchanged if there was any doubt.

Because an oath is only valid if given by free will, neither party could be forced into it. This did not of course exclude strong moral suasion by one's relatives.  But then, as now, a shotgun wedding doesn't count and can be annulled.

For peasants, a wedding was simple, promises exchanged before family and relatives, often standing in a ring.  If a priest came by at some point, he might bless a marriage that had been in effect for several months already.  (The idea that lords had some sort of "first night right" to peasant brides is completely imaginary, having been created by over-excited Victorian minds.)

For aristocrats, unlike peasants, the exchange of vows, which often took place on a church's front steps, was followed by a nuptial mass inside the church, and then the feasting and dancing.  One could be married in a parish church or a cathedral, but most emphatically not in a monastery or nunnery.

One of course dressed up for a wedding, but medieval brides did not wear white--indeed there was no particular color that was considered most appropriate.  White wedding dresses only became popular in the nineteenth century, in imitation of Queen Victoria's wedding with Albert.

Because a couple was not fully married until they had consummated their union, they would be tucked into bed together.  The wedding guests would often provide helpful tips through the window or sing naughty songs to get the couple in the mood.  There was no honeymoon trip; rather, the feasting might continue for several days.  The whole event could be so expensive for the bride's father that in England lords often demanded that those who held in fief from them should help pay for the oldest daughter's wedding.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

For more on medieval marriage and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Medieval Marriage

Modern assumptions about marriage were created in the Middle Ages.  Ancient Judaism had assumed a powerful man would have multiple wives and probably a few handmaiden/concubines, but Christianity settled on one spouse per person.  But the idea of a Christian marriage really only developed in the sixth century.

Before then, Christians continued to follow Roman marriage practices, which assumed marriages were arranged by the male members of the family, and the wedding itself was a big, drunken party (we still have that part).  The chief way for the Romans to distinguish a wife from a concubine (concubines were fine) was that a wife brought a dowry to the marriage, and a concubine didn't.

By the ninth century, Christian marriage settled into the form it would keep for the next millennium.  Concubines were decided to be just wrong.  Once married, one was supposed to be married for life.  The only times divorce (really annulment) was allowed were when the couples hadn't "really" been married in the first place, if for example one of them was already married to somebody else, or they had been forced unwillingly into marriage, or, the biggie, they were too closely related.

"Too closely related," from the ninth century to the thirteenth, meant not sharing any ancestors seven generations back.  Since one's ancestors double with each generation, in practice this meant that everyone in roughly the same social circles was related to everyone, and the aristocracy could essentially get divorce on demand by comparing family trees.  Among the peasantry, however, no one really cared as long as the couple were more distantly related than first or second cousins.

Among the aristocracy, marriages were often arranged for political reasons, such as to cement alliances.  Among the peasantry, economic considerations played a big part.  But even if the couple's families had decided on the marriage, the couple did have to agree, and once married they were expected to love each other and stay true to each other.  Even men, who it was assumed would fool around before marriage and if widowed, were not supposed to cheat on their wives.

Starting in the twelfth century, the romances were all about love, about people meeting a (socially suitable) person of the opposite sex, falling in love, and getting married.  Not surprisingly, this ideal conflicted with what the parents had in mind.

By the twelfth century weddings were usually held on the church steps (not in the church itself), though marriage did not officially become a sacrament until the thirteenth century.  The couple would give their oaths, before witnesses, to stay true to each other for life and exchange rings as a symbol of this.  (This looks a lot like a modern wedding.)  They would then generally proceed into the church for the nuptial mass, the first time a priest was involved.

But the couple was not really married before the "copula carnalis," actually consummating their union.  If one skipped this step, it was grounds for annulment.  Wedding guests might "help out" by shouting tips through the window after the new couple was tucked in together.

(Click here to find out about medieval divorce.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For medieval marriage and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.