If wives were unable to get pregnant, the men were allowed to give the wife back and marry someone else. The Roman Catholic Church became a powerful institution in Europe and marriages had to be legalised with a priest present. This was great for women, because men were taught to show greater respect for their wives, were not allowed to divorce them and had to be sexually faithful to their wives.
However, the church still said that men were the head of the family and that wives had to fulfil their wishes. Love marriages started in the Middle Ages. It's believed that the concept was introduced by the French. Even though love marriages meant that women no longer existed to serve men, the idea of men owning the woman stuck around for centuries.
In , the Catholic Church decreed that partners had to publicly post banns, or notices of an impending marriage in a local parish, to cut down on the frequency of invalid marriages the Church eliminated that requirement in the s. Still, until the s, the Church accepted a couple's word that they had exchanged marriage vows, with no witnesses or corroborating evidence needed. In the last several hundred years, the state has played a greater role in marriage.
For instance, Massachusetts began requiring marriage licenses in , and by the 19th-century marriage licenses were common in the United States. By about years ago, the notion of love matches gained traction, Coontz said, meaning marriage was based on love and possibly sexual desire. But mutual attraction in marriage wasn't important until about a century ago.
In fact, in Victorian England, many held that women didn't have strong sexual urges at all, Coontz said. Around the world, family-arranged alliances have gradually given way to love matches, and a transition from an agricultural to a market economy plays a big role in that transition, Coontz said. Parents historically controlled access to inheritance of agricultural land. But with the spread of a market economy, "it's less important for people to have permission of their parents to wait to give them an inheritance or to work on their parents' land," Coontz said.
Modern markets also allow women to play a greater economic role, which lead to their greater independence. And the expansion of democracy , with its emphasis on liberty and individual choice, may also have stacked the deck for love matches. Still, marriage wasn't about equality until about 50 years ago. To some people, it changes to meet social and economic needs, to others it remains firmly fixed.
So what has the institution meant down the years? Much of the recent debate has focused on the notion of who "owns" marriage - the Church or the State. Both, however, have played key roles at different times in the history of the institution.
For the Anglo-Saxons and Britain's early tribal groups, marriage was all about relationships - just not in the modern sense. This all changed with the differentiation of wealth. Parents were no longer content to marry their children off to just "anyone in a neighbouring group". They wanted to marry them to somebody as least as wealthy and powerful as themselves, Coontz says. During the 11th Century, marriage was about securing an economic or political advantage.
The wishes of the married couple - much less their consent - were of little importance. The bride, particularly, was assumed to bow to her father's wishes and the marriage arrangements made on her behalf. However, for the Benedictine monk Gratian the consent of the couple mattered more than their family's approval. Gratian brought consent into the fold of formalised marriage in with his canon law textbook, Decretum Gratiani. The Decretum required couples to give their verbal consent and consummate the marriage to forge a marital bond.
No longer was a bride or groom's presence at a ceremony enough to signify their assent. The book formed the foundation for the Church's marriage policies in the 12th Century and "set out the rules for marriage and sexuality in a changing social environment", says historian Joanne Bailey of Oxford Brookes University.
As early as the 12th Century, Roman Catholic theologians and writers referred to marriage as a sacrament, a sacred ceremony tied to experiencing God's presence. However, it wasn't until the Council of Trent in that marriage was officially deemed one of the seven sacraments, says Elizabeth Davies, of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales.
Divorce has existed for about as long as marriage so although we've had a lot of practice at monogamy, we're still not very good at it! The ancient Greeks liberally allowed divorce, but even then the person requesting divorce had to submit the request to a magistrate, who would determine whether or not the reasons given were sufficient. In contrast divorce was rare in early Roman culture.
However, as the empire grew in power and authority, civil law embraced the idea that either husband or wife could renounce the marriage at will. Throughout the last thousand years, divorce was generally frowned upon and from the earliest years of the Christian age the only 'proper' way to dissolve a marriage was by annulment - a status that was granted only by the Church.
Of course, one British king changed all that during the Sixteenth Century by having arguably the most famous divorce in British history. In many parts of 16th and 17th century Europe and America, the concept of 'bundling' was widely used.
This process allowed courting couples to share a bed, fully clothed with a 'bundling board' to separate them. This allowed a pair to talk and get to know each other in the safe confines of the girl's house.
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