Marriage in Early Modern EuropeAuthor(s): Raymond B. WaddingtonSource: The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 34, No. 2, Marriage in Early Modern Europe(Summer, 2003), pp. 315-318Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20061411 .

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Sixteenth Century Journal XXXIV/2 (2003)

Marriage in Early Modern Europe

Raymond B. Waddington

University of California, Davis

Marriage. John Seiden (1584-1654), whom Milton praised as "The chief of

learned men reputed in this Land," was of two minds. The parliamentarian and

legal historian could say firmly, "Marriage is nothing but a civil contract." In

another mood, possibly the one that made him a student of Syrian mythology, he

brooded, "Marriage is a desperate thing." Rather than the institution, the more

introspective and skeptical Montaigne considered the human motivations driving

it: "If you form it well and take it rightly, there is no finer relationship in our soci

ety. We cannot do without it, and yet we go about debasing it. The result is what is

observed about cages: the birds outside despair getting in, and those inside are

equally anxious to get out."

A subject this fraught becomes a magnet for rich scholarship. In my first field,

one thinks of such landmark studies as Lawrence Stone's The Family Sex and Mar

riage in England 1500-?800 (1977) and Road to Divorce:England 1530-1987 (1990), as well as the magisterial survey by Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of

Divorce in Western Society (1988). Both Stone and Phillips recognize, as Milton had

done three centuries before, that the need to dissolve marriage cannot be consid

ered without first defining what marriage is supposed to be. It hardly needs to be

said that three decades of involvement with the Sixteenth Century Studies Confer

ence have familiarized me with the work done by scholars of Reformation Ger

many, some of whom?Susan Karant-Nunn, Steven Ozment, Thomas Max Safley,

Merry Wiesner-Hanks?are household names to readers of this journal. More

recently, while poaching in Italian studies, I have been educated by a host of schol

ars who are doing exciting work in this area, among whom are Stanley Chojnacki,

Joanne Ferraro, Christiane Klopisch-Zuber, Thomas Kuehn, Anthony Molho, and

Guido Ruggiero. The issue of The Sixteenth Century Journal in your hand, we

believe, makes its own contribution to the continuing dialogue on the topic.

As with our previous special issue, Gender in Early Modern Europe (SCJ 31,

Spring 2000), when we saw that our manuscripts accepted for publication included

six that might be grouped by topic while still meeting our normal expectations of

disciplinary and national diversity, the editors concluded that another special issue

would be appropriate. Two articles concern the hotly contested issue of clerical

marriage. Thomas A. Fudge examines the polemics, both Protestant and Roman

Catholic, focusing on the marriage of Martin Luther and Katherine von Bora.

Michel de Montaigne, "On Some Verses of Virgil" (1585-88) in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1958), 647.

315

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316 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXIV/2 (2003)

Nancy Basler Bjorklund demonstrates the lifelong advocacy of clerical marriage by Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, including the varied consequences of

his own marriage on his career. Carrie Euler studies the influence of Heinrich

Bullinger's The Christen state of Matrimonye on English reformers during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. A pair of studies deals with French literature. Cath

leen M. Bauschatz explains the otherwise puzzling dedication of Rabelais s Tiers

Livre to Marguerite de Navarre by finding a sympathy between the two in their

opposition to clandestine marriage. Marian Rothstein charts the varied uses and

implications of a particularly resonant marriage metaphor, Plato s

Androgyne. Last

in time, Abigail Dyer argues that in seventeenth-century Spain, litigation over

"seduction by promise of marriage" was used to remove the stigma of premarital

sexual transgression.

Regrettably, we had no appropriate contribution from art history. As a gesture

toward visual representation, I offer images of marriage from three emblem books.

First, and most idealistic, "Amor conjugalis" (fig. 1) images the biblical "one flesh"

(Gen 2:24) in the embracing couple whose torsos are fused. Rothstein discusses this as a Mosaic parallel to the Platonic Androgyne. On the left margin of the woodcut

another familiar marriage trope, the vine entwined about the elm, invests the con

cept of conjugal love with traditional gender inflections: stalwart male and clinging female.

Fig. 1. "Amor conjugalis," from Mathias Holzwart, Emblematum Tyrocinia

(Strassburg, 1581), emblem 35

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Waddington / Marriage in Early Modern Europe 317

Fig. 2. "Matrimonium," from Henry Peacham,

Minerva Britannia, or A Garden ofHeroical Diuises (London, 1612), 132

The second illustration, "Matrimonium" (fig. 2), features a personification of

the married man whose condition is projected by symbolic attributes: "Matromonie

standes, / In wooden stocks, repenting him too late: / The servile yoake, his neck,

and shoulder weares, / And in his hand, the fruitefull Quince he beares." Peacham's

plodding verses explain that the stocks locking the legs in place show "his want of

libertie." Absent early modern instruments of penal confinement, the belief that

the male voluntarily surrenders his freedom when he marries has been updated in

an alternative image, well expressed in the refrain of a Van Morrison lyric: "I want

you to be my ball and chain." The yoke sometimes is interpreted positively as an

image of partnership or shared industry, but for Peacham it is simply "an ensigne of servilitie." Presumably, the quince symbolizes the only redeeming factor in mar

riage: "The fruitefullnes," Peacham comments, "of wedlock tells." In^4 Midsummer

Night's Dream, a play probably first performed for a noble wedding and itself con

taining three marriages, the aptly named Peter Quince functions as a bumbling

magister ludi, and the comedy concludes with fairies blessing the bride-beds to

ensure fertility.

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318 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXIV/2 (2003)

Completing the descent from ideal to real is "Nupta contagioso" (fig. 3).The

subject is marriage to a syphilitic, which the woodcut illustrates analogically by

King Mezentius's custom of binding a man to a corpse. The epigram voices the

complaint of a young woman who is the victim of an arranged marriage to a man

with the French pox. She tells her "cruel father" (saeve pater) that he has repeated the savage deed of Mezentius, binding her living body to a dead one. The emblem

is a condensation of Erasmus's colloquy,./! Marriage in Name Only, subtitled Coniu

gium impar (1529), in which it is explained that the girl's parents have sacrificed their

daughter from greed for the diseased bridegroom's title. The vivid image of mar

riage to a corpse, whether taken from Alciatus or Erasmus, turns up as an argument

in Milton's The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643, enlarged 1644). Rather than two souls in one flesh, a spiritually incompatible couple become "two carcasses

chain'd unnaturally together" or "a living soule bound to a dead corps."

Fig. 3. "Nupta contagioso," from Andreas Alciatus [Andrea Alciato], Emblemata

(1531; repr., Padua, 1621, here illustrated), emblem 198

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