Download or read book Law Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe written by James A. Brundage and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-02-15 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monumental study of medieval law and sexual conduct explores the origin and develpment of the Christian church's sex law and the systems of belief upon which that law rested. Focusing on the Church's own legal system of canon law, James A. Brundage offers a comprehensive history of legal doctrines–covering the millennium from A.D. 500 to 1500–concerning a wide variety of sexual behavior, including marital sex, adultery, homosexuality, concubinage, prostitution, masturbation, and incest. His survey makes strikingly clear how the system of sexual control in a world we have half-forgotten has shaped the world in which we live today. The regulation of marriage and divorce as we know it today, together with the outlawing of bigamy and polygamy and the imposition of criminal sanctions on such activities as sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, and bestiality, are all based in large measure upon ideas and beliefs about sexual morality that became law in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. "Brundage's book is consistently learned, enormously useful, and frequently entertaining. It is the best we have on the relationships between theological norms, legal principles, and sexual practice."—Peter Iver Kaufman, Church History
Download or read book Sex Law and Marriage in the Middle Ages written by James A. Brundage and published by Variorum Publishing. This book was released on 1993 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carnal delight, marriage, concubinage, coital position, rape, impotence and frigidity as grounds for annulment, the status of women both within and outside of marriage, intermarriage between Christians and Jews, prostitution, and sodomy are among the topics discussed in 17 essays reproduced from their original publication, 1975-91. Much attention is paid to Canon Law and church policy. Distributed in the US by Ashgate. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Sex Marriage and Family in John Calvin s Geneva written by Jr. Witte, John and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2005-10-20 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You would not expect this from his dour reputation, but John Calvin transformed the Western understanding of sex, marriage, and family life. In this fascinating, even sensational, volume John Witte and Robert Kingdon treat comprehensively the new theology and law of domestic life that Calvin and his fellow reformers established in sixteenth-century Geneva. Bringing to light and life hundreds of newly discovered cases and theological texts, Witte and Kingdon trace the subtle historical forms and norms of sex, marriage, and family life that still shape us today.
Download or read book Marriage Sex and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London written by Shannon McSheffrey and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awarded honorable mention for the 2007 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize sponsored by the Canadian Historical Association How were marital and sexual relationships woven into the fabric of late medieval society, and what form did these relationships take? Using extensive documentary evidence from both the ecclesiastical court system and the records of city and royal government, as well as advice manuals, chronicles, moral tales, and liturgical texts, Shannon McSheffrey focuses her study on England's largest city in the second half of the fifteenth century. Marriage was a religious union—one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church and imbued with deep spiritual significance—but the marital unit of husband and wife was also the fundamental domestic, social, political, and economic unit of medieval society. As such, marriage created political alliances at all levels, from the arena of international politics to local neighborhoods. Sexual relationships outside marriage were even more complicated. McSheffrey notes that medieval Londoners saw them as variously attributable to female seduction or to male lustfulness, as irrelevant or deeply damaging to society and to the body politic, as economically productive or wasteful of resources. Yet, like marriage, sexual relationships were also subject to control and influence from parents, relatives, neighbors, civic officials, parish priests, and ecclesiastical judges. Although by medieval canon law a marriage was irrevocable from the moment a man and a woman exchanged vows of consent before two witnesses, in practice marriage was usually a socially complicated process involving many people. McSheffrey looks more broadly at sex, governance, and civic morality to show how medieval patriarchy extended a far wider reach than a father's governance over his biological offspring. By focusing on a particular time and place, she not only elucidates the culture of England's metropolitan center but also contributes generally to our understanding of the social mechanisms through which premodern European people negotiated their lives.
Download or read book Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe written by John Boswell and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-08-28 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both highly praised and intensely controversial, this brilliant book produces dramatic evidence that at one time the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches not only sanctioned unions between partners of the same sex, but sanctified them--in ceremonies strikingly similar to heterosexual marriage ceremonies.
Download or read book Marriage in Medieval England written by Conor McCarthy and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of attitudes to marriage as represented in medieval legal and literary texts. Medieval marriage has been widely discussed, and this book gives a brief and accessible overview of an important subject. It covers the entire medieval period, and engages with a wide range of primary sources, both legal and literary. It draws particular attention to local English legislation and practice, and offers some new readings of medieval English literary texts, including Beowulf, the works of Chaucer, Langland's Piers Plowman, the Book of Margery Kempe and the Paston Letters. Focusing on a number of key themes important across the period, individual chapters discuss the themes of consent, property, alliance, love, sex, family, divorce and widowhood. CONOR MCCARTHY gained his PhD from Trinity College Dublin.
Download or read book Marriage Family and Law in Medieval Europe written by Michael M. Sheehan and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays by Michael Sheehan, whose work and interpretation on medieval property, marriage, family, sexuality, and law has insprired scholars for 40 years.
Download or read book Unmarriages written by Ruth Mazo Karras and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-03-19 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Middle Ages are often viewed as a repository of tradition, yet what we think of as traditional marriage was far from the only available alternative to the single state in medieval Europe. Many people lived together in long-term, quasimarital heterosexual relationships, unable to marry if one was in holy orders or if the partners were of different religions. Social norms militated against the marriage of master to slave or between individuals of very different classes, or when the couple was so poor that they could not establish an independent household. Such unions, where the protections that medieval law furnished to wives (and their children) were absent, were fraught with danger for women in particular, but they also provided a degree of flexibility and demonstrate the adaptability of social customs in the face of slowly changing religious doctrine. Unmarriages draws on a wide range of sources from across Europe and the entire medieval millennium in order to investigate structures and relations that medieval authors and record keepers did not address directly, either in order to minimize them or because they were so common as not to be worth mentioning. Ruth Mazo Karras pays particular attention to the ways women and men experienced forms of opposite-sex union differently and to the implications for power relations between the genders. She treats legal and theological discussions that applied to all of Europe and presents a vivid series of case studies of how unions operated in specific circumstances to illustrate concretely what we can conclude, how far we can speculate, and what we can never know.
Download or read book Love Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages written by Conor McCarthy and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Including many texts available for the first time in modern English translation, Conor McCarthy brings together a wide array of writings as well as informative introductions and explanations, to give a vivid impression of how love, sex and marriage were dealt with as central issues of medieval life. With extracts from literary and theological works, medical and legal writings, conduct books, chronicles and love letters, the writings range from well known texts such as the Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales to less familiar sources such as church legislation or court case proceedings. An indispensable sourcebook for all students and teachers of medieval history, literature and culture, Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages contains a wide breadth of material showing the diverse and sometimes disparate approaches to love, sex and marriage in medieval culture, brilliantly illustrating contemporary attitudes and ideologies.
Download or read book How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments written by Philip L. Reynolds and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 1083 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An indispensable guide to how marriage acquired the status of a sacrament. This book analyzes in detail how medieval theologians explained the place of matrimony in the church and her law, and how the bitter debates of the sixteenth century elevated the doctrine to a dogma of the Catholic faith.
Download or read book Handbook of Medieval Sexuality written by Vern L. Bullough and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like specialists in other fields in humanities and social sciences, medievalists have begun to investigate and write about sex and related topics such as courtship, concubinage, divorce, marriage, prostitution, and child rearing. The scholarship in this significant volume asserts that sexual conduct formed a crucial role in the lives, thoughts, hopes and fears both of individuals and of the institutions that they created in the middle ages. The absorbing subject of sexuality in the Middle Ages is examined in 19 original articles written specifically for this "Handbook" by the major authorities in their scholarly specialties. The study of medieval sexuality poses problems for the researcher: indices in standard sources rarely refer to sexual topics, and standard secondary sources often ignore the material or say little about it. Yet a vast amount of research is available, and the information is accessible to the student who knows where to look and what to look for. This volume is a valuable guide to the material and an indicator of what subjects are likely to yield fresh scholarly rewards.
Download or read book Common Women written by Ruth Mazo Karras and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1996 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Common women" in medieval England were prostitutes, whose distinguishing feature was not that they took money for sex but that they belonged to all men in common. Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England tells the stories of these women's lives: their entrance into the trade because of poor job and marriage prospects or because of seduction or rape; their experiences as street-walkers, brothel workers or the medieval equivalent of call girls; their customers, from poor apprentices to priests to wealthy foreign merchants; and their relations with those among whom they lived. Through a sensitive use of a wide variety of imaginative and didactic texts, Ruth Karras shows that while prostitutes as individuals were marginalized within medieval culture, prostitution as an institution was central to the medieval understanding of what it meant to be a woman. This important work will be of interest to scholars and students of history, women's studies, and the history of sexuality.
Download or read book Carnal Knowledge written by Martin Ingram and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-23 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was the law used to control sex in Tudor England? What were the differences between secular and religious practice? This major study, based on a wide range of church and secular court archives, explores sexual regulation in London and provincial England before, during and immediately after the Reformation.
Download or read book Outlaws and Spies written by McCarthy Conor McCarthy and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-18 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By reading two bodies of literature not normally read together - the outlaw literature and espionage literature - Conor McCarthy shows how these genres represent and critique the longstanding use of legal exclusion as a means of supporting state power. Texts discussed range from the medieval Robin Hood ballads, Shakespeare's history plays, and versions of the Ned Kelly story to contemporary writing by John le Carre, Don DeLillo, Ciaran Carson and William Gibson.
Download or read book Beds and Chambers in Late Medieval England written by Hollie L. S. Morgan and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First full-length interdisciplinary study of the effect of these everyday surroundings on literature, culture and the collective consciousness of the late middle ages. The bed, and the chamber which contained it, was something of a cultural and social phenomenon in late-medieval England. Their introduction into some aristocratic and bourgeois households captured the imagination of late-medievalEnglish society. The bed and chamber stood for much more than simply a place to rest one's head: they were symbols of authority, unparalleled spaces of intimacy, sanctuaries both for the powerless and the powerful. This change inphysical domestic space shaped the ways in which people thought about less tangible concepts such as gender politics, communication, God, sex and emotions. Furthermore, the practical uses of beds and chambers shaped and were shaped by artistic and literary production. This volume offers the first interdisciplinary study of the cultural meanings of beds and chambers in late-medieval England. It draws on a vast array of literary, pragmatic and visual sources, including romances, saints' lives, lyrics, plays, wills, probate inventories, letters, church and civil court documents, manuscript illumination and physical objects, to shed new light on the ways in which beds and chambersfunctioned as both physical and conceptual spaces. Hollie L.S. Morgan is a Research Fellow in the School of History and Heritage, University of Lincoln.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature written by Jodie Medd and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-10 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature examines literary representations of lesbian sexuality, identities, and communities, from the medieval period to the present. In addition to providing a helpful orientation to key literary-historical periods, critical concepts, theoretical debates and literary genres, this Companion considers the work of such well-known authors as Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Alison Bechdel and Sarah Waters. Written by a host of leading critics and covering subjects as diverse as lesbian desire in the long eighteenth century and same-sex love in a postcolonial context, this Companion delivers insight into the variety of traditions that have shaped the present landscape of lesbian literature.
Download or read book The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages written by Joan Cadden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-03-31 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how scientific ideas about sex differences in the later Middle Ages participated in cultural assumptions about gender.
