Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index


  • Record Number: 28187
  • Author(s)/Creator(s): Gellinek , Christian,
  • Contributor(s):
  • Title: Marriage by Consent in Literary Sources of Medieval Germany
  • Source: Collectanea Stephan Kuttner. II.  Edited by Giuseppe Forchielli and Alfons M. SticklerStudia Gratiana, 12.  Institutum Gratianum, 1967.  Pages 555 - 579.
  • Description:
  • Article Type: Essay
  • Subject (See Also): Canon Law Consent Literature- Verse Marriage
  • Award Note:
  • Geographic Area: Germany
  • Century: 11- 12
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  • Abstract: This paper tries to show that marriages by deliberate consent of the marrying partners (the so-called “Friedelehe” or “Neigungsehe”) were practiced at least in Southern Germany, and probably elsewhere in Europe, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The literary sources quoted and screened for evidence are primarily the “Ruodlieb,” written ca. 1050 in Bavaria , and secondarily “König Rother,” written in the same duchy a hundred years later, as contrasted to the twelfth century “Swabian Formula” for negotiating clan-arranged marriages (the socalled “Muntehe”). It is the author’s contention that poetry, which may have a schematic and formulaic tradition as its background, need not be discounted as a source of information about contemporary customs if the results of generally accepted legal scholarship on the same period also are consulted. In this particular case, it proved helpful to learn that the “Friedel-“ or “Neigungsehe” – after decades of laborious arguments – finally found recognition in H. Conrad’s “Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte” (1962) as having existed before and after the canonical civil law reform of the twelfth century. The pivotal figure in the formal act of concluding a “Friedel-“ or “Neigungsche” beside the partners must have been the assent-elicitor mediating consent in three consecutive stages (intentional, pre-contractual and contractual) in the presence of witnesses, who apparently neither surrounded the nupturients in a ring, as they undoubtedly would have during the conclusion of a “Muntehe,” nor exerted a clan-centered veto right. Their abstaining from disapproval may have been assured by preceding (secular?) banns, the nature of which is hitherto unknown. The development of the “Friedelehe” has to be seen in the light of the increasing or decreasing role of the individual in the medieval community, and not least, as a self-assertion of women.
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  • Author's Affiliation: Yale University
  • Conference Info: - , -
  • Year of Publication: 1967.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN/ISBN: Not available