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Love, Sex & Marriage in the
Middle Ages

This updated edition collects an extensive range of evidence for how people
in the European Middle Ages thought about the emotional state of love, the
physical act of sex, and the social institution of marriage.
Included are extracts from literary and theological works, medical and
legal writings, conduct books, chronicles, and letters. These texts discuss
married couples who are not having sex, and unmarried ones who are. We
encounter marriages for creating alliances, marriages for love, and prom-
ises of marriage made in the hope of obtaining sex. Learned texts discuss
the etymology of sexual terms and the medical causes of difficulties in con-
ceiving. There are accounts of clandestine marriages, sexual violence, the
madness of love-melancholy, and much more. By drawing on diverse voices
and presenting less accessible material, this sourcebook provides a nuanced
view of how medieval people thought about these subjects and questions
the similarities and differences between their perspectives and our own.
With an expanded range of texts, wider geographical scope, suggestions
for further reading, and updated explanatory material to reflect changes
in scholarship in over two decades, this edition is an invaluable resource
for students interested in sexuality, gender, and relationships in the Middle
Ages.

Conor McCarthy is Director of Philanthropy at the National Library of

Australia. He holds a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin. His publications
include Marriage in Medieval England: Law, Literature and Practice (2004),
Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry (2008), and Outlaws and Spies: Legal
Exclusion in Law and Literature (2020).
Love, Sex & Marriage in the
Middle Ages
A Sourcebook

Second Edition

Edited by
Conor McCarthy
Cover image: From the book of Messire Lancelot du Lac, Gautier
Map, 1401–1425 © BnF
Second edition published 2022
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
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business
© 2022 Conor McCarthy
The right of Conor McCarthy to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2004
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McCarthy, Conor, editor.
Title: Love, sex and marriage in the Middle Ages: a sourcebook /
edited by Conor McCarthy.
Description: Second edition. | Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New
York, NY: Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021053357 (print) | LCCN 2021053358 (ebook)
| ISBN 9780367706579 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367706555
(paperback) | ISBN 9781003147404 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Marriage—History—To 1500—Sources. | Marriage—
England—History—To 1500—Sources. | Sex—History—To
1500—Sources. | Sex—England--History—To 1500—Sources. |
Families—History—To 1500—Sources. | Families—England—
History—To 1500—Sources. | Great Britain—History—Medieval
period, 1066–1485—Sources.
Classification: LCC HQ513 .L685 2022 (print) | LCC HQ513 (ebook) |
DDC 306.709/02—dc23/eng/20211217
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053357
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053358

ISBN: 978-0-367-70657-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-70655-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-14740-4 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003147404

Typeset in Sabon
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents

Acknowledgementsx
Permissionsxii

Introduction 1

PART I
Ecclesiastical Sources 27

Introduction 29

The Church Fathers 32

1 Augustine of Hippo, Confessions 32
2 Augustine of Hippo, The Excellence of Marriage 33
3 Augustine of Hippo, Holy Virginity 36
4 Augustine of Hippo, The Excellence of Widowhood 37
5 Augustine of Hippo, The City of God 38
6 Jerome, Against Jovinian 39

Early Medieval England 42

7 The Penitential of Theodore 42
8 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People 50
9 The Law of the Northumbrian Priests 51

Theology and Canon Law 52

10 Hincmar of Rheims, The Divorce of King Lothar and Queen
Theutberga (De Divortio Lotharii regis et Theutbergae reginae) 52
11 Peter Damian, Book of Gomorrah (Liber Gomorrhianus) 54
12 Peter Damian, Letter 61 55
13 Gratian, Decretum 56
14 Peter Lombard, Sentences 60
vi Contents
15 The Fourth Lateran Council 61
16 Gregory IX, A Voice in Rama (Vox in Rama) 64
17 Decretals of Gregory IX 65
18 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 66
19 English Ecclesiastical Statutes 69

Canon Law and Actual Practice 76

20 Office of Same-Sex Union 76
21 The Sarum Missal 77
22 An Ecclesiastical Court Case from the Province of Canterbury 80
23 Two Cases from an Episcopal Visitation of Canterbury Diocese 83
24 A Rural Dean’s Court 85
25 The Trial of Arnaud of Verniolle 87

Beyond Medieval Christendom 90

26 Canons of the Council of Nablus 90
27 Maimonides, The Book of Women (Sefer Nashim) 91

PART II
Legal Sources 95

Introduction 97

Early Medieval English Law 99

28 Laws of Æthelbert of Kent 99
29 Laws of Ine of Wessex 101
30 Laws of King Alfred 102
31 Laws of King Canute 104
32 Concerning the Betrothal of a Woman 107
33 Old English Marriage Agreements 108

Early Medieval Germanic and Celtic Laws 111

34 The Lombard Laws 111
35 Early Irish Laws 115
36 The Laws of the Salian Franks 117

Anglo-Norman/English Law 120

37 Coronation Charter of Henry I 120
38 Magna Carta 121
39 Statute of Westminster I 121
40 Statute of Westminster II 122
41 Bracton 123
 Contents vii
42 Britton 129
43 Borough Customs 129
44 The Regulation of Brothels in Late Medieval London 130

Cases from the Secular Courts 133

45 Cases from the Manorial Courts 133
46 A Fourteenth-Century Rape Case 135
47 The Case of John/Eleanor Rykener 137
48 The Trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer 139

PART III
Saints’ Lives, Letters, Chronicles, Conduct Books 143

Introduction 145

Saints’ Lives and Female Religious Writings 148

49 Hildegard of Bingen, Know the Ways (Scivias) 148
50 The Life of Christina of Markyate 152
51 Rabbi Eleazar ben Judah of Worms, Lament for Dolce
of Worms 154
52 Jacob of Voragine, The Golden Legend 156
53 St Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden, Book of Heavenly
Revelations (Liber Celestis Revelacionum) 159
54 Julian of Norwich, Shewings of Julian of Norwich 160
55 The Book of Margery Kempe 162

Letters 164
56 Letters of Heloise and Abelard 164
57 A Woman’s Love-Letter 166
58 The Paston Letters 167

Chronicles 170
59 Aelred of Rievaulx, The Nun of Watton 170
60 Chronicle of Richard of Devizes 172
61 Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland 172
62 Annals of the Friars Minor of Colmar 175
63 Jean Froissart, Chronicles 175

Conduct Books 177

64 Holy Virginity (Hali Meiðhad) 177
65 The Ménagier of Paris, Manual for his Wife 179
viii Contents
PART IV
Literary Sources 181

Introduction 183

Old English Literature 186

66 Beowulf 186
67 The Wife’s Lament 187
68 Wulf and Eadwacer 189
69 Riddles 25, 44, 45 190

Middle English Literature 192

70 Middle English Lyrics 192
71 Cleanness 194
72 Geoffrey Chaucer, Portrait of the Pardoner 195
73 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue 196

Welsh Literature 218

74 Gwerful Mechain, Poem to the vagina (Cywydd y cedor) 218

Irish Literature 220

75 Táin Bó Cuailnge 220
76 Niall Frassach’s Act of Truth 222

Icelandic Literature 224

77 Njal’s Saga 224

Latin Literature 227

78 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 227
79 Marbod of Rennes, ‘The Unyielding Youth’ 232
80 Andreas Capellanus, On Love (De Amore) 233
81 Alan of Lille, The Complaint of Nature (De Planctu Naturae) 236
82 Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women (De Mulieribus Claris) 238

Arabic Literature 241

83 Ibn Hazm, The Ring of the Dove 241

French Literature 247

84 A Lyric by Marcabru 247
85 Azalais de Porcairagues, ‘Now we are come to the cold time’ 248
 Contents ix
86 Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot 250
87 Etienne de Fougères, Book of Manners (Livre de Manières) 256
88 Marie de France, Yonec 257
89 Jean Bodel, The Peasant from Bailleul 270
90 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance
of the Rose 273
91 Christine de Pizan, The Tale of Griselda 277

German Literature 282

92 A Lyric by Hartmann von Aue 282

Italian Literature 283

93 Dante Alighieri, Inferno 283
94 Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio 285

PART V
Medical Writings 289

Introduction 291

Medical Writings on Love 293

95 Avicenna, A Treatise on Love 293
96 Constantine Africanus, Viaticum 295
97 Gerard of Berry, Glosses on the Viaticum 296
98 Peter of Spain, Questions on the Viaticum (Version A) 297
99 Bona Fortuna, Treatise on the Viaticum 297

Medical Writings on Sex 299

100 Constantine Africanus, On Intercourse (De Coitu) 299
101 Trotula 300
102 Hildegard of Bingen, Causes and Cures 305
103 Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, Women’s Secrets (De Secretis
Mulierum) 306

Bibliography 309
Index 328
Acknowledgements

It has been almost 20 years since the first edition of this sourcebook, and
I am grateful to Laura Pilsworth and Routledge for the opportunity to
produce an expanded and updated edition. My thanks to all at Routledge
who worked on this new edition, particularly to Isabel Voice for seeing the
work past all obstacles. Thanks also to the anonymous readers whose early
and generous advice helped its contents to take shape. Emma Brown’s inde-
fatigable and much appreciated work in securing permissions made this
new selection of texts possible, and I am grateful to copyright holders who
gave permission for texts to be reproduced. My thanks again to everyone
at Routledge who worked on this book’s original edition, and particularly
its editor, Vicky Peters.
I am also grateful to family and friends for their support and interest.
Deidre Brollo, Caoimhe Brollo McCarthy, and Isabella Brollo McCarthy
lived with the writing of this book, sometimes in close confines, during the
pandemic year of 2021. For their longstanding encouragement, I thank my
parents Nuala and Michael, my brothers Michael and David, Anne van den
Dungen, Phillipa Dunne, Margot Durcan, Dario and Julie Brollo, Darren
and Emily Brollo, and all of the McCarthy and Brollo families.
For use of their collections and access to materials, I thank the National
Library of Australia and the Australian National University.
It is also a pleasure to acknowledge once again some longstanding debts.
A quarter of a century ago, Gerald Morgan supervised my PhD research
on medieval marriage at Trinity College, Dublin, and I remain grateful for
his guidance and support of that work, which greatly informed and influ-
enced this book’s first edition. I also remain grateful to the examiners of
that work, John Scattergood and Alcuin Blamires. Kathleen Coleman and
Robert Carver both gave much appreciated help with Latin translations
that appeared in both the original edition and this, its successor.
Finally, I want to repeat the acknowledgement from the first edition
that this sourcebook draws its strengths from the work of many others on
a wide diversity of scholarly source materials, and that any editor seek-
ing to cover such broad topics over an entire millennium will be aware
 Acknowledgements xi
of their own fallibility. For this new edition, which expands the earlier
book’s focus on medieval England to adopt a much wider scope, this is even
more true than previously. But once again I hope that such a broad scope
will help the reader towards an equally broad view of a rich and diverse
subject.

Conor McCarthy
Canberra
September 2021
Permissions

The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to
reproduce copyright material from the following publications:

Augustine Thompson for extracts from Marriage canons from the Decretum
of Gratian and the Decretals, Sext, Clementines and Extravagantes, trans.
John T. Noonan, Jr., ed. Augustine Thompson, revised ed., 1993.
Bloomsbury for extracts from Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed.
N. P. Tanner, London: Sheed and Ward, 1990.
Brepols Publishers for extracts from Malcolm Barber, ‘Propaganda in the
Middle Ages: The Charges Against the Templars,’ Nottingham Medieval
Studies 17 (1973).
Broadview Press for an extract from The Works of Gwerful Mechain, ed.
and trans. Katie Gramich, Peterborough: Broadview, 2018.
Cambridge University Press for extracts from The Laws of the Earliest
English Kings, ed. and trans. F. L. Attenborough, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1922 reproduced with permission of Cambridge University
Press through PLSclear; Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle
Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (+203) to Marguerite
Porete (+1310), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, reproduced
with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear; The
Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J.
A. Beach, Oliver Berghof, with the collaboration of Muriel Hall, corrected
ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; and St Augustine, The
City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W Dyson, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Catholic University of America Press for extracts from Peter Damian,
Letters 61–90, trans. Owen J. Blum, Washington: Catholic University of
America Press, 1992.
Columbia University Press for extracts from Medieval Handbooks of
Penance: A Translation of the Principal Libri Poenitentiales and Selections
from Related Documents ed. and trans. J. T. McNeill and H. M. Gamer,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1938.
 Permissions xiii
Cork University Press for extracts from The Field Day Anthology of Irish
Writing, Vol. 4: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, ed. Angela Bourke,
Siobhán Marie Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Margaret MacCurtain, Gerardine
Meaney, Máire Nic Dhonnchadha, Mary O’Dowd and Clair Wills, Cork:
Cork University Press, 2002.
Duke University Press for extracts from Helmut Puff, ‘Female Sodomy:
The Trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer (1477),’ Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 30.1 (2000).
Faber and Faber for extracts from A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse, ed.
and trans. Richard Hamer, London: Faber, 1970.
Garland Publishing for an extract from R. A. Clark’s translation of
Etienne de Fougères, Livre des Manières in Handbook of Medieval
Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, London: Garland,
1996; and an extract from Songs of the Women Troubadours, ed. and
trans. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Laurie Shepard, Sarah White, New
York: Garland, 1995.
Georges Borchardt Inc. for an extract from John Boswell, The Kindness
of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late
Antiquity to the Renaissance, New York: Pantheon Books, 1988, repr.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd for extracts from Andreas Capellanus,
On Love, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh, London: Duckworth, 1982.
Harvard University Press for an extract from Giovanni Boccaccio,
Famous Women, trans. Virginia Brown, Cambridge, MA, and London:
Harvard University Press, 2003; extracts from Bracton: On the Laws and
Customs of England, ed. G. E. Woodbine, trans. S. E. Thorne (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1968–77).
Manchester University Press for extracts from The Divorce of King
Lothar and Queen Theutberga: Hincmar of Rheims’s De Divortio, trans.
Rachel Stone and Charles West, Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2016; an extract from Miri Rubin, ‘The Person in the Form: Medieval
Challenges to Bodily Order,’ in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay
and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); and an
extract from Beowulf, trans. Michael Swanton, revised ed., Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1997.
Medieval Institute Publications for extracts from The Shewings of Julian
of Norwich, ed. Georgia Ronan Crampton, TEAMS Middle English Texts,
Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994.
New City Press for extracts from St Augustine, Marriage and Virginity,
ed. D. G. Hunter and trans. Ray Kearney, The Works of St Augustine 1: 9,
New York: New City Press, 1999.
Oxford University Press for extracts from Medieval English Prose for
Women, ed. and trans. Bella Millet and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990; The Life of St Christina of Markyate: A
Twelfth Century Recluse, ed. and trans. C. H. Talbot, Oxford: Oxford
xiv Permissions
University Press, 1959; The Romance of the Rose, trans. F. Horgan,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994; Councils and Synods with Other
Documents Relating to the English Church, AD 1205–1313, ed. F. M.
Powicke and C. R. Cheney, London: Oxford University Press, 1964; The
Liber Celestis of St Bridget of Sweden, ed. Roger Ellis, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987, and Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth
Century, ed. Norman Davis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971–1976,
reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Paulist Press for extracts from Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans.
Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop, New York: Paulist Press, 1990.
Penguin Books for extracts from Njal’s Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson
and Hermann Pálsson, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960; extracts from The
Letters of Abelard and Heloise, ed. and trans. Betty Radice and Michael
Clanchy, London: Penguin, 2013; and extracts from John Boswell, The
Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, 1994.
Persea Books Inc. (New York) for an extract from Christine de Pizan,
The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. E. J. Richards, New York: Persea,
1982.
Peter Oliver for extracts from Æthelberht’s Code, ed. Lisi Oliver, Early
English Laws, <https://earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk/laws/texts/Abt/>.
The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies for an extract from The
Plaint of Nature, trans. James J. Sheridan, Toronto: Pontifical Institute
of Mediaeval Studies, 1980; and extracts from Emil M. Fackenheim, ‘A
Treatise on Love by Ibn Sina’, Mediaeval Studies 7 (1945): 208–228.
Princeton University Press for an extract from Jacobus de Voragine, The
Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012; and an extract from Judith R. Baskin,
‘Dolce of Worms: The Lives and Deaths of an Exemplary Medieval Jewish
Woman and Her Daughters,’ in Judaism in Practice: From the Middle
Ages through the Early Modern Period, ed. Lawrence Fine, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001.
Professor Bernard O’Donoghue for extracts from The Courtly Love
Tradition, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982, with permis-
sion from Professor Bernard O’Donoghue.
Professor John O’Meara for extracts from Giraldus Cambrensis,
The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. John J. O’Meara,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982, copyright © 1982 John O’Meara.
Professor Patricia Skinner and Professor Elisabeth Van Houts for an
extract from Medieval Writings on Secular Women, ed. and trans. Patricia
Skinner and Elisabeth Van Houts, London: Penguin, 2011.
The Selden Society for Select Cases from the Ecclesiastical Courts of
the Province of Canterbury, c.1200–1301, ed. Norma Adams and Charles
Donahue Jr, London: Selden Society, vol. 95, 1981; and Select Cases in
Manorial Courts, 1250–1550: Property and Family Law, ed. and trans. L.
R. Poos and Lloyd Bonfield, London: Selden Society, vol. 114, 1998.
 Permissions xv
State University of New York Press for an extract from Women’s Secrets:
A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Mangus’ De Secretis Mulierum with
Commentaries ed. by Helen Rodnite Lemay, New York: State University
of New York Press, 1992.
Thomas Kinsella for an extract from The Tain, translated from the Irish
epic Táin Bó Cuailnge, trans. Thomas Kinsella, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1970, first published Dolmen Press, 1969.
University of California Press for an extract from Inferno: First Book
of the Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1980; an extract from Purgatorio: Second Book of
the Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982; and an extract from Gallic Salt, trans. Robert
Harrison, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
University of Chicago Press for extracts from Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘The
Regulation of Brothels in Later Medieval England,’ Signs 14.2 (1989);
an extract from John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and
Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the
Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980); and extracts from Benjamin K. Zedar, ‘On the Origins of the
Earliest Laws of Frankish Jerusalem: The Canons of the Council of Nablus,
1120,’ Speculum 74.2 (1999).
University of Pennsylvania Press for extracts from Mary Frances Wack,
Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990; an extract from Other
Middle Ages: Witnesses at the Margins of Medieval Society, ed. Michael
Goodich, Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998; extracts
from The Lombard Laws, trans. Katherine Fischer Drew, Philadephia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973; extracts from The Laws of the
Salian Franks, trans. Katherine Fischer Drew, Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1999; and extracts from The Trotula: A Medieval
Compendium of Women’s Medicine, ed. and trans. Monica H. Green,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
Wilfred Laurier University Press for an extract from Peter Damian, Book
of Gomorrah: An Eleventh-Century Treatise against Clerical Homosexual
Practices, trans. Pierre J. Payer, Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 1982.
Yale University Press for extracts from Poems and Prose from the Old
English, translated by Burton Raffel, ed. A. H. Olsen, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998, reproduced with permission of Yale University
Press through PLSclear.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise
the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in
subsequent editions.
INTRODUCTION

Love, sex, and marriage were topics much discussed in medieval writings
of all sorts: in literary works and theological discussions, in medical text-
books and private letters, in chronicles and legal manuals, in penitential
guides and conduct books. This book gathers together extracts from such
writings from across the entire medieval period, from the fourth century to
the fifteenth. It includes selections from texts and authors whose influence
was felt across medieval Europe, such as Augustine’s City of God, Isidore
of Seville’s Etymologies, Gratian’s Decretum, the letters of Abelard and
Heloise, the Romance of the Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de
Meun, Dante’s The Divine Comedy, and the medical text that circulated
under the name Trotula. It presents selections from texts well known to
modern readers alongside much less familiar material such as local eccle-
siastical legislation and accounts of court cases concerning marriage and
sexual behaviour. The purpose of this selection is not to offer any one, sin-
gle, homogeneous view of love, sex, and marriage in the medieval period.
On the contrary, it is to demonstrate the varieties and differences to be
found in medieval writing on these subjects.
What should we expect to find in these texts? Modern readers of the
European Middle Ages have seen both continuities and discontinuities
between the attitudes expressed concerning love, sex, and marriage in
medieval times and our own. These continuities and differences can be
about both actions and ideologies, ideologies being, in Louis Althusser’s
words, ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions
of existence’ (Althusser 1984: 37). Persons in the twenty-first century, or
the eighth, or the fifteenth, might carry out similar actions: a declaration
of love, an act of sexual intercourse, a marriage ceremony. But although
the acts in different centuries might resemble one another, the understand-
ing of what takes place through these actions, the cultural construction
of their meaning (both to the persons concerned and to the wider culture
that they live in) might vary significantly across time. Familiar actions in
these texts may be accompanied by very different mindsets. For instance,
as Ruth Mazo Karras notes, medieval people mostly understood sex acts as
something that one person did to someone else, rather than something that
DOI: 10.4324/9781003147404-1
2 Introduction
people do together, and so the different participants in a single sexual act
were not understood to be doing or experiencing the same thing (Karras
2017: 4-5). Or we may be surprised to discover that many medieval people,
as C. Stephen Jaeger has shown, were able to celebrate demonstrations of
same-sex love, on the assumption that same-sex love was something very
distinct from same-sex sex (Jaeger 1999).
Contemporary perspectives on these issues are also changing. Writing as
I do from a background in literary studies, I recall that New Historicism
reminded us many years ago that we do not objectively and scientifically
recover the past, but construct it from a present perspective: that we need
to take account of ‘those reciprocal historical pressures by which the past
has shaped the present and the present reshapes the past’ (Montrose 1989:
24). In the two decades that have passed since the previous edition of this
book, our own cultural contexts have changed significantly. Ideas of love,
marriage, and sexuality have become much less binary than they were two
decades ago, and they continue to evolve and to change. In part, at least,
seeking to understand medieval attitudes to love, sex, and marriage may be
useful because they can help to unsettle any lingering assumptions that the
practices and perspectives of the contemporary West on these subjects are
somehow eternal, ahistorical, and unchangeable.
The texts reproduced here pose difficulties of interpretation for the mod-
ern reader. One of the first obstacles to arise is that of bias. The written
records surviving from the medieval period, from which we might attempt
to reconstruct a picture of how life was lived in the past, are primarily eccle-
siastical documents. For most of the medieval period, to be literate was to
be a cleric, and the medieval Church’s attitude towards sexual behaviour
of any sort was a predominantly negative one. The Church attempted, with
varying degrees of vigour and varying results, to impose celibacy upon its
clergy and to police the sexual activities of the laity, both married and
unmarried. It promoted a view of sexual behaviour which exalted virginity
and chastity above even marital sex. So the written sources that provide us
with our evidence about medieval sexual behaviour are problematic, in that
they are often texts written by a clergy enjoined to keep celibacy about lay
behaviour which they regard as sinful. Many of the texts here are at best
uneasy about sexual behaviour, and many are downright hostile. We need
to be able to read between the lines to recover a more balanced picture of
what the realities of love, sex, and married life might have been like for the
majority of people.
But paradoxically, ecclesiastical disapproval also makes these texts quite
informative. Sex as it appears in these texts is at once more public and
more private than might nowadays seem the norm. In the extracts in this
book, we can see that the sexual behaviour of ordinary individuals is sub-
jected to several sources of inquiry: confessors, the ecclesiastical courts,
local manorial courts, and the municipal authorities can all be seen inquir-
ing into sexual behaviour (see extracts 7, 22, 23, 24, 25, 45, 46, 47, 48).
 Introduction 3
In the less-than-spacious living conditions of later medieval households,
we discover that witnesses in court cases are able to testify concerning the
conjugal relations of their friends: in the thirteenth-century case of Alice
contra John the Blacksmith, Alice’s landlady can testify that she often
saw the couple in bed together, and Evelyn and Edmund, fellow lodgers,
give similar testimony (extract 22). The private life of couples is a matter
of general awareness to the point where witnesses can discuss it in court
(cf. Kane 2019: 116–119 on similar evidence in other cases). On the other
hand, what appears to be a taboo against nudity (on which see extract 7
and Brundage 1987: 161, 302, 424–425) seems to mean that even at their
most intimate, there are things which married couples do not reveal to one
another.
Literature might seem to offer us a sort of counterbalance to the suspi-
cion of sex found in ecclesiastical texts. The bawdy humour of the fabliaux
appears to present a comic celebration of sexuality in antithesis to the sus-
picion of sex found in clerical texts (e.g. extract 89). But it is important
perhaps not to take this opposition at face value. The fabliaux and the
vernacular poems dealing with antimatrimonial satire might seem to offer
a world-view directly opposite to that of the Latin writings that express sus-
picion of sex, but in fact all of these texts are often found to share a similar
antifeminist agenda (on which see Blamires 1992). From some perspectives,
they look very different. From others, they look very similar indeed.
Literature also poses an additional challenge in that literary texts often
seek, in the words of Emily Dickinson, to ‘tell all the truth but tell it slant’
(Dickinson 1960: 506). The literary texts reproduced in this book are often
sophisticated and nuanced, and more often than not they are the subject of
a range of diverse and sometimes contested contemporary interpretations.
Nor is the dividing line between the literary and non-literary as clear-cut as
it might seem. Patrick Wormald’s discussion of early English law, for exam-
ple, notes the potential overlap between legal and literary texts (Wormald
1999: ch. 6). The Life of Christina of Markyate (extract 50), likewise,
seems to blur the lines between biography and fiction: as Barbara Newman
suggests, Christina’s story is ‘itself half romance, whose heroine escaped
her unwanted husband to become a chaste lover of Christ’ (Newman
2016: 3).
So, while the following quoted material offers a great variety of evidence,
that evidence needs careful handling. This is partly because of authorial
bias, partly because of the rhetorical sophistication of the texts, and partly
because historical change can mean that what seems familiar at first may
in fact turn out to differ quite seriously from modern assumptions. With
those caveats in mind, let us now turn to the three themes that this wide
range of texts consider from their diverse perspectives – the emotional state
of love, the physical act of sex, and the social institution of marriage –
together with some of the approaches to those topics by contemporary
scholarship.
4 Introduction
Love
In canto 17 of Dante’s Purgatorio, Virgil begins a discussion of love in
philosophical terms:

‘Né creator né creatura mai,’

cominciò el, ‘figliuol, fu sanza amore,
o naturale o d’animo; e tu ‘l sai.’

‘My son, there’s no Creator and no creature

who ever was without love—natural
or mental; and you know that, he began.
(Alighieri 1982: 17. 91–93)

But if Virgil sees love as universal, he makes it clear in the lines that follow
that there are different sorts of love. Natural love, he tells us, directs human-
ity unerringly towards God. But rational (or mental) love involves choice,
and choices can be mistaken. We can love the wrong thing, or we can love
something too much, or too little, and such choices have consequences.
Dante’s philosophy of love here is much indebted to medieval scholasticism
(see extracts 18 and 94 and Morgan 1977). This is not the only philosophy
of love to be found in the Middle Ages (for a Neoplatonic view, see extracts
83, 96), but it may be a useful starting point in showing us that views of
love in the medieval period were both complex and nuanced.

Vocabularies of love
The Middle Ages has a wide range of different terms for love, and they carry
a broad range of meanings (on vocabularies, see Morgan 1977, Morgan
1980, Payer 1984, Fell 1984: 68, Boswell 1996: ch. 1). This is something
that the reader of this book, approaching these texts in translation, needs
to be particularly conscious of. In his City of God (extract 5), St Augustine
discusses the Latin words used for love in the Bible, and discusses not only
amor, but also caritas (charity – the love of God), cupiditas (desire) and so
on. The distinction between these terms is not always clear-cut. Isidore of
Seville, in his Etymologies, says that carnal love (dilectio carnalis) is usually
called ‘desire’ (amor) rather than ‘love’ (dilectio) (extract 78). Augustine does
not make this distinction: he notes that amor is not always meant in a bad
sense, and that the Bible uses amor interchangeably with caritas (extract 5).
Andreas Capellanus, writing in the eleventh century, distinguishes
between amor and affectio, viewing the latter as the sort of love more appro-
priate to marriage, and the former as the sort of love usually found outside
it (extract 80). Andreas is making this distinction in pursuit of a particu-
lar argument. He is not suggesting, as is sometimes assumed, that love and
marriage are incompatible. Rather, he is arguing that the passionate love
 Introduction 5
that he calls amor is different from the sort of love that is found within mar-
riage, which he calls affectio: and indeed, there is a substantial discussion in
medieval ecclesiastical texts on maritalis affectio, ‘marital affection,’ as an
appropriate attitude between spouses (on which see Noonan 1969, Brundage
1987, Kooper 1991, Sheehan 1991 and cf. Ariès 1985: 130). That distinction
between amor and affectio can also be found in texts of a very different sort,
such as the thirteenth-century English legal manual Bracton (extract 41).
Elsewhere, passionate love, amor in Latin, eros in Greek, or, in Arabic,
‘ishq, is described as quite an extreme form of emotion: Andreas Capellanus
describes it as an ‘inborn suffering’ that results from ‘uncontrolled think-
ing’ about the beloved (extract 80); Constantine Africanus describes it as
‘a great longing with intense sexual desire and affliction of the thoughts’
(extract 96). Indeed, in Constantine Africanus and his commentators,
amor or eros is a medical condition: not a philosophical category, but a
melancholic disease: what Chaucer calls ‘the loveris maladye/Of Hereos’
(Chaucer 1987: 44).
Particularly in literary texts, love often seems to be downright contra-
dictory, as in the Middle English lyric that describes love as both ‘greatest
bliss’ and ‘distress and woe,’ ‘soft,’ ‘sweet,’ but also the cause of grief and
‘much care’ (extract 72). Such inherently contradictory perspectives are
by no means original to the Middle Ages. As Anne Carson says in writ-
ing about the love poetry of Sappho, the Greek word eros denotes ‘want,’
‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing’; hence the bittersweet nature of
eros, its combination of pleasure and pain, where ‘love and hate converge
within erotic desire’ (Carson 1998: 3, 9, 10).

‘Courtly love’ from Lewis to Lacan

The defining model for twentieth-century discussions of medieval notions
of love was the idea of ‘courtly love,’ originating with Gaston Paris, but
most influentially expressed in English by C. S. Lewis in his 1936 book,
The Allegory of Love. There, Lewis argued that a new form of love had
found expression in French troubadour poetry, and that this new form of
love exercised a fundamental influence on the literature of the later medi-
eval period, in France, but also in England. He also asserted that this love
with which medieval literature was concerned had nothing to do with mar-
riage, and was in fact an idealisation of adultery. In Lewis’s own words:

Two things prevented the men of that age from connecting their ideal
of romantic and passionate love with marriage. The first is, of course,
the actual practice of feudal society. Marriages had nothing to do with
love, and no ‘nonsense’ about marriage was tolerated. All matches were
matches of interest, and, worse still, of an interest which was contin-
ually changing. When the alliance which had answered would answer
no longer, the husband’s object was to get rid of the lady as quickly as
6 Introduction
possible. Marriages were frequently dissolved. The same woman who
was the lady and ‘the dearest dread’ of her vassals was often little bet-
ter than a piece of property to her husband. He was master in his own
house. So far from being a channel for the new kind of love, marriage
was rather the drab background against which that love stood out in all
the contrast of its new tenderness and delicacy. The situation is indeed
a very simple one, and not peculiar to the Middle Ages. Any idealiza-
tion of sexual love, in a society where marriage is purely utilitarian,
must begin by being an idealization of adultery.
The second factor is the medieval theory of marriage – what may be
called, by a convenient modern barbarism, the ‘sexology’ of the medi-
eval church. A nineteenth-century Englishman felt that same passion –
romantic love – could be either virtuous or vicious according as it was
directed towards marriage or not. But according to the medieval view
passionate love itself was wicked, and did not cease to be wicked if the
object of it were your wife. If a man had once yielded to this emotion he
had no choice between ‘guilty’ and ‘innocent’ love before him: he had
only the choice, either of repentance, or else of different forms of guilt.
(Lewis 1936: 13–14)

For Lewis, the key elements of this love which he saw as normative in later
medieval literature were humility, courtesy, adultery, and the religion of
love (Lewis 1936: 12–13).
Lewis’s description of ‘the actual practice of feudal society’ is unsus-
tainable. There are, of course, medieval romances that treat the theme
of misery within marriage (e.g. Marie de France’s lai of Yonec, extract
88), and Dante’s portrait of Francesca da Rimini is a literary account of a
real-life example of a wife whose political marriage results in an adulter-
ous love affair (extract 93, Barolini 2018). But Lewis’s suggestion that all
marriages were regularly dissolved marriages of interest is both impossibly
reductive, and entirely at odds with the model of consensual but indis-
soluble marriage that was eventually developed by the medieval Church
(extracts 13, 14, 17). Lewis’s second suggestion, that the medieval theory
of marriage viewed passionate love within marriage as potentially sinful,
is, as we shall see, only partly true. Yes, as we said at the outset, the medi-
eval Church’s attitude towards sexuality was predominantly negative. Yes,
this negative view extended to marital sex: various medieval authors cer-
tainly drew on the aphorism attributed to Sextus and quoted by St Jerome
that the ‘too ardent lover of his wife is an adulterer,’ and they debated
at length the question of when marital intercourse might or might not be
sinful (Kelly 1975: 245–261, Payer 1984: 111–131). But what Lewis passes
over here is St Paul’s concession of marriage in 1 Corinthians 7.9 as a rem-
edy for lust. If Lewis ignores this, St Augustine does not: for Augustine,
marital intercourse for the purpose of satisfying sensuality is a venial sin,
where adultery or fornication is a mortal sin, a much more serious matter
 Introduction 7
(extract 2), and this remained the dominant view throughout the medieval
period. St Paul also encouraged love between spouses (in Ephesians V),
and that encouragement is echoed by the medieval church: love between
spouses is an important theme in medieval marriage sermons (D’Avray
1985, D’Avray 2001: vii, D’Avray 2005: 69). Canon law, likewise, expected
spouses to treat each other with that love appropriate between spouses
termed ‘marital affection.’
Lewis’s reading of ‘courtly love’ as a key aspect of a wide range of medi-
eval texts has also been critiqued. His assertion that adultery is idealised in
medieval literary discussions of love has been criticised as inaccurate, and
his reading of Andreas Capellanus’s book, De Amore (extract 80) has been
seen as overliteral (Donaldson 1970). The supposed newness of the phenom-
enon has been questioned: Peter Dronke discovered the same sentiments
found in medieval love-lyric expressed in ancient Egypt, in Byzantium, and
in numerous other times and places (Dronke 1968: I, 1–56). Although the
Old English poem Wulf and Eadwacer (extract 68) is notoriously difficult
to interpret, some readings of the poem do see it as an expression of that
passionate love which Lewis argues should not appear until hundreds of
years later: as Christine Fell writes, the poem is ‘within the romantic view
of marriage rather than the practical’ (Fell 1984: 70).
Nor is the term ‘courtly love’ found in the texts themselves. A relation-
ship between courtesy and love is certainly visible across a range of lyric
and romance writing during the central and later Middle Ages, but those
works explore a complex relationship between the two terms. The lyric
by the twelfth-century troubadour poet Marcabru certainly links courtesy
and love (extract 84), but as Simon Gaunt notes this poet’s overall body
of work is almost obsessively critical of adultery (Gaunt 1990: 66–67).
The lyric by Hartmann von Aue (extract 92) acknowledges aristocratic
love-conventions only to reject them.
Despite such substantial critiques of the concept of ‘courtly love,’ the
term itself persists. It does so for at least two reasons. First, there is a vis-
ible literary dialogue about the nature of love taking place across a range
of medieval texts, particularly lyric and romance, from the troubadours
onwards. Bernard O’Donoghue has summarised that position as follows:
‘There is a body of literature which can be conveniently taken together with
common conceptual elements in it. If it has been wrongly defined, then the
definition should be corrected, but it does exist’ (O’Donoghue 1982: 13).
Second, the concept of ‘courtly love’ has found a new place in con-
temporary discussions, not through C. S. Lewis, but via the work of the
psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan (Labbie 2006). Lacan’s influence
means that the term finds its way back into contemporary discourse via
such theorists as Slavoj Žižek (Žižek 1993) and Mark Fisher (Fisher 2004).
Lacan’s version of ‘courtly love’ has also helped literary medievalists such
as Sarah Kay and Bernard O’Donoghue to reformulate the concept in new
ways (Kay 2000, O’Donoghue 2006). Kay has argued that discussions of
8 Introduction
‘courtly love’ have been problematic in ‘their assumption that such love was
susceptible of codification as a system of rules or doctrines,’ and suggests
instead that ‘courtly love’ is better discussed as ‘a series of questions which
are debated across a large number of texts, and which can be traced back
to tensions within medieval court life’ (Kay 2000: 81); this is a similar
position to that of C. Stephen Jaeger, who suggests in a useful formulation
that ‘courtly love is not a doctrine, but a large grid crisscrossed with con-
flicting opinions’ (Jaeger 1999: 120). For O’Donoghue, again drawing on
Lacan, the concept has enduring value in encapsulating a series of tensions
between individual desire and social norms: ‘conflict between the demands
of the well-ordered society and the transgressive sexual inclinations of the
individual is what brings together the worlds of the political and the erotic
in courtly love’ (O’Donoghue 2006: 13).
The term no longer means quite what it once did, then, and, as Jill Mann
writes, ‘sometimes it is hard to be sure what is meant by it, since it is often
treated as if its meaning is self-evident, and left undefined’ (Mann 2013:
92). Mann declares herself in agreement with those who think the term
essentially unhelpful, and better dropped from critical discussions (Mann
2013: 94). I agree, and in doing so, I would suggest that Sarah Kay’s fruitful
suggestion that discussions of love in medieval texts could be seen as posing
questions might be broadened to incorporate an examination of tensions
not just within a single all-encompassing category labelled ‘courtly love,’
not just in a particular social context (that of the court), or across par-
ticular types of text (literary romances in particular), but rather between
a number of different ideas of love across a broad range of different texts
and contexts.
As the texts reproduced and translated in this book should show, medi-
eval ideas of love cannot be reduced to a single overarching concept.
Recognising the many perspectives from which medieval texts discuss the
subject, and paying close attention to the actual terms that they use in doing
so, would seem to be potentially a more fruitful approach than attempts to
refine and rework Lewis’s flawed formulation of a love which is supposedly
(but not really) normative in later medieval literature. The selection of texts
given here offers writing about many different sorts of love from a number
of different perspectives: including theological texts, legal texts, literary
texts, medical texts and so on. It is a selection intended to demonstrate that
there are a great variety of ways of thinking about love across the medieval
period, and that recognising this plurality is an essential first step towards a
serious understanding of the sophistication of medieval discussions of love.

Sex
As with texts discussing love, there is a wide variety of evidence on offer in
the texts regarding medieval sexual practice. As already mentioned, these
texts present a difficulty for the modern reader given the bias against any
 Introduction 9
sort of sexual behaviour found in many of them. The second problem we
face is that it is difficult to discuss medieval sexual practices in terms of
modern sexual categories, which are themselves undergoing significant
change.

Sexual categories, medieval and modern

Studying historical sexual behaviour immediately forces us to scrutinise
our own thinking about sexuality and its categorisations. As Ruth Mazo
Karras writes:

The general consensus today is that sexuality is socially constructed. It

is not written in the body but created by society. A person might per-
form the same acts in a variety of cultures, but they would not express
the same sexuality in all those cultures because the acts would have
different meanings and are understood differently.
(Karras 2017: 8)

Michel Foucault, whose History of Sexuality had an important role in

shaping research into medieval sexualities at the turn of the twenty-first
century, took this position a step further. In the opening volume of his
History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that the notion of ‘sexuality’ is itself
a modern one, whose history can be traced to the recent past. In Foucault’s
view – or at least in the way that Foucault has conventionally been read –
the performance of sexual acts in the premodern period does not lead to
the construction of ‘sexualities’ as a category of identity in the same way as
is true of the modern period. Writing of the period prior to the eighteenth
century, Foucault argues:

What was taken into account in the civil and religious jurisdiction
alike was a general unlawfulness. Doubtless acts ‘contrary to nature’
were stamped as especially abominable, but they were perceived simply
as extreme forms of acts ‘against the law’; they were infringements
of decrees which were just as sacred as those of marriage, and which
had been established for governing the order of things and the plan
of beings. Prohibitions bearing on sex were essentially of a juridical
nature. The ‘nature’ on which they were based was still a kind of law.
(Foucault 1981: 38)

The medieval person committing ‘crimes against nature,’ then, differs sig-
nificantly from the modern homosexual:

As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a cat-

egory of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the
juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became
10 Introduction
a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to
being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet
anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into
his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality.
(Foucault 1981: 43)

All of this comes with caveats – a number of scholars warn that it may
be a distortion of Foucault’s claims to try to make an absolute distinc-
tion between sexual acts and sexual identities (Dinshaw 1999: 195, Clark
2009: 10).
Foucault’s question about premodern sexual identities has been answered
by subsequent research, but the answers are nuanced. People were charac-
terised as having sexual identities in the medieval period, as opposed to
simply being persons who participated in different sorts of sexual acts, but,
unsurprisingly, those identities do not map straightforwardly onto modern
sexual categories. Allen J. Frantzen writes that we can speak of a sexual
identity based on same-sex acts in early medieval England: that the labelling
of individuals visible in penitential texts via terms like ‘sodomites,’ ‘molles,’
or ‘bædlings’ contributes to a group identity based on sexual practices,
although this group identity is not the same as the contemporary category
of sexuality, and these identities were not necessarily defined only in sexual
terms (Frantzen 1998: 174, cf. Clark 2009: ch. 3). Carolyn Dinshaw also
argues for later medieval England that men who engaged in acts of male–
male sex were thought to be visibly marked and were, for others at least,
defined by their sexual desire (Dinshaw 1999: 194–195).
Several of the texts presented in this book pose questions about sex-
ual identities without being able to formulate answers. Chaucer’s Pardoner
(extract 72) is the focus of suspicion from the poem’s narrator. The narrator
suspects that the Pardoner is somehow deviant, but cannot quite put his
finger on the way in which he is deviant. Lacking a vocabulary of sexual
categorisation, the narrator resorts to equine language: he suspects that the
Pardoner is either a ‘gelding’ or a ‘mare.’ These terms are conventionally
translated as ‘a eunuch or a homosexual,’ but the narrator visibly finds the
Pardoner difficult to pin down, and has no easy categorisations to place
the character in. Questions multiply further when the Pardoner appears
again in the Wife of Bath’s prologue (extract 73), stating an intent to get
married. Chaucer does seem to be suggesting that the Pardoner’s sexual
actions contribute importantly to his identity – why else would he give
them so much attention? And in Foucauldian terms, the fourteenth-century
character of the Pardoner shares with the nineteenth-century homosexual
an ‘indiscreet anatomy,’ a ‘mysterious physiology,’ and (like all the pilgrims
in Chaucer’s General Prologue) being presented as a ‘type of life’ (Foucault
1981: 43). But the poem’s suspicious narrator ultimately seems to have no
way of determining what the Pardoner’s sexual identity might be, or any
means of expressing it. And so the Pardoner, instead of being assigned a
 Introduction 11
sexual identity, seems to remain a set of unanswered questions for both
narrator and audience.
But a lack of certainty about categorisations is perhaps not so different
from our own positions, as we move away from rather rigid twentieth-cen-
tury demarcations of sexualities, where what Judith Butler calls the
compulsory order of sex/gender/desire is increasingly open to question
(Butler 1999: 8), and our contemporary sexual categories are, perhaps
fruitfully, in something of a state of flux. In particular, as medievalists are
beginning to ask what trans medieval feminism might look like (Bychowski
and Kim 2019), we have the opportunity to revisit the many examples of
gender uncertainties that have long been visible in medieval texts. These
range from female saints dressed in male clothing to male outlaws dressed
in female clothing, and they include iconic figures both mythical (Pope
Joan, extract 82) and real (Joan of Arc). One case that has been a particular
subject of discussion is that of John/Eleanor Rykener (extract 47). This is
an account of a London court case from 1394, where ‘John Rykener, call-
ing [himself] Eleanor’ and dressed as a woman, is arrested by city officials
while having sex with a man, John Britby. The original 1996 article by
Ruth Mazo Karras and David Lorenzo Boyd that translates and discusses
this case makes it clear that the case is profoundly interesting in its focus on
John/Eleanor’s gender identity:

While Rykener might have engaged in prostitution, he was not identi-

fied as a prostitute; while he might have practiced sodomy, he was not
clearly identified as a sodomite. He was identified as a man who had
forsaken his gendered identity and had become a woman, engaging in
sexual intercourse with men ‘as a woman.’
(Karras and Boyd 1996: 108)

Two decades later, contemporary readings, both by Karras herself

with Tom Linkinen (Karras and Linkinen 2016) and by others such as
Kadin Henningsen (Henningsen 2019), would now identify Rykener as
transgender.
What of the medieval period’s own categorisations? Foucault described
sodomy as an ‘utterly confused category’ (Foucault 1981: 101), and with
some justification. First, while we do find early medieval texts that refer
to ‘sodomites’ in a sexual context (extract 7) the reasons behind God’s
destruction of Sodom were not defined in exclusively sexual terms for much
of the medieval period (Jordan 1997: ch. 2, Frantzen 1998: ch. 5, Clark
2009: chs 4, 5). Hincmar of Rheims, writing in the ninth century, alludes to
the argument that only penetrative intercourse can be defined as ‘sodomit-
ical wickedness,’ but then rejects it. For Hincmar, a wide range of sexual
actions ‘against nature’ may be included under the rubric of sodomy: any-
one who has ‘worked shamefulness against nature in male or in woman,
and deliberately and eagerly is made unclean by rubbing or touching or
12 Introduction
shameful motion’ is guilty of sodomitical acts (extract 10). Peter Damian’s
eleventh-century Book of Gomorrah is the only extended prose monograph
on same-sex sex from the entire medieval period, one that Mark Jordan sug-
gests actually invents the term sodomia ‘sodomy’ (Jordan 1997: 29, though
Stone and West 2016: 59 attribute that to Hincmar). Peter Damian also
defines sodomy very broadly, describing four different types of sexual act
under the term: solitary masturbation, mutual masturbation, intercourse
between the thighs, and finally ‘the complete act against nature’ (which
goes unnamed) (extract 11). In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas
defines sodomy more narrowly, as same-sex intercourse, but again groups
it with a number of other forms of ‘unnatural vice’ including masturbation,
bestiality, and heterosexual intercourse that does not follow ‘the natural
style’ (extract 18).
Whether broadly or narrowly defined, the inclusion of same-sex inter-
course with these other forms of sex does have a rationale: as Karras reminds
us, ‘medieval people did not draw the line between gay and straight, but
between reproductive and non-reproductive sex’ (Karras 2017: 9). From the
perspective of medieval Christianity, ‘natural’ sexual acts are those that
lead to reproduction. ‘Unnatural’ acts are those that do not. Hence Aquinas
and others make no essential distinction between various ‘unnatural’ sex-
ual acts like masturbation, bestiality, and sodomy. As David Clark writes
of our efforts to unravel terms like ‘sodomites,’ ‘molles,’ or ‘bædlings’ in the
early medieval Penitential of Theodore (extract 7):

It seems likely that the reason we as modern scholars find these texts
confusing and difficult to align with one another is that the original
writers had different concepts of what exactly was covered by these
terms, or indeed made less of a distinction between concepts we find it
important to differentiate, such as same-sex behaviour, masturbation,
sexual indulgence, gender inversion, hermaphrodism, and eunuchism.
(Clark 2009: 62)

Such a classification of same-sex sex with a range of other types of sex-

ual behaviour, which appear to us as very dissimilar, seems to underlie
Foucault’s description of the category of sodomy as ‘uncertain’ and ‘con-
fused’ (Foucault 1981: 37). Nor is this true of only one sexual category.
‘Fornication’ also had a variety of definitions in canon law, extending to
any kind of illicit intercourse and beyond, to include ‘spiritual fornica-
tion’ which might extend to idolatry, superstition, witchcraft, and so on
(Brundage 1982: 130). As Karma Lochrie shows, we cannot force medieval
categories of ‘natural’/‘unnatural’ to map easily onto contemporary notions
of ‘normal’/‘abnormal’ (Lochrie 2005).
One of the most-discussed books on medieval sexuality, John Boswell’s
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, argued that Christian
intolerance of same-sex sex was a phenomenon of the later medieval period.
 Introduction 13
‘For all its credulity, poverty, ignorance, and deprivation,’ Boswell wrote, ‘the
early Middle Ages was not a period of consistent oppression for most minor-
ities’ (Boswell 1980: 269). Boswell argued that this early medieval social
tolerance was replaced with persecution from the late twelfth century: ‘a
considerable transformation of public attitudes towards homosexual behav-
iour took place during the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries’ (Boswell
1980: 301). The ‘Boswell thesis’ (as Mathew Kuefler calls it in a collec-
tion of essays on the book a quarter of a century after its publication) was
likely correct in arguing for an increase in persecution in the later medieval
period. As Kuefler notes, other historians of medieval sexuality like Michael
Goodich also argue for an increase in intolerance in the later Middle Ages
(Kuefler 2005: 5). Robert Moore would subsequently cite Boswell in his
wide-ranging and influential account of twelfth- and thirteenth-century
Europe as the point of origin of a ‘persecuting society’ that would endure
all the way to the twentieth century (Moore 2007: 85–88). The Canons
of the Council of Nablus (extract 26) may play a particularly pivotal
role in this trend towards the persecution of homosexuality (Karras 2020).
If Boswell’s argument for a rise in persecution can be borne out, his argu-
ments for an earlier attitude of tolerance are much more difficult to justify
in light of the evidence (for arguments against Boswell, see for instance
Brundage 1987, Johansson and Percy 1996, Frantzen 1998). Pierre J. Payer
notes that while ecclesiastical councils prior to 1048 do not conventionally
mention same-sex sex, most penitentials from the sixth century to the tenth
have at least one canon on homosexuality, and more often than not they
have several (Peter Damian 1982: 6, 7) – see, for example, The Penitential
of Theodore (extract 7), which has an extensive discussion. Similarly, every
canonical collection prior to 1048 contains a number of texts censuring
homosexual practices (Peter Damian 1982: 10). So while it is certainly a
long way from The Penitential of Theodore’s prescription of long penance
for certain sexual acts (extract 7) to Jean Froissart’s graphic account of the
fourteenth-century execution of Sir Hugh Despenser (extract 63), that does
not mean that the early medieval period was a tolerant one. The moralising
texts presented in this book from all periods show very little tolerance for
any form of sexual behaviour, heterosexual or homosexual, though we can-
not be certain of the extent of their influence upon early medieval society.
And some of the positive evidence for tolerance that Boswell produced –
for example, the texts that he interpreted as representing blessings for same-
sex unions (extract 20) – have been given very different interpretations by
others (Rapp 2016).
We might also question the extent to which the persecuting tendencies of
the later Middle Ages were directed at sexual behaviour per se. As Karras
and Boyd comment: ‘Though canon lawyers, the theorists of the law applied
in the church courts, had a good deal to say about sodomy, in actual cases
the charge of sodomy appears most often as a further accusation to hurl at
heretics’ (Karras and Boyd 1996: 102).
14 Introduction
This is potentially an accusation that can go both ways, of course –
sodomites accused of heresy, heretics accused of sodomy – but heresy
is associated with sexual deviance in the accusations of the orthodox
throughout the Middle Ages. Augustine’s writings on marriage are, in part,
concerned to attack the views put forward by the heretical Manichaeans
on marriage and sexuality (Noonan 1986: ch. 4). In the central Middle
Ages, the Bogomils and Cathars were likewise accused of sexual deviance
(Boswell 1980: ch. 10, Noonan 1986: ch. 6; for actual sexual behaviour in
a Cathar village, see Ladurie 1978). We can see the links between heresy
and sodomy in the record of the trial of Arnaud of Verniolle (extract 25):
while there is extensive discussion of Arnaud’s sexual activities, he is also
accused of posing as a priest, celebrating mass, hearing confessions, and
granting absolution without authority, and is suspected, therefore, of both
sodomy and heresy. We find the same association in Froissart’s account of
the execution of Hugh Despenser, accused of being ‘a heretic, and guilty of
unnatural practices’ (extract 63). The links between sexual and religious
unorthodoxy are particularly visible in Gregory IX’s extraordinary par-
anoid fantasy Vox in Rama (extract 16). Heresy is also associated with
the subversion of gender roles: hence the accusation levelled at Margery
Kempe that she is a Lollard (for the Lollards and same-sex sex, see
Dinshaw 1999).
While we might not agree with Boswell’s conclusions, his work none-
theless posed a range of important questions which have been fruitfully
explored by later scholarship. Subsequent work has made a modified case
that, although the Middle Ages was a time of intolerance of male–male
sexual acts, the early Middle Ages at least approve of male–male love where
there are no sexual implications. C. Stephen Jaeger argues that friendship
and love were social ideals of the medieval aristocracy, lay, clerical, and
monastic, and that from antiquity to the late eleventh century this ideal
was restricted to love and friendship between men. Jaeger acknowledges
a debt to Boswell’s studies, but rejects his argument that sex between men
was tolerated (Jaeger 1999: 6–7 and n. 7). Allen J. Frantzen, discussing
early medieval English society, suggests that when sex acts are not explicit,
male–male affection is visibly expressed in a number of celebrated texts
(including Beowulf) in contexts of male camaraderie, familial bonds, and
religious devotion (Frantzen 1998: 69, cf. Clark 2009). Boswell’s later work
on same-sex unions, similarly, while not gaining scholarly acceptance for its
key argument that we can read a selection of medieval texts as blessings for
same-sex unions (e.g. extract 20), nonetheless usefully opened up questions
about the nature of marriage (Boswell 1996), which has been built upon
by others: Ruth Mazo Karras’s book Unmarriages, for instance, looks at a
variety of couple relationships in the Middle Ages that have parallels with,
but do not quite equal, the institution of marriage (Karras 2012), in a dis-
cussion which usefully decentres a scholarly focus on medieval marriage to
take account of a broader range of relationships.
 Introduction 15
The three grades of chastity
The study of sexuality does not equal the study of same-sex couples, and in
fact medieval moralists devote far more attention to what we would term
heterosexual behaviour than they do to same-sex relations. The context
within which these discussions of heterosexuality take place is the model
of the three grades of chastity, the three grades being virginity, widow-
hood, and marriage, in that order of merit. This model is present, either
manifestly or latently, in much medieval writing about marriage and sex-
uality. It lies behind the three treatises of St Augustine, on The Excellence
of Marriage, Holy Virginity, and The Excellence of Widowhood (extracts
2, 3, and 4). A conviction that chastity in widowhood was better than
remarriage lies behind ecclesiastical pressure on the secular power not
to force widows to remarry, and both the coronation charter of Henry I
and Magna Carta concede this (extracts 37, 38). Throughout the medieval
period, men and women could publicly vow themselves to virginity (con-
ventionally in the context of entering religious life, or less usually while
remaining in the world), or to chastity in widowhood after the death of
their spouse. Hagiographical texts often emphasise the difficulties that
such vows created for individuals – the vow of virginity is often seen as
under threat from the possibility of rape or family pressure to marry (see
extract 50, discussed in Saunders 2001: ch. 3): indeed, virginity is ‘often
visible only insofar as it is under threat’ (Bernau, Evans, and Salih 2003:
2). The category of virginity was and is a complex one (for a cultural his-
tory of virginity, see Bernau 2007), but medieval moralistic texts did not
find the category of virginity inherently problematic. Widows were poten-
tially a source of difficulty as sexually experienced independent women not
under the authority of either fathers or husbands, and hence potentially a
threat to masculine authority (McCarthy 2004: ch. 7). But the real site of
anxiety is marriage because, unlike the other two categories, it conferred
merit, but it also involved sex. To quote Foucault once again, prescriptive
codes:

were all centred on matrimonial relations; the marital obligation, the

ability to fulfil it, the requirements and violence that accompanied it, the
useless or unwarranted caresses for which it was a pretext, its fecundity
or the way one went about making it sterile, the moments when one
demanded it (dangerous periods of pregnancy or breast-feeding, forbid-
den times of Lent or abstinence), its frequency or infrequency, and so
on. It was this domain that was especially saturated with prescription.
The sex of husband and wife was beset by rules and recommendations.
The marriage relation was the most intense focus of constraints; it was
spoken of more than anything else; more than any other relation it was
required to give a detailed accounting of itself.
(Foucault 1981: 37)
16 Introduction
The difficulty for ecclesiastical writers was in reconciling the merits of
marriage with a suspicion of sex. As the thirteenth-century English text
Holy Virginity (extract 64) puts it, sex is ‘that indecent heat of the flesh,
that burning itch of physical desire, that animal union, that shameless cou-
pling, that stinking and wanton deed, full of filthiness,’ which is, for all
that, to be tolerated to some extent within marriage. This anxiety about
marital sex endures throughout the period, but marriage remains a good,
albeit one that is endlessly debated by medieval ecclesiastical thinkers.

Extramarital sex
In practice, of course, medieval people also had sex outside marriage in a
wide variety of contexts, as we can see from many sources. Various early
medieval legal and penitential texts prescribe penalties in the form of mone-
tary compensation or penance for sexual offences. In the cases from a rural
dean’s court in 1300 (extract 24), we find multiple briefly described cases
of fornication and adultery. In the cases from the manorial court at Crowle,
Lincolnshire, in 1319, we see women pay leyrwite to their manorial lords
because they had extramarital sex (extract 45). The fifteenth-century ordi-
nances regulating London brothels (extract 44) remind us that theological
discussions about the three grades of chastity were composed in societies
where sex was also available for sale, and recent work by Christopher
Paolella describes the links between human trafficking, sexual slavery, and
prostitution in the later medieval period (Paolella 2020). Sexual violence is
a concern in a range of early medieval texts such as the Early Irish laws con-
cerning rape (extract 35), the Laws of the Salian Franks (extract 36), and
the Laws of King Alfred (extract 30). In the later Statutes of Westminster
I (extract 39), rape and abduction begin to be conflated, with an emphasis
on the latter. The description of a fourteenth-century rape case where the
rapist of a young girl gets off on a series of technicalities reminds us of
the grim realities behind such legislation (extract 46). Neither are clerics
immune to sexual urges: we read of Arnaud of Verniolle assuring a young
cleric that various actions are not as sinful as he might think (extract 25),
and we have the testimony of the sex worker John/Eleanor Rykener that
priests paid particularly well (extract 47). Gwerful Mechain’s unequivocal
celebration of female genitalia takes a moment to satirise the clergy’s sexual
hypocrisy (extract 74):

And the churchmen all, the radiant saints,

When they get a chance, they’ve no restraint,
They never miss their chance to steal,
By St Beuno, to give it a good feel.
Unsurprisingly, then, extramarital sex of many varieties was far from unu-
sual in the Middle Ages. But there was a double standard. As Karras reminds
 Introduction 17
us, ‘women’s sexual activity outside of marriage did not receive anything
like the same toleration or acceptance that men’s did’ (Karras 2017: 118).
We can see this clearly illustrated in a late thirteenth-century court case,
where the offence is adultery. The man pays a money fine because it is ‘not
seemly’ for a knight to do public penance: his mistresses, however, are pub-
licly whipped (extract 23). Indeed, these double standards were previously
enshrined in law – in Roman and Germanic law, adultery was an exclu-
sively female offence (Brundage 1987: 32). Physical punishment for such
offences is not uncommon, though not normally anywhere near as extreme
as the particularly gruesome examples found in both the second laws of
Canute and the canons of the Council of Nablus, which both say that an
adulterous wife is to be physically disfigured (extracts 31, 26).

Marriage
There is no single dominant model of ‘medieval marriage’ to match the posi-
tions occupied by Lewis and Foucault in influencing discussion of medieval
love and sex respectively. In fact, the model proposed by one of the most
prominent historians of medieval marriage, Georges Duby, emphasises the
lack of a single model of marriage in the Middle Ages:

The codes by which marriage is governed … belong to two different

orders: the profane, and what we may call the religious. Normally the
two systems adapt to, and reinforce one another. But there are times
when they are in conflict, and such temporary discord causes marriage
practices to change and evolve towards a new equilibrium.
(Duby 1983: 19)

Duby’s model, based in his analysis of marriage among the twelfth-century

French aristocracy, is still influential (see Van Houts 2019: 15–17). I want
to go further than Duby here, and emphasise not only conflict between the
ecclesiastical and secular perspectives on marriage, but also contradictions
within them.

Marriage and the Church

The Church Fathers and the good of marriage

Extracts 1–6, which open the discussion of marriage, are from two of the
most influential of the Church Fathers, St Augustine and St Jerome, each
writing at the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth
century. The question which each is attempting to address concerns the
good of marriage. As already discussed, marriage is seen by early Christian
writers as occupying the lowest of the three grades of chastity – virginity,
widowhood, and matrimony. Both Augustine’s writings on marriage and
18 Introduction
Jerome’s are to some degree a response to the heretical writings of Jovinian,
who argued that virginity was not inherently better than marriage. The
difficulty was to refute Jovinian’s writings without arguing that marriage
was not good in itself. Jerome’s Against Jovinian was seen by contempo-
raries as being excessive in its attack upon marriage in his attempts to exalt
virginity. As Peter Brown puts it, ‘the pamphlet was a disaster. One of his
own friends, Pammachius, simply withdrew it from circulation’ (Brown
1988: 377). Against Jovinian did survive, however, as a source for much
later antifeminist and antimatrimonial writing (the two often going hand in
hand). Augustine was concerned to take a more moderate line, and to put
the case that marriage was good, but less so than virginity. He argued that
marriage contained three goods: offspring, fidelity, and the sacrament, and
that marriage was inherently good because of these. But Augustine’s argu-
ments for the value of marriage are nonetheless rather equivocal because of
his ambivalence about sexual intercourse, even within marriage. He argues
in The Excellence of Marriage (extract 2) that marital intercourse for the
sake of procreation is not sinful, whereas marital intercourse for other pur-
poses is venially sinful. But this concession that intercourse within marriage
for procreation is not sinful seems to be undermined a few lines later by the
suggestion that even marital intercourse for procreation is inferior to absti-
nence from intercourse entirely. This ambiguity about sexual intercourse
on the part of the Church, as already discussed, leads to an ambiguity
about the value of marriage that persists throughout the medieval period.
Two marriages in particular play an important part in medieval eccle-
siastical thinking about the institution. Both are biblical: the marriage of
Adam and Eve, and the marriage of Mary and Joseph. Part of Augustine’s
concern in asserting that marriage is good is to defend the marriage of
Christ’s parents from criticism. And he argued in The City of God that if
the Fall had not happened, Adam and Eve would have reproduced in Eden
without sin – that sexual union was not inherently tainted, but had become
so after the Fall because of the sin of lust (discussed in Clark 1991: 19).
This doublethink about marriage persists throughout the medieval period.
It is seen as having been instituted twice, to different purposes. On the
first occasion, it is instituted by God in Paradise as a sacrament, when he
instructs Adam and Eve to increase and multiply. The second institution
comes after the Fall, when marriage is conceded as a remedy for the sin of
lust, for, as St Paul puts it in 1 Cor. 7, postlapsarian marital sex is permitted
by way of concession, not by command.
Incidentally, these early Christian arguments on the good of marriage,
all written by men, resurface in very different forms in later texts, which
often debate the question of the good of marriage from a different stand-
point. There we can see antimatrimonial perspectives coming from women,
as in Heloise’s striking expression of her preference to be Abelard’s friend,
concubine, or whore rather than his wife (extract 56), or Marie de France’s
portrait of the malmariée in Yonec (extract 88). But we still find versions of
 Introduction 19
these same arguments coming from men, as the debate on marriage in late
medieval vernacular poetry often serves a double purpose as a debate about
women. Hence Chaucer gives Theophrastus a new twist (perhaps even a
protofeminist twist, depending on your reading of the text) in his Wife of
Bath’s Prologue (extract 73). That debate is not one-sided, however: there
are also late medieval responses to the antifeminist tradition that make the
case for women (see Blamires 1992, 1997).

The Church and marriage in the early Middle Ages

During the earlier part of the Middle Ages, the Church did not enjoy exclu-
sive legal jurisdiction over marriage. It attempted to impose its teachings in
various ways, as we can see from the penitentials (extract 7), ecclesiastical
intervention in prominent marital disputes (extract 10), and evidence of
ecclesiastical influence upon secular law (extract 31). But it was only in
the eleventh century that the Church gained control over marriage as a
spiritual matter, and hence subject to its jurisdiction, in England and France
(Goody 1983: 150–151). In the early Middle Ages, then, there is difficulty
in assessing the extent to which people accepted the Church’s teachings on
marriage, and the extent to which marriage practices which existed prior to
Christianity and which might have been at odds with its teachings – on sub-
jects such as polygamy and divorce, for example – might have survived into
the conversion period and afterwards (Goody 1983: 75–76, Lucas 1983:
68, Clunies Ross 1985, Brundage 1987: 143–145, D’Avray 2015: ch. 4).
We can see evidence in the texts in this book of what appears to be
compromise on these issues, and we can also see contradictions between
different ecclesiastical texts. The Church’s prohibition on divorce, for
example, is instituted by St Paul in 1 Cor. 7, and Paul’s statement on divorce
is quoted by Augustine in The Excellence of Marriage in his discussion
of the goods of marriage, where he argues that marriage, as a sacrament,
is indissoluble (extract 2.iv). But in The Penitential of Theodore, we can
see various concessions on this principle of indissolubility, discussing the
circumstances under which married persons separated from their spouses
may remarry (extract 7). And a text as late as the eleventh-century laws of
Canute still finds it necessary to insist that a man should have only one wife,
and to forbid concubinage (extract 31), suggesting perhaps that practices at
odds with Christian teaching survive until the very end of the pre-Con-
quest period. Contemporary scholarship continues to debate the details,
however. Liam Breatnach has argued recently that the word cétmuinter,
found in early Irish legal texts (extract 35), has been mistranslated as evi-
dence of polygamy, where, in Breatnach’s view, ‘in early mediaeval Ireland,
as elsewhere, polygamy and Christianity are not compatible’ (Breatnach
2016: 26). Carole Hough (1994) and Lisi Oliver (2002) similarly dismantle
the view that the laws of Æthelbert of Kent (extract 28) contain evidence of
early English divorce laws.
20 Introduction
What is certain is that things changed with the Church reform movement
that began in the eleventh century. Through reform, and through the devel-
opment of canon law which accompanied it, a much more rigorous attitude
emerged on such questions as the indissolubility of marriage, the outlawing
of concubinage, the prohibition of incest (broadly defined – see extract 15),
and the outlawing of clerical sex (inside or outside regular unions – see
extract 12).

Consent as the basis for marriage in later medieval canon law

If Church reform saw a tightening of traditional, albeit neglected, pro-
hibitions concerning marriage and sexual behaviour, it also saw the
formulation of a positive theory of marriage based fundamentally on the
consent of the parties to be married. The basic texts of medieval canon
law were Gratian’s Decretum (c.1140) and the Liber Extra or Decretals
of Gregory IX (1234), which together formed the Corpus Iuris Canonici.
Gratian’s view of the role of consent in the formation of marriage was that
it played a role, but that consent in itself did not establish the marital bond.
Consent began marriage, but sexual intercourse confirmed it (extract 13).
This view was challenged by the theologian Peter Lombard in his book,
the Sentences. Lombard argued that consent alone made marriage (extract
14). The eventual resolution between these competing views was achieved
by Pope Alexander III, whose decretals on marriage are incorporated in
the Decretals of Gregory IX. Alexander ruled that consent expressed in the
present tense made marriage, or that consent expressed in the future tense
made marriage if it was followed by sexual intercourse or an expression of
consent in the present tense (extract 17). This became the Church’s posi-
tion on how marriage was formed, and this consensual theory was the one
implemented by its courts. It is a theory, as Noonan observes, that does
not liberate sons and daughters from psychological or social pressure, and
does not disturb the prevailing pattern of parentally arranged marriages.
This view of marriage as a bond created simply by the verbal expression
of the consent of the parties to be married, without requiring anything
else, also coexists with a longstanding view of the creation of marriage as
a process – beginning with an expression of future intent (betrothal) and
moving through a number of subsequent stages (Reynolds 2007: 3-15). But
in removing the ultimate decisions regarding marriage from the hands of
the family, it makes them subject to the jurisdiction of the Church (Noonan
1973: 429, 433, cf. Sheehan 1987b).
As Philip L. Reynolds notes, however, the consensual model created a
situation where ‘the clergy’s role in the regulation of marriage was clear’
but ‘their role in the formation of marriage was much less clear’ (Reynolds
2007: 16), and the consensual model led to significant problems with clan-
destine marriages. Under the Church’s consensual theory of marriage,
people could (and did) contract valid secret marriages outside the control
 Introduction 21
of their families and of the Church. The phenomenon is the source of a sig-
nificant amount of local legislation in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century
England. Section 83 of the First Statutes of Salisbury (extract 19) outlines
Church concerns that promises made in jest, or for the purposes of seduc-
tion rather than marriage, will create binding marriages. But there is again
a sort of doublethink going on throughout the local legislation attacking
clandestine marriage. Section 84 of the Salisbury statutes outlines the ‘cor-
rect’ way to contract a marriage: in public, in the presence of a priest, with
several public announcements having been made beforehand so that the
Church can be reassured that the persons to be married are not married
already, or that they are not too closely related to each other and so on.
But the same statute embodies the consensual theory of marriage: outlining
the form of words to be used in the consent spoken (the crucial issue being
that they should be in the present tense), the statute admits, ‘for in these
words great force exists, and marriage is brought about.’ So if section 84
of the First Salisbury statutes argues that there is a ‘correct’ way to make
a marriage, it also makes it clear that there are all sorts of ‘incorrect’ ways
of making a marriage that are just as valid canonically. To quote Michael
M. Sheehan:

Whatever the theoretical priorities of the new conception of marriage

might have been, it contained within itself the grave pedagogical prob-
lem of the act that is at once forbidden and possible. English legislation
resolved it by a steady insistence on the publicity of marriage that com-
pletely overshadowed the quiet admission that such publicity was not
essential to the union.
(Sheehan 1996: 175–176)

But that ‘quiet admission’ causes real problems, and the English statutes
return to the subject of clandestine unions again and again in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries. An example of a clandestine marriage is that of
Margery Paston and Richard Calle, where the daughter of the Paston family
married one of the servants without the family’s consent (extract 58). The
bishop of Norwich, in attempting to determine whether or not a marriage
actually had been contracted between Margery and Richard, examined
each of them on the form of words they spoke to each other. According
to the canonical emphasis on consent, this is what is vital in determining
whether or not they were married.
Inevitably, the consensual theory of marriage created a lot of business for
the ecclesiastical courts. An example of a marriage where a dispute arises
regarding the formation of the bond is the marriage of Alice and John the
Blacksmith (extract 22), where there had been public ceremonies before
a priest and witnesses, but perhaps only of engagement. Nevertheless,
engagement (consent to marry using words in the future tense) followed
by intercourse is marriage, and it is clear that there had been intercourse
22 Introduction
in this case. Although all parties seemed to accept that a marriage already
existed, there are nevertheless references to another ‘espousal’ ceremony
to come – perhaps a public solemnisation of what all parties agreed was
already a marriage?
Not all medieval marriages, however, were based on free consent. The
Church sometimes forced recidivist fornicators into marriage, forcing them
to take matrimonial vows, often expressed in the future tense, so they
would become valid if there was subsequent intercourse, or with a condi-
tion attached to the same effect (extract 19). Although the idea of consent
is fundamental to the Church’s theory of marriage, then, its practice some-
times differs.

Marital sex
If consent made marriage in the later Middle Ages, what was it that people
consented to in marrying? In particular, did they consent to sexual inter-
course with their partners? St Paul’s injunction in 1 Cor. 7 that each partner
had control over his or her spouse’s body (quoted by St Augustine, extract 2,
and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, extract 73, to very different ends) would seem
to imply that consent to marriage was consent to intercourse: that it was
not possible to agree to marry someone, and then refuse to have intercourse
after marriage. But this issue was complicated by the Church’s ambivalence
about sexual intercourse, even within marriage. Augustine’s statement that
marital intercourse for the purpose of procreation (but not all marital inter-
course) was free from sin shows a certainty unavailable to later medieval
canonists, who, in the words of James Brundage, ‘taught that marital sex
was free from sin under some circumstances, although they failed to agree
just what those circumstances might be’ (Brundage 1987: 448). And if sex-
ual intercourse within marriage might be sinful, was it perhaps not better
to abstain from it? Many married people in the medieval period seem to
have thought so, and some of their experiences in trying to abstain from sex
within marriage are recounted in hagiographical narratives (discussed in
Elliott 1993). Examples given in this book are Margery Kempe (extract 55),
who persuaded her husband to join her in vowing chastity within marriage,
and Christina of Markyate (extract 50), who unsuccessfully attempted to
persuade the husband forced upon her by her parents to agree to a chaste
marriage, and was forced to take other measures instead.
Also important for the Church’s unease concerning the role of intercourse
within marriage was the example of the marriage of Christ’s parents. If
consent to marriage is consent to sexual intercourse, and Mary and Joseph
were married, then Mary must have consented to intercourse. But how
could that be reconciled with the medieval belief that Mary had taken a
vow of virginity? Gratian tries to reconcile these two positions (extract
13), but later writers such as Aquinas (extract 18) take a different view,
arguing that Mary did not in fact consent to sexual intercourse, unless it
 Introduction 23
was pleasing to God. The anxiety on the part of medieval theologians to
demonstrate that the marriage of Mary and Joseph was not in any way
open to question (again, see Aquinas, extract 18 and Elliott 1993) played
an important part in influencing their thinking on the role of intercourse
within marriage.

Marriage and secular law

Marriage and property

During the early medieval period, lay and ecclesiastical jurisdictions did
not have separate spheres of control over matters relating to marriage and
sexuality as they did in the later Middle Ages. Early medieval legal texts
are not generally as concerned with sexual offences in the same detail as
the Penitentials are, and their focus is for the most part on offences such as
adultery and rape, but this reflects perhaps not a division of jurisdictions as
in the later medieval period, but a differing set of concerns regarding sexual
ethics on the part of the secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. The laws of
Canute, however, interest themselves in subjects such as fornication, incest,
and so on, as the penitential texts do. Canute’s laws are relatively late, and
they certainly reflect ecclesiastical influence (the laws are perhaps written
by Archbishop Wulfstan). But they are nonetheless secular laws prescribing
a wide-ranging sexual ethic, something we do not see in the later medieval
period.
In the later medieval period, such questions are outside the scope of the
secular jurisdiction, for spiritual matters relating to marriage (including the
question of the formation of the marriage bond) are the exclusive preserve
of the ecclesiastical courts. If a question arises in the secular court relating
to such a matter – for example, if the court needs to know if a couple were
validly married or not – the case is referred to the Church courts for a deci-
sion on the question before returning to the secular court for resolution of
the original case. The secular law concerns itself only with matters relating
to property – the allocation of property that a husband should make on
his wedding day as dower for his wife, the inheritance of property, and so
on. However much the Church might view marriage as a spiritual matter,
or as a way of legitimating sexual intercourse (otherwise sinful), it always
served other functions as well: of making alliances between families, of
settling feuds – as we see in the extract from Beowulf (extract 66) – and of
transmitting property from generation to generation. It is these aspects of
marriage with which later medieval secular law concerns itself.

Conflicts between and within legal systems

Possible tensions between Christian teachings on marriage and surviv-
als of pre-Christian practices in the early medieval period have already
24 Introduction
been discussed. We can also detect tensions between the viewpoints of the
ecclesiastical and secular powers in the later Middle Ages. The Church’s
insistence upon the freedom of all Christians to contract their own mar-
riages coexisted with the secular power’s insistence that lords had economic
rights (at the very least) in the marriages of noble widows or wards who
held land from them (extracts 38, 41), and in the marriages of their unfree
tenants also (extract 45). The secular law insisted on the proprietary dis-
ability of married women – while they were married, they had no control
over their property, all such powers being vested in their husbands (see
extract 41). But although the canon law also insisted on the subordina-
tion of married women, their lack of any control over property prevented
married women from making wills, which the Church insisted on as nec-
essary for the possibility of individual salvation: medieval wills frequently
contain donations to the Church to pay for prayers and masses for the
departed (Sheehan 1963, Helmholz 1993). And the most obvious way in
which the two systems of law differ is in the existence of two entirely sep-
arate views of what constituted legitimacy: the Church saw children as
legitimate if their parents married after their birth, whereas the secular
state did not (see extract 41). And since the division of jurisdictions meant
that each often relied upon the judgements of the other where there was
some overlap of interest, the failure to reconcile their differing views on
what constituted legitimate offspring resulted in a significant dispute (on
which see Woodbine and Thorne 1968–1977: III, xv, Powicke and Cheney
1964: I, 198–199, Rothwell 1975: 353–354, Helmholz 1987c). In a very
different sphere, ecclesiastical insistence on the indissolubility of marriage
could impact upon royal strategies of alliance and succession, both matters
of high politics, and David D’Avray has recently refocused our attention on
this aspect of medieval marriage (D’Avray 2014, 2015).
There are also internal differences within the secular law – indeed, it is
difficult to speak of ‘the secular law’ in any coherent sense since there is no
single body of law that applies to secular matters in later medieval England.
To quote S. F. C. Milsom:

in the fourteenth century there was no law of England, no body of rules

complete in itself with known limits and visible defects; or if there was
it was not the property of the common law courts or any others.
(Milsom 1981: 83)

Statute law, the law contained in the legal manuals, and local customs with
the status of law, did not form a coherent whole: and so we can find some
local law stating that it is legal for a husband to sell a wife’s marriage por-
tion in the case of dire need, and other local law stating the very opposite
(extract 43).
Furthermore, we have already seen that there are also internal differ-
ences in the Church’s views on some of the most fundamental issues relating
 Introduction 25
to marriage – the formation of the bond, the role of sexual intercourse,
indeed, the very value of marriage itself as either a sacrament instituted by
God or a mere remedy for the evils of lust. As Duby (1983) argues, then,
marriage in the later medieval period is indeed governed by a dual system
of laws. But neither the secular law nor the religious is internally coherent,
and they are sometimes at odds with one another. Medieval marriage is, in
short, overdetermined.

This Book
The purpose of this book is to do two things. First, to bring together texts
that discuss the emotional state of love, the physical act of sex, and the
social institution of marriage, from a variety of sources. Anthologising
texts that discuss these themes together suggests that these subjects and
these texts are perhaps more easily understood together than separately:
there is a complex interrelationship between these three topics, then as now.
To assert, as C. S. Lewis did, that love and marriage could not be happy
bedfellows in the Middle Ages seems unlikely. In some ways, love, sex, and
marriage are disparate things, and all three are not always found together,
but various combinations appear in the selections in this book. In these
texts, along with much theorising, we find evidence of married couples who
are not having sex, and unmarried ones who are, marriages for creating
alliances, marriages for love, and promises of marriage made in the hope
of obtaining sex (leading to difficulties afterwards). We come across gentry
who love servants, and married women who find God’s love preferable to
that of their husbands. We find loving relationships between men blessed
in ecclesiastical ceremonies, and written words of love exchanged between
women. We find accounts of clandestine marriages, sexual violence, the
madness of love-melancholy, and more besides. So, love, sex, and marriage
interrelate in a wide variety of ways, and are fruitfully discussed together.
Second, to repeat the point made at the outset of this discussion, the pur-
pose of the selection of texts given here is not to offer a single homogeneous
view of love, sex, and marriage in the medieval period. On the contrary,
its purpose is to demonstrate the varieties and differences that exist within
medieval writing on these subjects. This is true across the span of the mil-
lennium that separates St Augustine from Christine de Pizan (a lot can
change in a thousand years), but it is true also at specific points in time.
Disagreements between contemporaries – Augustine and Jerome, Abelard
and Heloise – show us that these subjects can be the matter of fierce debate
at different points throughout the Middle Ages.
These texts are also the subject of an extensive body of contemporary
scholarship, from a variety of disciplines. There has been a rich academic
literature on these topics over the past half-century, and that literature has
produced a range of insightful readings from areas as diverse as theology,
legal history, social history, economic history, the history of sexuality,
26 Introduction
gender studies, the history of medicine, and literary criticism. Diverse read-
ings from these different disciplinary perspectives have given us a much
richer overall picture of love, sex, and marriage in the Middle Ages.
The previous edition of this sourcebook focused on medieval England,
though as I argued there and elsewhere (McCarthy 2010), in many respects,
there is no such place. This revised and expanded edition takes a broader
view, but with the wider focus adopted by this new selection, it may
also be worth suggesting that it is also impossible to speak of a coherent
entity called ‘medieval Europe,’ notwithstanding suggestions like Jacques
Le Goff’s that ‘it was in the Middle Ages that Europe first appeared and
took shape both as a reality and as a representation’ (Le Goff 2005: 1).
First, medieval Christendom is not entirely identifiable with Europe, nor is
medieval Europe entirely identifiable with Christendom – hence the texts
included here by St Augustine (bishop of Hippo in modern-day Algeria),
the penitential associated with Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury (origi-
nally from Tarsus in modern Turkey), and Constantine Africanus (a monk
of Monte Cassino who was African by birth). Hence too the presence of
texts by authors such as Ibn Hazm and Maimonides (important Muslim
and Jewish writers from present-day Spain) and Rabbi Eleazar ben Judah
of Worms (a Jewish writer from modern-day Germany).
Second, while the evolving ecclesiastical regulation on marriage might
have become relatively uniform across medieval Christendom in the later
Middle Ages, actual social practice was certainly not. In a classic article,
John Hajnal argued that ‘European’ marriage patterns, as he termed them,
involved late marriage for women with a relatively small gap in age between
men and women on first marriage. Hajnal argued on the basis of evidence
from the 1377 poll tax in England that the medieval English population did
not reflect this ‘European’ pattern (Hajnal 1975). Hajnal’s discussion has
been much debated, but it is certainly the case that marriage practice varies
between, say, medieval England and Italy, to pick two European countries
for whom there is a great deal of evidence and analysis: spousal ages were
much closer in later medieval England than they were in Italy. Readers
of this book will notice that where the material selected moves from the
general to the local, it often does so by discussing English evidence. Such
material comes with the warning that this evidence is local, not universal –
social circumstances in other medieval European countries differ.
This book should demonstrate to the interested reader that the medieval
period produced a diverse range of writing and opinion on the topics of
love, sex, and marriage. But it should also be apparent that, as with any
anthology, the selection here can only scratch the surface. It is intended to
work, not as a self-sufficient guide, but as an accessible introduction that
can offer a general view of the scope of this rich and fascinating subject.
Part I

ECCLESIASTICAL
SOURCES
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
into existence in the middle or end of the ninth century? If not, how
were they engaged during the centuries that immediately preceded?
Professor Freeman affirms that they were employed “somewhere
else.” If they were not used in the subjugation of Britain, perhaps
Professor Freeman will state circumstantially what portions of
Europe are comprehended under the vague generality of
“Somewhere else.” We want something more convincing than his
ipse dixit. Danish writers, we are told, have often greatly
exaggerated the amount of Scandinavian influence in England, a
remark that applies with equal force to the advocates of the Saxon
and Celtic theories. Things, it is said, have been set down as signs
of direct Scandinavian influence, which “are part of the common
heritage of the Teutonic race.” Admitting this “common heritage,” and
having regard to the fact, that the language of the Scandinavian, and
that of the so-called Anglo-Saxon are almost identical, who shall
decide between their conflicting claims? The Quarterly, citing from
the Corpus Poeticum Boreale of Vigfússon and Powell in reference
to the poetry of the Norsemen, says, “The men from whom these
poems sprung took no small share in the making of England; their
blood is in our veins, and their speech in our mouths.”[3] The
preponderance of the direct Scandinavian element in the English
language has been shown by Archbishop Trench, who states “That
of a hundred English words, sixty come from the Scandinavian, thirty
from the Latin, five from the Greek, and five from other sources.”
“Dane and Angle, Dane and Saxon,” according to Professor
Freeman’s own shewing “were near enough each other to learn from
one another, and to profit by one another.” Their dialectic difference
was never such as to prevent them from understanding each other.
“There is,” the Quarterly affirms, “very high authority for saying that
there was as little difference in those early times between a Dane
and an Englishman, as there was between two Englishmen in
different parts of the country.” The Saxons were in fact only an earlier
swarm of northern adventurers of the same race who were
afterwards known in history as Danes and Northmen. Still Professor
Freeman thinks the Scandinavian element was but an infusion into
the already existing English mass. Hardly I should think if the
existing English mass, and the invading Northmen had a common
origin! The name of England’s principal city, it may be remarked, the
great metropolis of the Empire is Scandinavian. Neither are there
wanting persons who believe that such also is the name England
itself. In a communication to Notes and Queries by Mr. Henry Rowan
in 1868, he suggests a derivation of this name from the Danish Eng.
“While travelling in Denmark,” he says, “I met with a word which
seems to me to afford a derivation of our name of England, as
probable, at least as the ordinary one of Angle land. The word I
mean is Eng, an old Danish name applied even yet to the level
marshy pasture lands adjoining rivers. I believe the Saxons and
Angles, from the time of whose invasion the name is supposed to
date, first landed and possessed the Isle of Thanet, which in parts,
especially those about Minster, and the river Stour, would answer
very well to the description of Danish Eng lands. It is from this word I
think the name may have sprung, instead of from the Angles, whom
we have no reason for supposing to have been so superior to the
Saxons as to leave the remembrance of their name to the entire
exclusion of the latter.” M. Worsaae, in the first words of his history
unwittingly confirms what Mr. Rowan here points out. “The greater
part of England,” he says, “consists of flat and fertile lowland,
particularly towards the southern and eastern coasts, where large
open plains extend themselves.” There is a low-lying district of
Aberdeenshire called the Enzie, a name of the same character,
evidently imposed by the Northmen. This is pronounced by the
natives aingie, the sound of the first portion of the name being as the
aing in the Scotch surname of Laing. The derivation just cited,
coupled with my conjecture that the name Scotland is the ancient
gothic Skot-land, land laid under tribute, Icelandic Skat, a tax (Skat-
land) goes to confirm M. du Chaillu’s contention that the British
people, and tongue (by tongue, I mean the present speech of the
British nation) are of northern origin.
The contention that the Danish influx into England was in any sense
a mere infusion must in the nature of things be pure fiction. It was a
full rolling tide of conquest and colonization swelling a population
already essentially Scandinavian.
The first authentic particulars relating to the ancient Britons are
derived from Cæsar who made his descent in the year 55 before
Christ. The original inhabitants appear to have been Celts from
France and Spain. We learn from the Roman historian that they had
been driven into the interior and western portion of the island by the
Belgae who settled on the east and south-eastern shores of
England, and were now known as Britons. He tells us in language,
about which there can be no misconception, that the Belgae were
descended from the Germans. These were the Britons with whom
Cæsar had to do, and these the Romanized Britons who, in their dire
extremity, sent forth their despairing cry to the gates of Imperial
Rome, “The barbarians drive us to the sea, and the sea to the
barbarians.” Prichard demonstrated, at least to his own satisfaction,
that “the ancient Belgae were of Celtic, and not of Teutonic race, as
had previously been supposed,” and ethnologists are agreed in
setting aside the testimony of Cæsar! What amount of hypothetical
evidence is sufficient to overturn an historic fact? It might be difficult
to say who is an authority on language, but anyone reasonably
endowed with judgment may be an authority on matters of fact and
practical sense. The science of language is not an exact science,
and leaves a good deal of room for the imagination to play. I would
rather doubt the conclusions of philologers than believe that the
Roman historian wrote without knowledge of his subject, or
deliberately stated what he had no means of knowing to be true. The
weight of evidence is certainly on the side of Cæsar. Not all the
ingenuity of all the Bopps and Grimms and Potts and Zeusses who
ever applied themselves to the elucidation of this most obscure of all
unintelligible subjects can ever be sufficient to overturn an outside
historical fact. “In the history of all nations,” Pinkerton says, “it is
indispensable to admit the most ancient authorities as the sole
foundation of any knowledge we can acquire. If we reject them or
pretend to refute them no science can remain, and any dreamer may
build up an infinite series of romances from his own imagination.
When, therefore, a modern pretends to refute Cæsar and Tacitus in
their accounts of the inhabitants of ancient Britain, any man of
science would disdain to enter the field.” It does not by any means
follow that every scholar who is familiar with the structural
peculiarities of language has necessarily any aptitude for perceiving
the exact relations of things. Many distinguished men eminent in
literature have been singularly deficient in ordinary reasoning power.
The late Charles Kingsley, it is well known, “could not discern truth
from falsehood.” Though occupying “an historical chair, he lacked
every qualification of an historian.”
M. Worsaae, the Danish antiquary, after a good deal of hesitation
and circumlocution in regard to several matters of disputed origin, in
particular the Ruthwell cross which he casts out of the category of
Scandinavian remains, and contradicts himself in the following
sentences: “Ornaments with similar so-called Anglo-Saxon runic
inscriptions are not altogether uncommon in England, particularly in
the North. But as not a few ornaments, as well as runic stones with
inscriptions in the self-same character, are also found in the
countries of Scandinavia both in Denmark and Norway, and
particularly the latter, and the west and south-west of Sweden (and
there mostly in Bleking), it may be a question whether this runic
writing was not originally brought over to England by Scandinavian
emigrants. It would otherwise be inexplicable that they should have
used entirely foreign runic characters in Scandinavia, whilst they
possessed a peculiar runic writing of their own.” I do not think there
can be any question in the matter. No stronger evidence could be
given in proof of the fact that the so-called Anglo-Saxons and
Scandinavians were radically one and the same people. M. Worsaae
has done much to illustrate the Scandinavian antiquities of the British
islands, and I am unwilling to cast reflection on the memory of one
so eminent and so well-intentioned, but it is evident throughout his
book, that he has accepted at second-hand, on a variety of subjects,
the conclusions of English and Scotch antiquaries, which as a
foreigner he was incapable of dealing with by independent
investigation. The Hunterston brooch, which in every lineament is
distinctively Scandinavian, he has been told to call Celtic. He deals
with this most interesting monument of art in the ambiguous manner
for which he is always remarkable where his judgment seems to
contradict his conclusion. “An excellent silver gilt brooch,” he says,
“found near Hunterston, about three miles from Largs, was once said
to have been lost by some Norwegian who fled from the field of
battle [nothing more probable]. There is a short Scandinavian runic
inscription scratched on the back of it, but from what has hitherto
been deciphered, it would rather seem to denote the name of a
Scotchman than of a Norwegian. Professor Munch reads ‘Malbritha
a dalk thana—Melbridg owns this brooch.’” M. Worsaae here
obviously means Celt, as opposed to Scandinavian, but uses the
term Scotchman to allow himself, if need be, a door of escape.
“Scotchman” would apply equally to anyone born in Scotland,
whether Celt by extraction, Scandinavian, Fleming or Norman. This
seems to me an undignified way of getting out of a difficult position.
The runic writing of the Hunterston brooch, which is in the Norse
tongue, has been accurately explained by Professor George
Stephens, of Copenhagen. M. Worsaae, we know, accepted the
attentions of eminent British antiquaries, and could not gracefully
seem to doubt their conclusions on special subjects submitted to his
decision. He is first told what to say, and then cited by his instructors,
as an authority for statements which they themselves have put into
his mouth. Perhaps, under the circumstances, this may not be an
exceptional manner of dealing with matters of disputed history, but it
is certainly not the way to reach the truth that reveals itself to
intelligence. “In workmanship,” M. Worsaae says, “the Hunterston
brooch resembles the contemporary Irish and Scotch more than
Scandinavian ornaments.” Now, it certainly does no such thing. It
does not appear to me that as regards the Scandinavian remains of
Great Britain, one like M. Worsaae groping his way darkly with the
help of such lights as he can find is at all competent to pronounce
dogmatic judgments. Ireland and Scotland were invaded, and
subdued, and peopled by the Northmen, and brooches of the self-
same character are found in the Viking interments of Scandinavia.
The contemporary Irish and Scotch brooches may reasonably be
presumed to be Scandinavian. The resemblance of the Hunterston
brooch to that found at Tara, and to others of like character found in
Scotland is certainly not greater than to the brooch in the Bergen
Museum exhumed from a Viking mound at Vambheim, or to that dug
up at North Trondheim in another grave of the Viking period. The
inscription contained on the Hunterston brooch proves to
demonstration, not only that its art, and that of all others of kindred
type is Scandinavian, but that the name “Melbridg” is Norwegian.
Whatever be the origin of the art exhibited on the brooches, it is plain
that this cannot be Celtic, inasmuch as that no one has ever shewn
that the Celts possessed any knowledge of art. It is all very well to
talk in an off-handed way about Celtic art, but something more than
this is necessary to carry conviction. To my perceptions a Celtic
statement is much improved by some form of evidence. Dr.
Soderberg of Lund doubts if I will find many adherents among
Scandinavian scholars. “We are all of us,” he says, “more or less
imbued with Celticism.” So much the worse for Scandinavia, that her
sons deny her legitimate claims to her own historic and archaic
remains. It is not however, as I think, so much a question of
scholarship as of practical sense, the capacity to deal with facts
which may be weighed by anyone possessed of ordinary reasoning
power or capable of speech and thought in their simplest forms. One
can understand a Scotch antiquary of the Celtic type placing himself
in an attitude of antagonism, just as we might imagine Professor
Freeman gliding like a shark along the Saxon line ready to do battle
on behalf of his cherished delusion, because that to both of these the
Northman theory is total extinction. But that the Scandinavian
antiquary, who as regards his national remains has no reason to
falsify the facts of history, should in the interest of an exotic fable,
waste his ingenuity in disclaiming the art that especially belongs to
his country surpasses my comprehension. Let us hear what the
Saturday Review has to say on the subject of Celtic art. Taking
exception to many of my positions, it says: “He [Mr. Roger] is on
much firmer ground when he declines to believe in any art or culture
that can fairly be called Celtic. The very patterns which are usually
spoken of as Celtic are common to all the gold work of the
Mycenæan graves, which few people, we think, will now place much
later than 1500 B.C.” “Dr. Schliemann’s Mycenæan discoveries
deprive the Celts of any credit for originality in their system of spiral
ornament.” Again “‘Celtic’ patterns certainly existed on the shores of
the Ægean fifteen hundred years before our era.” “Mr. Roger is
probably right when he claims a Scandinavian origin for the ancient
claymores (two handed), for the Tara brooch and other brooches, for
stone crosses, dirk handles, and what so else is too commonly
attributed to Celtic art.” “‘What is Celtic art?’ cries Mr. Roger,
triumphantly. What, indeed? ‘The Celts, Pinkerton tells us, had no
monuments, any more than the Finns or savage Africans, or
Americans.’ As to Americans, Mr. Roger can see their bas-reliefs at
the South Kensington Museum;[4] but for Celtic art not derived from
the Scandinavians or Romans, we know not where to bid him look.” I
am content to rest the matter here. There is no art known as
distinctively Celtic, and in this aspect of the question I am confirmed
by the Saturday Review. But to return to Professor Freeman. In a
number of the publication called The Antiquary, issued on November
16th, 1872, the writer of a paper on The Landing of the Saxons in
Kent, tells us that “after pillaging for ‘a hundred and fifty years’ the
British shores,” the Jutes, or Saxons, landed under Hengist and
Horsa, “and here,” the writer says, “we must halt for a few moments
till we have disposed of Mr. E. A. Freeman’s astounding statement
that Horsa meant mare. Hors, our misspelt horse,” the writer says,
“is like its German equivalent Ross, a neuter word. The Saxon hero
is sometimes called simply Hors, but more frequently by the addition
of a masculine termination—a, as in ‘Ida Ælla,’ and some thousands
more, he becomes Horsa, masculine and male. Mare is Myre,
feminine. * * * * If Mr. Freeman will be good enough to tell us how he
came to fall into this preposterous error, we may possibly clear up
the cause of his mistake; for the most part, when he makes a bad
blunder, we can form a notion what better authority has misled him;
but in this case no English dictionary, grammar, or history can have
been consulted by him. Can it have been a Latin grammar? Mr.
Freeman is extensively known as blowing weekly a shrill trumpet,
‘asper, acerba, sonans,’ in reviews of literary and illiterate
performances, but then he is in hiding; we hear the obstreperous
whirr, but the midge is behind the screen; when he appears in
human body, he makes lapses, trips and stumbles, and lays himself
bare to stings,” &c. This is in Professor Freeman’s early days, but
men carry their idiosyncrasies into their riper years. It gives us an
insight into this critic’s mind according to the estimation in which he
was then held by his fellow-scribblers. To the article in question,
which occupies nearly two columns of The Antiquary, the editor
appends the following note:—“The story of Hengist and Horsa
(including the so-called Anglo-Saxon invasion) is an exploded fable.
The Anglo-Saxons of England, like the Picts or Caledonians of
Scotland, were only the earlier Northmen or Scandinavians.”
This is pre-eminently an age of platitudes and Professor Freeman is
great in such. “There is,” he says, “an English folk, and there is a
British Crown.” There is also, it might be affirmed, a Scotch folk, and
a British Crown, and until Mr. Gladstone shall accomplish his
visionary project of Irish Home Rule, there is, and will be an Irish folk
and a British Crown. “But the homes of the English folk,” we are to
note, “and the dominions of the British Crown do not always mean
the same thing.” Does any one suppose they do? “Here by the
border stream of the Angle and the Saxon” we are in “the dominions
of the British Crown,” &c. If by the “border stream” be meant the
Tweed, it is more than doubtful if the Angles and Saxons ever saw
that stream. In Professor Freeman’s “youth,” the “Anglo-Saxon race
was unheard of,” and by some strange delusion, for which it is
difficult to account, the “British race” dates, he believes, from some
speech delivered a week before the time at which he writes. It is
evident Professor Freeman has not been a reader of Good Words, at
least of its early numbers published more than thirty years ago. In
one of these he will find “The British race has been called Anglo-
Saxon,” &c., and a good deal more which it might be inconvenient for
him to learn.
Professor Freeman “shows how some writers, sometimes more
famous writers, now and then get at their facts.” “One received way,”
he tells us, “is to glance at a page of an original writer, to have the
eye caught by a word, to write down another word, that looks a little
like it, and to invent facts that suit the words written down. To roll two
independent words into a compound word with a hyphen is perhaps
a little stronger; but only a little.” Are we to suppose that Professor
Freeman is recounting his individual experience in dealing with the
facts of English history?
The gifted Edmund Spenser, who charmed the world with his Faery
Queen died forsaken and in want. Milton sold his copyright of
Paradise Lost for fifteen pounds, and Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield
was disposed of for a trifle to save him from the grip of the law.
Tempora mutantur! Third rate contributions by high class writers
command their market value. If men can obtain payment for writing
such articles as that of Professor Freeman’s criticism of The Viking
Age that appeared in the January number of the Contemporary
Review it shows that there is something in a name, that the
conductors of such periodicals pay more regard to the reputation of
the writer, than to the quality of the writing. Professor Freeman is no
doubt a very able writer, but this is not the conclusion that would be
reached in reading his captious and illogical criticism of M. du
Chaillu’s book.
I have evidently wounded the susceptibilities of some extreme
churchman or irascible Celt, in the person of a reviewer in the
Literary World, whose hostility is hardly explainable on the ground of
mere difference of opinion. According to this disposer of events, I fall
wofully short in the qualifications of one who is entitled to speak on
the subject of archæology. I might, however, plead in extenuation,
and in mitigation of punishment the reason given by Mr. Gladstone
for upholding the verity of Old Testament Scripture, that “there is a
very large portion of the community whose opportunities of judgment
have been materially smaller than my own,” and that, “in all studies
light may be thrown inwards from without.” I profess not to unravel
the hidden mysteries of prehistoric antiquity, but simply to deal with
the historical aspect of outside facts, though, as the Saturday
reviewer justly remarks, I must get into prehistory somewhere.
Among the numerous disqualifications manifested in my treatise, I
show “a very indifferent acquaintance” with “Language;” and its “twin
sister, Ethnology,” of which, however, I may reasonably be presumed
to know as much as my censor. Most persons who write on any
subject do something to keep in touch with current facts and
common knowledge. If the critic of the Literary World had taken the
trouble to read my book attentively, he would have found many
references to what has been done by philologers and Ethnologists
on whose labours he sets so much store. “As the book is in a second
edition,” he condescends to inform us, he has “occupied more space
than he should otherwise have done in estimating its claims to
authority.” The conclusion he has reached is that I go as far astray in
one direction as the Celticists do in another, an opinion which is quite
within the limit of legitimate criticism. When, however, from his lofty
tribune he looks down and imputes to me ignorance of what has
been done by the great masters of “Language,” the Joneses, and
Colebrookeses, and Bopps, and Potts, and Grimms, and Steinthals,
and suggests that I do not know what has been said by such writers
as Camper, Jacquart, Blumenbach, Cuvier, Prichard, Latham and
Morton, not to mention the pernicious nonsense of Darwin, and the
vagaries of Professor Huxley, I must be permitted to take exception.
It is one thing to know what they have written, and quite another to
accept their conclusions as absolute and final, considering how often
we hear the most arrant nonsense solemnly propounded as the
deductions of scientific investigation. It has been pointed out by a
late minister of the Crown that “Newton’s projectile theory of Light”
which had apparently been firmly established has given place to “the
theory of undulation,” which, citing from the Virginian philosopher Dr.
Smith, he says, “has now for fifty years reigned in its stead.” On this
he grounds the suggestion that we should not “receive with
impatience the assertion of contradictions.” On the subject of
specialists we have the opinion of the same eminent individual,
notable among the great intellects of the age, one who like
Brougham, “has the languages of Greece and Rome strung like a
bunch of keys at his girdle.” No less a personage in fact, than the
Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, with whom, while admiring the
versatility of his genius, I differ politically, toto cœlo. To none of the
sciences, rightly or wrongly so named, do his remarks more aptly
apply than to the “Science of Language,” and its twin sister,
“Ethnology.” “I have had the opportunity,” he says, “of perceiving
how, among specialists as with other men, there may be fashions of
the time and school, which Lord Bacon called idols of the market-
place, and currents of prejudice below the surface, which may
detract somewhat from the authority which each enquirer may justly
claim in his own field, and from their title to impose their conclusions
upon mankind.” In proof of the fluctuating and uncertain character of
this so-called science Dr. Morton in regard to “certain points of
primary importance found himself compelled to differ in opinion from
the majority of scholars.” I believe with Bishop Percy, Dr. R. Angus
Smith, and others, that the Celts and Teutons even remotely had not
a common origin, but were ab origine distinct races of mankind. As
to authority I hold that “no man is an authority for any statement
which he cannot prove,” and although according to the critic of the
Literary World, I deliver my opinions in a manner “more forcible than
elegant”[5] my pretensions are exceedingly humble. “I venture to
draw attention to the subject, in the hope that the matter may be
taken up by some one with more time and better appliances at his
disposal than I can command.” Without pretending to be “exhaustive
or specially erudite” I have done the best I can to extinguish a
national delusion, and I hope cannot finally, and altogether fail. If I be
deficient in language, in whatever acceptation, I am in no worse
position than the statesman already referred to, who maintains the
truth of ancient Scripture avowedly without any knowledge of the
Hebrew tongue. Language, as Lord Southesk most accurately, and
pertinently points out, “is a thing that seems like a boomerang, so
queer are the twists it takes, and so uncertain its returns.” Ethnology,
or Anthropology—whichever its votaries choose to call it—is not, as I
think, a science. It consists of the conceits and assumptions of men
learned and unlearned who have reached certain conclusions, and
who profess to bring back from the depths of prehistoric antiquity
facts which may not be facts, or which at least we have no means of
knowing to be true. The whole subject is “feeble, perplexed, and to
all appearance, confused.” Many years since Mr. Hyde Clarke, at a
meeting of the Ethnological Society, remarking on the utterances of
Professor Huxley, suggested that, although the latter “had laid down
his statements as established by men of science, there was little
capable of proof.” What then is the value of a study, the results of
which are as unstable as the passing vapour? It was a conception of
the late Sir David Brewster, that science is the only earthly treasure
we can carry with us to a better state. Let us hope that if Language,
and its twin sister be among the number destined thither, they will be
freed from their mundane misconceptions and uncertainties.
The Reviewer of the Literary World thinks I “make a sorry jumble of
races and languages. All sorts of people, and tribes, dialects, and
remains, related and unrelated, are said to be Goths or Gothic,”
though in dealing with my shortcomings, real or supposed, he does
not always keep faith with facts. The ancient Scythians, he makes
me to say, were Goths, for which the only foundation is that I cite Dr.
Macculloch and Mr. Planché from each a paragraph in which the
name Scythian is mentioned. “The occupiers of prehistoric lake
dwellings Goths.” Precisely what I do not say. I mention the facts that
“a species of combat called holmgang, peculiar to the old Northmen,
was usually fought in a small island or holm in a lake,” and that
islands in lakes were places resorted to by the Scandinavian “foude,”
or magistrate, with his law officers, &c. In Iceland, the men on whom
sentence of death had been passed, were beheaded upon an islet in
a lake or river. I submit these facts to the candid consideration of
those who are capable of judging, because if my conjecture be
correct, palisaded islands were neither inhabited nor are they
prehistoric. “The Caledonians, Goths; the Picts, Goths.” I was taught
to believe that Pict and Caledonian are convertible terms. “The
Icelanders and others were Goths.” I do not, of course, know which
“others” the reviewer may have had in his mind, but the Icelanders
are certainly Goths. “Sometimes,” the critic says, “Gothic appears as
the equivalent of Scandinavian.” Certainly as opposed to Celtic. “And
the sum of the whole matter is that ‘the Scandinavians are our true
progenitors,’” which, he points out, is “the same blunder that M. du
Chaillu has been dashing his head against.” All wise beyond
conception! By a figure of speech a writer might be said to dash his
head against a rock, but hardly I should think, against a blunder! It is
rather odd that this captious censor should be ignorant of the fact
that the quotation which he cites from my preface contains the
ipsissima verba of the writer of an article that appeared in Good
Words nearly forty years ago, by whom M. du Chaillu was
anticipated, and that the same views and opinions were advocated
by myself nineteen years since in the pages of Notes and Queries.
The languages or dialects to be dealt with as regards the British
islands, are few in number, and we can judge of them in an outside
fashion, without the aid of Bopp, or Grimm, or Zeuss, or Steinthal.
These are the Welsh of the Principality, which, roughly speaking,
includes the extinct dialect of Cornwall. The Erse or Gaelic of
Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. The Teutonic of the Belgae,
which Prichard calls Celtic, but which we gather from Cæsar was
German. At least it is a fair inference from his statement, Belgas
esse ortos a Germanis, that they spoke some dialect of Teutonic
speech.[6] The language of the Picts or Caledonians, which Skene
affirms is neither Welsh nor Gaelic, but a Gaelic dialect partaking
largely of Welsh forms. This, however, on the faith of Tacitus, I
believe to have been Scandinavian, rutilæ Caledoniam habitantium
comæ magni artus Germanicam asseverant. The Saxon, or earlier
Scandinavian of South Britain, and the confessedly Scandinavian
dialects of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Northumberland
and North Britain. In point of fact only two languages, the Gothic or
Teutonic, and the Celtic, or whatever else may be the structure,
foundation or admixture of the dialects so named. I have elsewhere
stated that “The several dialects of what has been called Celtic might
be compared to so many dust heaps to which has been swept the
refuse of all other languages from time immemorial,” and I see no
reason to change my opinion. It will thus be seen that there is not
much room to jumble either races or language. The jumble, if such
there be, arises out of the confusion and obscurity of the critic’s own
mind. He ridicules the idea of identifying the “Gothic Magus” with
what he calls the “Celtic Mac or Maqui.” I deny that Mac is Celtic,
and I identify it with the Maqui of the Ogham inscriptions, because I
think there are good grounds for believing that Oghams and runes
were equally the work of the Northmen, although Lord Southesk,
who has made these remains a special study, differs from me in
opinion. There is certainly an uncommon outside resemblance
between the two words. It is however, satisfactory to know that his
Lordship is in substantial agreement with me on the main subject of
my contention, the preponderance of the Scandinavian element in
the British Isles. Coming to the essence of the controversy, he says,
“Where I agree with you thoroughly is in the belief that the
prevalence and influence of the Scandinavian races in Britain and
Ireland have been largely underrated, and that much due to them
has been ascribed to the various peoples commonly classed as
Celts.” “One has only to look at the people inhabiting Aberdeenshire,
Angus, &c., to convince one’s-self that Norse blood predominates.” I
regard the questions of races, art, and culture entirely from an
outside or historic view. In the face of such facts as I have adduced
to continue to call Mac Celtic is simply persistent dogmatism—a
perverse determination to adhere per fas et nefas to a foregone
conclusion. The prefix Mac though found in Scotch Gaelic and other
dialects of the Erse, has obviously been imported thither only as a
foreign term, in the same manner that the Norse word jarl, an earl,
found its way into the Welsh. Mac, as I have elsewhere pointed out,
occurs in the Anglo-Norse dialect of Craven, West Riding of York. It
was used in the sense of son by the Danes and Northmen. It occurs
as a prefix to an interminable number of personal names distinctively
Scandinavian, and in one form or other is found in every dialect of
the Teutonic. We must “deal with the evidence before us according
to a rational appreciation of its force.” “Plaid,” the critic, affirms, “does
not exist in Moeso-Gothic.” Thomson in Observations prefixed to his
Lexicon, says, “Plaid, a cloke in Moeso-Gothic, was the Icelandic
palt.” I would rather believe that the critic of the Literary World does
not know where to look for the word, than that the erudite private
secretary to the Marquis of Hastings in India, presuming on their
ignorance, sought to impose on his readers a word which he knew
did not exist. Again this critic says, “Denying to another (Anglo-
Saxon) a word that does (foster).” The expression is confused, but
he evidently means that “foster” is found in Anglo-Saxon. In the text
of my treatise I say, “Neither can there be any doubt as to the
Northern derivation of the word foster.” To this I append a footnote
taken from the Quarterly Review, vol. 139 (1875), p. 449. “The word
foster is not found in Anglo-Saxon, Moeso-Gothic, or German,” and
at the same time indicate the source whence my information is
derived. I accepted the statement on the faith of the writer. If it does
occur, it only shows how little dependence can be placed on facts
adduced by literary critics even in connection with such responsible
publications as the Quarterly Review. Another evidence of
disqualification as “a writer on Archæological matters,” is that the
word Celte cited from the Vulgate was shown long ago by Mr. Knight
Watson to be a misprint for Certe. The critic must indeed have been
much at a loss for a peg on which to hang his hypercriticism. I hardly
know why it is incumbent on me before delivering my views on the
Celtic myth to know all that has been explained on collateral subjects
by Mr. Knight Watson. I found neither note nor marginal reference
declaratory of this gentleman’s critical acumen, or of the great
service he had rendered to archæology in resolving this enigma, nor
if I had should I have introduced it into my treatise. My remark in
regard to the Vulgate is an incidental reference of the vaguest
description on which nothing depends. To borrow the expression of
an eminent individual, Would the critic of the Literary World “be
surprised to learn” that by a defect of information, quite as glaring as
that which he imputes to me, he has entirely missed the point of my
stricture which is directed against the executive of the Society of
Antiquaries of Scotland. At page 11 of its Catalogue of Antiquities,
printed in 1876, it is stated as the heading of a section, “Stone
Celts or Axe Heads.” Behind the word “Celts,” an asterisk, and
underneath, a footnote corresponding thereto the explanation “Celtis,
a chisel,” of all which the critic shows himself to be entirely ignorant.
He mentions the Gothic word afar. Thomson calls it hafar. I can only
conjecture that the critic may have first seen the light within the
vibrations of certain well-known sounds, and that he habitually drops
the letter h. In the course of my “polemic,” he thinks, I “undoubtedly
score a point here and there in matters of detail.” “Thus,” he says,
“he maintains what ought to be obvious enough [but which to the
Celtic expositor it never is] that remains inscribed in Northern runes
must be attributed to the Scandinavians.” I give, he says, “and this
appears to be my chef d’œuvre, a very probable reading (Grimkitil
thane raist, Grimkitil engraved this) to a fragmentary inscription ( ...
kitil th ...) on what is known as the bronze plate of Laws. And
inasmuch as” that this critic “formed a similar opinion many years
ago, he is bound to approve my suggestion that the old Greek and
runic alphabets were derived from some common source, and not
either from the other.” He is “bound to approve.” How very
condescending! It is evident he does not perceive the effect of his
own conclusion. If my reading of the inscription on the Laws plate be
correct it involves something more than a mere matter of detail. It is
the solution of a problem which has perplexed and bewildered most
antiquaries of the present century, because it demonstrates the
symbols of the Laws crescent plate, and those of the Scotch
sculptured stones to be the work of the Scandinavians. This has long
been my individual opinion, though I doubt if the critic of the Literary
World will make many converts among antiquaries on the other side
of the Tweed. When I attempt to establish “my own peculiar views,”
he says, I seem to “break down.” Are not the points on which—to
borrow his elegant diction—I “score” as much my “peculiar views” as
those on which he alleges I fail? “Of the Teutonic tribes, whose
settlements grew into our old Heptarchy, or Octarchy, none, and no
discoverable part of any, were Scandinavian proper. [This is mere
arbitrary statement.] There was subsequently, of course, in certain
districts, a large infusion of Scandinavian forms, proper names, &c.
[What does he mean by forms? The Scandinavians brought their
names when they brought their bodies] in consequence of the
invasions and settlements of the ‘Danes,’ but in spite of this, and of
much more serious disturbance afterwards, our language from the
Channel to the Forth, owing to its power of absorption, and
assimilation, remained, and remains substantially ‘English.’”
“Remained and remains substantially English.” These remarks are
unanswerable, which it is said, is the happy property of all remarks
sufficiently wide of the purpose. Is the language of the British nation
less “English” because derived from the Scandinavian rather than
from the Saxon, two dialects of the same speech in their essential
elements hardly distinguishable? If this be true—as beyond all
question it is true—it demolishes utterly the bugbear which the
suggestion he advocates sets up.
While accepting with becoming humility the disparaging estimate of
my performance, it is not desirable that a reviewer of this character
should have his say uncontradicted, though in setting myself right
with those whom his strictures might have influenced, I have perhaps
honoured him with too much notice. It is not a very formidable matter
to cope with such an adversary.

“While these are censors, ’twould be sin to spare;

While such are critics, why should I forbear?”—Byron.

THE END.
 FOOTNOTES:
[1] The sonnets were originally discovered in the Monastery of the
“Monks of Therfuse,” which stood on the site now occupied by the
terminus of the “Glenmutchkin Railway.” They were afterwards
placed for safe custody with the MSS. of Ossian.
[2] “Well-known scholars,” the Quarterly says, “have shown before
him, and he is justified in adopting the conclusion, that the name
of ‘Saxon’ must have been loosely applied to all the pirates that
scoured the Narrow Seas. We may conjecture that many crews
from Scania and the Danish Isles, or from the great bay by the
Naze of Norway, which gave its name to the Vikings, must have
been found among the roving fleets of the fourth and fifth
centuries, when the Empire was crumbling into ruins.”
[3] “The red-bearded Thor was called ‘The Englishmen’s God.’”—
Quarterly Review.
[4] I suspect these were not the savage Americans Pinkerton had
in his mind.
[5] A writer who, to denote that which is without foundation, makes
use of the expression “mere fudge” cannot be a very competent
judge of elegance.
[6] That cannot be regarded as science which based only on the
uncertain hypothesis of language contradicts the ascertained facts
of history.
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS, AND
OTHERS IN REGARD TO THE
SECOND EDITION OF “CELTICISM A
MYTH.”

“This issue of the work, resumes in an able statement the arguments

of those antiquaries who hold that the early civilization of these
islands was the work, not of Celts, but of Scandinavians.”—
Scotsman.

“He [Mr. Roger] is on much firmer ground when he declines to

believe in any art or culture that can fairly be called Celtic. The very
patterns which are usually spoken of as Celtic are common on the
gold work of the Mycenæan graves, which few people, we think, will
now place much later than 1500 b.c. ... Mr. Roger is probably right
when he claims a Scandinavian origin for the ancient claymores (two
handed), for the Tara brooch, and other brooches, for stone crosses,
dirk handles, and what so else is too commonly attributed to Celtic
art.”—Saturday Review.

“The book throughout in its many pages bears evidence to an

exceeding amount of careful research, clever reasoning, and close
intimacy with the subject.... Until contradicted and disproved the
facts in the pages of ‘Celticism a Myth’ must carry conviction.”—
Montrose Standard.

“A further issue of this learned work is evidence that the arguments

advanced against the pet theories of such recognised authorities as
Dr. Joseph Anderson, and Dr. Daniel Wilson have aroused some
commotion in the camp of archæologists.”—Publishers’ Circular.

“A second edition of Mr. Roger’s argument against the prehistoric

existence of a Celtic civilization, and his ‘demonstration beyond
reasonable doubt,’ that the only civilization in Scotland, of which we
have any knowledge, was brought there by the Scandinavians.”—
The Bookseller.

“It is a vigorous piece of controversy in favour of the argument that

Celtic literature, and Celtic art never existed.”—Evening News and
Post.

“It is a book that has interested me much.”—The Most Hon. The

Marquis of Lorne, K.T., &c.

“Where I agree with you thoroughly is in the belief that the

prevalence, and influence of the Scandinavian races in Britain and
Ireland have been largely underrated, and that much due to them
has been ascribed to the various peoples commonly classed as
Celts.”—The Right Hon. The Earl of Southesk, K.T., F.S.A. Scot., &c.

“I have long been of opinion that we owe the whole of our civilization
to Scandinavian, and Teutonic ancestors, and partly to Roman
influence, and your very interesting volume confirms that opinion.”—
John Kirkpatrick, Esq., Advocate, M.A., Ph.D. LL.B., LL.D., Professor
of History, University of Edinburgh.

“Bertrand gives maps shewing the course followed by the megalithic

monument builders in entering Europe, and this, I think, dispels the
idea of their being due to the Celts.”—Rev. S. Baring-Gould, M.A.
&c., &c.

“Your case is so well put, your rebutting evidence so cogent, and

your reasoning so clear, that you must by this time have convinced
many of your readers that ‘Celticism’ is ‘A Myth.’”—John C. H. Flood,
of the Middle Temple, Esq.

“You have certainly dispelled my illusion as to Celtic art, and I

consider you have proved your case certainly in the main, if not
altogether.”—Walter L. Spofforth of the Inner Temple, Esq.