Read more
The early Christian and medieval practice of spiritual marriage, in which husband and wife mutually and voluntarily relinquish sexual activity for reasons of piety, plays an important role in the development of the institution of marriage and in the understanding of female religiosity. Drawing on hagiography, chronicles, theology, canon law, and pastoral sources, Dyan Elliott traces the history of spiritual marriage in the West from apostolic times to the beginning of the sixteenth century.
List of contents
| Acknowledgments | |
| Abbreviations | |
| Introduction | 3 |
| 1 | "A Place in the Middle": Intramarital Chastity as Theoretical Embarrassment and Provocation | 16 |
| 2 | Spiritual Marriage as Insoluble Problem or Universal Nostrum? | 51 |
| 3 | Eleventh-Century Boundaries: The Spirit of Reform and the Cult of the Virgin King | 94 |
| 4 | The Conjugal Debt and Vows of Chastity: The Theoretical and Pastoral Discourse of the High and Later Middle Ages | 132 |
| 5 | Spiritual Marriage and the Penitential Ethos | 195 |
| 6 | Virgin Wives | 266 |
| Conclusion | 297 |
| Appendixes | 303 |
| Select Bibliography | 321 |
| Index | 355 |
About the author
Dyan Elliott
Summary
The early Christian and medieval practice of spiritual marriage, in which husband and wife mutually and voluntarily relinquish sexual activity for reasons of piety, plays an important role in the development of the institution of marriage and in the understanding of female religiosity. Drawing on hagiography, chronicles, theology, canon law, and pastoral sources, Dyan Elliott traces the history of spiritual marriage in the West from apostolic times to the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Additional text
"Elliot masterfully examines why female spirituality was perceived as a threat to the church and society at large, challenging the boundaries of sanctity and heresy. . . . By tracing the downward trajectory of holy women through medieval society's progressive reliance on inquisitional procedure, Elliot argues that inquisitional mechanisms for assessing female spirituality created confusion between the saintly and the heretical; these efforts to constrain female spirituality were part of a larger program of constraining women."
