Postgraduate Course: Debating Marriage between Antiquity and the Middle Ages (PGHC11449)
Course Outline
| School | School of History, Classics and Archaeology |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course examines why ideals and practices of marriage changed between c.400 and c.1000, and the broader significance of these developments. Focussing on a range of primary sources, students will gain a detailed understanding of how marriage was contested, disputed and transformed in this period, and will carefully examine the social, political and religious contexts of these developments. Students will also critically examine strikingly different ways in which historians have debated the evolution of marriage and kinship within grand narratives of the transition from antiquity to the middle ages. |
| Course description |
In the fifth century a pope presented with a tricky marriage dispute could take it for granted that slaves could not marry. In a society deeply shaped by Roman laws and norms, married slaves were legally and socially unintelligible. Fast forward to the ninth century and bishops were cautiously protecting the rights of slaves to marry (so long as their masters consented). Something was shifting. The slow emergence of slave marriage as a legal and social possibility is one facet of the broader evolution of marriage across late antiquity and the early middle ages. This course examines the history of marriage and related topics, including kinship and sanctity, in western Europe between c.400 and c.1000. Students will root important changes in ideals and practices of marriage in the changing social, religious and political landscape of the post-Roman world. Drawing on a range of primary sources, students will closely examine how the place of marriage in church, court and wider society was debated; and critically examine historiographical debates over the significance of marriage and kinship in understanding the transition from antiquity to the middle ages.
Unit I (Origins) provides students with an introduction to the three tectonic plates in the history of marriage: the norms and laws of classical and late antique Roman society; the articulation of new ideals and tense debates over the place of marriage in early Christianity; and Germanic customs surrounding marriage and kinship.
Unit II (Tensions) explores the friction generated as these tectonic plates collided in post-Roman societies. How did monastic and ecclesiastical institutions use marriage to articulate the ideals and regulate the practicalities of religious and clerical professions? How did legislators respond to the complex social realities surrounding the making and breaking of marriages? And what role did marriage play in the slow crystallisation of ideas surrounding lay piety and ¿secular sanctity¿?
Unit III (Trajectories) turns to three developments across this period, the implications of which historians continue to debate: the disappearance of adoption and emergence of godparenthood; the slow tightening of rules surrounding forbidden degrees of kinship; and the extent to which church law actually regulated the marriages of the most powerful
members of society.
Weekly seminar outline
1. Introduction: The history of the history of marriage
I. Origins
2. Roman norms: the late Roman sexual economy
3. Christian ideals: Augustine and the three goods of marriage
4. Germanic customs: the myth of friedelehe
II. Tensions
5. Renouncing marriage: monks, nuns¿and clerics?
6. Making and breaking marriage: from raptus and slave marriage to
divorce and remarriage
7. Sanctifying marriage: the problem of lay sanctity
III. Trajectories
8. Fictive kinship: from adoption to godparenthood?
9. Fractious kinship: incest and the forbidden degrees
10. Bad kingship: debating divorce in the ninth century
11. Conclusions
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate through seminar discussion and the coursework essay a detailed and critical command of the body of knowledge concerning marriage and related subjects, including kinship, in late antique and early medieval Europe, c.400-1000.
- Demonstrate through seminar discussion and the coursework essay an ability to read, analyse and reflect critically upon relevant scholarship on marriage and related subjects in late antique and early medieval Europe, c.400- 1000.
- Demonstrate through seminar discussion and the coursework essay an ability to read, analyse and reflect critically upon a variety of primary source material relating to marriage and related subjects in late antique and early medieval Europe, c.400-1000.
- Demonstrate the ability to develop and sustain original scholarly arguments in oral and written form by independently formulating appropriate questions and utilizing relevant evidence considered in the course.
- Demonstrate originality and independence of mind; intellectual integrity and maturity; a considerable degree of autonomy.
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Reading List
David d'Avray, Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (Oxford, 2005)
David d'Avray, Papacy, Monarchy and Marriage, 860-1600 (Cambridge, 2015)
Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France (London, 1984)
Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, 1993)
Valerie Garver, Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World (Ithaca, 2009)
Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983
Judith Evans Grubb, Law and Family in Late Antiquity: Emperor Constantine's Marriage Legislation (Oxford, 1995)
Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass., 2013)
Karl Heidecker, The Divorce of Lothar II: Christian Marriage and Political Power in the Carolingian World (Ithaca, 2010)
Bernhard Jussen, Spiritual Kinship as Social Practice: Godparenthood and Adoption in the Early Middle Ages (Newark, 2000)
Ruth M. Karras, Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2012)
Philip L. Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage during the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods (Leiden, 1994)
Pauline Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers: The King's Wife in the Early Middle Ages (Leicester, 1983)
Rachel Stone, Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire (Cambridge, 2011)
Suzanne F. Wemple, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900 (Philadelphia, 1981) |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
- Effective retrieval of scattered and highly technical information
- The ability to evaluate critically a range of relevant scholarly methodologies and to choose and apply successfully the most effective one(s) necessary to answer specific research questions
- The ability to evaluate 'primary' sources of evidence of the past in order to draw valid conclusions about it
- The ability to produce a sustained and effective analysis of a difficult research problem
- Preparing balanced and accessible discussions of complex issues and detailed material
- Composing concise but effective arguments to firm deadlines
- The ability to work effectively and professionally in a seminar/group discussion atmosphere
- Critical thinking and reading as applied to fragmentary evidence and/or scholarly argument
- The ability to develop a strong grasp of complex subjects through directed reading
- The ability to test, modify and strengthen one's own views through collaboration and debate
- The ability to identify and carry out a viable research project with occasional supervision, but with readiness to take responsibility for one's own learning
- The ability to approach problems with academic rigour, imagination and mental agility
- Possession of an informed respect for the principles, methods, standards, values and boundaries of study in this area of enquiry, as well as the capacity to question these
- IT skills connected with Internet use, word processing and visual presentations
- Command of bibliographical and library and/or archival research skills
- Analytical reading skills |
| Keywords | Marriage,Antiquity,Middle Ages |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Zubin Mistry
Tel:
Email: |
Course secretary | Mrs Lindsay Scott
Tel: (0131 6)50 9948
Email: |
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