Sexualität und Emotionalität in der vor modernen Ehe by Rüdiger Schnell (review)

Abstract

1072 Reviews that there is practically no reference to the huge?above all Western?literature on Eisenstein's film). Despite that, Perrie's book undoubtedly represents an important contribution to the growing area of research on the cultural history of the Stalin era. University of Nottingham Evgeny Dobrenko SexualitdtundEmotionalitdtin der vormodernenEhe. By Rudiger Schnell. Cologne: Bohlau. 2002. x + 595pp. ?59. ISBN 3-412-16001-6. This lengthy,richly informative, and impressive work contests the conventional view that before the eighteenth century love and marriage had little to do with each other. Schnell concedes that there are voices in the Middle Ages that categorically deny any such connection, but argues that it is wrong in principle to regard them as the only,or even the dominant, view in the Middle Ages. The subject of this book is therefore the presence of marital love before the modern period, and it polemicizes against the idea that the centuries before this were unrelievedly misogynous and misogamous. The author bases his argument almost entirely on pragmatic literature, devoting only his last chapter to what court literature of the twelfthand thirteenth centuries has to say. The opening chapter is a lengthy foundation for what follows. The author points out that marital affection could result from years of living together, so that love could arise in the course of marriage, which in itself qualifies any sweepingly negative view of medieval marriage. Especially valuable is what is said about the relationship of gender to nature and nurture, and, following this, the long critical survey of various positions adopted over the last fifty years on the question of sex and gender. Chapter 11deals with texts in which sex and marriage are treated in negative terms. In these texts (theological discourses) the body, equated with flesh, was seen as the site of sexual sinfulness, the loss of control by ratio over the body. In view of the recurrent equation of the body with woman (as opposed to that of the mind with man), the disobedience of the flesh could be seen, in a way repugnant to patriarchal society, as tantamount to the rule of woman over man. With Chapter 111we come to texts in which sympathy and friendly affection take the place of sexual love. The theological concept maritalis ajfectus therefore implies a moral disposition to help in all emergencies, a union of hearts for which Mary and Joseph act as a model and from which sexual longing is kept apart. Unlike the authors of vernacular literature, theologians for the most part saw no connection between loving feelings and sexuality (in drastic terms, why commit adultery if a wife was available?). One valuable collateral result of this chapter, however, is the suggestion that the doctrine of consensus prescribed by the Church from the twelfth century opened the door for the possibility of love in marriage. The argument changes tack in Chapter iv: texts which deal with emotional af? fection within the bonds of marriage. The wide range covered by marital amicitia in the Middle Ages suggests that, contrary to what has been long suggested, companionship in marriage was a reality long before the sixteenth century. To establish how faramicitia included emotional features, the semantics of this word, going back to Cicero , are studied; particular value attaches to the way in which this concept, originally denoting friendship among men, is applied to marriage (here Schnell could have derived assistance from Gerald A. Bond, The Loving Subject (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), not mentioned in his otherwise rich bibliography). Chapter v is concerned with the positive emotional dependence of a married couple on their sexual relationship, contradicting the opinion that,before 1600, love and sexu? ality were kept separate by theologians. This chapter argues its case by examples from theological texts, whereas the concluding chapter looks at earlier evidence in court MLRy 98.4, 2003 1073 narrative literature. Of interest is the suggestion that the theologians' secundae causae of marriage recur elsewhere as causae amoris, thus implying a possible combination of marriage with love. That this was feasible is seen as a concession by some clerics to the reality of laymen's experience. In Chapter vi Schnell confronts the question who...