The Duty to Desire: Love, Friendship, and Sexuality in Some Puritan Theories of Marriage

Abstract

When philosophers or political scientists look for early statements of some modern Western ideas of marriage, they are likely to turn to Locke's Two Treatises of Government, for there we find elements or hints of the modern view that marriage is a contractual relation between two autonomous and equal partners. Husband and wife jointly set the terms of their relationship; their particular interests determine its character; they retain the freedom to leave when the terms of the contract are no longer satisfied. In this search of forerunners, however, it is a mistake to limit one's reading of seventeenth-century texts to Locke's. In the following pages, I hope to persuade you that a number of seventeenthcentury English theologians and preachers, for the most part Puritan, deserve equal attention. I shall consider William Ames and Richard Baxter, two of the most important casuists for seventeenth-century Puritans; Thomas Gataker, William Gouge, and Daniel Rogers, three Puritan clergymen who distinguished themselves particularly in their writings on marriage; and Jeremy Taylor, who was no Puritan, but whose attitudes toward marriage were in many respects like those of the Puritan casuists and theologians.