The Original Bundlers: Boaz and Ruth, and Seventeenth-Century English Courtship Practices

Abstract

The courtship habits of Early Modern England included a wide spectrum of sexual togetherness. Between penetrative sex, which could end in premarital pregnancy, and no physical contact at all, there was a wide spectrum to maneuver. The paper offers a new tentative research orientation attempting to interpret the social place and meaning of one custom of premarital sexual togetherness--namely: Bundling, in late sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Rather then relating the question of bundling to diaries, life stories or the church courts, as has usually been done, the interpretation focuses on a different source: the contemporary understanding and representation of the biblical story of Ruth and Boaz. The night meeting of Ruth and Boaz at the threshing floor (Book of Ruth ch.3) served as a kind of biblical example of pious, virtuous bundling. By offering a kind of conservative via media between full intercourse and no sexual contact at all, it seems that godly guidance, and not just economic needs or changes in Church legislation, could have had a potentially casual role in shaping, and in the same time, delimiting, sexual habits of popular as well as elite social classes.